My heart beats in my chest on the left side. And truth to tell, as if you couldn't already, that's pretty much how I think. Actually, child of the Woodstock Novelty that I am, and witness to some excellent weird shit gone sideways I characterize myself as a Relentless Pragmatist (and don't forget the capitalization!). Neither a Yasgur Farmer nor an Altamont Angel, I was always more at ease as a Watkins Glen Summer Jam Barefoot Boy on the last (or lost) weekend in July of 1973 with The Dead, The Band and The Allmans travelling with Andy K and his roomie, Cosmo, but not Michael Richards' Cosmo.
Cosmo rented a U-Haul truck and filled it with dry ice and canned soda along with boxes of Dixie cups reasoning that if enough people showed up and were thirsty they'd buy soda and he'd make some money. Because this plan came together as he and Andy were heading out to the car from their apartment in Highland Park, some of it was slightly improvised. The only soda Cosmo could get in large quantities was Diet 7-Up. He couldn't begin to afford all the dry ice to keep the soda cold he would've needed and the Dixie cups were only available if you bought them by the pallet. Cosmo never hesitated. Hanged for a sheep, hanged for a lamb.
By the time Summer Jam ended Cosmo had no soda and no money from selling it because he couldn't figure out what to charge for it to cover costs, even though he was majoring in Business Administration at Rutgers. That in literature is what we call foreshadowing; in life it's just another day on the ant farm. Actually by the time Summer Jam started Cosmo had no soda left. That took genius. We'd gotten to the racetrack so much earlier than necessary we were ahead of the now legendary traffic jams that 600,000 PLUS people will cause. They were sure thirsty. And stoned.
But then again, quite possibly so were we. We forgot Cosmo had all those paper cups but people didn't mind drinking warm soda out of a can, so we were safe as houses. Less safe was the truck. We set up shop, so to speak, about 100 feet from dead center of the stage, figuring whoever was in charge would eventually make us move, except, and this is through the haze of 38 years ago (okay?), I don't think anyone was in charge.
As the sound checks for each of the bands became concerts in their own right., people discovered you could climb up the passenger side of the truck, using the window opening as a step to get to the roof of the cab and from there you could pull yourself up onto the flat roof of the box compartment in the course of the two days perhaps half of all those in attendance did just that. I could see the roof over the passenger compartment was horribly compressed; so much so that Cosmo started to figure out how late at night he'd have to return the truck to get any of his deposit back. The answer: no clock had enough hours in the night for that to ever work.
Which was just as well since the box roof, designed by the truck manufacturer to support nothing, had failed on an epic scale and as I think I remember it had holes the size of people in at least two places because that's how some folks ended up in the truck, suddenly, during the performances on stage.
Cosmo had long since sold out of soda and in an altered state, usually referred to as 'near the Adirondacks', about four hundred of us had a paper cup fight illuminated only by flashlights the night before the show that rather neatly used every single one of the six billion or so cups that Cosmo had stacked inside. It was, he offered cheerfully the next morning, one less thing to take home to Jersey.
I met Bill Graham, the concert promoter between acts on the side stage when I went to pick up my wallet which I had misplaced and two people had found and turned it all in, money and everything. They refused to take a monetary reward and were disappointed to learn my soda connection was out. Almost a decade later, I'd meet Graham again in an ante-chamber of the Frankfurt Flughafen for an interview and he not only remembered me, he asked about Cosmo.
I long since lost track of Cosmo though in recent weeks as I watched the Occupy movement ebb and flow-and I don't think we're done with that by a long shot, by the way-I flashed on the realization that all the Wall Street GB's, the greedy bastards, I so intensely dislike in the abstract are my age cohort. The indignities and indecencies we imagined our parents inflicting on us are nothing in comparison to the ethical and moral atrocities we committed against our children and their futures. And if we didn't commit them it wasn't for lack of trying or opportunities.
Why couldn't we make any money all those years ago selling a desired and desirable product at a good price in an environment willing to pay for it? Because we were practicing for the Fall of 2006, when the bottom fell out of the Ponzi Scheme our very bright classmates with MBAs helped create when the rest of us went mentally numb from the roots of our hair down as we became The Old Men Whom We Once Mocked. Looks like we passed the audition.
-bill kenny
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