The new TV spot, "Rain" goes back to VW's glory days with scenes of hippies in a VW bus in a rainstorm. It's a paean to Woodstock with Joe Cocker singing "With a Little Help from My Friends" in the background. After hippies push a microbus out of the mud, a classic VW Beetle appears. It ranks with the LSD scene in Taking Woodstock, or Joni Mitchell's eponymous song, and of course serves nearly as an advertisement for my novel Miles From Nowhere, scheduled for publication in the Fall of 2018, just in time for Woodstock's 50th.
The tent seemed bigger inside than out, maybe 12 by 12,
like a gold rush retreat for transients, like there should be a roulette wheel
in the corner and can-can girls. There
was a myriad of characters sitting cross-legged on Indian blankets. They were smoking pot; some were
tripping. Others were sleeping or
talking. There was a little boy playing
with Matchbox cars. One was a pink
travel trailer. One was a VW van like mine. He came over and showed me that the roof came
off the trailer. Inside you could see bunks and a stove and a mini fridge.
“Don’t let him bother you.” Must have been his mother. She offered us sandwiches. “You better eat. Nothin’ much
to eat here.” Hatfield handed me a roll of paper towels.
“You two can crash if you want.” The rain fell on the
tent like someone dropping dimes, but we were warm and thankful.
“Maybe we oughta try your Green Stamps.” I got the stamps
from my wallet and licked the back. Farm
Girl did the same. “Now what?” she said.
“Now we wait.” A half an hour passed. Hatfield’s wife made
us tea on a white gas stove. “How do you know these folks? They’re awful nice.”
“I dunno. Met
’em.” She finished her sandwich and drank her tea. “I like it here.” I did too. It was like a Western; not a
pretty western, not the John Wayne kind, not like Shane, but dreary and full of wet browns, gritty and dirty, or
black and white like High Noon, with Farm Girl and her smile outshining the
pretty perfect of Grace Kelly. “This is nice,” she said. She was looking at her hands.
She sat Indian style. The rain let up. Hatfield played
the guitar, a song called “Almost Persuaded.” He sang like a cowhand. It was
kind of a sad song about a married man smitten by a young thing in a bar; about
how he’s almost persuaded and all, and then he sees his reflection in his
wedding ring and he leaves. A pretty good story and kind of nice in a way, like
he forgot for a minute who he was and then he was reminded. Country songs were
like that. He sang, “And I was awl – most persuaded.” Farm Girl liked it and clapped her hands and
smiled. She put her head on my shoulder
and closed her eyes; so did I.
The tent was hollow and dim, cavernous. There were
stalactites and stalagmites, there were cowboys and prospectors, there was
Ronald McDonald. Farm Girl took off her shoes and socks, her shoes flew away. She
rolled up her pant legs and put on a sweater that said “Iowaowa.” Farm Girl put
our things in the corner of the tent by a statue of Ganesh.
There was a chill in the air, so misty you could see your
breath and everywhere was mud. It oozed around your toes like stepping in butter.
It was on the tent and on the fence and drifts of mud like dark snow were piled
against the stage. They’d put down a zigzag of planks on which to walk, and we meandered
through a kind of demilitarized zone, separated both from the crowd and from
the stage. Up the knoll you could see
the tens or hundreds of thousands, muddy and wet and sitting there in the slop,
a kind of steam rising off their wet, muddy bodies, sitting there and grooving
to Crosby, Stills and Nash, harmonizing that Judy Blue Eyed song in their
do-do-do-do-dutes. It was like the music
and the aura overcame the mud.
On the side of the stage was a cairn of black boxes piled
ten feet high, some that said Peavey, some that said Fender, and they rested on
a floor of wooden pallets. Stenciled on
the sides were names like McDonald and Winter and E. Winter and Robertson. Farm Girl and I scaled the boxes like we were
climbing an Aztec pyramid, and we sat level with the stage and Farm Girl looked
out over her muddy subjects and said, “It’s too beautiful.” Stephen Stills sang, “Blackbird singing in
the dead of night/ Take these broken wings and learn to fly.”
I sang, “All your life/ You were only waiting for this moment
to arise.”
And Guinevere had such golden hair, and we were
traveling, traveling on a train to Marrakesh, and out the window on the planks,
avoiding the mud, stepping daintily was Neil Young with an electric guitar and
he climbed onto the stage and the set went electric. “Hello, Mr. Soul.”
And then I don’t remember and Farm Girl climbed to the
top of the pyramid and there was a brilliant light shining upon her and she
blazed up there and I followed and she smiled and in that gap-toothed smile
there radiated joy, and I got to the top and I held her in my arms and I kissed
her. She said, “Hey, can I have some of
your purple berries?”
“Yes, I’ve been eating them for six or seven weeks now,
haven’t got sick once.”
“Prob-ly keep us both alive,” she said.
Suddenly the mud people stopped sliding down the hill,
and everyone was quiet and then everyone sang as one in beautiful harmony, tens
of thousands of us, “Find the cost of freedom,/ Buried in the ground.” Farm Girl and I stood at the top of the
mountain, and we sang, “Mother Earth will swallow you,/ Lay your body down.”
