Part 11 (1/2)

THE RAIN STARTS gently, pattering on the roof of The Cranberries' dressing trailer like polite applause. There are a few half-guilty glances and giggles as Dolores O'Riordan and her band realise how perfectly they've timed things. They were the first band to play on this ominously overcast Sat.u.r.day, and now they're free to make their escape. As they congratulate themselves and commiserate with us, the rain builds to a thunderous ovation.

”Here,” says Fergal Lawler, proferring a leftover bottle of red wine. ”You're going to need it.”

THERE HAVE BEEN better-organised car accidents and less self-important Soviet funerals. We've only been at Woodstock '94 a matter of hours when it dawns on us that we may be witnessing-nay, actually partic.i.p.ating in-the greatest American fiasco since the Bay of Pigs.

Back down in New York City the previous day, the usually mercilessly cheerful television weather forecasters could not have appeared more grim if they'd delivered their reports dressed in hooded robes and carrying scythes. So apocalyptic were their predictions for the Woodstock weekend that I'd been apprehensive about venturing upstate without several cubits of oak, and manuals on elementary boat construction and animal husbandry.

I had tried to reason with my travelling companions, Vicki Bruce of Island records and Vox Vox photographer Ed Sirrs. I pointed out that we were comfortably ensconced in a fine hotel on Park Avenue, that Woodstock '94 was going to be broadcast live on pay-per-view television, that we could cover the event just as thoroughly while staying dry, clean and within walking distance of the bars and restaurants of Manhattan and if they didn't tell anyone, neither would I. They didn't listen. They thought I was joking. photographer Ed Sirrs. I pointed out that we were comfortably ensconced in a fine hotel on Park Avenue, that Woodstock '94 was going to be broadcast live on pay-per-view television, that we could cover the event just as thoroughly while staying dry, clean and within walking distance of the bars and restaurants of Manhattan and if they didn't tell anyone, neither would I. They didn't listen. They thought I was joking.

And so we join the 300,000 befuddled souls gathered in these New York state paddocks. We are being rained on, p.i.s.sed about, ripped off, spattered with slime and generally tormented like no other a.s.sembly in human history, with the arguable exception of General Haig's 4th Army, and at least the footsoldiers freezing in the trenches of the Somme had been able to get a drink, and hadn't had to listen to Del Amitri.

For no, we cannot get a drink. There is no alcohol available on site. Indeed, in the backstage press tent, we cannot even get a cup of coffee. Americans, while admittedly useful to have around if you're trying to liberate a continent, are the last people you should call if you're trying to organise a party. I've had more fun in Sweden. It would take a leaky press tent full of mutinously muddy, bored, annoyed and sober journalists three days to list everything that is wrong with Woodstock '94, and speaking as one of those journalists, I can report that our deliberations are exhaustive. In fact, the only area in which Woodstock '94 lives up to its declared ambitions of, like, bringing people together as one, man, is the manner in which scores of personal and professional British media rivalries are forgotten in the cause of a good self-pitying whinge. ”This is h.e.l.l, isn't it?” announces one damp British writer to the a.s.sembled hackery, huddled in the press tent, our chairs sinking slowly but inexorably into the mud. ”Utter f.u.c.king h.e.l.l.”

There are jails which permit their inmates to get away with more than organisers allow the punters at this crazy, zany homage to the anarchic, devil-may-care, do-what-thou-wilt spirit of the original Woodstock. We are not allowed take our own food onto the site (well, the concession-holders jacking their prices a hundred percent and more over the odds are only trying to make a living). We may not spend US dollars (greenbacks have to be converted for festival scrip, the reason for which is a mystery to everyone). We are strictly forbidden tent pegs. At a festival at which tens of thousands have arrived expecting to camp out, this last edict verges on genius.

It's only Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It's going to get so much worse. We can tell. The rain is now hammering against the tent with all the ferocity of a vengeful G.o.d and, it has to be said, he'd have every excuse. Out in the fields in front of the stages, humanity is returning, literally and spiritually, to the primeval ooze.

THE MUSIC ON the Sat.u.r.day commences with a set by Joe c.o.c.ker, a veteran of the original Woodstock. He's touting the same act that he has been for thirty years, which is to say he still looks and sounds like he's shat himself and it's running down one leg. The crowd go mad, but Americans will clap at anything. Baseball, for example. As c.o.c.ker delivers ”With A Little Help From My Friends” like it's being forced out of him with thumbscrews, I traverse the swamp to Woodstock's other stage.

