Tibetan Freedom Festival

The Boston Phoenix
June 25 - July 2, 1998

[Tibetan Freedom Festival]

Tibet amok

The largest rock benefit of the '90s spins out of control

by Carly Carioli
Washington, DC -- By the time the third annual Tibetan Freedom Festival is over, five concertgoers will have been hit by lightning, a Tibetan monk will have removed his dentures for the cameras, I will have stumbled onto an all-access backstage pass, Radiohead's Thom Yorke will still be skulking about in the same T-shirt he was wearing when he arrived, and most observers will be wondering how all of this is supposed to affect a tiny territory halfway around the world. Right now, though, it's a gorgeous, sunny Saturday morning, and I'm just one of about a hundred or so press cadavers corralled in a sweltering tent in the parking lot of RFK Stadium, awaiting the appearance of the Beastie Boys for a scheduled press conference. There's a little problem, though: there are no microphones set up at the speakers' table. They were there half an hour ago, but they've vanished.
Running the show is the independent promotion company Nasty Little Man, a powerful and famously incompetent cabal that also organizes the Warped Tour, among others. Members of this shadowy organization are wearing name tags that say HELLO, NASTY, which is both the way they answer their phones and the title of the Beasties' forthcoming album. The question right now, though, is how many Nasty Little People it's gonna take to plug in a microphone. I count five, and eventually it's a member of the press corps who gets the thing working. Then a Nasty Little Woman informs us that Radiohead, not the Beasties, will be arriving shortly to take questions.
All-star benefits have never been rock and roll's brightest moments. The Tibetan Freedom Festival is the second-largest benefit concert ever -- only Live Aid was bigger -- and one gets the sense that all weekend, at all levels, all those involved have bitten off more than they can chew. At the top level is the Tibet Fest's sponsor and beneficiary: the Milarepa Fund, formed by the Beasties with the royalties from their album Ill Communication. Milarepa seeks to raise awareness of human-rights abuses in Tibet, which has been occupied by China since before most of the concerts' performers were born. This weekend's events -- a two-day concert at RFK, for which nearly 130,000 tickets were sold in four hours, and a public rally Monday on the lawn of the Capitol -- are meant to influence President Clinton's first official visit to China, scheduled to take place in less than two weeks.
The Beasties' Adam Yauch and Mike D admit that the timing of the festival is a coincidence. But Clinton's China trip does give the event, for the first time in its three-year run, a purpose beyond just consciousness-raising. "What we really need to press on Bill Clinton at this demonstration on Monday," says Adam Yauch at Saturday's first press conference, "is that he needs to go in there and ask for negotiations between the Tibetan government and the Chinese government. If he returns having achieved anything less than that, then his visit has not been a success."
Which is a nice little proclamation -- it even gets a hearty round of applause, which shows you what kind of press conferences we're dealing with here -- but the political reality is that the president has a lot more to worry about than getting the Dalai Lama and the Chinese premier together for tea. At home, there's the ongoing investigation into whether the Chinese government funneled campaign money to the Democratic National Committee. And once Clinton gets to China there's an official reception in Tiananmen Square, which could always turn into a Bonzo-goes-to-Bitburg moment. Given what's bound to be an extremely delicate eggshell walk for the president, and given China's testy needling of Milarepa in the press -- a communiqué from Beijing last month made the lame-duck gesture of banning Tibet Festival performers from China, and an editorial in last Sunday's Washington Post tersely dismissed the organizers' calls for talks -- it's clear even before the festival begins that there's no way a rock concert is gonna convince the White House to broach a thorny, arcane topic like Tibet. Plus, Bill Clinton is out of town until Monday.
But celebrities don't care for political details. Like politicians, they gravitate toward the large gesture and the easily digestible sound bite. There's certainly no ambiguity in the sight of Palden Gyatso, an ancient-looking Tibetan monk clad in a crimson robe, who appears before reporters with a boxful of props (three cattle prods and a couple of pairs of handcuffs) and recounts a litany of tortures he suffered at the hands of the Chinese while imprisoned for political crimes. At one point, explaining how having a cattle prod shoved in one's mouth will tend to dry out the roots of one's teeth, he yanks out his dentures and holds them up.
No one here seems to want to entertain the possibility that there are some problems you can't cure with a rock concert. Just how hard it is to get this through people's heads -- no matter how well-meaning they might be -- is apparent when a reporter asks Yauch what he plans to do if this weekend's mission fails, if Clinton ignores Tibet during this visit and moves toward increased trade with China. "I guess we can just keep doing concerts," he says.
Whatever. Very few people who are not in very successful rock bands have ever suffered under the delusion that rock and roll's influence can be harnessed and directed at remote cultural entities, like scientists focusing a laser beam on a tumor, or the FBI blasting Nancy Sinatra tunes at David Koresh. What's really at stake at the Tibet Fest is whether anyone believes rock and roll has a conscience.

