Willow continued, “We asked a man in a Woodstock uniform shirt when the concert was going to start, and he told us it wouldn’t be too long now, so we decided we’d better head on back to our seats. Did you get a good rest, Gabriel? Are you all right now?”
“Yeah, I’m feeling much better, thanks.”
“Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yes, honest.”
“I can’t wait for the first band,” Michael said. “Sweetwater! You’ve heard of Sweetwater, right? A friend of mine saw them open for the Doors, and he told me their live sound was wild!”
“They’re not playing first,” I said. “Richie Havens is.”
“No, the man in the uniform just told us that Sweetwater was going to be the first act, Gabriel,” Willow said.
“He’s wrong. Sweetwater gets stuck in traffic, but Richie Havens flies here in a helicopter and—” I stopped in horror. I had blurted out stuff that hadn’t happened yet, just to look smart in front of my uncle’s girlfriend. Brilliant move. “I mean, I heard some kid walking by say that,” I added, lamely.
David looked at me oddly, but didn’t contradict me. Just then, the speakers roared to life, and the stage announcer said, “Let’s welcome … Mister Richie Havens!” David’s eyebrows shot up. Willow looked amused. Michael shrugged.
I have to tell you, the concert experience of 1969 was mind-blowingly different from what we are used to in our time. (I admit, I have only been allowed to go to one concert ever, and it was with my mother, but still, I have watched a million concert DVDs, and I know the drill.) There was no Jumbotron, so the performers were just teeny, tiny dots. Nobody around us in the audience was holding up a cell phone or a video camera to record what was going on or take a profile pic. Nobody was tweeting or posting a status. There were no huge corporate advertising banners in sight. As Richie Havens sang his first song, “Minstrel from Gault,” the anti-Vietnam War lyrics washed over the crowd and there was nothing to distract us from the moment. We were all just right there, listening together.
It might sound corny, but there it is. I could feel the tribal power of half a million people all concentrating at once on the same one thing. Also, Richie Havens ruled. I can’t imagine how brave you’d have to be to go onstage in front of 500,000 people with nothing but an acoustic guitar and your two backing musicians, and kick off the largest concert in history. This guy absolutely killed, though. Not only did he play well, but in between songs, he spoke in a warm, calm voice, the way you would talk to friends who were just hanging out in his living room. Plus, he came back for encore after encore.
Here was the most incredible thing, which I knew from reading about it in the future. His last encore, a song called “Freedom,” was totally improvised. The promoters of the concert kept pushing him back onstage to play more because the next groups weren’t ready yet, so when he ran out of songs, he made one up on the spot. It was probably the coolest song of his whole set, too.
Watching it happen in real time, I just kept thinking, I don’t know how anyone could possibly not understand that playing music is a mystical act. I was going to feel that way several times during the weekend, but right then, seeing the entire crowd falling into a group trance for the first time, I knew that whatever else happened, I had to make sure I appreciated this once-outside-of-a-lifetime opportunity.
While attempting to meet Jimi Hendrix, save my uncle, and change my father’s future—hopefully without ceasing to exist.
BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
The next guy to come out onstage was equally amazing, in a completely different way. He was a holy man from Sri Lanka named Swami something, and he gave an invocation. He said two remarkable things. The first was this:
“Music is a celestial sound and it is the sound that controls the whole universe, not atomic vibrations. Sound energy, sound power, is much, much greater than any other power in this world.”
I was sitting there thinking, Before today I would have thought that was just some kind of semi-random guru baloney. But one chord on an electric guitar actually teleported me, so I guess maybe this guy has a point. I wonder if he knows how right he is?
Then he told the crowd how historically important they were:
“The entire world is going to watch this. The entire world is going to know what the American youth can do to the humanity. So, every one of you should be responsible for the success of this festival.”
I turned to David to see what he thought of this, and almost passed out. He was casually holding a huge hand-rolled marijuana cigarette, and was about to take a massive drag on it. Because, you know, when the entire world is watching, it’s definitely a good idea to show your responsibility by getting high in broad daylight. I wanted Michael to act like a big brother and yell at him, but all he said was, “Hurry up and take your hit, Davey. We all need to get mellow for Sweetwater!”
So yeah, apparently, “Daddy Michael” wasn’t going to be fulfilling a major disciplinary function this weekend. Granted, tons of people around us were doing the same thing, or passing around bottles of alcohol, or engaging in any number of other legally dubious activities, but I was horrified. This was my dad. I couldn’t believe he was eventually going to grow up and have the nerve to ground me for appearing at a rally for the legalization of pot for terminally ill cancer patients.
David inhaled a massive lungful of smoke, and held it until I thought his head would explode. Meanwhile, Willow took a dainty little puff, then leaned across and held the joint out to me. “Gabriel, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Where are our manners? We haven’t even offered any, um, flammable refreshments to our guest!”
“Uh, n-no thanks,” I stammered. “I’m trying to cut down for, um, track season.” Not that I was a runner, or in fact any type of athlete at all, but it was the first excuse that had flown out of my mouth somehow. I had no plans to try any drugs at Woodstock. I had gotten drunk a couple of times in my friends’ basements and stuff, but I had never tried any kind of drugs before, and—even if I did decide to try them at some point—there was no way my first psychedelic experience was going to be with my own father.
