Woodstock

Mitch Mitchell didn't enjoy it much.

IIRC, Hendrix's band was under-rehearsed and playing Monday morning didn't help.

In the deleted scenes, there's a clip of Sha-Na-Na doing one of their really theatrical numbers, and you can see a perplexed Hendrix looking on offstage.

Also: How are we talking about 'Best Sets' and nobody's brought Sly up yet?

^^^^

IIRC, Hendrix's band was under-rehearsed and playing Monday morning didn't help.

Yeah, he'd got an old chitlin circuit friend of his, who'd literally only been back from Vietnam for two weeks, on rhythm guitar and two fairly superfluous percussionists, one of whom looked about as stoned as it's possible to be and still stand upright.

Also: How are we talking about 'Best Sets' and nobody's brought Sly up yet?

Yeah, he'd got an old chitlin circuit friend of his, who'd literally only been back from Vietnam for two weeks.

Yeah both those songs weren't included on the earlier release of the Hendrix Woodstock set as well.

He also played some lead guitar on some tracks too - with Jimi Hendrix standing on stage beside him - can you believe it?

Never forget that Hendrix thought Buddy Miles should be allowed to sing a few, too, and Noel Redding got a song on Electric Ladyland. Artistically speaking, the guy pretty much defined "generous to a fault."

Yes, sweet guy.

he always hated his own singing, which might also have been part of it

Forgot about that

In the deleted scenes, there's a clip of Sha-Na-Na doing one of their really theatrical numbers, and you can see a perplexed Hendrix looking on offstage.

― frustration and wonky passion (C. Grisso/McCain), Saturday, August 17, 2019 2:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is revisionist history — Hendrix was buds with Sha Na Na and IIRC he was the one who got them on the Woodstock bill!!

Hendrix producing Cat Mother & The All-Night Newsboys makes more sense now.

Never forget that Hendrix thought Buddy Miles should be allowed to sing a few, too, and Noel Redding got a song on Electric Ladyland.

Hendrix OTM on both counts.

Yeah I’ve always loved Changes

Buddy's problem was not singing per se, but instead improvising vocals and scatting.

xp To me it sounds like Sly & The Family Stone were not able to give it 100% due to sound/stage/technical problems although the parts that made it into the movie & soundtrack are dope as hell.

Heard an interview on WFMU with Andy Zax who put together the new Woodstock set, and he said that Hendrix stepped back and let this guy sing a couple of his own tunes, and apparently they were so horrible that the Hendrix estate refuses to let them be heard and they’re the only songs not included on the 38 disc Woodstock box (aside from a Sha Na Na song which it’s disputed if it was even played)

Rose Simpson has been tweeting about Woodstock:

https://twitter.com/IsbRose

Meantime, the full on box set is now going for ridiculous money, which was really to be expected when it sold out before release. Copies going on eBay regularly around $3000. (I'll just say I'm glad I have mine.)

On the hilarious/terrible tip, meanwhile:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/woodstock-50-disaster-872320/

I didn’t even know the ISB were at Woodstock. Does that mean I have to shell out for that box set?

I suspect that, rather than the Lee songs being irredeemably bad, the Hendrix estate wanted to present the set as being more consistent than it actually was. After all, they need it to live up to its legendary status.

Ah ok, interesting. The way Zax very carefully tiptoed around talking about them in the interview I heard, it almost made me wonder if there was like something dirty or offensive about them. But maybe he was just trying not to step into any legal stuff w/the estate or something. It definitely makes more sense if he was just some dude who is not Jimi Hendrix that the estate wants to write out of The Hendrix Story.

“I was excited to be there because I represent the Vietnam War; the war no one wants to talk about and pretends never happened,”

boomers

didn't the ISB wind up with a very short set on the wrong night thanks to trouble getting there. I think they also got rained on pretty heavily.
Wound up being put on in the middle of the rock night not the acoustic one they might have been more fitting to

There's some footage in the Woodstock Diaries films that came out about 10 years ago I think. Definitely remember having seen some clip of them from there. The 4 piece with the girlfriends at the time I think.

They played during the day before Canned Heat. There's Youtube footage - they're doing I Looked Up period stuff.

Ok rock day not folk day. Friday was acoustic folky stuff but it rained heavily. They insisted on playing the next day which was heavier rock stuff where they didn't really fit.
They played half an hour.
Apparently the Woodstock diaries clip is about a minute. & looks like the dvd came out a long time before I got it which would probably be about 10 years ago. Date given is 94.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e01VEXzyi1s

part of the ISB set ...

Yes, "When You Find Out You Are" etc, some way from being their strongest material.

yeah — hard to imagine them really getting across well in a setting like that. the folkier stuff that worked at woodstock still kinda relied on energy (richie havens, at least). ISB certainly look the part of a buncha hippies though.

