2025-08-18

Woodstock, or Schlock Around the Clock


This is the ignoble 56th anniversary of the last day of the original Woodstock Festival, an event that seems sadder, cringier, and more deluded than ever. To mark the occasion, I'm including the following excerpt from The Endless American Midnight....


Woodstock Aftershocks

So much has been written about Woodstock, I’m not sure whether anything of value is left to take from it. Despite all the hype, it was the death-knell of Aquarian idealism, at least as it’s generally understood today.

A lot of these great musicians got their start playing all-night raves in small dancehalls and clubs; a truly underground phenomenon. In San Francisco and other cities, the music was the spear's tip of a multimedia experience that united a relatively small, well-educated and culturally-savvy vanguard who were just naive enough not to see the wolves at the gate, or to realize that most people don't want to be enlightened.

Personally, Woodstock wasn't really my scene. I would have rather been at Monterey Pop. That was before all of the really bad vibes set in; the bad drugs, the assassinations, the Mansons, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the Angels, you name it. At Monterey, kids still believed that if only the rest of the world could feel what they felt in their music, then their lives would be changed too.

Of course, this was the naïveté of a pampered generation that had no experience with real want or hardship, and to this day sees itself as the very apex of civilization. But once the Establishment started to push back in 1968, things quickly changed.

And the lovefest at Woodstock was soon followed by its mirror-universe inversion at Altamont. From what I’ve read and been told, Haight Street and Sunset Strip were both nightmare zones by 1969, besieged by runaways and thrill-seekers, then quickly followed by an army of thugs, sickos and pushers ready to feed on the sheep.

According to Mikal Gilmore's article, "Summer of Loss," it had been headed that way since 1967. The Diggers, who represented the original SF freaks, went so far as to declare 'The Death of Hippie' mere weeks after the Summer of Love ended. Their little oasis had been spoiled and the real party was over.

It's become a truism among certain alt.researchers that Hippie was all a setup from the start, but that's not how it works. The countercultures that do resonate arise from a handful of marginal types who can't find a place in mainstream culture. So they coalesce and build one all up from scratch. Several attempts at doing so have failed, but the ones who succeed often become easy targets for the rip-off artists. And if they're really unlucky, fodder for the spooks.

At the very least, yesterday's rebels often become today's superstars and tomorrow's establishment. Those are just the facts of life. If you're smart and talented and charismatic, someone is going to try to make a buck off of that. Very few artists can resist the siren call of success forever, particularly when they have expensive drug habits to support.

A lot has been made out of the military and intelligence lineage of a lot of these artists’ fathers, overlooking the fact that the entire country was effectively militarized twenty years before, and pretty much every Boomer's father was in the military. And if your dad was even mildly smart or media-savvy, he ended up in intelligence or in the officer corps. Beats crawling through the frozen mud in some ass-end of France, right?

Which is not to say that they were not wolves set among the sheep; that's been going on since countercultures first appeared. But reducing the entire Sixties counterculture to psyop status just doesn’t wash. There were a lot of people who were honest, genuine and motivated, not to mention independent. Of course, these were also the rebels who the System usually came down full-force upon.

I resented the hell out of the whole Woodstock phenomenon and the generational mythology around it when I was a young punk rocker. It seemed like one great big party that didn't bother to pick up after itself, and left behind a whole ton of cultural trash. And being a student of counterculture history, I was always annoyed that the Baby Boomers acted as if they created all of it, when they basically just consumed what the media provided them.

And most of the vaunted social experiments of the time ended in failure. The lip service paid to starry-eyed idealism — and flat-out bullshit — you see everywhere in the Woodstock documentary is as wince-inducing as seeing those kids roll around in septic mud. And tragic, in light of where it often led. But for better or worse, the Sixties equal ‘Counterculture' to most people. And the last gasp of it, since what we see now are just endlessly mutating subcultures.

In the end, the Sixties counterculture left us a lot of great music, and not just the overplayed old standards you hear on classic rock radio (I’ve been listening to a lot of Sixties Psych, and the depth of talent even in bands I'd never heard of is mind-blowing).

We'll probably never see that kind of embarrassment of riches again, but it's worth working towards a building a culture that at least has the potential to do so, even if just an exercise. That’s going to be a lot harder in this technocratic surveillance state we’re all trapped, but not impossible.

Potent countercultures are always powered by spirit, even if it’s a spirit other people wouldn’t even recognize as such. Mind you, I don’t mean ghosts and I don’t mean religion, I mean a power that’s as ephemeral as it is motivating. A power that ties people together in a common purpose, even if they have no idea it even exists.

The kind of power the Borg-Song was created to suppress.