What was the hot music of 1999? 1989? Fine Young Cannibals and Black Crowes, but they don’t generate any real nostalgia, do they? How about 1979? Punk was big and getting bigger, and no one is throwing it parties. So how did the summer of festival love that turned into the winter of rock’s discontent come to symbolize everything officially reaching middle age?
I pondered this while watching Taking Woodstock the day after it opened in a theatre empty but for me, my mother, and a man in the nosebleed seats who coughed half the time. My mom and my late stepfather had taken me to see Woodstock in Seattle when it was released in 1970. It was an extraordinarily liberating experience for me to see the hippie dream live onscreen, and dazzling in its display of rock euphoria, after having seen it mostly in photos.
Within Ang Lee’s film about the festival are reproduced images and moments captured in the Life magazine special edition of the festival, which I pestered my mom to buy for me. She did, and it has survived, barely. I pulled it out from an old stack of Life magazines I have kept throughout the years for personal nostalgia.
Its pages were stiff and stuck together, but not so much that I couldn’t see once more the photographic images that would fire the wanderlust in my teenage soul. I too wanted to experience that joy, that elation, that sense of brotherhood and sisterhood through the communal experience of music. That I thought nothing of how clean the port-a-cans might be or how I’d pay for food much less pot was out of the realm while image of freely showering in the water – there was always water nearby, right? – and hot sex with hippie boys loomed large. Ah, it’s a more acerbic memory now than then, but there ya go.
I don’t say that to sound jaded. Last week I saw Bandslam, a teen trifle flick that turned out to be much better than it had to be. Not only was it filmed in Austin and featuring Austin’s own bands Joker (as the swaggering Glory Dogs), Zeale and Phranchyze, and The Daze (under their own name). Though Austin stars as New Jersey (!) in the film, its local settings are unmistakable. Unfortunately, the lack of gratuitous sex, teens that are so much smarter than their elders, and drug use ensures Bandslam will only appeal to kids with good sense and love for music.
On the other hand, any film that pits one teenager against the other on the issue of whether or not the Velvet Underground went downhill before or after Lou Reed fired John Cale and delivers David Bowie at the end, just might find status as a teen cult movie.
This article appears in August 28 • 2009.