“That’s cool,” Michael said. “More for us!”
If there’s anything more depressing than being the designated driver of a picnic blanket, while your own father gets completely wasted beside you, I am unaware of that thing.
We all eventually lay back on the blankets for a while, just thinking. I was partly wondering about what the guru guy had said about the power of music, and partly trying not to freak out over the drugaholic-teen-dad issue. If the Swami did know that music had power over the universe, did that mean I wasn’t the only person who had ever traveled through time by playing an instrument? I mean, it kind of made sense that I wouldn’t be, when I thought about it. Jimi Hendrix had all kinds of songs about time-and-space travel, and he was just the one person whose guitar had happened to fall into my hands. There were other musicians who had been talking about this back in the 1960s, too, like a jazz guy named Sun Ra.
Maybe I wasn’t even the only time traveler at the Woodstock Festival. I kind of smiled to myself. I was having some pretty trippy thoughts, considering I was the one person on the blanket who wasn’t high.
When the next band, Sweetwater, came on and started tuning, David said, “If the whole world is watching us, and if music has so much power, man, do you think maybe we can really stop the war?” Then he coughed.
The cough was sort of a relief to me. Maybe it meant he wasn’t as accustomed to smoking pot as he appeared to be.
Willow’s voice floated up from the other side of David’s body, all slow and dreamy now. “That’s a groovy idea, Davey. You’re a beautiful kid, you know that?”
I glanced over at David, and he was beaming from ear to ear. Okay, I knew he was under the influence and all, and there was something about Willow that would have made any fifteen-year-old guy feel good—but still, he was just soaking u
p that praise like the driest sponge you’ll ever see. It was happy and sad at the same time.
Then Michael spoke so gruffly, I had to sit up and look to be sure he was really the person who was talking. “Never happen, David.”
“Why not? Look at all these people. Look at all the love, Mikey.”
“There’s too much money being made, little brother. Too much money. Dow Chemical, Brown and Root, Monsanto—as long as all these huge companies are getting rich over there, who cares about a bunch of eighteen-year-olds getting their asses shot off in a rice paddy?”
“I care.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, you’re not a real close advisor of President Nixon, Davey.”
David looked crushed. Willow had pumped him up, and his brother had popped him. Willow knew it, too. She put one arm around David, and poked Michael with her free hand. I saw her whispering in his ear. Even over the sounds of the band’s final tuning notes, I was pretty certain I heard her hiss, “You promised!”
As Sweetwater went into their set, David pouted for a while, and Willow stood up to dance by herself. Their music had a mellow, trance-ish hippie groove with weird instruments like flute and cello along with bongos and lots of harmony vocals. I could have been pretty happy watching Willow doing her snaky gyrations all night, but after a couple of songs, Michael got up and hugged her. Between songs I heard him say, “I’m sorry,” and then their dancing got increasingly close until it became disturbingly sexy to watch. I wondered whether people used the expression “Get a room!” in 1969.
David jumped up and said, “Let’s get some food, Gabriel.” I started to protest about my money situation, but before I could get a word out, he reached into his brother’s backpack and pulled out a wad of singles. “It’s on Mr. Lover over there.” Then he giggled and snorted, both of which were noises I had never heard from him before.
I shrugged, stood, and followed as my father threaded his way unsteadily through the twilit hordes toward the distant promise of a snack. It looked like it might be a bit dicey staying together and finding our way back to Michael and Willow, but there was only one of me, and—not for the last time that weekend—I had to choose between my dad and my uncle. I can’t say we walked in anything approaching a straight line, because we had to dodge dancers, randomly placed blankets, countless thousands of people still streaming in from every direction, and general, random crowd motion.
We ended up in line at a stand that said FOOD FOR LOVE in huge, wavering letters.
There were at least fifty people in front of us, and within seconds, the line started swallowing us up from behind, as well. I had been to a couple of sold-out major league baseball games, but I had never before felt such a sense of being pressed between so many people. In fact, just as the band onstage stopped playing for a moment, a short, pale girl behind me started to freak out about it.
“I can’t take it, Debbie! They’re all around me! Why do they all keep looking at me? It’s like they want my soul. Tell them. Tell them.”
She was standing with a friend, and they both looked like they might be the same age as David and I were. The friend said, “Tell them what? I don’t know what you mean, sweetie.”
“Tell them they can’t have my soul!”
Truthfully, I didn’t think anybody had been paying any particular attention to this girl before she started screaming insanely, but naturally, we were looking at her now. Sweetwater had picked an unfortunate moment to take a breather.
Debbie gave David and me an imploring look and said, “Uh, you can’t have my friend’s soul, do you hear me? Her soul is off-limits!” Then she whispered, “Please play along, okay? Her name is Tina.”
David raised his eyebrows, which gave me an odd sense of déjà vu, because it was the same exact thing he would do forty-five years later when he knew I was trying to get away with something. “Su-u-re,” he said. Bending a bit so his eyes were level with Tina’s, he said, “I promise I will not take Tina’s soul. I will not even take Debbie’s soul. I am hungry, though. That is why I am in this food line. Is it okay if I take a hot dog?”
