Remaindering the Sixties: By the Time We Got to Woodstock

With the recent 40th anniversary celebration of the Woodstock Festival, all of the hype, hoopla, and myth of the era came bubbling back up in the public consciousness like a funky burrito at bedtime. The already heavily-marketed event has experienced the expected slew of revamped CD and DVD releases (and accompanying fawning reviews), while timely books try to put the "importance" of the festival in proper context. Plus, you Target shoppers will be able to pick up great deals on overstock Woodstock merch in the weeks to come….

Music journalist Bruce Pollock's latest tome is called By the Time We Got to Woodstock, subtitled "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Revolution of 1969." Music fans turning to Pollock for a little insight into the Woodstock phenomena will be sorely disappointed because, in truth, he spends very little time actually discussing the festival and a lot of pages doing, well…I'm not really sure what the hell he's doing, but he's doing something that he understandably felt was important enough to share with the rest of us.

The main thrust of Pollock's book-length treatise is that the year 1969 was an important turning point in the history of rock music, a radical changing of the guard that is represented by – but not restricted to – the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, held in the quaint upstate New York village of Bethel in mid-August '69. It's an interesting premise, and not totally unbelievable in its audacity. After all, the storied festival aside, a lot of great music was released during the year, including influential debut albums from the MC5 and the Stooges.

To make his point, Pollock has divided the book into two widely differing sections, the first being "No Easy Way Down," which attempts to portray the period from Nixon's election to the Presidency in November 1968 through the Kent State massacre in May 1970 as representing not only the literal and figurative "end of the '60s," but also the symbolic end of innocence as well. With the venal, paranoid, vindictive Nixon in office the counter-culture came into the gunsights of the administration, while other events, such as the Manson Family slayings and atrocities in Viet Nam, served to sour the milk-n-honey of the Flower Children into something approximating the pink-flavored medicine your mom used to pour down your throat.

The seven chapters that make up the book's first section, "No Easy Way Down," are, truthfully, marginally entertaining in a prurient way, even if Pollock's machinegun prose often seems to be the literary equivalent of the man-child Stewart on Mad TV exclaiming "look what I can do!" He drops a lot of names, throws out a few interesting ideas, fleshes out nothing, and provides little context or insight beyond outlining a loose chronological timeline of the decay of the Peace & Love Generation.

If the first half of By the Time We Got to Woodstock prompts the reader to continue with their ride, if only to see where Pollock, the conductor, is taking them, the second section of the book is the inevitable trainwreck at the hands of the drunken engineer. Titled "Opiates for the People," after the old Karl Marx canard "Die religion...ist das opium des volkes," music is the focus here…specifically the music of 1969. Or is it? With the first chapter in the section, "Three Minutes of Heaven," Pollock invests a lot of ink talking about songs from both 1968 and '70, bookending his intended target with a nearly non-stop barrage of song titles and artist's names that tax the strength of even the most fanatical among the pop/rock masses.

In attempting to explain that 1969 is the line in the sand where the three-minute, AM radio-friendly pop song lost its mojo while the ascension of FM radio and underground "album tracks" would alter the face of modern music, Pollock gets lost in the quicksand of his own making. His premise, on its face, is false – as a teen in suburban Nashville circa the early-70s, I remember quite vividly the still-thriving singles scene as played out daily on both the city's WJET and WLAC AM stations. A new generation of soul and R&B artists would replace the Motown-bred hitmakers of the '60s with fresh blood and chart-topping hits well into the end of the decade (and the dreaded rise of disco).

In fact, I would submit that the fondly-remembered 45rpm single, a staple of AM (and some FM) stations throughout the decade of the 1970s, wouldn't be dealt a fatal blow until the launch of MTV in 1981 and the subsequent alleged "mercy-killing" of vinyl by compact discs later in the decade, both phenomena dealing much more damage to the "singles" concept than FM radio ever did (and thus dismantling much of Pollock's argument).

