Muted Lunacy

Jerry Garcia may be dead, but many Deadheads are on a new “long strange trip” for alternative communities. The sheer number of tourheads at the Bread and Puppet Theater’s Domestic Resurrection Circus in Glover, Vermont last month led me to wonder if they wanted to join in or take over. Since Garcia’s death a little over a year ago, the Bread and Puppet Circus has changed. An influx of post-Jerry Phish followers, fresh off their Vermont tour dates, flooded the festival. These “guppies,” as a deadhead friend of mine calls them, influenced the character of the event–more vending stalls, more drums, more people content to hang out in the camping areas without even attending the politically-oriented theater for which Bread and Puppet has become famous in the left community. This “hip” influx contributed to a marked difference in the character of the event since the first time I was there two years ago.

My gut reaction, looking around at the patchouli-drenched, dread-headed hipsters selling their tour-wares in the vending area adjacent to our campsite was a sort of high-minded disappointment, a sense that something valuable was in decline, an authentic rebellion about to be swallowed by the cool kids. But I am also a newcomer to Bread and Puppet, a young Midwestern tourist, and a confessed Dead and Phish listener. If there’s was a problem, wasn’t I a part of it, too?

When I interviewed him for my undergraduate thesis a number of years ago, Timothy Leary (another recent counter-cultural casualty) spoke of his faith in global counter-culture, a youth rebellion in which he cultivated his role as cheerleader. He saw an expansive, open minded cultural horizon, forged by the intrepid young explorers of the post-psychedelic computer generation. While this vision became increasingly appealing toward the end of the joint, in retrospect I’m not sure I am still convinced.

Is a crowded Medeski, Martin, and Wood show on the Wisconsin Union Terrace a sign of the new America? Probably not. Is the latest wave of Bread and Puppet-goers a part of a new cultural revolution? At the risk of turning my vacation into homework, I decided to conduct some impromptu research.

The first night of the festival filled me with a sense of possibility. As the evening drew to a close, staged performances came to life throughout the hills of Bread and Puppet’s homestead. My partner and I chose to attend a performance on Chiapas, and we made our way to the new building ” a barn-like building behind the troupe’s museum. We couldn’t find a place to sit at first, but a pleasant middle-aged man gave us the seats he had been saving for friends who didn’t seem like they were going to make it. We introduced ourselves (his name was Bob) and we asked him about the festival. He prefaced his answers by commenting that he didn’t have much to say, but it soon became apparent that we’d asked the right person.

Bob, an activist and a nine or ten year festival veteran, told us that “for years this has been the event that the left sort of came to get refreshed. We needed energy to go on, and to have humor, because we would lose it.” At Bread and Puppet “you could find the satire again, you could find the strength in it–you could go back out. One year they didn’t do it. I remember the following year, I was really a wreck. I couldn’t figure why I was feeling this way until it dawned on me: there was no Bread and Puppet.”

Bob also sensed the tension of the festivals evolution as it absorbed the counter-cultural stragglers lost in the Grateful Dead’s void, but he had some faith in the festival’s ability to adapt, and his friendly manner and thoughtful comments spoke to the festivals potential. As we chatted with Bob, I felt I was an insider, an activist taking my feet off the hectic trail for a weekend of communal puppetry.

But the next morning I felt a conflict. Sleep had knocked me back to square one. Wasn’t I just like one of those kids off the Phish tour looking for a cool place to hang out? Could I make something constructive out of my experience at the festival? Looking for a way out of my quandary, which was becoming a pain for me and an annoyance to my partner, we stumbled upon the bread house, where the members of the troupe and a motley crew of volunteers bake the free bread for the festival. Like the instinctive volunteers we are, we jumped into the fray. I spent a couple of hours peeling and mashing garlic, slicing bread, singing and chatting with a new community.

Peter Schumann, the theater’s founder and driving force, spends the morning of each festival day, until the mid-afternoon Circus performance, in the occupation of his Silesian ancestors, baking thick, hearty bread. Each day he rushes down the hill from the baking ovens to perform, and at the end of each Circus he leads a parade around the ring, on the highest stilts, as a wobbling Uncle Sam, blaring away with two straight trumpets. Peter’s commitment has driven the theater for years, and he could easily spend the days of the Domestic Resurrection Circus holding court with critics, reporters, and theater buffs. Instead he bakes bread. He prefers it that way.

I introduced myself, gestured toward the recording equipment that my partner and I had brought along, and asked if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. He responded quickly—”I don’t do interviews.” But he went on, “We just do this thing. It’s up to other people to interpret it.”

I found out later that the members of the troupe don’t answer questions for or about Bread and Puppet. They’re seeking something real–outside the realm of mass media and popular culture. They’re producing insightful folk art that’s ‘cheap I (by their own manifesto) or free, like the Circus and the bread itself, not for fame or compliments, but for their community and its guests. More than the political satire I’d heard touted on Pacifica radio, I was compelled by the cultural collective atmosphere that emanates from the Bread and Puppet Theater.

In some ways, The Nation’s Tom Frank was right when he proclaimed in April that “Hip Is Dead.” The old hip is long dead, washed away with the commercial media blessing of On the Road, the Summer of Love and Woodstock. Maybe Garcia’s death marks the last haul of the old guard of the counter-culture. Maybe the “guppies” pose no even minimal threat to the capitalist order. But an issue of balance jumps to mind: For every would-be hipster who buys Gap khakis to look like Allen Ginsberg, I suspect I’d find one who read one of the poet’s books and learned to criticize the American government or found pride in his or her homosexuality.

Hip isn’t really dead, it’s just changed with the moment, and like all cultural forces it provides us with an easy scapegoat for the excesses of capitalist society. When Frank wrote that “the problem isn’t that hip has been co-opted but that it isn’t adversarial in the first place” he took a 1950s rebellion, and judged it useless in a 1990s context. As Peter Schumann called to our attention in his Circus sideshow “Brother Hypocrite,” it’s impossible to completely escape from consumer culture. The Nation should know that.

Sure, even counter-culture can be a social opiate, but hip can be a gateway drug. When you start being yourself, if it involves looking or thinking differently, you start to think you have a right to be that way. My own interests in Beat poetry and counter-cultural community led me to my progressive politics, and ultimately to a newfound community at Bread and Puppet. Jerry’s mourner’s didn’t ruin Bread and Puppet–maybe their experiences will even bring a new social consciousness into the counter-culture. Yes, we’re hypocrites if we think ourselves removed from consumerism, but Bread and Puppet was real enough–constructive and critical. And it was pretty darn “hip to boot.”

By James Carrott - November 1996