Tina looked pretty confused by this complicated line of thought. “You don’t … want … my soul?”
“Nope, pretty much just a wiener dog. With mustard. And maybe some relish. And a brownie. Do you think they might sell brownies here? I love brownies.”
Tina’s eyes lit up. “Me, too. I like the icing.” Then she pouted. “I didn’t even know demons ate regular food.”
“Oh, I’m not a demon. I think the demon food lines are over on the other side, by the bathrooms. I’m just a kid from Pennsylvania. My name is David.”
“Far out. I like vanilla icing. Or sparkly icing. Your friend’s hair is sparkly. Can I call you David and Goliath?”
My father giggled again. This was a match made in heaven. Debbie rolled her eyes at me, and jerked her thumb in the direction of our companions. “Tina accidentally got dosed with some acid. What’s your friend on?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Oh, yeah. Tina’s pretty spacey on a good day. But anybody who can relate to her right now has to be riding on a rocket ship of his own.”
“Uh, well, he might have smoked a little something.”
“How about you?”
“No, I’m the designated driver.”
“The what?”
Oops. Apparently, that wasn’t a 1960s term. “I’m staying straight to watch out for my friends.”
“Me, too. So, what’s your name? I assume it’s not actually Goliath.”
“Gabriel.” Well, sort of.
“So, Gabriel, how did you and David get here? Tina and I both live in Astoria—that’s in Queens—so we took a bus from New York City. It wasn’t too bad, but I’ve been hearing nightmare stories all day from people who had to walk absolutely miles.”
“Debbie, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But hey, we’re all here now, right? So, uh, is Tina going to be okay? And what did you mean, she got dosed with some acid?”
Debbie looked at me like I was the dumbest boy she’d ever met. “Where did your friend say you were from again?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“And you don’t know what ‘dosed with acid’ means? Wow, I’d better educate you before you end up walking naked down a road somewhere and get hit by a car or something! ‘Acid’ is LSD. You know, the drug? It makes you see pretty colors that aren’t there, and hear voices, and stuff?”
“I know what acid is. I just meant, how did she accidentally get dosed with it? Don’t you have to swallow a pill or something on purpose?”
“That’s usually how it works, but these older guys were handing out cups of punch over by the fences on our way in, and we were thirsty, you know? So Tina took some, but this one dude gave me the creeps the way he was watching her drink it, and I said, ‘Wait a second, did you put something in there?’ But he just started laughing and said, ‘Take it easy, baby. I’m just trying to bring a little color into your life.’ I knocked the cup out of her hand, but I guess it was too late. Anyway, I heard that drinking a lot of orange juice is supposed to help a person calm down when they’re on acid, so I’m hoping they might have some for sale here. But whatever you do, don’t drink from any open containers that get passed around, unless you want to wind up like her.” She nodded toward Tina, who was studying David’s hair very intently and mumbling something about stars and flying. “At least, that’s my advice.”
“I’ll, uh, keep that in mind. I need to take care of my friend and his brother this weekend, so I really can’t afford to get all messed up on drugs. I mean, no offense to your friend or anything.”
Debbie looked at Tina, who was now making David’s hair flap and calling it “my free brown spirit bird,” and snorted. “I’m deeply offended,” she said. “How can you say my friend is ‘all messed up on drugs’? You have no idea what a mess she is when she’s straight! Anyway, where’s your friend’s brother? How old is he? Who’s watching him now?�
�
“Well, nobody’s watching him now. But—I mean—he’s older than us. David and I are both fifteen, and his brother, Michael, is eighteen. He’s back at our blankets with his girlfriend. I’m not babysitting him or anything. He’s just kind of … well, I made a promise to myself that I’d look out for these guys this weekend. That’s all. It probably sounds kind of stupid.”
“No, actually, it sounds kind of sweet.”
Just then, the audience off to our left started clapping more loudly than they had been. Sweetwater’s set was over. In the lull that followed, I heard angry shouts from up ahead in the line.
“What do you mean, you’re out of food?”
“No burgers left? What are we supposed to do, eat the music?”
“Let me speak to the manager!”
Debbie and I looked at each other. “Let’s split,” she said. “These vibes aren’t going to be good for Tina.”
I agreed that an angry mob was a much less fun scene than a peace-loving mob, so I tapped David on the shoulder and told him I thought we should take a little walk. “What about my brownies?” he asked.
“What about my orange orangey orange juice?” Tina chimed in.
I remembered something. “Hey, David, didn’t we buy a thing of orange juice at the store today?”
He was too glazed to process that, but I was pretty sure we had, and that we hadn’t drunk it during our afternoon picnic. That meant it had been in the August heat for half a day, but I didn’t think OJ went bad the way milk did. “Debbie,” I said, “if you’ll follow us, we have some orange juice in our backpacks.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We had a pretty bad experience with the last man who offered us a free drink.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m planning to charge you for it.”
She laughed. As the shouting built in volume behind us, we began to wend our way through the dusk back toward the blankets.
Are You Experienced? Page 6
