Fifty years ago yesterday was the final day of a certain “Aquarian Exposition” that allegedly featured three days of peace & music, which most folks commonly refer to as Woodstock. Beyond the original event already being irretrievably cemented in the firmament of pop culture, it spawned a couple of spin-off anniversary events, the last of which, in 1999, being marred by poor planning, wanton property damage and sexual assault. Perhaps in an attempt to extinguish the bad taste left in many mouths by that iteration, the festival co-founders endeavored to stage a fiftieth anniversary this past weekend but that, too, came plagued with shoddy planning and was nixed at the eleventh hour.
Personally speaking, I’ve never given much of a rat’s ass about Woodstock. Sure, I like the Who, Hendrix, CSN and several other of the bands that played the original richly rhapsodized event, but it was obviously not my generation’s thing. It was just this sacrosanct cultural happening we were all informed had changed the course of history and blah blah blah. Disinterested at first, I became an open detractor of the whole Woodstock shpiel by the time I got to college in the mid-80s. To my mind, there was so much great new music going on in real time in the mid-80’s -– of every conceivable stripe, not just the stuff I liked -– that I was pointedly put off by classmates my own age still banging on about Woodstock. To quote an applicable legend stamped on the gatefold of Alien Sex Fiend’s 1985 album, Maximum Security, “Fuck the Sixties, … Let’s Bring Back the Eighties!”
Don’t get your tie-dyes in a twist, my tender Deadhead friends … there’s a point to all this.
So, while I was posting deliberately provocative “Never Mind Woodstock” quips on Facebook last week, it stealthily occurred to me that practically every generation has its own watershed warhorse. While I may sneer at the revisionist purple prose that elevates the happenings at Yasgur’s Farm to some sort of cultural epoch, I still get weepily reverent about, say, the musical and cultural phenomena spawned by CBGB -– a touchstone no less laboriously bandied about than Woodstock, and -- for all intents and purposes -– probably just as cloyingly over-rhapsodized in the minds of today’s younger folks. The average teenager on the street is probably just as bored by the concept of the Ramones, Blondie and the Dead Boys (or, for that matter, Kraut, SWANS and Cop Shoot Cop) in 2019 as I was bored by Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Richie Havens and Jefferson Airplane in 1985. Who am I to be pooh-poohing Woodstock when I’m still carrying a torch for the stuff that touched my life?
So, yeah, I’m sorry. Maybe we should all just get on with it. Not everything requires an anniversary event.
But while we’re on the subject…
There’s already been an unwieldy host of backwards-looking books, oral histories, magisterial memoirs, handsome coffee table tomes, minutia-laden box sets and photographic collections about the varying scenes of CBGB, from the early days of Richard Hell and Patti Smith through the No Wave era of James Chance and Lydia Lunch to the NYHC days of Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law to the serrated noise-rock of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore. I should know. I have way more of them than any sentient adult should own. But I just spotted one that came out relatively recently that slipped by me.
Published in November of 2016, “Rebels: Punks and Skinheads of New York’s East Village 1984 - 1987” by photographer Lilian Caruana is another glimpse into a scene and indeed a part of New York City’s past that is hard to fully reconcile in 2019. By and large, Caruana’s photographs show a softer, more human side of their subjects, not just the limb-flailing melees like the one she captured in the shot above.
Here’s how the photographer describes the book:
This book began when I moved to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s. In its dirty, rubble-strewn streets among the graffiti and the garbage, I found creative energy—poetry readings, graffiti art, and music flowing from the multitude of bars and performance spaces. Most interesting were the young people who hung around the legendary CBGB, an exotic and forbidding-looking “tribe,” sporting torn clothing, body metal and shaved heads or spiked hair. I began photographing them in the clubs and soon was invited into their “squats” in abandoned tenement buildings. Poverty, drugs and crime had fueled the decline of the area and these buildings slid into decay and were gutted or burned down. Here they lived as a collective, mattresses on floors, rigging electricity from adjacent buildings, taking showers with fire hydrants. As we talked, they expressed a profound alienation from mainstream society as well as a wish for freedom, purpose and integrity. They had a “do it yourself ” ethic — forming their own bands, writing their own songs, making their own records, creating their own magazines and their own style. I chose to photograph them in their daily lives, not just the clubs, so that the viewer can look beyond the forbidding social markers—skulls, swastikas, studs, chains and spiked hairdos — beyond the defiance and see their humanity and vulnerability.
At the risk of belaboring the very obvious, to walk around the East Village today, it’s getting harder to believe it’s the same place as captured in Caruana’s photographs.
To see some more of the Lilian Caruana’s photos, click here, and to get your own copy of the book, click here.
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