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CHAPTER 1
Millions Like Us
ONE COLD CHRISTMAS EVE IN 1910, the citizens of San Francisco gathered in the streets to hear the world-famous soprano Luisa Tetrazzini sing from a platform built on the steps of the office of the San Francisco Chronicle. For half an hour the opera star, backed by an orchestra and a fifty-person chorus, held a crowd estimated at 250,000 spellbound with her unamplified voice, which the newspaper described as "sweet, clear and pure in all its artless beauty." "If you closed your eyes," wrote Samuel Dickson, "you would have thought yourself alone in the world with that beautiful voice. I was two blocks away and every note was crystal clear, every word distinct" (Nolte, "Luisa Tetrazzini's Gift").
In later years, Tetrazzini's name would enter the English language due to her liking for a particularly creamy turkey casserole recipe. But in 1910 she was the equivalent of a rock star. Her performance was billed as a gift to the citizens of San Francisco, but although one might be tempted to think of it as akin to the time in 1987 when U2 played for free at the Vaillancourt Fountain in San Francisco, it was more like the time in 2014 when they gave their music away for free on the iPhone 6.
In both those cases, the artists in question had an economic agenda that transcended merely entertaining their fans. U2 was promoting its records (Rattle and Hum, 1988, and Songs of Innocence, 2014). In the Tetrazzini case, the concert — beautiful, pleasurable, valuable, and well-meant though it may have been — was at least in one part a veiled threat. Tetrazzini was in a contract dispute with a New York concert promoter who was not meeting her salary demands. When the promoter, a Mr. Hammerstein, wouldn't release her from her contract, she threatened to "sing in the streets" instead. In other words, if he didn't pay up, she would give away for free what he had hoped to sell: her voice.
Eventually, Tetrazzini's contractual issues were resolved, and she sang (for profit) for a month at the Dreamland Ballroom in San Francisco, but she still made good on her promise. Thus, her free concert carries with it the useful knowledge that every free concert has an ulterior motive. Also, Tetrazzini's concert proves that even a hundred years ago musicians were already struggling to assert their rights of ownership over their art. As Stewart Brand once said, "Information wants to be free. It also wants to be expensive" ("Point the Institution" 49). The same thing can be said about popular music. Regarding information, Brand went on to note, "that tension will not go away" (49). In the case of popular music in the age of the internet, that tension is practically the whole story.
Because Tetrazzini's concert drew a reported 250,000 people, because her concert took place in San Francisco, the locus of 1960s free music festivals, and because it was held on Christmas Eve, it seems like a properly sentimental starting point to begin a book about rock festivals. After it was over, the Chronicle described the crowd as "a monumental microcosm of humanity itself ... boot blacks rubbed elbows with bankers and painted creatures with fat and wholesome mothers of families" (Wickham, "Melody" 27). To many music lovers, it is this microcosmic element of humanity — as well as the ability and the desire to rub elbows with it — that makes the experience of seeing live music in the midst of a large crowd uniquely satisfying. Music festivals are places where we override many of our prejudices about mankind and that allow us to think we are accessing a larger social world. At the start of the twentieth century, such a gathering was rare, but thanks to subsequent developments in amplification, the next 100 years would abound with such gatherings. These festivals would be bigger. They would be louder. And they would become distribution centers for certain forms of power.
Although free and festival-like in nature, Tetrazzini's concert really had little in common with the kind of gatherings that would come to characterize the gigantic free concerts of the latter half of the twentieth century. To begin, it was not amplified, since amplification technology did not exist. Thus, it is a reminder that the type of concert that today we call a rock concert is a truly modern invention. Prior to the invention and widespread adoption of the gramophone (invented 1877, adopted circa 1910) and the radio (invented circa 1895, adopted circa 1920), music was always experienced live, and often for free. Indeed, symphonic music was a common feature at boardwalks, parks, town band shells, and other community gathering places across America and Europe. Since the adoption of radio and records as a means of hearing music at any time and in any place, this is no longer true, but the desire to hear music performed live remains constant. People still seek out the live music experience, and they still want to gather in giant numbers and rub up against one another, often at great trouble and expense.
