Word: stage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When we got there, up in this loftlike arrangement with great photographers' background screens and a tiny stage, I was greeted effusively by one of those New York fashion ladies with a lovely face and the tan of a Galopagos Islands tortoise. Leathern Petite. "Well, you must be the leader of the Bead Game," she said. She had a way of making it sound as though I was really Genghis Khan and that it was very important that I was wearing an eye-burning Nehru jacket and tan wool bellbottoms. I basked in her admiring glance for a few moments...
...something to live up to. It wasn't necessarily that the music was bad; perhaps the audiences were tired, that the prosletyzing impulse of the hip movement was dying out, that the hip audience was trying to live out its dictums instead of hearing them preached from a stage at the Tea Party. There had been too many heroes by the time the Boston Sound came on the scene...
...Underground Cinema was doing its set. Ian Bruce Douglas, now probably the most fiscally successful of the Boston rock musicians, was rapping at the audience, mostly fortyish folk with company suits who were sucking booze from the bar and looking woozily over their shoulders at the weirdos on the stage. Occasionally a bleached-blonde hot tomato would do her version of the Swim with some paunchy insurance salesman, the type who would have had a lampshade on his head if there had been any around. "We play psychedelic love-rock," Douglas shouted to the impervious audience. Those...
...prowls all over the stage in slow-motion. Chuck Berry, handsome smiling face, these days with long flowing black hair, playing his guitar with jerks of the forearm as if he were drawing water from a well, playing a boogie to blow Bill Haley's mind. He ends the set with a triumphant "Go, Go Johnny, Johnny B. Goode" and is gone waving his guitar...
Performers were carefully scheduled on each stage so as not to overlap, by catering to people's different tastes (thus Steppenwolf on one stage while Joni Mitchell was playing at the other, Ian and Sylvia in the meadow while Iron Butterfly played the grandstand) though even with diligent shuttling from stage to stage I inevitably missed some performances. This kind of sensible planning on the part of the Festival organizers marked most aspects of the three day show. Facilities were thoughtfully and adequately provided: free parking, food stalls, seating, elaborate and powerful sound systems. Not to mention the whimsical diversions...