The Hackensaw Boys : Rob

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in the grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.
- Stephan Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

So there I was, backstage at the Bonaroo musical event in Coffee County, TN. Most of the Hackensaw Boys were half-heartedly cavorting with the passersby and whole-heartedly drinking bottled beers supplied by two girls in a golf cart. I think I can say, without fear of misrepresenting my fellow Hackensaws, we all felt pretty good.

Eventually, someone discovered that by standing atop the ice chest behind the stage we could see into the campsite where the first ten thousand or so Bonaroosters to arrive were engaged in what appeared to be a western-style land rush conducted from SUVs. I noticed that the vehicles rent great chunks of the over-saturated Tennessee soil in their passing. Three days of frequent and violent thunderstorms had rendered many of the stage areas little more than glorified bogs and all the employees of the Bonaroo promoter had observed private prayer ceremonies the night before.

Whether due to the effects of the employees’ pleadings or the operations of chance, the rain had held off this evening and the setting sun suffused the gray clouds with the gentle rays of that most heavenly of body’s passing light.

It’s a widely reported meteorological occurrence that the light cast by the sun setting behind storm clouds frees the mind to wander aimlessly among the rivulets of thought permeating the average homo sapien’s consciousness. This condition renders the much touted powers of free will impotent and cures all manner of bodily aches and pains. The light from that moment’s dying daystar was no exception.

As I watched a pair of particularly toothsome young ladies and a trio of invigorated young men trying to clear a path for their critically mired touring sedan through the Coffee County muck, I tried to imagine the same group of healthy young festivalarians three days hence – their skin denatured in a thin slime of sweat, mud and love; their minds overstimulated by a near constant diet of live music, recreational drugs and intense moments of meaningful eye-contact; their bodies fed only by wonderlust and the occasional dearly-purchased burrito; their spirits slowly succumbing to the more primal aspects of the human condition . . .

I am sure that I was not the only person wondering what it was all about, only certain that I was glad to be there.

I shivered in the warm humid air.

My reverie was interrupted when I noticed that the quintet had surrendered all hope of freeing their vehicle and reached some sort of peace with their lot. I observed cigarettes being lit and beers being opened and felt the ground shudder under the effects of their now-stationary vehicle’s sound system. I called to mind the words of Michael O’Hare who claimed in The Lady from Shanghai: “I have always found it very sanitary to be poor.”

The simple and laughable fact was that though I could not have afforded a ticket to the Bonaroo musical event – a circumstance directly tied to my presence there as a performer – in three days I would be cleaner than these people. The truth of this realization struck me to the core. You see, dear reader, the sanitary condition of those who perform live music is so consistently worse than those who pay to see live music that the sudden reversal of those roles momentarily shocked me with the forgotten sensibilities of my youth when I was compelled to travel many physical and astral miles (both of which I rather enjoyed) and endure constant deprivation (which I also kind of enjoyed) to see live music – not because I was fraternally and financially bound to a group of traveling musicians but because it was fun.

Who are these people who come here? I wondered. Who are these people who (moneyed or not) affect an appearance of relative poverty, gather in such great numbers in such faraway places and do things that some people disdain as flights of fancy, others condemn as immoral, and still others fail to comprehend at all? In a sense, I was asking, “Who are We?” for I knew myself to be one of them. “Are we,” I wondered, “Americans?”

In my heart I felt it to be true for was not this enterprise nothing more than an expression the democratic ideal, albeit with musical accompaniment and corporate sponsership? Furthermore, if we were not Americans, what did it mean to be an “American” if the definition could include such as ourselves?

For those of you who might be suffering some anxiety on this point, allow me to assure you that after having traveled the length and breadth of this land numerous times and having spoken with people from all walks of life in the context of occasions ranging from back-yard barbecues to multi-million dollar musical events, from retirement homes to street corners, I find the desire to maintain the Union to be strong – which is to say that most people believe it to be worth saving. Everywhere there is property; there is a feeling of enfranchisement and a sense of participation in – and possession of – the American project (insofar as that project supports one’s property, imagined and real). Whether this solidarity is the by-product of over two centuries of democratic rhetoric or something more elusive and ineffable in the human spirit, this writer is unable to say.

Whatever divisions do exist among the American people lie not in questions of Patriotism (which like all human endeavors is rightly motivated by self-interest) but rather in the old problem of unevenly divided wealth. The vast majority of Americans understand that some citizens are liable to have more wealth than others. Most citizens can tolerate that fact – the problem as it now stands involves questions of distribution and merit. In short, why is the disparity between rich and poor so great and how did the rich get that way?

To remedy the situation, this writer proposes that the following course be followed:

A census of the wealth of every citizen shall be conducted and all that wealth converted into money, which will then be placed in a bunker in the Great Salt Flats of Utah. If anyone tries to steal the money it will be immediately destroyed by bunker-piercing missiles fired from the nearby testing range. Then, using the census results, the citizenry will be divided into four parts according to their previous financial status (rich, upper-middle, lower-middle, and poor) and each quarter credited with an amount figured to be the average of their class.

Each quarter of the population will then be assigned a mongrel dog of the same weight.

The poor’s dog will be starved for six days, the upper-middle’s four days, and so on by degrees of two so that the rich will have a bitch that has just eaten. The animals will then be set loose upon a freshly butchered buffalo. After a period of twenty minutes the dogs will be weighed and the heaviest shall receive the largest quarter of the wealth, and so on down, until all shall be surfeit and content.

Perhaps an odd sort of vision for the Bonaroo but, then again, things were just getting started. The ticket holders’ collective sense of anticipation spread from the swelling campgrounds and gridlocked automobiles on the Interstate to invade our thoughts and make much that will never happen seem possible.

The rest of the evening can best be summed up in two words common to the idiom of the Volunteer State – Picking and Grinning.

Best,
Mahlon