| Mar-y-sol
was a lifetime changing event for a lot of folks. It seems
now like an out of body experience. I can look back at it
with some amusement, though at the time we were all in danger
of rotting in a Puerto Rican jail.
On the third day of the festival I was standing in front
of the stage, behind the corrugated steel barricade that
separated us from the 30,000 badly sun-burned and sun-stroked
kids who had come down from New York and New Jersey to listen
to music in this Vega Baja pasture. It was 104 degrees F.,
it was raining, and there was some terrible local salsa
band filling time on stage. Bill Hanley, the expert sound
designer, was standing next to me looking at the crowd.
He said, "You know, if anybody out there is having
a good time, he's just not paying attention."
There was an injunction the week before the festival, trying
to stop it. Those loyalists among us fought it like crazy,
got a hot lawyer, went to court and won our case so the
show could go on. I found out years later that Alex was
praying for us to fail. He already knew the financial disaster
this thing was headed for, and an injunction to prevent
it would have been exactly what he needed. I think he was
torn. Which is typical of Alex. He knew he was going to
lose, that the injunction would help him, but he was also
devoted to the cause, what we were doing was right if financially
unwise. He went ahead anyway, and with courage that inspired
all of us to do what, in retrospect, must have been very
foolish. |
