"What shall we say? Shall we call it by a name?"
In the past ten years, the term "old school" has become part of the popular american slang lexicon. Because the term is used widely, to describe everything from Sunday Morning Cartoons ("Bugs Bunny is the best of the Old School") to rap ("Grandmaster Flash wrote the book on Old School rap") it would be both presumptuous and wrong to assume that the jamband scene had any sort of exclusive claim to the terms "Old School" and "New School."
Humans by their nature like to compartmentalize reality in order to better understand it. Thus, in history, there is the trend to divide time by Decade or by Era. Moments in history are used as dividing lines between the Past and the Distant Past. Any historian worth their salt will quickly point out that these dividing lines, while useful, are mere contrivances. The seeds of the present are always contained in the past. So while it's fun to write about and ponder the terms Old School and New School, which do emerge on the tourhead scene frequently and have a rather specific, if at times ambiguous, meaning, I think it is ultimately important to view the terms as loose understandings of style and that these characterizations are in some ways no more useful than stereotypes.
At jamband shows the term Old School predominantly refers to one thing: Grateful Dead Tour. And within the context of Grateful Dead Tour, it predominantly refers to an apocryphal time and place when everyone was kind, miracle tickets were offered rather than grovelled, and the parking lot was filled with "strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand."
The stereotype of New School (particularly as seen through the eyes of some Old Schooler who is getting out for a weekend to see a show while the kids are with grandma) is summed up by the website passedoutwookies.com. The charicature of a New Schooler is a narcotized youth wandering half crocked through a festival campground, baseball cap askew atop a head full of dreads slurring, "who's got my pharmies?"
Why the shift? Times change. Much can be attributed to changes in culture at large.
Tour has always been, in many respects, the front lines of the War On (Some) Drugs. Sadly, one of the first casualties was Kindness. Random Acts of Kindness can certainly still be found on tour, but people are, rightfully, much more wary of one another. "Is this person a narc? Someone out on bail who is trying to get a more lenient prison sentence by using entrapment to put me in jail?" Such concerns lent a heavy edge to tour and soured what was, in many respects, a very open and trusting community seeking shared exploration of altered states of consciousness.
As the War On (Some) Drugs became more militarized (the US Army invading Humboldt County in the fall of '90 is just one example that springs to mind) and more and more heads were given mandatory minimums and lengthy prison terms due to bad laws such as the carrier weight laws that were designed to cripple the LSD subculture, the scene on tour also began to get more grim, more militant, and more dangerous.
Additionally, with drugs like LSD on the Endangered Species list, the youth began to turn to other more readily available drugs. Drugs pretending to be MDMA (Ecstasy) skyrocketed in use, regardless of whether they were cut with other more dangerous drugs (speed and opiates being the most common additives). The use of heavy sedatives, opiate derivatives and cocaine came back into vogue and now it is often easier to score coke and pills on tour than hallucinogens and other drugs with little or no known lethal toxicity level.
As society became more militant (with gangsta rap emerging in urban centers) and tour more dangerous (heavy sentences for peaceful people participating in victimless "crimes") the drug underground on tour also became tougher. Thug life on tour gave birth to Gangsta Wook.
When writing on the death of Ken Kesey, Grateful Dead lyricist John Barlow wrote that the titans of the Old Guard were hard on the outside and soft within while "the latest crop of us seem soft on the outside and hard within."
And perhaps that is the clearest earmark of the New School. The true Old School was raised on Baby Boom Era values —values that were fostered in the post WW II era and which met a classic "Fall From Innocence" following the assasination of JFK, the government's lies during Viet Nam and Watergate, and the ensuing chaos of the Sixties. The "current crop" had no such Fall From Innocence. We were raised on scandal. The CIA smuggled guns and cocaine to fund the Nicaraguan contras while "Touch of Grey" was topping the charts and nary a conviction resulted. The current crop of youth hardly bat an eye at Enron, Abu Ghraib, US-launched wars of aggression... scandals that make Watergate seem like, well, a simple break-in. Much as it is difficult at times to come to terms with, tour is a mirror of this macrocosm.
The kids keep dancin' and shakin' their bones 'cause it's still all too clear we're on our own.
On the plus side, the New School has tools the Old School barely dreamed of. While rec.music.gdead and the Grateful Dead's newsgroup on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) were early outposts on the electronic frontier, sites like jambands.com, dead.net and other highly trafficked internet discussion pages have created huge virtual communities where people attending festivals can gather away from the events and foster ongoing friendships.
With so many wonderful and eclectic festivals springing up around the country, it is refreshing to see people open to diverse and wonderful music, new and more creative ways of interacting, and a general willingness to embrace the spirit of celebration.
If the Old School can lend any wisdom to the New School, perhaps the single clearest lesson it can offer is that we are presented at every turn with opportunities for transformation. It is that very promise of transformation that should inspire subcultures toward positive influence rather than engender a feeling of remorse and despair.
As Wavy Gravy is fond of saying, these are, indeed, the good ol' days and it's time to have nostalgia for the future! |