Washington is home not just to the president but also to Ian MacKaye, the Dalai Lama of punk rock. MacKaye has spent nearly two decades in a kind of self-imposed commercial exile; since forming Minor Threat and the vastly influential Dischord label in the early '80s, he has been instrumental in redefining the relationship between artists and their fans -- pricing his CDs reasonably, keeping his concerts safe and affordable, and in effect fighting to maintain rock and roll at a manageable scale in a business that lives by being larger than life. He's the one Eddie Vedder looks to when stardom begins to saw on his nerves. Christian youth are taught to ask themselves, "What would Jesus do?" In indie rock they ask, "What would Ian MacKaye do?"
And there he is, the moral compass of underground rock, standing in the demilitarized zone between the press corral and the artists' pavilion. He's asked for his general impressions of the festival. "I'm just overwhelmed by the whole thing. I haven't had a chance to form any yet," he says. "I've never been to anything this big. I was at one Lollapalooza, but never anything like this." But he says he'll be around all weekend, and he'll be happy to talk to us later on.
In the press tent, Radiohead are answering the official difficult question of the day: Aren't the kids really just here for the music? Almost every artist who takes the podium has to field this one. Earlier, as the drums of the day's opening prayer ceremony wafted in from the stadium, 23-year-old Sean Lennon (son of John and Yoko, signed to the Beasties' Grand Royal imprint) drew applause for his resentment at being asked the question at all. A college activist on the same panel called the question "disturbing." Radiohead at least have an answer: "When you get 66,000 people standing in front of the Tibetan flag, people are gonna get the point," says front man Thom Yorke. "People are not that stupid."
"This isn't really an ideal situation to see any of these bands live," says guitarist Johnny Greenwood. "The point is that it's a celebration of a common cause." On Sunday, Yauch will deflect a question about the Beasties' set by saying, "We're just gonna play some songs. I don't think that's the most important thing going on here."
The important thing, ideally, is a kind of bait-and-switch: fans come for the chance to be close to their idols, and they leave with a conscience. The transaction is dubious in the first place, but it's especially risky for the generation of artists who emerged from rock's underground between 1983 and 1993: R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, Beck. They are artists who have grown up wary of celebrity, who regard mass popularity with distrust. Their collective clout is now massive enough to make the Tibetan Freedom Festival the biggest benefit concert since the mid-'80s. But it's strange to see the likes of Sonic Youth tipping their hats to the values of the generations they've spent so much time skewering: the peace-loving pop tyrants of the '60s through the '80s. It's as if they've convinced themselves that the only thing wrong with Live Aid was that they weren't on-stage instead of Wham!, and that the real problems -- the challenge of maintaining either artistic integrity or political sincerity in the context of a giant rock concert -- were simply annoying procedural formalities. And now they're finding that sprawling events such as these become almost a force of nature -- even the artists seem at the mercy of the concert itself.
For instance, the sound sucks. The acts are toggled between two adjacent stages separated by a monstrous Tibetan mural, allowing for almost continuous performances. Inside the stadium, the first big-deal act has taken the stage. It's Live, and the kids are loving them. On the field at RFK, people lie on beach towels and plastic drop cloths, basking in sunny 80-degree heat, the air a mix of sweat and suntan oil and herb smoke. Live's shaved-headed front man, Ed Kowalczyk, pauses before their last song ("Lightning Crashes" -- in retrospect, the day's most eerie performance) to launch into a soliloquy that comes out muddy and inaudible. Not only is the vastness of RFK making for less-than-ideal music; it's also obscuring the message.

