Good Music, Bad Vibes, Long Wait

“I was obsessed, a fanatic,” Murray Lerner says. “People got tired of hearing about it.”

It’s hard to imagine this affable, relaxed, 50ish filmmaker as a tireless monomaniac on a mission. But in fact it took Lerner 25 years to get the money to complete “Message to Love,” his documentary about the 1970 Isle of Wight rock festival--and then it was the British who finally came to the rescue.

“If everybody I spoke to, and their friends, came to the film now, it would make a fortune,” Lerner says with a chuckle as he sits in his spacious office with a panoramic view of Manhattan’s West Side. He begged everyone, he says, “from the studios to an oil guy to stockbrokers. But people didn’t want to see all this stuff--especially people in the music business.”

Why not? At first glance, the film, which plays for a week at the Nuart Theatre starting Friday, looks like an easy sell. The Isle of Wight was a bigger festival than either Woodstock or Altamont and featured performances by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Doors, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis and Joan Baez. There are, of course, the requisite exciting performances, lots of drugs, undulating dancers, intimations of free love, some groovy clothes and much else that we’ve come to associate with the era.

But “Message to Love” is less about the gathering of the Woodstock nation than about its dissolution; in place of community, good vibes and the supposedly ecstatic bond between musicians and fans, it documents fissure, class struggle and greed. “Message to Love” shows how things fall apart, rather than how people come together--or, more precisely, how the growing role of big money in rock was making it impossible for people to come together.

Says Lerner: “The music was subversive--but subversive of what? People were making lots of money from this ‘subversive’ music. The movement was evaporating into companies selling psychedelic T-shirts.”

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The festival, which unfolded over five days in late August 1970, drew 600,000 fans. Only about 50,000 of them paid the admission fee, though, and--in an attempt to keep out the unwashed hordes--the promoters ringed the concert area with fences patrolled by security guards with German shepherds.

As “Message” progresses, a three-way drama unfolds among the hip but venal concert promoters, the “Free Festival” radicals demanding to be let in and the musicians who really do dig the crowd but really do need to be paid, in cash, before they can tune up. (As one agent explains with a grin, rock “is a business of mistrust.”) Ultimately, the crowd smashes the fences and the concert is declared “free,” but it’s clear that the victory is pyrrhic.

Lerner, whose crew shot 175 hours of film with eight cameras, eschews voice-over narration; this is a story of clashing groups, but it is one told largely through the development of individual characters. There’s Rikki Farr, the young, smarmy emcee whose contempt for the fans is palpable. “We worked one year for you pigs, and you want to break our walls down? . . . Well, you go to hell!” he greets the crowd; once he’s defeated, though, he leads a mass sing-along of “Amazing Grace” (apparently, when the profit motive fails, peace and love will have to do).

There’s an indignant Joan Baez, criticizing the “stinking rotten world” that “these kids” have inherited but rejecting the outlandish notion that she should donate her musical services; a shaken Joni Mitchell, tearfully asking the audience for respect; and a regal Jimi Hendrix, who isn’t asking anyone for anything.

Most interesting are the concert-goers, who deride the musicians and themselves.

“It’s almost like a feudal court scene, where you’ve got your royalty on the stage,” explains one. “And then you have your serfs out in the audience.” Some of them come off as absurdly hyperbolic--one man describes the festival as a “psychedelic concentration camp”--but others articulate their egalitarian visions. “This festival started as a commercial concern, but it’s fast becoming a people’s festival,” a fan says. “And I think that most of the musicians will back us up.” And it’s refreshing to see someone actually refuse his 15 minutes of fame: “Why do people want to see us on television?” asks one gentle soul, who looks like a very young Bob Dylan. “It’s not like [we’re] Bobby Kennedy.”

Lerner was far from surprised by the clashes at the festival. In fact, even before he reached England, he says, “I predicted what would happen. I sent a long telegram to the people who were financing the film, saying there would be tension about money. The idealism of the music was at variance with the commercialism of the industry, and I thought that would affect the kids there.”

