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The stuff of legends

In honour of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, I rummaged through the boxes of vinyl mouldering in the basement of Smilin' Dog Manor and dug out the three-record album released several minutes after the concert was over and weeks before the mess lef
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In honour of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, I rummaged through the boxes of vinyl mouldering in the basement of Smilin' Dog Manor and dug out the three-record album released several minutes after the concert was over and weeks before the mess left behind was cleaned up. I didn't play any of the discs; just laughed at the photographs and wondered why I ever found any of the music compelling.

If forced to choose, for example if someone broke into the house, held a gun to my head and said, "Play something off the Woodstock album or I'll kill you," I think my best chance for survival would be the Sly & The Family Stone medley - Dance to the Music, Music Lover, and I Want to Take You Higher - on side five. The way I figure it, about the time Sly segued into Music Lover the wave of nausea sweeping over the intruder would give me a chance to grab his gun, tie him up, cram earplugs into my ears and make him listen to the remaining five sides of drivel until he pleaded with me to put him out of his misery. "If we chant real loud people, maybe it'll stop raining." Ugh.

Contrary to the treacle that's been written about it by apologists for the marquee excesses of the Baby Boom (de)Generation - ironically enough all written by Baby Boomers who fail to grasp the irony - Woodblock was not the apex of the 1960s, the peace movement, free love or, for that matter, even good drugs. Woodcock was to the music and concert world what Star Wars was to movies: the apex of wretched excess and the beginning of the end. And like Star Wars, everybody loved it... at the time.

The people who were there loved it for the same reasons survivors of natural disasters love to tell their tale of their survival. It sucked, it wasn't at all what they were expecting but it garnered enough attention to confer some weird derivative of status on those in attendance. Question half a dozen people who were actually at Woodsuck about what they remember and the only element that runs through all their descriptions is this: they can't remember the music. I like to think that's nature's defense mechanism at work. Who knows how many psychoses were narrowly averted by half a million impressionable people not noticing Sha-Na-Na greasing the stage with their retro rendition of At the Hop . Bad enough it was captured on film.

What they do remember is mud, toilets adequate for a crowd of 10,000, no food, emergency supplies of air-lifted food that was almost as appealing as eating the mud, the unbridled relief they felt when John Sebastian finally left the stage and that weird lizard guy announcing the brown acid they'd all taken was bad, bad, baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

But to hear the stories told on successive Important Anniversaries - 10 th , "At least disco hadn't been invented yet, man."; 20 th , "We changed the world, man."; 30 th , "None of us even knew what stock portfolios were then, man."; and 40 th , "Tribal... it was tribal... man." - is to make one long for the day when we celebrate the passing of the last known Woodsock Survivor, much as Great Britain just celebrated the death of its last World War I soldier. Whew, now we can finally forget.

In the burnished glow of cheap nostalgia, Woodschmuck is truly all things to all Boomers. It has something for everyone to think they love. The folks who were there love the fact they were there and you weren't. The ones who weren't there - of which I am one, having been working the graveyard shift in a cheap gas station on Route 66 and asking myself, "Where the hell is Woodstock?" at the time - love to lie about having been there. People who weren't born until much later love to laugh at the people who think it was "meaningful." And even the cops, townspeople and old-fart, conservative, white men loved it because they heard there were nekkid girls there and enough casual sex to kickstart their licentious, if forever vicarious, imaginations.

The beta version of Woodchuck was, of course, Altamont. If New York could do it with such insipid acts as Canned Heat - Going Up the Country - certainly California could do it way more groovy with the Rolling Stones, or so the thinking went. That was before Mick Jagger, graduate of the London School of Economics, decided he could save some coin and give Hunter S. Thompson something to write about by hiring the Hells Angels to do security for the concert. The gangfight and resulting death and destruction pretty much ended wide-open outdoor concerts forever.

But the true spawn of Woodcut, the reason it signalled the beginning of the end, was the stadium concert. Having seen the deprivation and depravity people would tolerate to attend a happening under the guise of attending a concert, slick marketers realized just how much those "organizers" had left on the table. They realized people would tolerate just about anything to attend concerts so why not treat 'em like cattle in a feedlot. Bag checks, overpriced food and drink, horrible sightlines, distorted music, tacky souvenirs, a sonic lag between what you saw on the video screen and the sound that eventually reached you, all within the safe confines of a sports stadium with indoor plumbing. It was magic.

And so, it's taken 40 years to crawl out of the mud and mire of Woodsmoke. But this weekend, we have a chance to listen to live music in Tiny Town, outdoors in good weather, performed by people who were largely unconceived when that other concert was happening in upstate NY and, who knows, maybe create a whole new generation of myths. The Mountain West Music Fest - MWMF, pronounced mümff, I believe - finally puts the golf course driving range to good use for the weekend. Nary a ball will be shanked Saturday and Sunday but a good time shall be heard by all.

What'll happen instead is good music - Xavier Rudd, K'Naan, Garaj Mahal, et.al. - sunshine, great vibes, a sea of picnic baskets, groovers, dancers and, most importantly, enough portable toilets to relieve a small army. And, as an added bonus, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Olympics or municipal politics.

With no music fest in Pemby this year and with the very talented braintrust of the Women of Watermark running the show - they of the World Ski and Snowboard Festival - this promises to be the don't-miss high point for live music this summer. And if the music every year on the WSSF mainstage is any indication, it'll be very, very good.

If nothing else, it'll be years before it's nostalgic. Be there so you don't have to lie to your grandchildren about it.