http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/19/canned-heat-woodstock-anthem
In the first instalment of his new music blog, Jon Savage looks into
Going Up the Country, a song that caught the countercultural mood of
1969 with its yearning for a rural retreat
8/19/09
Released right at the end of 1968, Canned Heat's Going Up the Country
went top 20 in the US and the UK in early 1969. Based on Bulldoze
Blues by Henry Thomas a Texan country blues singer recording during
the 20s it was sourced and sung by Alan Wilson: Canned Heat's
guitarist, long-time blues researcher and, at one point, colleague of
John Fahey.
There were at least two Canned Heats: the first, fronted by lead
singer Bob "The Bear" Hite (later to become the star of Bongwater's
brutal fantasy, Chicken Pussy specialised in gruff, often
excruciatingly long blues workouts. The second was the pop version:
Wilson had an appealing, high voice and a way with melody that turned
old blues tropes into international hits.
Going Up the Country caught the countercultural mood in late 1968 and
early 1969: "I'm gonna leave the city, got to get away." The focus
was shifting from the crowded inner cities (and, by implication, pop)
to the country or, at least, a fantastical sylvan facsimile
Quicksilver's Shady Grove or Creedence's Green River.
The message was clear and repeated by many leading lights: Bob Dylan,
the Byrds, the Band, Neil Young. This was partly informed by the
desire to calm down, to get earthed after the excesses of
psychedelia, but it was also prompted by the pioneering spirit that
had been an important part of the founding hippie vision.
In her photo book, Flashing On the Sixties, Lisa Law begins by
snapping the Beatles, the Byrds and the Velvet Underground in LA
total high 60s pop but as early as 1966 she and husband Tom
"dropped out" to Mexico. By the next year, they were both travelling
around in a tepee before settling down in with a commune in New Mexico.
"We felt like frontier people," she wrote. "The way of the Native
Americans encouraged us to go on in our search for harmony with what
Mother Nature had given us. Life seemed like a fantasy, but living
and working the land was real. We were allowing ourselves to
experiment, to dare to try something new."
By 1969, the commune idea had spread throughout the counterculture.
It had many attractions: the possibility of freedom, of sex and drugs
and new ways of living. It helped to provide a ready-made family for
adolescents estranged from their biological parents this was the
era of a severe generation gap and also a refuge for draft dodgers
from the Vietnam war.
Going Up the Country is one of the first songs that you hear in the
soundtrack of Woodstock, the 1970 feature film that celebrated what
was the biggest commune of all time: "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days
of Peace & Music" held in upstate New York over the weekend of 15-18
August, 1969. Like the movie, the event turned necessity into a virtue.
The whole thing was out of control: an almost unexpected gathering of
500,000 American adolescents. The fact that it wasn't a disaster was
a tribute to the stoned good humour of the audience and
lightning-fast reactions on the part of politicised hippies like Tom
Law and the Hog Farm's Hugh Romney (Wavy Gravy) who worked hard to
provide an infrastructure in the middle of the chaos.
Watching the movie shown on BBC4 last weekend brings back all
manner of conflicting thoughts and emotions: I have to say that I
hated it at the time. The endless self-referentiality (still repeated
in today's Glastonbury footage) was grating, and some of the
performances particularly Ten Years After's nine-going-on-ninety
minutes worth of I'm Going Home were (and remain) just awful.
But it's pointless to deny it: something extraordinary happened
during that weekend. In extremis, the core hippie values of trust
your neighbour, of communality, of grace under severe and
self-inflicted mental derangement held firm. They were underpinned by
a tradition of activism see the Hog Farm, Joan Baez and Country
Joe, whose I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag is a film highlight.
Woodstock had real purpose at a time when the Vietnam war a
chaotic, lethal conflict threatened to claim a large proportion of
American adolescents. Other kinds of internal stresses the Age War,
the Perception War created a need for togetherness, for a show of
generational strength that the festival embodied. The legend had its
basis in fact.
There was a darker side. Psychedelics open you up, for good and for
ill. In Joel Makower's Woodstock: The Oral History, a young helper
called Peter Beren remembers wandering through the crowd: "The
overwhelming impression was one that was atavistic, primitive,
shamanistic, as if all the restraints of civilisation had been
removed and they could do whatever the hell they wanted to."
Everybody mentions Altamont held just five months later as
Woodstock's evil twin but other events that month would prove just as
powerful an antidote to the country utopia. A week before the
festival opened, there were six brutal killings in Los Angeles
conducted with maximum, feral ferocity. Because they involved a movie
star, Sharon Tate, they made international news.
When the perpetrators were eventually arrested that autumn, it was
revealed that they had been led by Charles Manson into a foul,
fear-filled perversion of the commune ideal. This was not the
supportive family that the runaway members were seeking but a brutal,
abusive environment involving mind-control and sheer subjugation that
mimicked and mocked a generous and sincere impulse.
In March 1970, the Woodstock film was premiered. It did excellent box
office becoming the tenth most popular movie of the year and the
triple soundtrack album topped the US charts in July and August 1970.
Canned Heat were featured in both: not that either benefited Alan
Wilson, who died of a drug overdose a month later. Whether or not
this was suicide has never been established.
Woodstock helped to legitimise stadium rock as a genre and as
Country Joe pointed out when I interviewed him 20 years ago marked
a turning point in the marketing of the hippie counterculture by
major corporations. Since then, it has become an American archetype,
if not a cliche a byword, to some degree, for baby-boomer
self-satisfaction. Which is not how it happened.
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