Woodstock (40) & The Fall of the Wall (20)
This year is jam-packed with jubilees: some that are very significant for our history, some for the spirit of my generation, and some that are completely private. But most of them contain a little bit of everything.
ex Ponto Magazine nr.16
We were way too young be hippies and at the same time too old for punk; we were still kids when we missed the revolution of ’68 – and finally, at the end of eighties when we were most likely ready to get to the breath, we simply got outvoted in the elections and ultimately crushed by a brutal force. We found ourselves very confused and unprepared, caught in the midst of a passionate slaughter and destruction. We became an undisputable minority, pounded in an exile, scattered throughout Europe and around the world. Our “soft” socialism gave us a luxury that our peers from the countries of that real, rigid and seriously dangerous “socialism” didn’t have a chance to experience. On same side of the barricades we saw Andy Warhol and Russian formalists, Malevich and Kandinsky, we all listened to Bob Dylan and recited revolutionary poems, we read and Mayakovsky and Jim Morrison, we were fascinated with flower-power musicals such as Hair and romantic Soviet films like The Gypsy Camp Vanishes Into the Blue, we listened to the heavy metal or new wave music and read the classics of Marxism, we mixed up the ideals of Woodstock and Easy Rider with perhaps equally questionable ideals of Red Brigades and Bader-Meinhoff, we were balancing between the vulgar materialism and science fiction, between religion and parapsychology, between thesis on Feuerbach and UFO’s, the dialectics of nature and the Bhagavad-Gita, between Friedrich Engels and Eric von Däniken, between the gods and cosmonauts. We were crucified between the local plum brandy and marijuana, wine from Herzegovina and hallucination pills, between spritzer from Vojvodina and synthetic glues. We grew in a sort of amusement park full of colours of Disney fairy tales and proletarian songs, Mayday parades and Pink Floyd concerts, solemn oaths of semi-military organizations and noise of electric guitars, red flags in the wind and blue jeans smuggled from Trieste.
This could be a sort of a sketch for the portrait of the last urban Yugoslav generation, which ironically also became the first mature post-Yugoslav generation. Its destiny was to share all the frustrations of growing up in the environment of one ideological society, and at the same time the environment of essential disorientation within a collapse of the principle values of something that was supposed to be their world. That was one generation which faced the materialisation of the most terrible political and historical nightmares in their surroundings, and in the end involved in bloody nationalistic wars.
 Here is a legend about a young long-haired and barded communist entering the Party’s Central Committee sometime in mid-seventies, uttering for that time rather brave words to his older comrades: “Rock en roll does not spoil our children!” That man was Ivica Racan, who took his place in history by leading Croatia into its first democratic elections and later becoming the first prime minister of post-Tudjman era.
Tito’s regime had balanced between The West and The East, and consequently it had been pretty tolerant with many influences from The West - they were easy recognisable in a common life, in the arts, film, theatre, music, fashion, even the national economy to a certain degree. Until early sixties, the rock music was simply part of urban scene in most of the cities, licensed albums of all important rock performers of the time were published regularly, concerts, even some Woodstock-like, were organized all around the country, and there was a good deal of bands (mainstream or alternative) in all urban centres like Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Rijeka, Belgrade, Novi Sad or Skopje. Yugoslav pop music made a great influence on The Eastern scene in general; some pop singers became the biggest stars in Soviet Union, too. Next to Anglo-Saxon rock music in the west, there was a kind of Slavic-rock with origins from Yugoslavia (together with some Hungarian rock attractions, like Locomotiv GT and Omega) in the east. Paul McCartney said once that Yugoslav musician goes to USSR in the same fashion like the British one goes to the USA. But it was only the mid seventies rock that really entered a big stage in the Socialist Yugoslavia for the first time – opening the doors of large state radio and TV stations, and selling LP’s in millions copies. The explosion came from Sarajevo, probably the most important centre of an early YU rock scene. Sarajevo already hosted Indexi as the most advanced band of the time with a Beatles-like powerful creativity followed by Bijelo Dugme, led by Goran Bregovic, becoming the most popular and influential band in the region ever.
I am not sure if the regime was conscious about a subversive nature of the pop subculture, but it is a fact that they never tried to do anything against it. For some reason, the old comrades believed their young fellows with long hair.
As seen through the eyes of my generation, Woodstock was not just a big and important music festival, not just a magnificent 5 LP’s record set, and not just one fascinating documentary – it was much more like a symbol of movement for peace, love and tolerance.
It seemed to be one of the brightest stars in the night sky of all our utopian dreams. At the time we did not know much about all the social and political reasons for the events that happened on Max Yasgur’s farm from August 15 to August 18, 1969. We knew nothing about a long history of the town of Woodstock as an alternative art colony, and the fact that the festival took place some 70 km away in the suburbs of Bethel but kept the name Woodstock just because of its tradition. We did not care too much about American frustrations with Vietnam, and even got pretty disappointed if anyone tried to explain to us that it was all that what the concert was about. We would have rather seen one pure and abstract idea of humanity, togetherness and better world (just as the communist party tried to teach us when we were children) sent to outer space by Hendrix’s vibrations, Janis singing, Ravi Shankar’s sitar or rebellion charm of Joan Baez.
 So here we are - twenty years after Woodstock and twenty years after the fall of Berlin wall. The wall stood for a strong negative symbol of a divided world and divided Germany, and people like to interpret its fall like a symbolical end to the cold war and rigid totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, it had such a symbolical energy that even the very first moment of its destruction, with its first brick plucked off, got people exalted thinking that they were taking the history in their own hands. The event had already been designed as symbolic in advance and as such presented in the media.
The fall of Berlin wall was also celebrated with a fantastic and spectacular rock concert of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and numerous guest stars such as Sinead O’Connor, The Band, Cyndi Lauper, Brian Adams, Van Morrison and Scorpions.
I remember Scorpions well; they sung a song about wind of changes. Even now when I hear this anthem-like rock ballade pumped with the hope about better times coming, I feel some strange thrill and a sort of fear inside – it reminds me of the lost promises that nineties and the 21st century will bring some better world for all of us.
For Bosnia and the most people in the region it was not the case, for sure.
PS. Recently a few friends of mine and I decided to form our own rock band. It is the best way to fight against middle-age crisis, especially if you reach a certain age and a pretty serious personal jubilee. So, it was just a question of fellowship - once a week we spend one evening drinking our beers in the practicing room instead of going to café. Last summer we went to the farm of our mutual friend Harm, somewhere in Brabant. We invited all our friends and made an open stage concert. A few of us (some are even world-known musicians) went on the stage made of some trailer remnants borrowed from a neighbouring farm, and we played all night long. Harm has a big screen and 16mm projector and he posted some images from the real Woodstock as a stage background. The sky was open and full of stars. That was our own micro-Woodstock, a brief moment when people, even those from our cursed generation, could feel good for a while. Being together, that’s all that matters.
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