TANGLEWOODSTOCK
Huffington Post
07/05/2017
Written By
David S. Simon
I just got back from Tanglewood where I saw James Taylor.
No. That's not right. I heard James. I saw his projected image on a huge TV screen that was the size of Kim Jung Un's commemorative stamp (which can cover the side of a large house).
But I don't think you go there to have a visual experience. You go there to have a visceral experience. You go there to time travel and to be rock-a-byed to sleep like Sweet Baby James.
This was not so much a concert as it was a massive pilgrimage scored by the dulcet offering of primitive wood and string.
Some 30,000 plus, staggeringly Caucasian people, drifted in like they were surfing along the waves of 50 year old dreams.
If you want to color in the Berkshires you would pick the Emerald Green Crayola for pretty much the entire picture. The trees and hills stand in stoic poses like our long lost parents who are waiting to greet us with their lush, leaf filled open arm branches.
Beginning with the obedient, pre-concert, conga-like line that snaked its way through the parking lot towards the entrance Gaige, with a kind of Armistice Day celebration fever (while frisbees, footballs and softballs flew in near military precision like a patriotic army of tiny jets gunning for home), the feeling of belonging bonded everyone together as if we had all been liberally swabbed with Gorilla Glue.
Complete strangers all, drawn together by the pangs and the guaranteed delivery of air dropped packages of soon to arrive bliss, bonded together with dopey, welcoming smiles that seems to be a code for the words, "how cool is this?"
It all felt very tribal, which is, ironically, a very American thing. Despite how we treated the Native Americans of the past, every single ethnic group in this country does exactly what they did: we gather with our own as if to renew our licenses at the DMV us of who we really are.
This is not exclusionary. This is a vacation of liberalism. It's a recharge of the light brigade. It's like the earth's magnetic pull is drawing us all towards our one truth north, so that we feel, at least, a sense of where we are all going.
We didn't so much walk into the concert as we did escalator our way via in via the flying green lawn carpet. Once inside the outside, there was an initial compulsion to FIND YOUR SPOT. People Gold Rushed in like they had to stake their claim or were willing to fight to the death at their local Target store the night before Christmas over the one Barbie left.
It's a miracle that no one was killed as everyone raced to claim their rightful patch of concert real estate. Once the stake is made, however, everyone relaxed and TANGLEWOODSTOCK began.
But instead of prancing in the mud and conceiving children on the spot, being that most in attendance were literally and ironically living the sixties (which is quite the mortal reminder) instead of brown acid, designer food is dispensed with gourmet wavy gravy, candelabras were lit (that is not a joke), and we were all suddenly grateful that we are not dead. It's like a spell had been cast and we were all drinking the Mike's Hard lemonade whose side effect are spontaneous merriment and casual outbursts of stupidity.
While, yes, of course, most continued to stare at their phones like the Louis Pasteurs of the Pasture peering through their individual microscopes, we all began, in our way, to disconnect. There was no visible heightened security. No Make America Great hats or T-Shirts with a bug-eyed Bernie Sanders trying to escape from them.
We were all dressed in the invisible uniforms of the armed forces that occasionally come together to periodically march in the parade that is scored by the cherished melodies that are the mutual soundtracks of our mutual past.
You see, despite what Thomas Wolfe says, you can go home again because the truth is we never really leave it.
Home is the currency of the heart which you carry in the wallet of your heart which is good wherever you travel. No matter how far from your childhood that you stray.
When adults gather by the thousands, whether at a baseball stadium or a massive concert venue, it is an unwritten and full accepted truth that we have been given permission to become Tom Hanks in"Big" kids again. We shed the multiple layers of skin that have been hardened by our endless responsibilities and fight against all the invading illnesses and disappointments that have invaded our lives and we spontaneously romp naked and free in the suddenly sprouting fountain of youth themed sprinklers of once upon a time. It's all a celebratory reunion of the soul which reveals to the the world our once true and forever essence which, at certain grown up moments, feels tarnished, tired and unbearably sad.
Many of us are at the point where our parents finally have to say goodbye and that leaves us feeling as lost and staggered as that little naked and napalmed Vietnamese girl stumbling down that scorched earth path. And some of us lose each other too.