Things here are, if anything, worse. I hadn't been expecting great things from Woodstock on a musical level, but nothing had prepared me for the horror of Zucchero in full flight. Zucchero is Italy's idea of a pop star, which explains why Italy, over the years, has been to rock'n'roll roughly what Rwanda has to package holidays. Zucchero resembles nothing so much as a drunk Albanian taxi driver in the process of emptying a karaoke bar. He is followed by Youssou N'Dour, today's token world music artiste, who is something of a stranger to Mr. Tune, and then The Band, or part thereof. They play for a week, then bring on someone from The Grateful Dead, and play for another month.

With blood beginning to collect on my palms and visions of St. Francis dancing in my eyes, I strike out for the press tent, hoping to reach sanctuary before night falls and jackals begin emerging from their lairs to pick off the fallen and unwary. By now, the walk from the South Stage to the backstage area is at best ankle deep, and at worst capable of swallowing troops, horses and cannons. On the liquefying hills and slopes along the way, those who have surrendered to the conditions hold mud toboggan races on stretchers stolen from the medical tents. Gangs of mud-covered vigilantes roam the site looking for clean newcomers to haul forcibly into the slime.

One forlorn form, naked but for a pair of shorts and an all-over suit of steaming slime, totters around in the downpour clutching a smudging, hand-written sign that reads ”I Want Drugs.” Alone in the middle of a vast mud lake, a drenched youth sits in a half-submerged deckchair, cradling a sodden hardback book, having clearly plumbed Colonel Kurtz-like depths of dementia. Woodstock now looks like the set of one of those nuclear armageddon films that were so big in the 80s, and I am walking through a crowd scene from the day after the bomb.

In the press tent, the atmosphere is souring further. Two distinct, mutually hostile camps have formed: i) the British media; ii) everyone else. The festival organisers think we're being a bit hard to please. ”You have things like this in England, don't you?” asks one. ”Yes,” replies the journalist, without lifting his head out of his hands. ”But with the one crucial difference that ours are, in some respects, any fun at all.” The American media, meanwhile, charge around us foreign types, waving television cameras and tape recorders, asking us What We Think It All Means. ”It's a bunch of bands playing in a field, it happens all the time in Europe, it doesn't mean anything,” is one common response. ”p.i.s.s off,” is another.

Almost excitingly, from an Australian perspective, among the visiting press is Ian ”Molly” Meldrum. Meldrum spent the 70s and 80s hosting a television rock programme called Countdown Countdown, on which he mumbled a great deal, crawled like a millipede cowering from sniper fire to anybody foreign or famous who deigned to turn up, and promoted a succession of desperately witless local acts. Countdown Countdown is often recalled with fondness by people who grew up in Australia during this time, in much the same way that people will, a few years down the road, laugh about a night in the cells. Call me humourless, but I don't think the man who delivered fame, however fleeting and local, to (for example) Kids In The Kitchen, Pseudo Echo, The Uncanny X-Men and Indecent Obsession at the expense of (say) The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Ed Kuepper and The Hummingbirds should get off quite so lightly. The thought of seizing his trademark cowboy hat and tramping it into the mud occurs to me, as does the idea of kicking away the crutches with which he's walking today. But no. He's here, and he's him, and between them that's punishment enough. is often recalled with fondness by people who grew up in Australia during this time, in much the same way that people will, a few years down the road, laugh about a night in the cells. Call me humourless, but I don't think the man who delivered fame, however fleeting and local, to (for example) Kids In The Kitchen, Pseudo Echo, The Uncanny X-Men and Indecent Obsession at the expense of (say) The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Ed Kuepper and The Hummingbirds should get off quite so lightly. The thought of seizing his trademark cowboy hat and tramping it into the mud occurs to me, as does the idea of kicking away the crutches with which he's walking today. But no. He's here, and he's him, and between them that's punishment enough.

Outside, the music is degenerating as fast as the weather. The North Stage hosts tedious crusties Blind Melon, tedious weightlifter Henry Rollins and tedious n.o.body Melissa Etheridge. These acts are introduced by a ridiculous bulls.h.i.+tter in a tie-dyed t-s.h.i.+rt who spouts interminable cosmic drivel about how we're all ”beautiful” and ”making history, man.” History is what he'll be if he comes within chair-throwing range of the press tent. I realise that, all things considered, I'm quite looking forward to Crosby, Stills & Nash, which is a new experience.

