Basically, it was Woodstock without the mud and subsequent catastrophe of Altamont. The funny thing about Altamont was that it was on the West coast, conventionally seen as a very mellow place (“live in NY and move before it makes you too hard, live in California and move before it makes you too soft” & etc.), and was, along with the Manson tragedies, the pinnacle of twisted violence that brought about the downfall of the psychedelic counterculture. But I guess that’s what you get for delegating security duty to blacked-out-Hell’s Angels. And hey, it was the Seventies! Sixties? Who knows these daze, my Dad barely remembers, but anyways…
The Werk Out Music & Arts Festival held Aug. 7-9 was an exemplary model of the original hippie mindset done the right way. I don’t mean this sardonically or disparagingly, it was community for the sake of community, and it was genuinely warming and refreshing to witness. It felt especially nice to see no fighting. It was comfortable and relaxed, a perfect atmosphere for sharing your personality and perception of reality with other people (and chemically inducing some amusing shifts to aforementioned perception).
You could almost see the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, smoking a cigarette from the infamous, prodigious holder, musing at the horizon under a casino visor, completely spun out on good Peruvian coke, and happy that things have finally taken a turn for the better. The watermark seems to have been met, even surpassed in some ways.
My girlfriend and I arrived Thursday Aug. 7, about an hour or so before the noon check-in time. I turned left onto the designated VIP road and rumbled over the hilly trail to the admissions booth in a spacious field. A dreadlocked staff member directed me perplexedly to a table where I got the complimentary wristband and lanyard denoting me as media. He laughed as I donned my credentials telling me, “This is it, this is it. Man, this is going to be such a good time”. We continued on to the general camping area, since my girlfriend purchased a general admissions ticket, and were directed to an improvised parking lot on a giant lawn stretching as far as the vacant woodlands bordering the premises. We walked with our gear through the main gate and set up in the middle of the campgrounds.
The main and only complaint was of the rock paths that rendered bare-foot traveling painful and impossible. Whether it’s a true concern, or just a very mild form of natural selection, I leave to be determined (what’s so wrong with wearing shoes guys?). The vendors and food stands were something to be seen, especially if you were hungry, with multi-colored clothes and kaleidoscopic selections available at every turn, including Disc O Pizza. The shop owners were eclectic especially in their supplies, and it was easy to see the stands as a corridor of goods, a type of tie-dyed market. My girlfriend bought some pants and a top from an authentic Ecuadorian vendor before we decided to go on to the car, to try to sleep a bit. The steamy riffs of the main stage drew us into the crowd for hours before the sound dimmed in the glowing morning, and we made our way towards ameliorating shade.
Walking back from the car, having napped in the trunk, the campsites were pretty impressive. It was a true tent city, best observed when waking in the misted morning to the scents and sounds of breakfast, the world turning upwards with bacon sizzling somewhere, aromatically inspiring jealousy, groggy festival goers brushing their teeth with water bottles and smoking their morning cigarettes, waking up with disheveled hair like, “What happened last night? Last morning? Today is what tomorrow was?” There was a stack of hammocks between a few trees, suspended like cocoons, at the same level as blooming electronic flowers mounted high-up, affixed by attendees on tall tree trunks which stood on the hill adjacent the main stage.
But I don’t wanna sugarcoat the thing either. I’ll give it to ya in the realest, purest words — it was HOT! I woke up the first morning experiencing incipient heat-stroke. It was very hot, and my girlfriend and I came unprepared. We only had a 2 person tent, no shade, and with my inordinate knowledge of camping, I neglected to notice that this two-person tent was more like a “maybe two, more like one person, but I guess two people can still have sex in it” kind of tent. But with a lot of water, ice, and music, we managed to survive, somehow. It was hot man. To this day, I don’t know how Space Panda lived through his performance with that damn suit. Also, I assumed a mattress made of layered blankets would be easier to deal with than a simple tent and sleeping bags. As you can already tell, I was wrong.
So, we searched for a new camping spot away from the oppressive sun and somewhere in the shade. We moved our tented mound of blankets away and ended up at the far stage, watching live painting as a band jammed, the music itself oozing through the luminous brushstrokes of the artist, who dabbed at the canvas with frenetic stabs, grabbing the momentum of the music and conveying it in a different medium. Feeling takes many forms, but it’s really all the same.
It was intriguing to see the festival embrace all forms of art, and it created a very organic, open feel to the entire event. It makes you consider the hidden lives of people who pass you by while you are walking, because he looked like a regular guy. It really made me start thinking about what story is behind every non-familiar face that you pass day-to-day. The bass thumped like a pulse in the background as a guitar careened over the beat like an airplane in mid-crash, splashing into the psychedelic face-first.
When it came to the main stages, the funk was enough to debunk the most boring contrivances of contemporary life; just feels good man, it felt nice to move with other human shapes in the groove, sound itself uncoiling smoothly from the instruments, grassy pastures, colors and glassy-eyed wondrous moments of prime substance, primal feeling harnessed into something less destructive than negativity. The best was that negativity was the only thing in short supply; strangers became acquaintances and then friends even easier.
The Werk’s light show beamed in screaming purples and greens reaching far in the darkness, grooving with the booming sound and illuminating the night time trees. The cool breeze of nightfall slid through the tent village refreshingly, pressing me to sleep. Pink Floyd was reincarnated in midair, with echoes of the Dark Side flying through the hills and valleys, improvised structures and genre-bending covers, improvised everything because it was too real. Too fun, undefined as fog on a Sunday sunrise, but contradictory in its truth, becoming ultimately defined as a few new friends and truly good times.
Contact Stan O'Neill via email at Sn002310@ohio.edu