No wonder neither rich individuals nor industry execs warmed to the film; as playwright Bertolt Brecht once observed, money is so rarely the subject of the theater that one suspects it is the object.

Recalls Lerner: “I brought about 40,000 feet [of film] back to America and began to have screenings. PolyGram, HBO--let me put it this way: There was basically no company that I didn’t go to. Fox was very interested for a long time, but their lawyers felt there was too much bad publicity about the finances of the festival; I guess they objected to the very thing that was the essence of the film. And CBS Films was interested, so we screened it for the record division. And suddenly in the middle, when Tiny Tim came on, Clive Davis and his whole entourage got up and walked out. So that was the end of that.”

What finally saved the film, Lerner says, was “the power of the festival’s 25th anniversary,” which inspired interest from the BBC and the British distributor Castle, both of which put up the $1.5 million in finishing funds.

Lerner grew up in Brooklyn and in the early ‘60s attended Harvard, where he taught himself filmmaking.

“I read an essay by Eisenstein on his method of editing, on the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated opposites to create a new concept,” he says, referring to the Russian filmmaker. “My specialty was modern American poetry, and it seemed to me that that was what poetry was doing, and that film was a less esoteric way of doing the same thing.”

After graduation, Lerner moved to Greenwich Village, where he became a folkie, hanging out in coffeehouses where artists like Mimi and Richard Farina and Odetta were performing. In 1963, Lerner was invited to the Newport Folk Festival to photograph archival material, and he spent the next few years making “Festival,” his 1967 documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award. (Lerner’s 1980 documentary “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China” won the best documentary Oscar.)

And just as “Festival” documents the transition from folk to rock, epitomized by Dylan’s controversial 1965 electric set at Newport, so “Message to Love,” with its footage of the garish Emerson Lake & Palmer debut, foretells the glittery changes that would overtake pop music in the ‘70s.

From the beginning, Lerner envisioned “Message to Love” as a corrective to what he saw as the misty romance of “Woodstock.”

“I was intent on going behind the scenes,” he says, “and ‘Woodstock’ strengthened my resolve, because I thought there was a lot they weren’t showing.”

And his filmic style, he says, consciously negates cinema verite:

“I’m filming the interaction between me and what I’m observing, which I think is the opposite of classical cinema verite. Second, I do care a lot about everything being in focus and hearing the sound. American cinema verite was nitty-gritty; it almost glorified poor quality. I felt fanatically about being the opposite.”

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Lerner felt neither invigorated nor depressed by the conflicts at the Isle of Wight.

“I was just excited,” he says. “I felt I had this great sociological epic, that I had unearthed a fantastic look at character and social dynamics.” But when Jimi Hendrix died, just 12 days after his electrifying performance, “I was quite shocked--he looked OK to me. Being onstage near him--we were filming quite close--was one of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had. It was like being transported to another region, whether heaven or hell.”

Precisely because the counterculture is now blamed by conservative critics for everything from AIDS to crack, the release of a film like “Message to Love” may be particularly timely. And the questions the film raises about the thorny relationships among commerce, art and politics are still disputed by rock musicians, fans and critics.

In a recent telephone interview, for instance, John Sebastian, who ends his Isle of Wight set by urging the crowd, somewhat unnecessarily, to “smoke a joint for me,” insisted: “Music is no more a free thing than going out and getting veal cutlets is. You have to buy it.”

Such commercial loyalties will probably seem comfortably familiar to a contemporary audience, as will the political shortsightedness of the festival-goers. What may be baffling, though, are the genuinely utopian hopes of the hippie-radicals and their confidence in the future.

“We’re very different in our opinions, in what we care about,” one mild-mannered young man explains, adding that establishment types “like to study us . . . because they’re afraid that we’re going to take them over one day.”

“Message to Love” is about thousands of people who genuinely believed, as Tom Paine put it more than 200 years ago, that “the birthday of a new world is at hand.” Ah, but they were so much younger then; we’re older than that now.