A long, long article about last weekend’s tribute concerts in the area.

“I remember the smells, the crowd, the mud,” said Nick Ercoline, who along with his wife Bobbi, were both there in 1969. They’re not your average Woodstock attendees: Before they married two years later, the Ercolines were immortalized as the hippie couple on the cover of the “Woodstock” film’s soundtrack album. Speaking to Variety just before Arlo Guthrie went on outside the venue’s amphitheater pavilion on Thursday, the weekend’s opening day, Nick added: “My favorite band was Sly & the Family Stone. They woke everybody up.”

I just Googled, and there’s a lot of recent press on Bobbi and Nick Ercoline (seems the “Woodstock couple” thing has been a significant part of their lives since Life interviewed them in ‘89). Kind of neat.

Great thing is there's that other couple that's been in the news lately too:

https://people.com/human-interest/couple-who-met-at-woodstock-finds-photo-50-years-later/

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S10E06/387469.jpg?b64lines=IEJPTyE=

Cool story about the Griffins. Looking at those then-and-now photos really drives home how quickly time passes. The Woodstock photo looks like it could have been taken of two kids yesterday (I bet it feels that way to them, too).

Just watched a PBS American Experience special on Woodstock (it didn’t focus on the music as much as the background, logistics, scene, etc.).

Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm were really heroes of the festival — feeding everyone, keeping the peace, manning “freak-out” care tents, etc.

It’s also nice how Bethel residents donated a bunch of food when the burgers ran out, to “keep the kids fed” — I didn’t know about that.

Finally (and obviously), Max Yasgur was sure a cool guy.

^Was interesting to hear about the other music fests earlier in '69 that all were failures basically. All I'd ever heard about was "1st there was Monterrey...then Woodstock...the end". Didn't realize how tricky of a thing it was they pulled off w/Woodstock.

There were a lot of festivals that year around the country before and after, but that's where multimedia documentation helped Woodstock (and less happily, Altamont).

It’s also nice how Bethel residents donated a bunch of food when the burgers ran out, to “keep the kids fed” — I didn’t know about that.

My dad was a teen at the time and lived a few minutes away from the site, he always talked about all the attendees sleeping on their lawn, and his very conservative dairy farmer dad inviting bunches of them in to sleep on the floor in the house, cooking for them, handing out lemonades and sodas. Its a sweet memory for him.

Grand Funk Railroad basically made their name playing for free at all the other 'Pop' festivals that year.

Dave Marsh wrote a good summation/analysis of festival culture in Before I Get Old:

In the wake of Monterey, the festival had become the fashion among hippie promoters. Replacing the package show concept, in which a group of performers traveled to small knots of listeners, the festival put together a lump of performers in one place and let the audience come to them -- in vast numbers.

...

The comfort and needs of the festival audience were afterthoughts. Sound systems were barely adequate to fill the open spaces with noise, much less music. Toilet and sanitation facilities were scant. If it rained, the audience sat in mud and discomfort for up to three days; if it was beatiful and sunny and hot, backs and faces became blistered. Outside of the promoter-controlled concession stands, there was no way to obtain food and drink. The acts who came on before the stars were often lame or incompetent, leaving the crowd to entertain itself.

...

The festival audience came to celebrate a spirit that eventually disintegrated in their faces, and strangest and nastiest of all, they were willing to pay up for the privilege and resented anyone who questioned their wisdom. This does not endorse the logic of the law-and-order Right, which wished to quell the festivals because they still represented a ghost of hope for the youth counterculture as a community. But licentious opportunity was finally the only justification for the festivals, even if the drug-taking and sex were decadent in the long run. Ultimately, the pop festival served to reestablish the old order of the entertainment business: Star time had come to the hippie generation.

in the longview, it's baffling that anyone enjoys music festivals

And there are articles scattered throughout 1969-70 issues of Rolling Stone about failed festivals — either because permits didn’t clear, or because hippie scam artists announced an amazing lineup that never showed (and probably wasn’t supposed to show).