Patti Smith's scheduled set time comes and goes without her showing up. By 3:30, when the Dave Matthews Band wraps up, the weather has turned nasty, gray, and howling. In the press tent, KRS-1, nappy mini-dreads peeking from underneath a wool cap, is giving a somewhat disjointed but eminently enjoyable press conference. He's been rambling on for about 10 minutes without anyone asking a question when he says -- and I have no idea what the hell he's talking about -- "People just ain't ready to hear me say that the president of Coca-Cola is a black WOMAN!" And just as he says this, there is a terrible crackle and roar that shakes the ground, a clap of thunder and lightning that makes everyone blink. A smile blossoms across KRS's face. "The mother goddess represents!" he declares, beaming. "I'll say it again -- people are not ready to hear that the president of Coca-Cola is a black WOMAN!"
The sudden, violent rain has chased most of the press into the tent, from which we watch Herbie Hancock finish up his set. Gang Starr's Guru is saving the oldster's languid ass by leaping around the stage, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. No one seems to mind the driving downpour, and the set ends in an ecstatic flurry of windblown sheet music. As techs clear the stage, someone with an Internet hookup in the press tent informs us that the National Weather Service has issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the next half hour. After several more bursts of lightning, someone realizes that the tent we're standing under is supported by a series of tall metal poles. Moments later, we're being herded out of the tent and into the rain by Nasty Little People -- there's just been a tornado watch issued, and they're worried about the rig being blown to Oz with all of us in it.
It's close to an hour before the day's concert is officially canceled, during which the audience seeks refuge inside RFK's hallways. In the meantime, a rumor circulates that someone in the stadium has been hit by lightning. "I heard it from two people," says one reporter, but then again, he's covering the concert for Teen People. It's not until after the stadium has been cleared that a guy from a news wire service confirms that six people have been injured by a lightning bolt and taken to the hospital. One is in critical condition. Like weasels or rats or some other garden-variety rodents, the Nasty Little Men have completely vanished, leaving the working press to fish their soggy gear out of the tent and speculate aimlessly about the fate of the festival.
Unaware that anyone's been injured, and perhaps spurred on by all the religious chanting that Buddhist monks have been doing on- and off-stage, some kids come up with a chant of their own. Taking their cue from the promise that appears on all 66,000 ticket stubs, they get a good, loud "Rain or Shine!" going, and TV cameras flock to capture the moment on tape.

The first day has been an unmitigated disaster, a torrent of cancellations, misinformation, and smug proselytizing. The lightning only serves as an exclamation point, as if the Goddess or Buddha or the president of Coca-Cola had reached out of the sky to demonstrate that the artists and organizers had created a monster beyond their control, whose meanings and methods were slipping out of their grasp.
The "celebration of a common cause," however, is just getting started out in the parking lot, which adjoins a grassy stream embankment. Cars, VW vans, and Winnebagos are stacked two and three deep along a half-mile stretch in one of the biggest tailgate parties the stadium's ever seen. An hour after the concert is canceled, the rain has stopped, leaving puddles and ankle-deep mud in its wake. Acres of hibachis are cooking away impatiently; it looks like a massive argument conducted via smoke signals. Beer is out by the case, the cooler, the keg. Under a bridge, a DJ is spinning earth-shattering drum 'n' bass from a rented flatbed truck. A couple of kids do coke off their dashboard. A football field away, some hippies have set up turntables and a PA under a tent and are playing '70s lite funk. But what's most impressive is the balloons.
At first glance it looks like a carnival. Every 30 or 40 yards there's a guy with a five-foot helium tank filling up balloons for crowds of teenagers; burly guys walk up and down selling them by the batch. Except they're not helium tanks. They're filled with enough nitrous oxide to sedate a prison riot. Hundreds upon hundreds of fresh-faced kids slog through the soft clay with woozy smiles on their faces, taking long puffs. The ground is littered with yellow and blue and red and green splotches, rubber confetti. Trucks turn doughnuts. Kids who watched Woodstock II on pay-per-view go for mudslides in the road. Everywhere you turn, they're selling pretty nitrous balloons, at $5 a pop, for as far as the eye can see.

