I have this on a shirt from a show I attended in 1998. That's right, baby, the "Being There" tour. Jay Bennet played fiddle while hanging by his knees from the HVAC.

Broadening PitchKnives’ scope from comestibles to ingestibles, allow me to recount last Friday night at the Americanarama Music Festival in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The overwhelming takeaway from the evening was a trio of rock n roll reiterations and a surprise:

1)    My Morning Jacket is the weirdest, mightiest, stadium-sized ROCK! band alive.
2)    Wilco is an unstoppable, deeply organic live act that covers a sweeping stylistic range in realizing some of the very best songs of the last 20 years.
3)     Bob Dylan can deliver a much better performance than you might expect.

That these are the takeaways is a testament to what the bands accomplished.

Because approximately 90 seconds into My Morning Jacket’s set, the crowd two feet in front of us scattered apart to reveal two men, each roughly twenty-five pounds over weight and with a bronze badge swinging from a chain around his neck, slamming a college-aged kid in loafers into the grass.  My first thought was of festival security and the fact that they weren’t interested in what I took out of my backpack and jammed into my pockets, only that I leave the empty backpack in the trash.  The Boston Marathon was on my mind.

But it immediately became clear that Hoboken’s Finest had, at the instant the kid broke out a dime bag to roll a joint, tackled his ass, twisted his limbs around, pressed his face into the ground, and cuffed him.  Why bother, after all, with something like, “Sorry, buddy, you’re busted; you’re under arrest; let’s go” when you can save your breath and rough up the threat to society?  The kid had no chance to run.  He didn’t even know what hit him. 

I also recalled my experience an hour earlier when, armed with the empty canteen the festival allowed into the grounds, I went looking for a water fountain.  No dice.  A nice guy checking IDs for beer bracelets told me their pipes had gone to rust and the fountains themselves abandoned.  An EMT told me it wasn’t the kind of festival that gives water and that people should bring their own.

“They won’t let us,” I said.

“Then you should buy it.”

“It’s three bucks for twelve ounces.  I know it’s not up to you, but I imagine it makes your job harder.”

She shrugged.  “It’s the cheapest thing here.”  Then she scowled at me for being an asshole.

Most outdoor festivals have water stations these days.  They know that a bunch of people drinking beer in the summer sun need to stay hydrated for safety’s sake.  I’m pretty sure they remember Woodstock ’99, when water cost something like four bucks a bottle and the festival devolved into arson and rape and general insanity.

But Jay, you might say, four-dollar water does not lead to rape.  And I would agree with you and thank you for helping me to my larger point:

A culture—be it a music festival’s or city’s or country’s—that insists on extorting outrageous fees for basic resources essential to the wellbeing of a captive population is morally indefensible.  Seventy-five bucks for a ticket is not enough for such a culture.  Every single opportunity to make a dollar must be found and taken because, hey, It’s Just Business.  And after all, water is free backstage and in the Media area.

And what about the kid smoking weed, a controlled substance in the state of New Jersey?  Surely he shouldn’t be allowed to smoke just because he’s at a festival created by Bob Dylan.  It might be regrettable that people can blow Newports into Shannon’s face and make her sick, but Newports are legal.

And I would agree with you and thank you for helping me to my larger point:

A culture—be it a music festival’s or city’s or country’s—that tolerates the complete disregard of basic human decency as the primary method of arresting an individual posing no harm to anyone around him is a culture plagued by serious rot.  Enforcing he law is not enough for such a culture.  The immediate recourse to every issue must be violent and, let’s be honest here, itself against the law.  And after all, the pot-smoking friends of those undercovers aren’t getting tackled in the backyard at the neighborhood Fourth of July BBQ.

Four-dollar water does not lead to rape.  But it sets a tone, as did the Americanarama Festival, not just a Darwinian, Everybody look out for yourself, but a predatory, We’ve got you now; you’re ours for the taking.  That’s the attitude of casual violence.

The people whom we pay to protect us need to demonstrate that they care to.  The overwhelming evidence presented in the news confirms a rapidly rising trend of doing the exact opposite.

And the people whom we pay to protect us also need to demonstrate their interest in our basic right to the primary engine of life.  Every event that sells beverages should have water fountains as well.  Water should be controlled and protected by the government and continue to cost pennies, not dollars.  To make water primarily a commodity rather than a resource is to declare either a thorough disinterest in, or a complete ignorance of, the wellbeing of others.  In a person, this would be considered a sociopathic attitude.

And it is persons who make the decisions for festivals and police departments like those in Hoboken.