Rock and Hard Places Read online

  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 fuckheads.” 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 clustered around a tatty mermaid’s grotto constructed of theatrical maché 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 shirt 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, “Shithouse.” “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 wishing 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 fucking 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 “FUCK,” “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 Buzzcock-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 deliver
s “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 titty bar.”

  “Yeah,” says the other. “We could like, drop these guys off, and go to the titty 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 shiftless, unhygienic, duplicitous, cheese-scoffing, white-flag-hoisting, stripy-shirted, 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.

  This is because the French just don’t give a crap. They are completely, loftily, almost magnificently unupsettable—and on those rare occasions they give the impression that someone has succeeded in offending them, they’re just pretending, as they know that this is even more annoying. In a truly logical world, France’s national anthem would be—indisputably splendid though “La Marseillaise” is—Travis Tritt’s “Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares),” perhaps arranged for the accordion. The slogan “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” would actually translate as “Talk to the hand.” The French are, to use the lovely word they surely coined just to describe themselves, insouciant. As such, they nobly and generously serve as a global safety valve, a means by which all the world’s chronically fractious and querulous peoples can let off steam without seriously scalding anybody. Mixed gatherings of different nationalities can be edgy affairs, everybody treading carefully around imagined or perceived sensitivities and resentments. It usually only takes one person to tell the joke about the difference between Frenchmen and toast, and before you can sing a bar of “It’s a Small World After All,” even the most previously tense of international soirees becomes a cacophony of hearty backslaps and insistent protestations that no, old chap, it’s my round.

  All of which is by way of buying time before confessing that the journey into France’s revolutionary heritage recounted here, commissioned by The Face on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the student revolt of 1968, stirred in your correspondent the budding of an understated, but unmistakable, Francophilic tendency. Vive, you infuriating contrarians.

  WERE THE POLLSTERS of Family Fortunes to ask a hundred randomly selected riffraff what they most associate with Paris, the odds are the Mona Lisa to a 2CV that the greatest percentage would imagine a scene like this. In a hysterically baroque theatre near the Arc de Triomphe, a fashion show: next year’s clothes hung on young women built like broomsticks, so excruciatingly thin they must have to move around in the shower to get wet, and on the brieze-block shoulders of swaggering, flawless young men with unfeasible jawlines, punchably smug. At the end of the catwalk, a battery of photographers, firing flashguns into the whites of eyes that never blink.

  The clothes are by Jean Colonna, the occasion one of the umpteen catwalk shows of Paris Fashion Week. Colonna is not as big a name as Gaultier, and he hasn’t attracted as many riot police to his opening as Armani did, nor is he as big a deal as McQueen, McCartney or any of the young British designers who have recently taken the helms at some of France’s biggest labels, but he’s pulled a decent enough crowd, some of whom are wearing their sunglasses inside with a shamelessness sufficient to suggest that they’re in some way important or famous. I wouldn’t know—what I know, or care, about fashion, could be carved onto foie gras with a chisel. But I think the knee-length tartan coat is quite smart, and I’m as gratified as anyone would be to see the Paris of popular imagination made flesh, however in need of a decent feed some of that flesh looks.

  Outside, in the grey chill of an early spring morning, another Paris is sleeping off another day of living up to another sort of magnificent cliché.

  “Revolution is the ecstasy of history.”

  —GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968

  AT THE BOTTOM of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, not far from my hotel, a huge digital clock is counting down the 56-and-a-half-or-so-million seconds that remain between now and the end of the millenium. It seems right that people will gather here, in the vast square over which the clock presides, to watch an era end. Six-and-a-half-or-so-billion seconds ago, people gathered here to watch an era begin, though they wouldn’t have known it at the time. The storming of a prison called the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was, in itself, more than slightly quixotic, delivering the release of four forgers, two lunatics and one drunk, syphilitic, aristocratic idiot who had been locked up at the request of his own father. Louis XVI recorded the day in his diary with the terse entry “Rien,” which goes to show how wrong a chap can be—as Louis himself doubtless reflected as he mounted the guillotine four years later.

  The mob who razed the Bastille did more than burn down an old and ugly building. They instituted a municipal tradition of revolt that would dominate their city for the next two centuries—and counting—and which would ensure that Paris dominated the imagination of the planet. The reason that Paris is so often and so lyrically celebrated in film, theatre, fashion, music, holiday brochures and all our received wisdoms about romance is the lingering sense that in Paris, as nowhere else, the world can be turned upside down.

  “Open the nurseries, the universities and all the other prisons.”

  —GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968

  AFTER GETTING OFF the train at Gare Du Nord and dumping my bags, I get a taxi to the Sorbonne, Paris’s 750-year-old university. In 1998, of all years, these tatty beige halls will get used to visitors. Thirty years ago, the Sorbonne was the epicentre of a rebellion remarkable even by the standards of 1968—a year, like 1989 or 1917 or 1871 or 1848, in which the prevailing institutions of the world suddenly looked less like rigid structures and more like a spaghetti-western film set: facades held up by wires, hooks, pulleys and the crossed fingers of those who’d erected them. In 1968, in Vietnam, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan and Great Britain, from the LSE to the Élysées, things stopped making sense.

  On May 2nd, 1968, following weeks of protest by students outraged both by events in Vietnam and a rule that prohibited cohabitation between male and female students—the debate over their priorities has never been entirely resolved—the university in Nanterre, in the western suburbs of Paris, was closed by the Ministry of the Interior, acting under the orde
rs of President Charles de Gaulle. The evicted students, led by ginger-haired German agitator Daniel Cohn-Bendit, marched into the centre of Paris and occupied the Sorbonne. Barricades were erected. Slogans were painted. Flags were waved. Speeches were made. Fists were shaken.

  Given time, the students might all have got bored and hungry and gone home, but De Gaulle didn’t wait to find out. On May 3, police were dispatched to clear the Sorbonne, a task they carried out with what might tactfully be described as excessive enthusiasm. As the students took control of Paris’s Latin Quarter, the public mood shifted from bemusement to anger at the heavy-handedness of the government—few things are more sacred to Parisians than the right to protest. On May 10, the “Night Of The Barricades,” 100,000 students and sympathisers rioted. There were 500 arrests and 370 injuries—though it has recently emerged that a student who died two weeks later did so as a result of wounds inflicted by a police stun grenade, and that his Gaullist parents were persuaded to comply in a cover-up for fear that a martyr could have ignited full-scale revolution.

  France’s trade unions, under pressure from their members, and sensing an opportunity to bend the government over a barrel, took the side of the students. A general strike on May 13 brought 250,000 workers onto the streets. De Gaulle, the most colossal figure of the French twentieth century, was rattled. He embarked on a bafflingly-timed state visit to Romania—where, just over twenty-one years later, his host, Nicolae Ceausescu, would demonstrate that he’d taken on board several unhelpful lessons from the De Gaulle technique of charming a restive public.

  When De Gaulle returned to his collapsing capital, he delivered an ineffectual address to the nation, sulked for a bit and then vanished. While his government wondered where he’d got to, De Gaulle was staging another eerie preview of his friend Ceausescu’s demise, making a farcical flight by helicopter to assure himself of the support of his military. The differences were that De Gaulle flew to Baden-Baden in Germany, not Tirgoviste in Romania, and that De Gaulle’s generals encouraged him to return to Paris and assert his authority, rather than dragging him to a barracks wall and shooting him. On May 30, half a million pro-government demonstrators marched down the Champs Élysées and reclaimed Paris. The ghosts of the Paris Commune, and of the French Revolution, had been vanquished, but only just.