She’s Gotta Be Like She’s Gotta Be

“We got to let it all be . . . ‘cause it’s all gonna be how it’s gonna be.”

Do I wish I’d said that? No. And I wonder if Stephen Stills wishes he hadn’t said that.

The year was 1971, and the place was the Big Sur Folk Festival. I wasn’t there. It’s not even the 20th anniversary of the event. I just happened to see the movie the other night on my local public television station. Those who don’t watch history on television are destined to sentimentalize it.

When my teen-age daughter, Emma, saw the beginning of the movie, “Celebration at Big Sur,” she began laughing. “Tape it for me,” she said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said with a sneer. “I really want to spend my time watching this.”

Like a lot of people, I have fond memories of that period from 1967 to 1973 that we call the ‘60s. We were idealistic, we were creative, we were trying to get back to the garden. The thing I have forgotten is how stupid we were.

Was it the prevalence of marijuana? Was it youthful naivete? Was it a liberal arts education?

Throughout this movie, people said the dumbest things as if they made sense. The line above from Stills was uttered after he had an altercation with an obvious psychotic (as opposed to all the subtle psychotics in the film). The psychotic was disrupting the concert during the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young segment.

Now, dig. You’ve got these guys who are young, hip and handsome, guys who we’ve all watched grow old, go through rehab and get ugly. There they are in their fringe-and-salad days singing songs about peace and love like “Down by the River (I Shot My Baby).”

In one segment, we see Crosby and John Sebastian OM-ing in the hot tub. In another segment, they are sharing a communal meal with Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and ordinary mortal hippies.

Then, as they are singing, the psychotic starts shouting, “Yutta, yutta, yutta.” Stills goes over to the psychotic and starts to shove him. It looks like the peace and love is gonna turn ugly. Like it’s all gonna come down.

Four guys surround Stills and walk him away. He gets up on the stage and looks out at the audience, pauses as if he’s in pain and says, “We got to let it be . . . ‘cause it’s all gonna be how it’s gonna be.”

You could’ve heard a joint drop.

Then he explains that he almost got into a fight but his friends “loved” him out of it.

You had to be there. History. First as incoherence; later as public television.

The concert continued. Joni Mitchell hit a high A during “Woodstock,” beating out Joan Baez’s high G in the special song she wrote “for David.”

All through the concert, women in dresses they had made from their Indian bedspreads were moved to perform creative interpretive dances that looked like Roseanne Barr on acid. Or maybe Isadora Duncan on Quaaludes.

And I kept imagining these women today--running successful gourmet chocolate businesses or home computer services or substance abuse clinics. What if they turned on the TV as they once turned on? What if any of their friends from now could see them then?

The next morning, Emma said, “I can’t believe you stayed up until midnight watching that. Do you think anybody was watching besides you?”

“It should be required watching for anybody who thinks the ‘60s was a time of deep thinking,” I said.

Then Emma put on my burgundy miniskirt, my hand-embroidered blouse, my hand-crotcheted poncho and the floppy burgundy felt hat that I bought during the Summer of Love. It was ‘60s day at summer camp. She looked at herself in the mirror and laughed maniacally.

“Hey, be careful with that stuff,” I said. “It meant a lot to me once.”