Cruising for a place to get drunk around midnight, we stumble upon a meeting with the Beasties' Mike D and a dozen or so other Tibet Festival organizers, who are holed up in the lobby of the Westin Hotel trying to hash out the next day's performance schedule. A war room-like atmosphere prevails; the concierge brings pots of coffee. Beck and Tracy Chapman have commitments that will prevent them from sticking around to play Sunday; the Verve have canceled due to illness. Even so, there's no way to fit all the remaining bands on Sunday's bill -- as it is, organizers have already resigned themselves to shortening sets to an average of 40 minutes per major act and running an hour past RFK's 8 p.m. curfew, which will cost them in the neighborhood of $15,000. They can make it just by the skin of their teeth -- if they cut somebody. They've decided to give the boot to Kraftwerk, the semi-obscure German electronic-music pioneers who've re-formed to play just three US shows. Make that two. "Wait, I've got a question," says one of the organizers, hoping for a miracle. "Has A Tribe Called Quest even showed up yet?"

We get our first reliable details on the previous day's casualties out of the Washington Post on the way into RFK on Sunday morning. Four people were injured after lightning struck the first-tier stands inside RFK; one of them, 25-year-old law student Lysa Selfon, needed to be resuscitated on the scene and was admitted to DC General Hospital with second-degree burns over 20 percent of her body. (Her condition improved steadily over the next three days, though doctors remained worried that her brain might begin to swell.) At a morning press conference, a Nasty Little Person reads two statements.
The first, from the Milarepa organization: "All of today's prayers by the monks and nuns are dedicated to the people who were struck by lightning yesterday. Please keep them in your thoughts as well. As far as we know, the young lady is in serious but stable condition, and her condition is improving."
The second, from Kraftwerk, in the peculiar read-between-the-lines syntax of a man being held for ransom: "We have accepted the recommendation of the Milarepa Foundation and will not be performing on June 14. We were advised . . . that our performance would be logistically impossible. Kraftwerk were obviously very disappointed but, in the spirit of the cooperation of the event, accept the decision. We apologize to our fans for this situation, and hope they understand that circumstances were beyond our control."

The Post was nice enough to list the exact section, row, and seats of the people who caught that lightning bolt, so my photographer and I head down to see if there are any visible signs left. We arrive to find that MTV's John Norris has beaten us to the punch. Well, sort of. A microphone in one hand and a cigarette dwindling in the other, he's with a camera crew a few rows away from where the Post listed touchdown, trying to film a couple of lead-in segments. Behind Norris's head, a bunch of kids are waving and whooping it up, hoping to make it on camera. Norris pleads with them for a little mellowness, in deference to the subject he's tackling, then checks with his producer. "No, I don't want them yelling," says the producer. "And put out that cigarette."
Mark Zellar, a collegiate-looking young man from Baltimore, is sitting in Section 111, Row 5, Seat 1 -- the purported electric chair, the hot seat, El Zappo Centrál. "No way," he says, incredulously, when he finds out. Then he shrugs. "Well, you know what they say -- lightning never strikes in the same place twice."

