Vic Socotra

14 August 2009

Music Festivals

(Original Goose Lake International Music Festival Poster, 1970)

It is about forty years to the day, give or take, that the Woodstock Nation broke out the tokes and rolled like sweet smoke across the American consciousness.

I wasn’t there, not hip or mobile enough in 1969, but a lot of us jumped on that turnip truck thereafter. A series of knock-off festivals ensued to ensure that we all got a taste, including one that I did manage to attend with some others still (perhaps surprisingly) alive.

The festival was strongly opposed by the residents of rural Leoni Township, near the south-central Michigan city of Jackson. They knew what was coming, and feared what it was going to be: drugs, full frontal nudity, and possibly socialism.

They failed to prevent its occurrence despite extensive litigation.

Approximately 70,000 advance tickets were sold, but contemporary press estimates said that as many as 200,000 people attended. I don’t know. It certainly seemed like a lot of people at the time. According to the historical record, the festival at the little muddy lake was characterized by the “widespread use and exchange of hard drugs.”

We arrived on Saturday, August 8th, I think, by Volkswagen Beetle, and missed the Friday line-up, which included The Mighty Quick; John Drake's Shakedown; SRC; the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble; the Flying Burrito Brothers; John Sebastian; the MC5; Chicago; Rod Stewart & the Faces and Ten Years After.

We found a place to camp out in the midst of the throng, and saw Früt; Wizard; the Third Power; Brownsville Station; the Litter; Teegarden & Van Winkle; the Stooges with Iggy Pop, and Lesley West’s Mountain.

Sunday was the dance-off, and in a haze we floated out, past opportunists who warned that “the Cops are busting everyone at the gate- give us your dope!”

I think we made it through Suite Charity; Teegarden & Van Winkle; Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels; Bob Seger; the Frost; the Flock; Savage Grace; the James Gang, and Jethro Tull with the angular Ian Anderson on the flute.

Originally scheduled but not appearing were Savoy Brown; Joe Cocker; Alice Cooper and Ram.

Local authorities chose not to intervene in the open drug use for fear of rioting. I think they were right. We were pretty full of ourselves that year.

Saul Alinsky was still alive and working on his handbook Rules for Radicals, which was published in 1971, the year before his death in Carmel, California, at the ripe old age of 62.

Despite its relative brevity, Saul lived a life of great influence. His Rulesscolded us for our willingness to riot. In his mind, revolution was a slow, patient process. The key to success was the penetration of churches, unions and political parties.

In Chicago, Alinsky allied himself with power wherever it existed. He was closely aligned with the Catholic Church, and had cordial relations with the mob, including Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, Al Capone's second-in-command.

His tactics were not original. You can see the hand of consummate community organizer Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in his writing. Ulyanov is better remembered by his stage name, “Lenin,” and his take on capitalism was remarkably similar to Alinsky’s:

Lenin: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Alinsky: “I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday."

You can see that Saul’s tactics were hopelessly derivative, but you cannot deny his success. Seed money for his Industrial Areas Foundation came from department-store mogul Marshall Field III, Sears Roebuck heiress Adele Rosenwald Levy, and Gardiner Howland Shaw, an assistant secretary of state for Franklin Roosevelt.

During the fabled Sixties, Alinsky fellow-travelers infiltrated the War on Poverty, steering federal “stimulus” money to his pet projects. Cesar Chavez, icon of the migrant worker’s movement Cesar Chavez was a ten-year employee of Alinsky’s, and hence Bobby Kennedy drifted into the circle of his admirers.

Alinsky, like Lenin, was an opportunist. The three-day1964 riot in Rochester, New York, was the first of a wave of civil disturbances that swept across America through the rest of the decade. The message that Alinsky trumpeted was right out of his Rules: police brutality and disenfranchisement of African-Americans.

Not that he wasn’t right, to one degree or another, but the message was the essence of asymmetric warfare. It was the verbal ju jitsu of the powerless against the powerful. The more frightened the establishment became, the less it was able to exercise the real power that it held.

Alinsky’s used the riot as a cudgel on the major employer of the city, the Eastman-Kodak Company. He did an interview with Playboy shortly before his death in which he discussed his campaign tactics.

You would be interested, I think, since the voice that lifts off the page is vibrant and alive even after all these years.

One of his Rochester tactics was a scheme to buy up tickets to the Rochester Philharmonic, one of Kodak’s civic gems. He intended to have a hundred African Americans dine of huge portions of baked beans prior to the concert and conduct what he called a “fart-in.”

Alinksy eventually won that campaign not by methane gas, but by convincing the Unitarian-Universalist Association to assign him their proxies for the Kodak annual share-holder meeting, and the company, in panic at the thought of Alinsky being elected to the Board, backed down to his demands.

The Rochester war is is the template on which Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition extortionists have been dining out for years.

Saul Alinsky is still very much with us. Hillary Clinton became part of the extended network, even if she did not work directly for Alinsky. The President did too, being trained in The Method by Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation.

I’m not accusing anyone of anything here, please don’t get me wrong. I’m just trying to describe the process of how we came to be where we are. The tactics codified by Saul Alinsky are nothing new, nor the exclusive property of the Left, new or Old.

Lee Atwater is a contemporary of mine, who chose to perform his life’s work in the political circus. His derivative strategies for the Republican Revolution are almost a direct lift from the deadly serious pranksterism of the Industrial Areas Foundation.

Lee died young, but his impact was huge. His acolyte on the right, Karl Rove, brought us the same tactics. The Brooks Brothers Riot may be the single most successful demonstration of Alinsky’s Rules at work.

The vocal demonstration on November 19, 2000, by Republican activists against Democratic election canvassers in Miami may have determined the outcome of the election, and the subsequent road through two terms of the demolition of the New Deal by George W. Bush.

Well, at least that was the most successful demonstration until the election of former Industrial Area Foundation worker Barack Obama.

When you look back, it is sort of peculiar. Saul Alinsky has been in the White House one way or another for the last three administrations.

Here is how he put it in the introduction to The Rules:

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Anyway, how we got here is only an interesting sidelight on what is happening now. Being one of the Goose Lake Tribe of the Baby Boom, I am not as up for a good riot as I once was. But is does help to understand The Rules to put the loud discussion on Health Care Reform in context, don’t you think?

It is like the tumult at a music festival, only not nearly so much fun.

We will get to the “Single Payer” tomorrow. Of course, that is a bit of a misnomer. We are all going to pay, big time, everyone one of us.

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