The second chapter of section two, "The Joy of Segues," tackles the FM radio side of the musical equation (naturally), with the same scattershot lack of finesse as the AM radio chapter. A self-indulgent morass of band names and album titles and long-forgotten songs ("see what I can do!"), he breaks the argument down into several bite-size concepts such as "The Dylan Influence" and "The Guitar Invasion," in order to squeeze more mileage out of his premise which is…what? That AOR was the commercialization of free-form FM radio, when in reality the free-form wonderground that he describes barely existed outside of NYC/LA/San Fran and maybe a handful of other large metro areas. For most of us, it was AOR from Jump Street, and it only worsened from there.

The last chapter of By the Time We Got to Woodstock is "Sky Church," Jimi Hendrix's favored term for the outdoor concert performance experience. After mentioning the Woodstock Festival several times throughout the book, Pollock finally provides the reader with a little gristle-n-bone, if little actual meat, on the event. Overshadowing the alleged "peace and love" vibe on the weekend mudfest in Bethel, however, is the dark tragedy of Altamont, held a continent away in December 1969. During the Rolling Stones' performance at the free concert, several members of the Hell's Angels outlaw motorcycle "club" beat a gun-wielding young black man to death with pool cues.

To Pollock, the seemingly random violence of Altamont symbolized the end of the era, and the drawing of the final curtain on a generation that came of age during the tumultuous decade of the '60s. As one who grew up with, rode with, and drank with outlaw bikers since before I developed acne and high school awkwardness, I can state authoritatively that any violence committed by outlaw motorcycle enthusiasts is not "random," but rather part and parcel of the biker's lifestyle and self-image. When you're the biggest, baddest Cro-Mags riding the blacktop, violence finds you, and the hiring of Hell's Angels as security for the festival is proof that drugs had addled Jerry Garcia's brain.

Truth is, from the deification of outlaw bikers by people intelligent enough to have known better, to the war in Viet Nam, to student protests and the inevitable crackdown on same, violence is woven throughout the decade. If one accepts that as a given, then the myth of the "peace & love" generation dwindles down to a few idealistic dreamers and an accompanying generation of Baby Boomers who have accepted the fable as a way to enrich and possibly stave off their own fast-approaching mortality.

From start to finish, By the Time We Got to Woodstock is a mess, talking a lot but saying very little…kind of like a Vanilla Ice song. I can't quibble with Pollock's taste in music – with his final chapter, "Hello/Goodbye" – he name checks artists as diverse as Springsteen, Kate Bush, Tom Petty, Patti Smith, Warren Zevon, XTC, and Motorhead, among many others, all of which are also personal faves of mine. But seldom has somebody taken so much time to say so little, and have it published for our reading enjoyment.

The 1960s were a period of change for popular music, 1969 maybe more so than most, but a similar argument could be made for a number of other years as well (such as 1977 and the British punk revolution, or again in 1981 with the MTV generation). As the decade wore on, it became apparent that there was real money to be made in rock music (by the artists and the record labels), and the gradual evolution of the genre from one largely created by a smallish but cliquish group of middle class musicians to one of working class balladry started with the British Invasion, took a foothold in the states with John Fogerty's Creedence Clearwater Revival, and by the early-1970s had exploded.

Rock music took an ugly left turn beginning in 1970 as a disgruntled rabble of barely-educated hellraisers largely took over the genre, resulting in the sins and delights of critically-reviled genres like arena rock, heavy metal, and punk. But you won't need Bruce Pollock to tell you about any of this…save the $20 you'd spend on a copy of By the Time We Got to Woodstock and instead buy a couple of CDs, like Spirit's Clear, Creedence Clearwater Revival's Green River, and/or the MC5's Kick Out The Jams. Any of these albums will give you a better idea of the year 1969 than will this book. (Backbeat Books)

(Click on the book cover to buy By the Time We Got to Woodstock if you really want it....)