One reason may be simply because music sounds better when performed live. Moreover, being in the actual physical presence of an artist has a psychological value. But most importantly, I think, it's fair to say that people who love music have a deep desire to be in close proximity to others enjoying the same music. At the very best concerts, the music and the artist and the experience all merge to make an event that is something quite different from simply hearing a live performance of music. Listening to music is one thing. Listening to it together is a whole other experience, one that can change a simple act of appreciation into a political action. As an example, when speaking about the experience of living as a West Indian immigrant in London in the early 1970s, Paul Gilroy described the experience of community bonding over listening to Jamaican-inflected pop music styles such as ska and reggae in a crowd setting in London. He wrote that in so doing — in listening to this music alongside others from his diasporic community — members of the crowd became
not so much lost as lucky. An unusually eloquent militant and musically rich culture oriented us and gave us the welcome right to employ it in order to defend ourselves, identify our interests and change our circumstances. We were buoyed up by a worldwide movement for democratic change and energized by the intensity of a very special period in the cultural life of our diaspora. ("Between the Blues" 378)
Gilroy's experience, which he calls "listening together," though specific to a time and place, perfectly captures what happened in the late twentieth century at countless other specific locations. Woodstock stands as the easiest of these gatherings to parse: attendees were able to display their allegiance to a new set of values and lifestyles in a manner that accrued emphasis and feeling; as a group, the audience appeared to become an ideological force. At Woodstock, the phrase "you had to be there" gained currency, and throughout the ensuing years, large musical gatherings have attempted again and again to serve this purpose, although the values, lifestyles, and ideologies have changed radically. In Tetrazzini's time, an outdoor concert of that type was a foreshadowing. By the end of the twentieth century, it would be a commonplace.
One of the things foreshadowed by that the crowd on the steps of the Chronicle building that Christmas season of 1910 was simply a fact about people — or rather, about population. The future was going to contain more of them, and they would be placed in closer proximity, in smaller spaces. In 1910, the population of California was 2.3 million; by the 1960s, it was five times that number. By then, there was a great deal of talk about overpopulation and the so-called "population explosion," thanks to the popularity of Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, a best seller when it was released in 1968. As a California native, I can personally recall that in those days, people often used to say things like, "By the year 2000, every human being will only have one square foot to stand on." It was a prediction that, as a small child, I used to contemplate with horror as well as disbelief, particularly when I was in an airplane passing over the vast empty plains of Nevada, Arizona, and later, many other parts of the planet. It seemed impossible.
Happily, the famine and overcrowding of the planet that was anticipated by Ehrlich did not take place (at least not to the catastrophic extent he predicted). Yet it is easy to see how the hypothesis came about, since crowding and overcrowdedness have been a feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. In 1895, before the twentieth century even began, Gustave Le Bon predicted that the twentieth century would be the "era of crowds" (The Crowd, xv), and that prediction has proven to be accurate. For most Americans, being a part of an enormous crowd is a fairly commonplace event. Whether in shopping malls before Christmas, in sports arenas during ball games, on subway platforms on New Year's Eve, or in the city streets after the World Series, pushing one's way, shoulder to shoulder, through narrow areas in the company of countless other people is not a particularly unique or distressing experience. Some people in dense cities do it every day.
But as all of those who have experienced one know, the rock festival crowd is different. In 2014, Nielsen reported, 32 million Americans bought tickets to at least one music festival, and America is not even the prime market for music festivals; that would be Europe (www.nielsen.com). Today, attending such a festival — Outside Lands, Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Wonderland, All Tomorrow's Parties, or Magnaball at Watkins Glen — is an almost mandatory experience for people aged eighteen to thirty-four, and one that cuts across geographic and class status lines. Joseph Campbell once described the experience of seeing a rock concert in the company of its fans as "a wonderful fervent loss of self in the larger self of a homogeneous community," and his experience echoes and is multiplied by what happens in these festival crowds.
At a rock festival, the crowd has entered into a space — the festival grounds — willingly and in search of a particular crowd experience, one that differs significantly from joining, say, a crowd crossing 42nd Street in Manhattan during rush hour, joining a celebration or protest, or merely attempting to get to the front of a bothersome ticket line. Rather, rock festivals are where the masses now choose to participate in public life. Beginning with Newport and Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, and continuing on through the ensuing decades at locations like Glastonbury, Live Aid, Woodstock '99, Rock in Rio, Coachella, and Burning Man, certain festivals have imprinted themselves on the media as being events of great cultural relevance and importance. Hence, in the crowd's mind, these spaces are where participants may believe they are participating in history itself.
