AN ESSAY ABOUT MESSAGE TO LOVE

In spite of writing its theme tune, Joni Mitchell never actually got to play Woodstock. She was offered the chance, but she was too busy making a TV appearance on The Dick Cavett Show because her agent told her she couldn't pass up Dick's massive national exposure. Later, Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Occasionally Young, told her what it was like, and it was from his second-hand accounts that she wrote the hymn of the hippy movement: "Woodstock" – the bombers turning into butterflies, being stardust, golden, a quest to get back to an imagined Eden, etc etc etc.

A year after Woodstock, Joni Mitchell finally got her chance to play her totemic song in front of a crowd of peace-n-love-lovers even bigger than Woodstock – one of the largest gatherings of humanity ever assembled – the 600,000 who made their way to the Isle Of Wight Festival. Brother, was she in for one fucking big disappointment…

In Murray Lerner's documentary of the event, Message To Love, immediately after Woodstock, an aging American hippie called Yogi Joe invades the stage. He tries to grab the mic, and begins ranting about how he "has to get a message through to the kids on Desolation Row." The stagehands grab him and roughly manhandle him offstage. Then the crowd starts booing. A day earlier, Yogi Joe had mounted the same stage to talk about how the festival was being turned into a "psychedelic concentration camp." Backstage, Lerner's cameras capture him in full flow of LSD-paranoia: "Rikki Farr came to me on Wednesday. He gave me a hundred tickets and made me the head of the committee to paint the fence invisible. He wanted to paint it invisible because he was so embarrassed by it."

Up on the far hill of the Afton Down site, the so-called Desolation Row, French and Italian anarchist kids lie camped outside the festival's massive two-part fence, separated from the paying crowd by twin tiers of corrugated iron sandwiched by guard dogs, and prepare to tear down those walls like an invading army. All for the price of the £3 admission fee. On August 29, 1970, the hippie dream is finally getting its nuts kicked in by reality.

When sociologists and shoot-from-the-hip pop-pundits analyze The Death Of The Sixties--the wave breaking and rolling back--most of them point to one of two events. Cielo Drive--Sharon Tate getting carved up like a cantaloupe by the Manson Family, or Altamont--a deranged Meredith Hunter pulling a pistol on the Stones, then paying for it with a fatal knife through the chest c/o an intoxicated Hell's Angels security goon. Really though, this was all just Bad Stuff Happening that correlated with a certain date. If you want to talk about the real Death Of The Sixties, then you've got to talk about the ideals of the sixties: freedom, free-ness, universal brotherhood, all getting beat down by the cold-porridge realities of life, the necessity of commerce, the "They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, maaaan" cynicism of the business bods, and the simple painful truth: evolution has bred the human race to be both selfish and self-absorbed.

That's why The Sixties ended exactly 40 years ago this weekend, as the Isle Of Wight's promoters were pitched into a battle of wills against the movement they were trying to celebrate, over what everyone in Lerner's film seems to refer to as "bread." "Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, want it, want it, want it. Bread man bread, pay, pay, pay, " as Rikki Farr, the event's MC, rants to the cameras from his offices backstage.

If Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock documentary is the sanitized high noon of the hippie dream, then Message To Love captures the grubby nightmare full-frontal. It is quite possibly the greatest festival documentary ever made. And it is also one of the least well-known. This is mainly because Lerner sat on the tapes for 25 years before he managed to scrape together the cash to secure a release. In part, he claims, this is because his backers were uneasy with him showing the wires: the moolah-mill nuts-n-bolts financial realities of staging a big pop concert. It was only in 1995 that it slipped out, with help from the BBC.

