By Roger Franklin
The crowds of dusty backpackers who streamed home from the Woodstock 99 site at Rome, north of Manhattan, caused no trouble, perhaps because they were so exhausted from their revels of the night before.
All the same, to anybody over 40, the notion that words like "riot,"
"dangerous" and "Woodstock" belong in the same sentence remains extraordinarily hard to accept.
Old habits break hard, and three decades of myth-making about the original Woodstock have left such an indelible mark not even arson can entirely destroy it.
This Woodstock, like the first, was supposed to be about peace and love - not T-shirt vendors being beaned with iron bars, or parking lots full of semi-trailers going up in flames.
Even the organisers, unlike the police, had trouble acknowledging what their own eyes had seen.
"You can't call what happened here a riot," insisted co-promoter Michael Lang to the press on the morning after (Tuesday New Zealand time.) "It was just a few kids acting up at the end. This festival re-affirmed all the values of the original. I'm not going to let this little bit of trouble stop me from regarding Woodstock 99 as a success."
And then Lang cut off questions before anyone could ask about the trucks that were still smouldering, or the mobile bank looted of more than $US170,000, or the 21-year-old college student whose spine and legs had been crushed when the mob tipped a mobile home right on top of him. As for questions about gang rapes, Lang wouldn't touch that one at all.
As the smoke clears, the one certain thing about Woodstock 99 is that the crowd was prepared to honour only one of the original festival's cherished myths - the obligation of youth to trash whatever their parents stand for.
In 1969, the Baby Boomers did it with paisley prints and ostentatious pacifism. Last weekend, their own kids did it with tattoos, violence and gang rapes.
"You don't understand," the news cameras caught an older concertgoer pleading with a knot of youths on that final night. "I was at the first Woodstock and this isn't what it's all about! You're ruining it!"
The kids she was lecturing seemed nervous at first. This woman was in her late 40s, old enough to have been one of their mothers and thus due at least a meagre measure of respect.
But then they began laughing, first sniggering at her talk of harmony and soon bellowing war cries of incoherent aggression just inches from her face. One even flipped a plastic bottle her way before the mob danced back to the flames.
Perhaps, if she had been just a tad more honest about her own generation, Woodstock 99's orgy of destruction might have made more sense. It certainly did to former Who bassist John Entwistle, who played the first festival and returned for the second with his new band.
"It was a disaster in 1969, none of this crap about how beautiful everything was. What I remember was mud and delays and overdoses everywhere," Entwistle said.
"I remember a fridge backstage stocked with orange juice that was all laced with acid, and nobody bothering to warn anybody about it."
Plenty of others, however, continue to prefer the gilded myth to grim reality. Ironically, their numbers include several members of Rome's town council, whose members have been downplaying Monday night's chaos with almost as much energy as the promoter despite the fact that their municipal budget has been blown to kingdom come by the unexpected costs of coping with 300,000 visitors.
"We tried really hard to persuade the Pentagon not to shut the old B-52 bomber base where the festival was held," said local businessman Sam Gleeson.
"It's not a rich area up here, so when the bombers left, it seemed like a good idea to stage a rock festival. We need the money."
It is an irony only an old hippie can love: The town wanted to keep its B-52's, the same planes that rained death and destruction on Vietnam, yet they settled for the direct descendant of the pop festival that made Country J McDonald famous for his anti-war song, Fixin' To Die Rag.
As for commercialism and the profit motive, those twin bugbears of the 1969 gathering, they helped stoke the fires. At the first Woodstock, only fools paid to get in since it was so easy to jump the fence.
Last weekend, the site was sealed from the world behind a 4m cyclone wire fence patrolled by 1200 security guards who seem to have cared not at all what mischief members of the crowd embraced just so long as every single visitor had parted with $150 for the price of admission.
"Ripoffs everywhere," fumed Rena Caracci, a 29-year-old college dormitory supervisor.
"All I saw was people making obscene amounts of money. You know, you couldn't get a drink of water from a fountain because the lines went for miles. So if you were thirsty, it was cough up $4 for a small bottle of water or pass out. Do know how much water you drink when it's 100 degrees and there is no shade?"
By Monday night when the trouble started, the festival's medical area had treated more than 5000 cases of dehydration.
At the original Woodstock, the pacific protocols of a stillborn Youth Revolution acted as brake on the crowd's worst impulses. Fornicating was fine; fighting wasn't.
On Monday night, those constraints no longer applied.
"It was the young guys who caused all that trouble.
They were just awful, awful," explained Caracci's sister, Dee-Dee.
"Everyone was drinking and the mood was really ugly. These young guys were just roaming around, completely smashed, tearing everything to pieces."
And raping too. Police are investigating four allegations.
"There was a number of situations where there was a total passing around of women in the lines [of guys]," admitted the festival's first-aid director Phil Crimaldi.
"No one was screaming for help ... some of the women having intercourse were unconscious."
Another witness, a T-shirt vendor, told how at least dozen young men took turns with a girl "who looked about 16."
"She was out of it, moaning and vomiting, but the guys didn't care," he said, adding that he was too busy trying to protect his wares from looters to intervene.
One common point shared by the first Woodstock and its successor is the opportunity both provided for right-wing moralisers to lament the rending of America's cultural fabric.
In 1969, it was then-vice president Spiro Agnew who cited the nude bathing and drug taking as evidence of the nation's decline. This time it is ultra-conservative presidential contender Pat Buchanan who has been beating the drum.
"The belief then was that one chooses a moral code to suit one's own personality and lifestyle. In the phrase of the day, `Do your own thing,' " Buchanan said.
"Well, that's the way the original Woodstock generation brought up its own kids and the end result isn't pretty. The sins of the fathers, that's what we're seeing."
To be fair, Buchanan is a zealot and for every rampager, there were hundreds like Caracci and her friends who simply wanted to get out of the way.
All the same, it's hard not hear echoes of the riot's soundtrack, the song that came on the PA system not long after the Red Hot Chili Peppers wrapped up the festival's final set. It was a Gen-X anthem by the band Cracker that boomed through a night fired with smoke and sirens, the song with the catchy little chorus that goes, "Don't [stuff] me up with peace and love."
This time, like the first Woodstock, the crowd wasn't about to argue with the message from the stage.
By Roger Franklin
The crowds of dusty backpackers who streamed home from the Woodstock 99 site at Rome, north of Manhattan, caused no trouble, perhaps because they were so exhausted from their revels of the night before.
All the same, to anybody over 40, the notion that words like "riot,"
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