WOODSTOCK '94: THE MUSIC; Familiar Voices and Familiar Themes (Published 1994) (2024)

Deja vu arrived on the second day of Woodstock '94. It wasn't just the mid-afternoon downpour, which instantly reminded those who had been at the first festival of the texture and smell of Catskills mud. Other flashbacks had been planned, as Joe co*cker, the reconstituted Band and Crosby, Stills and Nash (minus Neil Young) performed at their second Woodstock festival. This time, Crosby, Stills and Nash got to sing their hit "Woodstock," which Joni Mitchell wrote after the 1969 festival. When Mr. co*cker sang "With a Little Help from My Friends," hundreds of thousands of arms waved and swayed in the air, and everyone seemed to be singing along, in a tribute to 1969 as heartfelt as it was predictable. Later, the Band (without its main songwriters, Robbie Robertson and the late Richard Manuel) juxtaposed songs from "Music from Big Pink," composed in Saugerties, with more recently recorded material. Other 1960's figures sat in with the Band, including Roger McGuinn of the Byrds and more Woodstock alumni: Hot Tuna (the guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and the bassist Jack Casady, who were with the Jefferson Airplane) and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.

But the next generation, which outnumbers baby-boomers on the field and among the performers, was also making its own, more ambivalent statements about past and present.

In 1969, the music as well as the aura of the Woodstock festival was largely about pleasure, community and a stubborn hope. Woodstock '94, even with its scattershot bookings, reflects a more frustrated, more desperate generation. Nine Inch Nails made common cause with the audience by performing covered in mud, but Trent Reznor's booming, ominous songs proclaimed "I'm all alone" and "I feel my hatred grow." Blind Melon revived the roiling psychedelia of the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, but its songs are devoted to private struggles; its lead singer, Shannon Hoon, wails in a troubled voice about his own "misery." The generational shift was plain in the festival's juxtapositions. While Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing about trust and love on the larger north stage, Primus was on the south stage, playing jagged, dissonant, cranky songs like "Here Come the Bastards." The Rollins Band, led by Henry Rollins, ranted hard-rock songs intended to be cathartic on the north stage, snarling "You're pathetic and weak." A few moments later, the Band was on the south stage, jauntily singing about memories and unrequited love.

The younger bands asserted their own worth against perceived baby-boomer self-righteousness. "They don't trust our generation to just bring people together," said Mr. Hoon. "We're here to prove them wrong." While the vast bulk of the crowd stayed good-humored and polite, even through the rain, men in the audience booed and threw plastic bottles when the poet Maggie Estep recited two sexually assertive poems, which seemed to be a challenge to their masculinity.

True to the 1969 festival, the younger bands, and the audience, eagerly endorsed smoking marijuana, having a good time and staying cheerful. Cypress Hill devoted half of its set to raps about smoking pot. But while the band condemned violence in its patter between songs, the other half of its set gleefully boasted about gunplay: "shoot 'em up, just shoot 'em up, boom boom!" That made the band less than useful advocates for the legalization of marijuana.

Candlebox, which performed late Friday night, writes neo-psychedelic songs that are more amorphous, more self-pitying and less believable than those of Blind Melon. Candlebox's lead singer professed sympathy for audience members who, he believed, had not been allowed to bring in "substances." But he was misinformed.