Throughout the weekend, Farr takes to the mic again and again, to cajole, threaten and promise the increasingly agitated crowd into paying its own way. "Once we hear that 170,000 have paid, then we will make the festival free," Farr decrees at one point, illustrating that he knows nothing at all about game theory. Someone who could have told him that his optimistic promise is a big disincentive for anyone to actually cough up was the renowned academic, game theoretician and White Panther, Dr. Robin Farquharson. But the South African social scientist is instead filmed busily rousing the rabble and decrying the organizers. "It's become a feudal system… the rockstars are a new aristocracy… the promoters, the groupies, are their courtiers…"

Farr himself comes across as an odd combination of the false joviality of an MC, the peevishness of a man out of his depth and on the brink of ruin, and a genuine idealism about the social possibilities of this kind of mass-gathering. He constantly strives to put himself back on the good guys' team. A compromise will be reached, he tells Lerner: if the kids are broke, then they can paint the fences of the site, and earn a ticket that way. Simple. The kids duly paint swastikas on the fence. They write Fuck The Guards and screw around chucking whole buckets of paint over each other.

Meanwhile, the rumors that only 40,000 fans have so far actually paid to get in--way short of the 170, 000 required to break even--start feeding back to the artists. Promoter Ron Foulk is filmed arguing down the phone with one band's management about breach of contract. "I'll tell you what, Larry," Foulk quivers, "We haven't got the money right now."

"Tiny Tim's straight," Bert Block, the festival's agent, smirks down the lens, "I don't know what time he's going on. We had to give him the money first: can't sing with his ukulele without the money--it doesn't tune-up without the money, Murray--you understand? Right, in cash. In Pounds. They're in there counting it now." We see a stack of cash being readied, bills freshly unfolded from gate-takings, ready to circulate straight back into Tiny Tim's pockets.

Back onstage, Farr changes tack again from carrot to stick. Now, the festival will not go ahead unless more people pay, he threatens, simply because many of the artists refuse to go onstage without their fees. For their part, the artists, desperate not to be cast as new aristocrats taxing the people, shift the blame straight back. Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson denounces the idea that he's a "breadhead." No one has said they won't play without their money, he whines. And he's right of course: why would any artist bother saying that? After all – that's what they employ their agents to say on their behalf.

As if Anderson's flautistry and codpiece combo doesn't announce it clearly enough, musically, there's another death-rebirth motif going on. Prog is busy being born as hippie carks it. The newly-formed Emerson, Lake and Palmer start their first-ever performance by firing an antique canon, while Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix give their last-ever UK performances before they get busy with dying. Somewhere in the background, a torch is being passed. Though perhaps not the one that sets fire to the main stage just after ELP.

Outside, the clamor gets louder. A group set upon the fence, and start rocking it back and forth, shaking it to pieces with their bare hands. They breach the fence. A guard dog is killed. The security, outmanned and outgunned, relent and watch passively as the drifters pour through.

Finally, Farr and his fellow backers have had enough. On the final day, Farr gets back onstage. "Please open the gates. Whoever wants to come in let them come in. We've lost everything. But when I say everything I only mean money. We are now open to creditors. But the very fact that you are sitting out there, and we have been able to make this happen is worth more to us than any money ever could."

Every great documentary needs character development, and finally, he is redeemed. The crowd applauds. He raises his arms in a double-peace sign. Or is it the Richard Nixon salute? The ambiguity of the gesture is great. He's a complex man, Rikki Farr. Many years later, Rikki Farr's complex relationship with it's-only-money would take a bad turn. In 2008, he was jailed for 18 months in Arizona, for hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax evasion.

On the Monday, it's pissing down, the camera surveys the wrecked site: fires smolder, litter is piled sky-high. The Dream has been converted into a series of broken umbrellas, empty beer bottles and crumpled joint stubs. "It'll never happen again," Farr chokes out through the drizzle, in a weird echo of Withnail's final soliloquy. "This was the last great event."

It was. In 1971, Parliament passed The Isle Of Wight Act – a sort of proto-1994 Criminal Justice Bill--which was designed to ban all such mass-gatherings. The greatest decade in the history of man was over. They had failed to paint it black.

GAVIN HAYNES