Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll

You Can't Go Down Home Again

You Can't Go Down Home Again It was a hot, bright Saturday afternoon, and some nine thousand sunburned fans roamed through Newport's Festival Field sampling the folk music workshops. Although there was a semblance of a schedule (the staff had mimeographed a map of offerings ranging from Folk Dance to Banjo, from Bluegrass to Blues Jam Session Open to All), groups formed and dissolved and regrouped pretty much as they pleased. Some people tried to guess where the celebrities would go—the workshops provided informal contact with performers, and everyone wanted informal contact with B. B. King, Taj Mahal, and Janis Joplin—but most took potluck. Over at Area 17 (Contemporary), Tim Buckley sang to fifty people; down behind the food tentT Pete Seeger admired a Yugoslavian fan's homemade guitar and told someone from WBAI if he ever needed free records to write to him. The ticket-buying crowd was on the straight side. Most of the grungier types—the ones who made Newport cabdrivers slow down and say "Willyalookit that!"—were nonpaying fellow travelers who gathered in the hills behind the fairgrounds, like Hitchcock's birds, waiting for 26 You Can't Go Down Home Again the evening concert. Inside, the norm was hair above shoulders, work shirts rather than beads, McCarthy and Peace and We Cry Harder Schlitz Beer buttons. Near the main gate, next to tents displaying guitars, Times Square psychedelic jewelry, and Joan Baez's autobiography, stood a VISTA recruiting booth emblazoned with a poster of Dustin Hoffman captioned "What'll You Do When You Graduate?" Then into this pastoral carnival crashed the sound of—electric blues. The workshops were not supposed to use amplification, but for obvious reasons this rule could not apply to City Blues, so a minimum of sound equipment had been set up on the amphitheater stage. Behind the amps the stage filled up with kids; others gravitated to the seats below. They were hoping for B. B. King or Big Brother and the Holding Company but were happy to get Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. Wells and Guy are much closer to pop than to folk. Their blues are hard, almost r.-&-b., with drumming that could pass at Motown; their act—dancing, hugging each other, exhorting the audience, jumping off the stage—resembles a soul show. And they are loud. Within minutes they had attracted a concert-sized crowd (nearly as large, in fact, as the audience the previous night). Finally, George Wein, the festival's rotund director , clambered onstage and suggested turning down the sound a bit. The spectators groaned. "But it's too loud, it's interferingwith the other workshops." "Kill the others!" "Stop the other workshops!" Supporting shouts and applause. "Suppose we turn these mikes off, and turn them on when somebody 's singing—" The crowd booed and hissed. Wein capitulated, and Buddy Guy announced, "This is my first year at Newport, and now you people have to come to Chicago. We play loud! I'd like this mike even louder!" Everybody cheered. 2 7 O U T O F T H E V I N Y L D E E P S As soon as Wells and Guy had finished, the audience began yelling "B. B.!" and "Big Brother!" and "fan-niss!" "We had something unique set up here," Wein announced sadly. "Twenty-two workshops . . . no amplification . . . so each little group could ..." "BIG BROTHER!" They settled for the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and, a little less graciously, for Uoc Watson ("This was supposed to be blues" someone grumbled), but the excitement was gone. Watson, an excellent country guitarist, did a fine set, which got an appreciative but reserved reaction, and everyone filed out. A blond girl in a floppy hat raced backstage to join some friends. "Hello, you freaks!" she squealed. "I shook hands with Buddy Guy!" That same afternoon, Richard Goldstein, pop music columnist for the Village Voice, entered the press tent to make a phone call. Goldstein, who is twenty-four but looks eighteen and has long, straggly hair, a mustache, and muttonchops, was wearing a white jacket trimmed with embroidered flowers. A festival official, Charles Bourgeois (sic), stopped him at the door; when he showed his press pass and stood his ground, Bourgeois called him "just another one of those young punks" and confiscated the pass, because , he said later, he assumed it was stolen. That was the way...