Around this time last summer, the editorial staff of The Advocate (including James Heflin, Kendra Thurlow and me) was deeply immersed in what I've come to call the "2008 Easthampton Beard Summit," a perhaps unlikely collaboration with the editorial staff of The Local Buzz (including Greg Saulmon, Josh Thayer and Bill Peters). The summit consisted of learning three ZZ Top tunes to play at the Transperformance at Northampton's Look Park, the annual benefit concert for the Northampton Arts Council and the town's public schools. Though Saulmon, Thayer and Thurlow repeatedly bemoaned their struggles to find and/or fabricate beards for the occasion, Heflin and I managed to effortlessly stumble into beard heaven just by walking a block from our Conz Street offices to Webs, the wool warehouse which provided us not only with superior beard-making material for a nominal price, but also offered helpful advice on how to shape and coif our Texan chin toupees to maximum effect.
Such are the logistical challenges of transperforming (that year's theme was Letters and Numbers), and I was even on double duty that year, having to perform additionally in the B-52s (check out our "Love Shack" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv2U7Kl7aio) later the same day in a backless red pantsuit I had hastily borrowed. Strange though I may have looked, between sets my fashion courage was rewarded with an intimate embrace from the wireless mic-wielding Jose Ayerve as he wove, a suitably dramatic Bono, through the crowd during Spouse's set as U2. Later that evening one of our singers passed out cold and had to be ambulanced out to the ER at Cooley Dick, quite possibly because her wig had been squeezing too tightly on her head.
Nearly every year the event is faced with some unexpected difficulty or another, such as the year I played with Tag Sale as the Sex Pistols for 1999's Limeypalooza theme. In that instance, the whole electrical system failed just as we were screaming "anarchy" into suddenly non-functional microphones and impotently strumming un-amplified electric guitars to a panicked crew of scurrying sound technicians and an audience who could only hear drums. There was also the year when rain dictated the necessity to move the NYC-themed event indoors to the Northampton High School gymnasium, which, even with the best intentions, proved to be both socially and sonically inferior to the show's native habitat in the Pines Theater. Perhaps the worst snag, however, occurred in 1996 when the Night at the Opry was pummeled by a storm that Arts Council Executive Director Bob Cilman described as "something similar to a tornado," which destroyed the whole set, saturated the entire seating area and knocked down trees, forcing them to reschedule the event to a week later and move its location indoors to John M. Greene Hall when rain was predicted again.
Though this year is the 19th anniversary of the Transperformance (not exactly a nice round number), it also marks the closing of a cycle, as its theme at its inception in 1991 was Woodstock: The Performance Peace, highlighted by 96-year-old Young @ Heart Chorus member Anna Main's version of Country Joe McDonald's "Fish Cheer." The nonagenarian spelled "F-O-R-G-E-T" instead of "F-I-S-H" (or later bastardized versions which spelled less palatable "F" words), and a clip of her performance made it onto MTV News with Kurt Loder. In fact, the event wasn't even branded as the "Transperformance" until 1993, for that year's theme, Dick Clark Look Park.
This year also marks the 40th anniversary (a rounder number) of the Woodstock festival at Max Yasgur's upstate New York farm, and the occasion has spurred a host of events in celebration of the quintessential outdoor mega-show, including many regional and national performances by original Woodstock performers. For its own celebration, the Arts Council has wrangled Lookstock, once again re-creating the Woodstock experience (which has sort of become the model for the annual event anyway), albeit on a much smaller scale and in a perhaps more family-friendly environment. Initially, the lineup was to include acts from Woodstock '94 as well as the legendary 1969 affair, but that concept was ixnayed by a lack of interest from artists and perhaps a general sense that that event, much like Ang Lee's Hulk movie or the David Niven-fronted Casino Royale Bond film, might be best relegated to the "do-over" boneyard of woefully misguided attempts at adaptation.