I was just reading the issue of Rolling Stone that came out before Woodstock and it had a piece about Seattle Pop Festival that could have been a Woodstock account: slogging through mud, larger than expected crowed, food shortage etc. Even a lot of the same acts. I didn't realize either that Woodstock was more culmination of a summer of festivals. The xpost above

Also interesting how little attention is paid to the Texas International Pop Festival two weeks later, considering most of the acts were recorded (there's a 13 disc set I just downloaded) and there's a decent amount of film.

the thing that really gets me about footage from all these festivals is how pervasive the idea of white people + R&B was, it was practically an ideological article of faith that this was the direction music was going to go in (NARRATOR: it did not go in that direction)

B-b-but what about Joe Bonamassa’s Blues Cruises?

lol. It's just really striking in the footage of Altamont, Woodstock, etc. where you can see this palpable feeling that the black and white worlds need to merge and that music is a key part of making that happen, and that for the (largely white) audience this means embracing both black acts that are attempting to cross over (Sly, Hendrix, Otis, etc.) and, unfortunately, a bunch of shitty (for the most part) white bands doing blues and R&B covers. But just a few years later that's all essentially fallen apart - Hendrix and Otis are dead, Sly retreats, black audiences gravitate more toward funk, white audiences move toward "hard rock" or country rock and big racial cultural divides are still very much in evidence.

I suppose in that late 60s moment there's some parallels to the much later crossover phenomenon with rap and hip hop culture, which is funny cuz boomers by and large didn't understand (or approve of) that at all.

I feel like this is a pattern that repeats throughout the history of popular music in America, this collective desire for racial integration via music, it periodically comes to the fore and fades away subject to politics and industry forces and big aesthetic shifts

boomers by and large didn't understand (or approve of) that at all

Citation needed! (Casual music fans didn't "understand," maybe, owing to the extent they had aged out of caring about such a thing.)

Seems like there may have been some early revisionism---for inst, in Buried Alive, her Joplin bio, Myra Friedman said that a lot of people coming back to NYC, like one of her neighbors, reported that conditions were dire, and the Times ran a piece titled "Nightmare in the Catskills"---but then, somehow, there was a turn-around: Times had much nicer follow-ups, maybe with some exclusive interviews? And son enough, Friedman's neighbor was "dancing all over the building," talking about what a groovy historical event it was.

🚨🚨exciting update:

I have acquired the full 38 disc set (or mr veg acquired it for me because he lives to serve)

i am go for launch :D

sweetwater here you come...

i’m going to go find a hot dog, can u watch my blanket? i should be back in (muffled sounds)

sweetwater but no fever dog :/ (jk)

Not waitin 4 Wstock:

Hey kids - that’s the Byrds playing at Jane Fonda’s Fourth of July party 1965 - photo by Dennis Hopper. pic.twitter.com/M5l4E26YTl

— Pat Thomas (@PatThomas1964) July 4, 2022

Glad you got the set there, VG, through whatever means. :-D (My big ol' actual box sets right near my desk.)

liveblog plz

i am almost through to end of sweetwater, “come down from the tower” plea from nanci & the band

real talk:
i think it might be something to do with 15 years or so going to Bridge School, and a life of attending looser sundry outdoor festivals of all kinds -listening to the full show really hits me in a much different way than i expected. sense of history for the vibe, the stage announcements & all the attendant ephemera that goes with this … and the acts that don’t really exist anymore except in the context of Woodstock

i’m just really locked into this groove man ✌🏻

(apparently there was a VH1 biopic about Sweetwater featuring Michelle Williams !)

Bert Sommer now - he sounds like a dream from the first bar, really just entranced by this dude, what a voice my god. Kind of a Donovan vibe if its ok to say (voice quality i mean)

fun fact: he was in West Coast production of Hair & it is his irl hair on the original show poster so how about that

BILL MCGEE PLEASE BRING THE MEDICINE TO THE INFORMATION BOOTH

already annnouncer’s tone is IF YOU FREAKS DONT GET OFF THAT GODDAMN TOWER RIGHT NOW SO HELP ME I WILL TURN THIS CONCERT AROUND I AM NOT KIDDING

[few hours delay for dinner & life stuff]

back to the show & Tim Hardin up next
love his voice so much, seems incredibly talented
reading backstory about him & between the addiction/talent he sounds a bit reminiscent of Gram Parsons, he didn’t exactly endear himself to the ppl around him

i will def seek out his albums though, just gorgeous stuff here

again with “get off the #^%*! scaffolding”

update: everyone is now off the scaffolding

FLAT BLUE ACID IS POISON
BE COOL

and now Ravi Shankar <3
looking forward to hearing this full set!

goddamn ravi’s tutorial is cool as hell & so charming. a great way to ensure a captive audience

Melanie is a nice surprise for me
I only previously knew a couple of her songs from her later heyday around “Brand New Key”

but she really has a very strong natural singing voice, and as far as i have heard she could absolutely hold her own w the folkies of the day.

v enjoyable set imo

i feel bad saying this but I do not dig Arlo Guthrie a whole lot

he is Not For Me™️

tells the worlds longest story about Moses which is about as much fun as listening to an acid-head talk, ymmv with that but ugh no thanks . dude could talk the leg off a table just sitting around drawing breath

and here i pause to sleep