The only act to properly sum up the squalor of the weekend are Nine Inch Nails, who address the crowd, with commendable accuracy, as ”miserable, muddy f.u.c.kheads.” Reznor and company are plastered from head to foot in brown goo after a pre-show punch-up, and are a welcome torrent of cleansing venom. Their triumphantly misanthropic set ends with ”Head Like A Hole” and a comprehensive demolition of their equipment. After that, Metallica's gruff barking, pointless widdly-widdly soloing and dim macho posing is only ever going to look a bit daft, and does. We beat a retreat to the strains of redoubtable heavy metal pantomime queens Aerosmith. How we chuckle at ”Walk This Way” as we blunder through the dark, damp undergrowth in search of our car.

IT RAINS ALL night. The swimming pool in the middle of Pollace's Crystal Palace Resort in Catskill bursts its banks at about two. Me, Ed and Vicki sit on the porch behind one of our villas and drink too much. Pollace's Crystal Palace Resort is a kind of Italian-American Butlin's, a couple of dozen white weatherboard villas cl.u.s.tered around a tatty mermaid's grotto constructed of theatrical mache rocks and artificial waterfalls. The clientele, aside from us, consists of Italian-American families who each have a dozen wheelchair-bound grandparents and a thousand screaming children. The decor of the reception area resembles the plunder of inept archaeologists who've excavated a Bulgarian discotheque.

Still, the staff are friendly, and excited beyond reason that they have ”you British press guys” staying with them.

”WOULD ANDREW MUELLER . . .”

It's six o'clock in the morning. Christ.

”. . . PLEASE COME TO RECEPTION IMMEDIATELY . . .”

It's booming from the loudspeakers that sit on poles around the resort compound. It's some consolation that everyone else is being woken up by this.

”WE HAVE AUSTRALIA ON THE LINE.”

What are they talking about? I stand unsteadily up and get hurriedly dressed; it's only by great good luck that I don't get my trousers over my head and my s.h.i.+rt around my knees. I squelch barefoot through the pouring rain in the dawn half-light to reception.

”There's this radio guy on the phone for you,” beams the bloke at reception. ”He's calling all the way from Australia!” He's beside himself. ”Are you, like, famous or something?”

Not that I'm aware of. I exploit my celebrity as far as asking for a cup of black coffee, which the reception bloke positively sprints off to organise, and pick up the phone. It turns out to be a researcher from Radio National back in the old country, who's got my name and contact number from someone in London, and wants to know if I'd be okay to be interviewed about the Woodstock catastrophe by Philip Adams. Adams is a reliably amusing and acerbic commentator and columnist, and something of a childhood hero. On one hand, the idea of bantering on air with the great man is no problem at all. On the other, I'd prefer not to do it on the strength of two hours' sleep while sweating tequila through my palms.

”How's it going, Andrew?” comes Adams' unmistakable, sonorous drawl. And so, after years spent dreaming of just such a moment, the first word I speak to the distinguished broadcaster is, ”s.h.i.+thouse.” ”I can imagine,” he laughs. ”I've seen the pictures on television. Though if you could give us a slightly more tactful perspective once we start, I'd be grateful.”

I get through it okay, suffused by the coffee provided by the receptionist, who smiles ecstatically and hops from foot to foot while the interview takes place. At the conclusion of an epically self-pitying rant wis.h.i.+ng all the miseries of the pit upon Woodstock's organisers, Adams says, ”Well, Andrew, you've acquired a most engaging mix of Australian cynicism and English detachment,” which, until I get a better offer, will do as an epitaph.

Back at my villa, after two more hours' sleep, I am woken again, this time by a knock on the door. It's Ed Sirrs.

”I don't care,” he announces, ”if it means I never work in London again. But I am not going back to that terrible f.u.c.king place today.”

Ed is no lightweight. He has braved the most violent of moshpits, the most inadequate of stagefront security, the most temperamental of musicians. He is probably the best live rock photographer working, and does not baulk at much. But his mind is made up, and I for one will not hold it against him.

Indeed, a few miles up the road, Vicki and I wish we'd had the same resolve. The entire Woodstock site now has the consistency and colour of French onion soup, but smells a good deal worse. You'd get further in a punt that you would in car. All the roads into the festival area are closed. We try to reason with a security guard, using the time-honoured means of waving our laminates and trying to sound as foreign and as important as possible. We claim to be Peter Gabriel's management, Bob Dylan's children and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' trombone section. ”I don't care who you're here with,” he tells us. ”You can't drive a car where there ain't no road.”

We're still seven miles from the gate when we abandon the car in a ditch by the road. A bit further along, some enterprising yokels from nearby farms are running a tractor shuttle from the point at which the road is closed. We pay a man with no front teeth and eyebrows on his cheeks ten dollars each for a lift as far as he can take us, which is to a roadblock four miles from the entrance. We walk the rest of the way, proceeding against a steady human tide-an exodus of filthy early leavers, refugees from the disaster occuring over the ridge. The only good news is that by the time we squelch into camp, we've missed The Allman Brothers and Traffic. I hadn't realised they were still alive.