Even though Adam Yauch insists that on this day music isn't the most important thing, it's a set by the Britpop band Pulp that seems to fix everything, suddenly, briefly. They've been granted only 20 minutes, but the first two songs are enough to encapsulate the entire weekend -- songs that ask the questions no one wants to answer. Jarvis Cocker flits on stage flashing Elvis shimmies and cocksure Jagger swagger and strut as he sings "The Fear," the song that opens the band's latest disc, This Is Hardcore (Island), an album about unredeemed souls passing through the purgatory of middle age, about coming to terms with one's own nothingness. "This is the sound of loneliness turned up to 10," he howls. "When you've got the fear, and when you're no longer searching for beauty or love/just some kind of life with the edges taken off/when you can't even define what it is that you are frightened of/this song will be here."
The song hammers across RFK out at the audience, but it is a song most of them won't understand for another 20 years. If anyone's meant to hear this song it's the musicians backstage, in the wings; it's a song for everyone who's playing out a scene in this rock-and-roll midlife-crisis movie-of-the-week of a concert. The next song is for the kids. "Sorted for E's and Wizz" is a tune about getting zonked on drugs at a rave and dancing with yourself till six in the morning and then being afraid to go home. But at RFK, the lines that jump out are about standing in a field with 20,000 other people and not knowing how to feel about it. "This is about people gathering together in places like here," Cocker says by way of an introduction. "Except you know why you're here. This one isn't quite that straight ahead."

On stage, things heat up -- Michael Stipe guests with Radiohead; the Fugees' Wyclef Jean tears up an Elvis song on guitar to prove he can rock with anyone at the festival; Blues Traveler screw up John Lennon's "Imagine" (from which Sean is inexplicably, but mercifully, absent). Back in the press tent, all sorts of strategies are afoot -- a Nasty is trying, unsuccessfully, to secure an interview with Jarvis Cocker for Perry Farrell. Reporters and photographers stand hunched over the railing separating the press from the artists' refuge, rubbernecking for a glimpse of the wildlife. The Beasties were right, sort of. Everyone's tired of beating their way through RFK to get a vantage point for a muddy-sounding rock show. They've jotted down enough Tibet sound bites to get a murderer into Nirvana, and they're numb to the talking heads parading endlessly behind the microphone. Even celebrity is beginning to lose its luster. So what the hell is this weekend about, again?
The Milarepa Fund has set up an area in front of RFK that we've taken to calling Tibetland. In the middle of Tibetland, a large tent has been converted into an authentic-looking replica of a Tibetan temple. A series of priests (in headgear that looks like something out of the Roman Empire), nuns, and dancers appear periodically to chant and pray and perform. In the plaza surrounding the tent stand several three-sided scaffold totems. Looking up at the totems from outside the plaza you see mug shots of political prisoners; from the highway you see the words FREE TIBET; from inside the plaza, you see only mysterious, stylish cryptograms amid an assortment of food huts and merchandise booths.
The booths are of two basic types: Tibetan trinkets and hippie gear. At the former, you can use a major credit card to buy items from "The Tibet Collection: Gifts Made By Artisans in India and Nepal"; or you can buy the Dalai Lama's life story, or thrift-store goods adorned with silk-screened slogans, or woodgrain-finished FREE TIBET skateboards. Notices at these booths encourage shoppers to "Preserve Tibetan Culture" with their purchases. A few feet away there are booths hawking hemp products and limited-edition Jerry Garcia lithographs. You can get a "Tibetan Combo Meal" for $6, drink not included.
This is the vision of Tibet that Milarepa is selling: somewhere between a nonviolent vegetarian utopia and a shopping mall. It's the kind of image Americans tend to hold of the rest of the world -- a cartoonish, exotic theme park of heroes and villains and martyrs. Like Bill Pullman in David Lynch's Lost Highway, we like to preserve things our own way, the way we want to remember them, not necessarily the way they happen.

