Woodstock

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.)

is it ok to cite my parents lol

lol sure

I think for musicians it was probably different (cf. Dylan liking Schooly D and Run DMC for "throwing horses off of cliffs") but for general aging boomer *audiences* who, yeah, were aging out of popular music, I dunno ime it was p rare to run into anybody over 30 that didn't think rap music was total shit.

My parents liked rap OK, guess I was lucky.

Wow, harsh characterization above of Canned Heat/Ten Years After/Butterfield/Johnny Winter...???

Yup they all suck

Nah

Canned Heat is the only one of those groups I even want to try and like, and that's just because they made that album with John Lee Hooker. All the others are pretty much landfill material. Alvin Lee especially. Ooh, it's like the blues, but played at triple time? How fascinating.

just because they made that album with John Lee Hooker

Best reason to is because Alan Wilson was a genius.

When I saw the clip of them at Monterrey, was reminded that Beefheart and the Magic Band didn't make it, but then the realization that Canned Heat were actually better.

XP I really like the early Ten Years After stuff which seems to have a bebop influence pretty prevalent. First lpm, Undead the live lp are both good and i think the next couple are ok. NOt sure to what extent they went downhill after the Alvin lee at hyperspeed solo thing from the Woodstock film became popular.

THere did seem to be a misguided attempt at authenticity atthe time. people getting off on doing tuneups mid set to show howserioulsy they were taking things, apparently doing that in front of black audiences in places like the Apollo and not realising how badly they were going down for doing it.
I al;ways liked the slight dislocation of attempting to put influences in different contexts. Like post-punk picking up on funk influences though not having the full environment to osmose everything from and therebby coming up with something else as it is played in whatever teh new context is. BUt without the ability to organically grow things into a new whatever you wind up with something approaching parody.

Canned Heat’s song in the Woodstock director’s cut is an infuriating slog. I don’t mind when drummers speed up, but when they slow down, it’s deeply irritating. I don’t mind “Goin’ Up The Country” or “On The Road Again,” though.

Ten Years After’s Woodstock bit sounds like proto-hardcore to me (apart from the pointless vocal scatting, that is). Lee was a one-trick pony, though: it was a fun trick, but you didn’t wanna hear it for more than five minutes. (But I always loved that someone tossed a watermelon on stage, and Lee was casually all, “oh cool, a watermelon,” and took it with him.)

I think TYA started off a bit more multidimensional. I do like those first couple of records at least. I think Cricklewood Green from 1970 is still OK too.
Did think there was more to them than that Woodstock display but could see them getting ossified in that mold and that being the main thing they're picked up on as. Like the shortcut image of them being that when there's more to them like.
Probably triggered a number of heavy metal ideas much like Cream not being able to amplify themselves quite how they would have wanted to would.

Cream = also landfill fodder

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