”I'm not sure they are,” says someone who saw them.

Surveying the now half-submerged press tent, it's clear that we've actually been quite lucky. There were some whose devotion to duty was such that they stayed until the end of Aerosmith's set, with the result that they weren't able to get out of the site at all, and had been forced to sleep here on whichever tables and chairs hadn't sunk down to the mesozoic layer. There is a Woodstock poster still clinging to one wall of the tent, bearing the festival slogan ”3 Days of Peace and Music” in stars-and-stripes-coloured writing. Over the ”3 Days,” ”Peace” and ”Music,” some sleepless soul has written, with feeling, in red marker pen, the words ”f.u.c.k,” ”RIGHT” and ”OFF.”

Today's bill is no less dismal than yesterday's, featuring sets by The Neville Brothers, who I forget while I'm listening to them, Santana, during whose performance I swear I grow a beard, and Jimmy Cliff's All-Star Reggae Jam. There are few more frightening phrases in the language than ”All-Star Reggae Jam.” All three acts, though atrocious, play to large crowds, and I have to wonder how many of these people are so mired by the sludge that engulfs everything that they can't move even if they want to.

Cometh the hour, though, cometh some unlikely heroes. In the late afternoon, Green Day appear. Their daft Buzzc.o.c.k-ish pop romps are perfectly agreeable in and of themselves, but their singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, displays an instinctive understanding of what the weekend is about, or at least what the weekend has degenerated into. He goads two sections of the audience into a mudfight. This, inevitably, leads to an avalanche of earth landing on the stage itself, and the weekend's only stage invasion. Green Day's set is abruptly curtailed by venue security, but Billie Joe frees himself of their grip, runs back onto the stage and begins heaving great handfuls of mud back into the crowd, before being removed again by the bouncers who are supposedly protecting him. It's a fine, fine performance and one which, when replayed on the television monitors in the press tent, draws a heartfelt standing ovation from the by now almost hysterically irritated media.

It's on the North Stage today that Woodstock II achieves some sort of redemption-ironically, through a figure who famously snubbed the original Woodstock. Bob Dylan appears just as the clouds break, for the first time in forty-eight hours, to reveal an appropriately apocalyptic sunset. Behind the stage, it looks like the sky is on fire, and Dylan and his band rise to the backdrop. He delivers ”It Ain't Me Babe,” ”It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” and ”Masters Of War” with chilling conviction; where his voice these days often resembles an asthma sufferer blowing into a kazoo, tonight it's as startling and forceful as it must have sounded when he first imposed it on an unsuspecting rock'n'roll landscape. During ”I Shall Be Released,” his face, up on the giant stage-side monitors, looks transported and tear-struck, as if looking for escape from his myth in the raging red sky above us. The expression stays with him during ”Highway 61 Revisited”; he now looks like a man with nowhere to run but the endless road ahead, and it's just about been worth coming here and putting up with all this nonsense to discover that Dylan, of all people, can still sing it like he means it.

THE ONLY WAY to get out afterwards is pay two inbred solvent-abusers a hundred dollars each for a lift in their van. I sit between them in the front, trying not to think too hard about the possibility of our ride ending in shallow graves in the surrounding forest. Our mercenary rescuers bicker about my directions to our stranded car.

”Hey,” says one. ”I think that's, like, near the t.i.tty bar.”

”Yeah,” says the other. ”We could like, drop these guys off, and go to the t.i.tty bar, and spend all their money.”

”Yeah,” agrees the first. ”That'd be, like, cool.”

They have their radio tuned to Woodstock's on-site station, which is now playing highlights of Dylan's set. When ”I Shall Be Released” comes on, I hum along, quietly.

14.

BASTILLE CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.

1968 revisited, Paris MARCH 1998.

IT'S INCREDIBLY EASY to make fun of the French, which is why so many people do. However, those who amuse themselves by deriding France's weird food, silly language, baffling cinema, interminable literature, tawdry politics and erratic military record, among other hilarious defects, rarely pause, amid their mirth, to consider a yet wider virtue of mocking the snail-chewers. Which is that deriding the French as a breed of s.h.i.+ftless, unhygienic, duplicitous, cheese-scoffing, white-flag-hoisting, stripy-s.h.i.+rted, beret-wearing, bicycling onion retailers is not merely amusing in and of itself. It is also, in a way that cannot be claimed of the ritualised insulting of any other identifiable ethnic grouping or nationality, utterly righteous.