It seems, as we get older, that more and more people bid us a sudden and unexpected (or expected) adieu with alarming regularity and instead of gathering up new friends like field daisies, we have to instead, toss a handful of earthy and roses into the six foot holes.
Even while parents are barely alive or even conscious, we tend to pull. towards them in the hopes of finding out the last minute answers to our most grievous questions.
But as they suddenly depart, booked on the passage of that Ship of Ghosts and Inevitability we are finally forced to finally of take full responsibility for ourselves and each other and at times that makes us want to cry until we dehydrate the river of our half full hearts.
Being alone, as you get older, is a force to be reckoned with because it is, most of the time, forced upon you.
But what you soon discover is that aloneness is not just a concept. It's a living breathing, thing; a philosophical roommate that simply has to be reasoned with.
Little by little, you win it over and it wins you and in that moment is when you fall in a kind of love and contentment where you quickly discover that there are pools of richness to be discovered in what you had once perceived as the oasis of the parched desert version of you.
There is music to be heard, art to be visited, coffee to be sipped in cafes and memories to dance with. Lands to be descended on.
But best of all there are concerts to attend.
And artists like James Taylor, who is now in his seventies, become more like a patriarch and a true-batdor than merely some guy who is offering up a press to play jukebox of his greatest hits.
He also becomes the reminder of teenage lust to millions of still dream filled, knees squashed together women.
As plucks his strings it's like he's plucking the strings that instantly releases the sweetness of who we are which lives like a prisoner in the now locked up and often forgotten vault of our our long ago lives.
And when he sings in that easy going, Carolina meets The Berkshires crooning style of his, which lulls us like a gently swinging summer hammock, just like Crosby and Sinatra did years before, we feel like daddy has returned one more time to remind us just how loved we can be.
And we return to the sixties and early seventies too.
The air becomes scented with weed and all the flowers on the Hawaiian shirts of pear shaped men seem to vibrate and dance. Women swoon like they have been bitten by the moon. Children and even newborns turn towards the stage with a a lovely look of innocence and discovery that says, in concert, "wow what's that?"
Songs float by like effortless sailboats, one after the other, along the horizon that we yearn for, which now mournfully travel on a ocean of quiet regret.
The familiar melodies, which often pop up on the radio, like tiny kites on an often wind swept day, are, in the moment, so healing and rescuing, that we simply want to hug each and every note just to say "thank you for being my friend."
And we sing. And we dance. And we stare at the sky and wonder where we are headed next.
Torches are lit, torches are shared and torches are passed.
And as the sun slowly pendulum-swings its way into the earth's gut, all dressed in its totally hot, self-satisfied, job well done orange jump suit and is replaced by the elegant, grown up, velvet duvet of a star lit night, which seems to know, cosmically, the instructions on how to tuck us in, as our eyelids grow heavier and less weary of the world, while our hearts become as warm and as light as french pastry.
As the music begins to approach its ghost conducted crescendo and the faint hint of a finale begins to arrive like a right on time bullet train, we 40,000 strong, who are now one living, breathing organism, begin to feel the crescendo of our own own about to burst bliss. It's like a Wizard navigated hot air balloon has suddenly arrived to fly us back to Kansas, which of course, we no longer need, because Sweet Baby James has outfitted us all with ruby slippers whose clickable heels are all the transport we will need to carry us safely home.
But the home it is temporarily returning us to, is the one that lives on the faraway hill, in the faraway land where our mommies and daddies, brothers and sisters, tail wagging dogs and endless skies and hula swaying tees, still live despite the fact that their earthly presence is long gone.
And when we drive back, deep into the belly of the satin black night, car floating towards our other homes, the one where we live for now, the lull and concert comfort lingers still on the banks of our necks and shoulders and kisses us with invisible lips and whispers into our ears, all we need to hear. It says:
You have lived and you live now.
And just like that we are reminded of the innumerable and immeasurable gifts that we receive by the second, that surround us like like the armies of the night, that will defend, with their lives, our right to dream and to be reborn.
Over and over and over again.