WOODSTOCK
I've been fascinated with the Woodstock festival of 1969 since I think Middle School, but maybe it was High School. I remember babysitting for someone who had both soundtracks on LP and the enormity of the first one (3 LPs in a gatefold sleeve) was literally awesome to me. PBS used to show the movie sometimes and I have a memory of watching it in my parents' den on Thanksgiving. I remember being hypnotized by the epic scope of the whole thing and the naive idealism of the whole thing. Eventually I got the record and the VHS 2-tape set of the movie. I memorized all the songs, all the drum solos and even all the stage patter ("Bugsy to the pink and white tent"). And that Jimi Hendrix jam at the end? Sublime.
I got used to the tape and then finally saw the widescreen version which is an entirely different experience. I never realized there were 3 images on the screen almost all the time! Eventually, years later, I got the CD of the soundtrack and it was great to have it, but it was the same old thing.
1989 rolled around and all the Woodstock 20th anniversary nostalgia hit and I saw the movie again, listened to the music again and wished I'd been there again. Of course, the 1994 and 1999 sequels were disgusting and a stain on the name of Woodstock. I even started to write a song about it: "Woodstock 94/What did they do it for?/Did Crosby Stills and Nash/Really need the cash?" Yeah, rhyming four and for. Genius.
Anyway, Flash forward to the internet age. I found online a bootleg download of the COMPLETE Woodstock concert. TWENTY CDs worth of material. Luckily I had an iPod at that point and spent a summer listening to that entire 3 days of peace and music in the car. Yeah, some of it was terribly audio quality and some of it was hippie-dippy folksy crap, but there was a ton of fantastic stuff in there I'd never heard. For example, Santana's Soul Sacrifice is mind-blowing on the orginal album, but it's like 4 minutes longer in the original recording; Abbie Hoffman crashing the Who's performance; Canned Heat's Woodstock Boogie and innumerable other bits. It was a bit overwhelming, but it gave a real sense of what it was like to be there. The romanticism was stripped away and the sublime rode shotgun to the mundane. That made it somehow even better.
Last year the super-elongated Director's Cut of the film came out and watching that was just as amazing as listening to the entire thing on audio was. The whole vibe was just groovy. Somebody jumped on stage during Canned Heat's performance and took a cigarette from the singer's pocket. No biggie. Everyone was, to put it bluntly, being nice to each other. There were huge problems and lousy weather, but they made the most of it and, as a whole, enjoyed themselves and each other. Beautiful.
An official 6 disc set of the concert came out last year. It's got tons of great performances, edited for sound quality and tightness and it's fantastic. I'm in the middle of listening to that again. Something about the summer makes me want to listen to that stuff again. Coincidentally, the film Taking Woodstock is on cable this month so I DVRd it and I just finished it. It wasn't a GREAT film, but it was certainly enjoyable. I particularly loved the way they spun certain things about the original documentary film from a new perspective. Again, it showed the mundane and the human side along with the epic scale of the whole thing. Eugene Levy was perfect as Max Yasgur.
I am sure that I've got a romanticized vision of the whole thing and if I was there, and of age, I would have been aching to go home by the time CCR took the stage at 2:00am or whatever. But the more I see and hear about it, the more I am awed by the event itself as well as the performances.
Santana's Soul Sacrifice, Ten Years After's I'm Going Home and Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner/Purple Haze/Improvisation are some of the most amazing performances ever recorded, in my book.
So, what's my point? I don't know, I was just all enmeshed in the appreciation and thought I'd share it with you. Beautiful.