TERRASTOCK FESTIVAL: DRUGGIE MUSIC, SOBER FANS

SAN FRANCISCO -- There was a strange contradiction at the Terrastock
festival, a three-day marathon of underground psychedelic folk, pop, rock
and experimental music that ended on Sunday at the Custer Avenue Stages
here: The music celebrated drugs for an audience that didn't. Mick Farren
of the 1960s proto-punk band the Deviants began his set with a story about
a time he had taken "a whole lotta acid." Tom Rapp of the '60s acid-folk
group Pearls Before Swine sang a new chorus he had written, "Nothing wrong
with marijuana/You should use it if you wanna." And Nick Saloman of the
English rock band Bevis Frond, who publishes the magazine that sponsored
the two-year-old festival, Ptolemaic Terrascope, introduced a song thus:
"This one continues the theme of drug-taking, and involves driving trains."

Yet the audience at the festival, one of the few where bouncers and
security forces weren't even a presence, seemed completely sober the whole
time. Except for the gentleman who spent an hour videotaping a speck of
dust on the floor, no one appeared to be on drugs or talking about drugs
and there was no odor of marijuana smoke, a smell that is de rigueur at
nearly any such concert. The audience and most of the bands Terrastock
catered to were interested not in mind-expanding drugs, but in the musical
exploration and the expansion of form that has resulted from musicians
taking such drugs and trying to play their instruments.

Standing in front of immense, breathtaking video backdrops projected by
Jeff Crane, performers played dense guitar jams (the bands Bevis Frond,
Bardo Pond and Ghost), psychedelic folk (Damon and Naomi, Tom Rapp and
Stone Breath), pop songs sabotaged by improvisation or nontraditional
instrumentation (Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel and Green
Pajamas), rock music shot through with analog electronic instruments (Cul
de Sac, the Lothars, Fifty Foot Hose and Silver Apples) and, the festival's
specialty, minimal, droning, gently propulsive rock (Windy and Carl, Azusa
Plane, Grimble Grumble and Roy Montgomery).

A few acts fit into no category, including the Spaceheads, an English duo
that made bewitching abstract dance music using just trumpet and drums, and
Kendra Smith, a reclusive former member of the Dream Syndicate who pursued
her mystical, medieval, spiritual and Luddite obsessions through pump
organ, a Bohemian lute and soft singing.

Perhaps because the music was somewhat retro, separated from its original
cultural context, the audience was there just to listen (not to socialize
or make a lifestyle statement). After their performances, some band members
expressed surprise that the crowd -- 800 people willing to spend as much as
14 hours each day in a warehouse watching nearly 40 bands -- was so quiet
and attentive. Even most of the musicians who performed stayed all three
days to listen to music and sit at tables in a back room selling their own
CDs. The message of underground music festivals like Terrastock can be
summarized in two words: Dig deeper.

In some ways, the music at the festival, a mix of current underground bands
and their obscure antecedents from the 1960s and '70s, wasn't any more
experimental than elements of what the Beatles and John Lennon or Pink
Floyd and its former leader, Syd Barrett, did. But as a rule it promoted
the music that didn't get the acclaim, often because it was too bizarre or
ahead of its time to win recognition. Some performers at the festival
stopped making music decades ago, thinking their time was up, and have gone
in other directions. There was a musician-turned-lawyer (Rapp) and even a
news announcer and ice-cream truck driver (Simeon of the pioneering
electronic hippie band the Silver Apples). Eddie Shaw of the Monks, a
bizarre pre-punk concept band of American GIs stationed in Germany in the
'60s, was on hand to read from a book he wrote on the group.

One of the most impressive aspects of Terrastock was the sheer perseverance
of some performers. Bevis Frond has been making great psychedelic rock for
12 years; the Green Pajamas have been honing their bright pop songs in
obscurity for 14 years, and the Young Fresh Fellows have been making
quirky, eclectic pop and garage-rock for just as long.

Though their efforts have been rewarded by little more than a constantly
fluctuating cult following, some of them still haven't hung up their dreams
of success and all of them have songs capable of being hits. After all, it
took similarly eclectic psychedelic-oriented bands like the Flaming Lips
and the Meat Puppets more than a decade to score their first (and only) pop
hits. Then again, it took the Silver Apples, Pearls Before Swine and the
Monks over 30 years to build up just this tiny following. But Terrastock is
not a festival that rewards success. Popularity may disqualify a band
forever from the hipster collector underground. Some see this as a sign of
closed-minded obscurantism, in which the esoteric is lauded regardless of
its merit. But the truth is that Terrastock and its audience are part of a
necessary support system, because in a music business centered on the
search for the next big thing, someone has to dig through record catalogs
to discover the next good thing, or search the archives to rediscover the
last lost thing.