The original Woodstock festival occurred Aug. 15-18, 1969 on a 600-acre plot of farmland in Bethel, N.Y., and at the time no one could have predicted the sheer magnitude of the event's popularity; the promoters sold 100,000 tickets before the weekend started, but gave up charging when nearly half a million people showed up (they hadn't even completed building fences around the concert area). The officially three-day festival featured 32 acts, including icons like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the last of whom I have the pleasure of covering this year with my compadres in Page 6, and for whom the show was their second gig as a band (talk about luck!). Culturally, the weekend put a global face on the anti-establishment, anti-war and pro-peace and love/back-to-the-land movement that had been building in America and around the world for a decade or more.
If the moment wasn't preserved enough in the collective memory through word-of-mouth, Life magazine photo-spreads and a Joni Mitchell-penned anthem (later propelled to the top of Billboard charts by CSNY), it was cemented as a cultural meme in the 1970 film Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh. It recorded the event in all its muddy, stoned and naked communal glory and helped redefine the purpose and style of the documentary film as a medium. Perhaps in an attempt to make up for his hulk of a flop and continuing in the tradition of Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has seized the occasion to claw back to the forefront of foreign directors who seem to really want to be American with his latest effort, Taking Woodstock. The film opens in theaters on Aug. 28 and celebrates the festival's anniversary by telling the story from a local's point of view (based on Elliot Tiber's memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, A Concert, and a Life).
Back at the local Woodstock, workers are toiling like possessed insects to prepare the Pines Theater for the concert. Arts Council staff members Diane Porcella (backstage) and Sondra Peron (front-of-house) are getting ready for their annual duties of keeping the show flowing and making sure they're aware if the next act is stuck on the side of the road in Conway with a busted fuel pump. Local luminaries Theatrix are checking the circuits for the event's lighting and Ears-on-duty engineer Dan Richardson is once again wiring the joint for sound, in conjunction with Master Electricians George Kohout and Curt Golec. Local radio personalities Monte Belmonte, Bill Dwight, Kelsey Flynn and Jaz Tupelo are brushing up their psychedelic monologues as this year's hosts along with Jim Armenti and Hans Teensma. The NAC has even secured poster art for Lookstock by Arnold Skolnick, who designed the original Woodstock festival's poster and happens to live nearby (go figure).
Over the span of its existence, the Transperformance has cumulatively raised between three and four hundred thousand dollars for the Northampton public schools and for the Arts Council, which annually doles out arts grants to local creative types who work in media as varied as film, poetry and sculpture. Whatever its theme, the annual event is huge for the toddler-to-teen set. If you've got rambunctious youngsters who typically need a blowgun tranquilizer dart to bring their energy level down closer to yours, this is the place for you. You can bring a blanket, sip your soy chai latte and chat with your grown-up friends while your little Bam-Bam burns out his spaz batteries dancing up front with scores of other kids. In past Transperformances, the Valley's local Jonas Brothers, Who Shot Hollywood?, have even swooned packs of doe-eyed tweens with their innocent charms and disproportionately large, unapologetic hair. Of course, the presence of the ubiquitous Young @ Heart Chorus brings the program back into a truly all-ages appeal; where else can you hear an 80-year-old sing "I Wanna Be Sedated"?
This will be my sixth Transperformance (as a performer) and I'm very much looking forward to it, though I have to admit that learning four-part vocal harmonies is a serious bitch. I'm also looking forward to seeing Fistah's take on The Who, The Young @ Heart Chorus's Jefferson Airplane and Evelyn Harris' Janis Joplin, and especially F. Alex Johnson's Jimi Hendrix. I'm already thinking hard so that any rain that starts falling will surely stop immediately. I'm fortunately armed with the foreknowledge that "the brown acid" is not such a good time, so I'll probably stick to beer and backstage finger-foods, and perhaps a wee, off-premises personal celebration of a certain recently-decriminalized treat. I hope y'all will turn out for the occasion; after all, "we are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." What with all this rain, it could probably use some weeding.
Transperformance: Lookstock is an all-ages event and takes place Tues., Aug. 25, 4-9:30 p.m., $3/kids, $5/seniors, $8/general. Pines Theater, Look Park, 300 North Main St., Florence (413) 587-1069.
