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Rating: Premise: here the festival is only mentioned in passing, it’s just an excuse to honor a great guitarist (rip) who, by coincidence, died on a December 23rd—the very same day as my birthday...
It was August ’69 when Leslie Abel Weinstein stepped onto the highly prestigious stage of the “Woodstock Music and Art Fair”, more commonly known as the “Woodstock Festival”, together with his rock band, the “Mountain” (practically unknown back then, but instantly legendary after that performance). At 9 pm on the second day of the festival, they kicked off a set of 11 tracks that none of the few folks still sober could ever forget (and no wonder!), the others, depending on what they’d ingested throughout the day, each have their own version of the memory—if they remember at all.
After his Jewish parents divorced, he shortened his surname to West, and played with the likes of Al Kooper, Jack Bruce, the Who, Bo Diddley, Sir Michael Philip Jagger, Michael Leslie Jones (leader of Foreigner), Ian Gillan from Deep Purple, Joseph Leonard Bonamassa (just Joe for his friends), the late John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, and he even auditioned with the Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The magazine “Rollin Stone” ranked him as the two hundred and forty-fifth greatest guitarist of all time—not exactly small potatoes! Among the other guitarists who credit his playing style as an influence are Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, known as Eddie, and John William Cummings, aka Johnny Ramone.
Leslie had quite a few health issues. After surviving bladder cancer in 2000, he had a leg amputated in 2011 due to complications from diabetes, and in the end he passed away at seventy-five from cardiac arrest in 2020.
P.S. a fun fact: Leslie married his fiancée Jenni on stage, right after the “Mountain” show at the 40th anniversary Woodstock concert in 2009, in front of over 15,000 people. Ehm, the two youngsters tied the knot under a canopy of raised electric guitars, and that’s that...
P.S.2 I only saw the “Woodstock Festival” on television (savasansdir) as an adult, but I enjoyed it years later and would gladly watch it again. Who knows—maybe you can still find the film from those glorious days of Peace & Music (and not just that, apparently) somewhere...
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