Bored, underwhelmed, and vaguely depressed by the whole distended lot of this, I end up leaving and wandering around the parking lot. On my way back, I spy what looks to be a thirtysomething guy and his girlfriend attempting to bribe their way into the show, so I sit down on the grass to watch. The transaction, if there was ever going to be one, doesn't materialize, and so I end up just sitting there, about 30 yards from the guarded entrance to the artists' pavilion, on an island outside RFK's front entrance, watching another man and his wife scream at each other. Their two young children are hanging on, waiting for it to be over, as if they've seen this movie before. Time passes; what sounds like Blues Traveler wafts over the concrete hulk of RFK. Then, out of nowhere, a random guy walks out past the artists' checkpoint gate and throws something at me. "Here," he says, as I realize it's his laminate. "Go ahead in."
After I get over the initial shock at my life turning into a soft-drink commercial, I wander inconspicuously backstage. This is what I see: Eddie Vedder and Kim Gordon shooting the shit. Thurston Moore watching Luscious Jackson perform via closed-circuit TV. Brad Pitt trailing an entourage on his way into the bowels of RFK, perhaps to take advantage of the massage room. Former Beastie Boys/Run DMC/Slayer producer Rick Rubin, looking awfully upbeat for a guy whose label (American) went belly-up recently and who lost a $1.5 million lawsuit less than three days ago. John Popper and the rest of Blues Traveler up against the side of a tent, being interviewed by Much Music, the Canadian MTV. Popper -- a fat, dirty, bedraggled lump of flesh whose cane must hate its life -- is rambling on some Ted Nugentish riff about how it's perfectly natural for nonviolent, peace-loving people to own lots of firearms. "It's like if you collect hammers," he says. "Like, would we wanna outlaw people who collect hammers?"
Climbing up the stairs into the wings above the stage, where they let the VIPs go, Dave Grohl is behind me; on my way down, Krist Novoselic is on his way up. Michael Stipe emerges for R.E.M.'s set in some sort of skirt. Soundgarden's Matt Cameron is filling in for the departed Bill Berry. I file it all away, pocketing the currency of celebrity gossip and proximity.
Back in the artists' play area, I spy Ian MacKaye again. He ducks into the Sonic Youth tent, but I manage to catch up with him a few minutes later. This time he's more guarded. He wants to know what kind of questions I have for him, what kind of article I'm writing. He explains that he's here as a guest of the organizers, not of any of the bands, and that he wouldn't want to be associated with any piece that was critical of them. "Their hearts are in the right place," he says. "They're solid people."
It's a hot afternoon, and with security guards making only token attempts to stop kids from sneaking en masse onto the RFK lawn, the crowd in front of the stages has swelled dangerously. Kids with minor injuries -- dehydration, scrapes, bruises -- are carried out in a steady stream. While photographing one of them, Geoff Kula, the photographer for this article and a notorious smart aleck, is accosted by the bald-headed guitarist from the Wallflowers. The bald one, who's soon joined by the Wallflowers' keyboardist, accuses Kula of "exploiting" the injured kid -- armchair psychiatrists will recognize this as projection -- though in the course of a heated exchange it becomes clear that what really bugs them is the possibility of the concert's being portrayed in anything less than glowing, happy terms. "Life isn't just about getting up on stage and singing your pretty little songs," Kula retorts.
Maybe Kula and I are the villains, just a couple of cynical, starstruck losers with nothing better to do than put down a perfectly harmless Good Cause. Sure, these mass-rally rah-rah things tend to make people act out smaller-scale versions of the tyrannies they're supposed to be protesting, and maybe they encourage kids to blindly accept whatever hoo-rah their favorite pop stars feed them, and maybe the Wallflowers are so disgusted by what's going on around them that they would rather pretend what's happening in front of their eyes didn't just happen. So what? Rah, rah, rah. . . .
Though the Red Hot Chili Peppers play an unannounced closing set -- believe me, it wasn't worth that $15,000 Milarepa had to shell out for missing curfew -- it's Pearl Jam who effectively get the last word. "This one goes out to all of the intelligent people in the audience," scowls the cretinous Eddie Vedder, introducing "Evenflow." "I think I saw about one or two of you today. Some asshole asked me today: `Do you think any of this makes a difference? Everyone's just here for the music.' And -- I don't give a fuck. We've got all your money."
Thankfully, someone had the presence of mind to throw a bottle at him. The words sort of hung in the air, gathering their own weight and their own whisper that you could trace from certain pairs of eyes in the audience to other pairs of eyes, and the whisper said something like, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
"You want a story? I got a story for ya," says a prominent national rock author, after Eddie has vacated his bully pulpit. "A third of the crowd leaving during Pearl Jam's set."
Carly Carioli can be reached at ccarioli[a]phx.com.