Of course, the real cultural relevance of these festivals is both less and more than they sell themselves as. It's more, because they have informed the personal experience of literally millions upon millions of people on the earth today. It's less, because although today's rock festivals are routinely capable of gathering vast crowds together on a scale undreamed of by Hitler, Stalin, or Martin Luther King Jr., these crowds are entirely lacking in cohesive political will. In fact, those human bodies who participated in demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and Tahrir Square (to name just two crowded crowd events) have participated much more fully in public life. Taking risks, working toward civic change, and announcing one's beliefs and values in the face of opposition are actions that deserve to be acknowledged as true civic behavior. Truly, the ultimate point of crowds and crowding ought to be to make some kind of meaningful ideological or symbolic gesture, and this is a role that, as I will argue in the following pages, rock festivals, although often willing and able, have been incapable of following through.
And yet, despite the absence of political, ideological, or religious cohesion, large rock festivals do fulfill a particular psychological function in the minds of many members of the audience. They may be political placebos, simulacra of civic duty, or even the "circus" part of the ancient Roman figure of speech about bread and circuses. But since the early 1960s, they have vexed their purposes by serving as marketing tools for particular ideologies, ranging from Woodstock's association with the antiwar movement to Burning Man's encomiums about the gift economy and leaving no trace. Rock festivals are sites where certain aspects of current history are transformed by their audiences into contemporary fact. And they are places where new technologies are put on display in order to better market them to the masses. What they are not are incubators for ideological or political action. They are not sites of resistance. They might conceivably be places of disaster, but they cannot be utopias, and they never were. Rock festivals may represent a certain type of power. But rock crowds do not.
Festivals have not always been the agoras that they are today. When entering them was relatively accessible, they were what they purported to be: showcases for musicians to perform their art, attracting fans. But today's most popular rock festivals have conflicting aims. They not only wish to showcase music, they also wish to become significant — that is, they wish to attach some meaning to their brand. One way they do that is by using extremely persuasive narratives about culture to attract ever larger, ever richer crowds, narratives that will make the gathering seem to attendees to be more than just a concert. Ideally, the narrative, whether political, ideological, or religious, should make the gathering seem more meaningful, but the narrative's logic is often betrayed by the terms of the festival itself.
An example of a festival rhetoric that both attracts audiences and defies serious political purpose is the narrative of ecology. Rock festivals, by creating a hybrid of natural and urban settings, point toward the disjunction between them. Festivalgoers crave the former and flee the latter, but the irony is that festivals explicitly address issues of ecology and planetary health while simultaneously creating spaces that mimic the ill-effects of overpopulation. Hence, rock festivals on repurposed land — for example, Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York, for the first Woodstock; the Griffiss Air Base for Woodstock '99; and the semirural stretch of Manchester, Tennessee, that now houses the enormous Bonnaroo festival every year — become temporary tent cities, mimicking the slums of the Third World. As just a small example, according to the Guardian, the Glastonbury Festival in 2015 generated an estimated 1,650 tons of waste — including 5,000 abandoned tents, 6,500 sleeping bags, 400 gazebos, 54 tons of cans and plastic bottles, 41 tons of cardboard, 66 tons of scrap metal, 3,500 air mattresses, 2,200 chairs, and 950 rolled mats, which it took a team of eight hundred people six weeks to clear up (York, "Glastonbury's Rubbish").
And yet, despite the despoliation that these festivals bring to these landscapes, an overarching narrative about nature — as the setting for freedom and of the natural world as an overridingly excellent feature of America itself — is one that governs much of the rhetoric of rock festivals. There is actually a historically contingent reason for this: in 1964, the same year that the Civil Rights Act ended violent struggles for racial equality, and just prior to the contentious 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress. Its passage marked the legal beginnings of a movement of concern over environmental issues, a dialogue that had been increasing in volume and strength since World War II and that now entered into the mainstream consciousness. At a time when social problems involving race and class were ripping apart political discourse, preserving wilderness in America was a topic about which most people could agree.
At the same time, there is a fundamental disjuncture between rock festivals and discourse on ecology, since rock festivals also visibly ruin the land on which they take place. Taking part in a rock festival does not involve immersing oneself in Walden-like solitude but in its opposite: crowding. It is as if large rock festivals like Woodstock or Bonnaroo actually act out overpopulation; and in so doing, they create a different category of space, one neither fearsome nor destructive. Weirdly, large rock festivals allow people to experience all the discomforts of global material deterioration, from overflowing toilets to dust storms. What people then do with that experience does not necessarily reflect an understanding of this disjunction, but there's always that possibility.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Half A Million Strong"
by .
Copyright © 2018 University of Iowa Press.
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