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Rating: The unpredictable commercial success of the soundtrack of the film "Woodstock," released by Atlantic on a voluminous and expensive triple album, convinced the managers of the rival label Columbia to follow suit and release, in 1971, a triple LP (later digitized into a double CD) assembling performances by various artists from open-air festivals.
Except in this case, there are two festivals: respectively, the second edition of the Atlanta Pop Festival (Georgia, USA, from July 3 to 6, 1970) and the third edition of the Isle of Wight Festival (England, from August 26 to 31, 1970). Two kermesses distant an ocean but united by the same characteristics typical of that musical season: half a million or more participants with free admission except for the good kids who had bought the ticket in presale, poor organization, grand adaptation spirit of the beautiful youth present to hygienic, health, and nutritional difficulties, drugs and nudity in abundance, understanding and collaborative residents and police (the few that were there), unfettered pacifism nobly keeping at bay any and every "diversity" and ideological, moral, religious, racial, or character contrast. Truly stuff from another time.
The sales of this triple album were disappointing, certainly missing the powerful draw of a successful film, but also and especially a careful selection of tracks and performers and the related, adequate technical treatment of the recordings, thrown together without the precious and meticulous care that the great sound engineer Kramer had reserved for the Woodstock tapes. The CD version, released by a minor label, is understandably quite difficult to find.
The performances extracted from the two festivals are presented in succession: first the American one (the first of the three LPs, or the first seven tracks of the first CD) and then the European one (the second and third LPs, or the rest of the first CD plus all of the second). Of the fourteen groups or soloists immortalized in action, twelve are American and two British, five perform in Atlanta and nine at Wight.
The most represented musical genre is rock blues, not long out of the underground of the London scene, thanks above all to Cream, Stones, and Hendrix and well on its way to dominating for a while in Anglo-Saxon countries (even Italy would adapt... a couple of years later and with the competition of progressive). The performers here present, each according to their own style, are the Allman Brothers, the Mountain, Johnny Winter, the Cactus, the Ten Years After, and Jimi Hendrix. The main variation to primary blues is constituted by country folk with the Poco, David Bromberg, Leonard Cohen, and Kris Kristofferson; a foray into progressive pop is instead rendered by the Procol Harum, a strong dose of soul-funk is ensured by Sly & Family Stone and the Chamber Brothers, while the grand finale is fusion jazz, with its inventor Miles Davis in action.
In defiance of all elementary commercial and practical sense, some of the selected performances are real tour de force, stuff close to twenty minutes, excessively elongated by various improvisations and indulgences of the involved soloists. A form of entertainment that, certainly effective when seated in the audience immersed in the feeling of the evening, is somewhat lost on a record, when variety, consistency, conciseness, and compactness favor concentration while listening. So we have Mountain going off on a tangent to never return in "Stormy Monday," an extremely slow blues that instead of ending becomes laden with rhythm and furious call and response between bass and guitar.
Similarly, Ten Years After operate on "I Can't Cryin' Sometimes": the late poor Alvin Lee (who passed away a little while ago) takes the long way around, with a country intro, a scat continuation (voice and guitar in unison, not easy) and finally the opening riff of the piece. Here too follow a good ten minutes of improvisation, top-notch guitar playing with which Lee shows more than ever strengths (he is a clean, precise, fast, and gritty soloist) and weaknesses (his licks, his melodic phrases are decidedly recurring, his "swoop" is more or less always the same). I repeat: live everything is a spectacle, on record it emerges a bit of boredom.
Even Miles Davis does not joke: almost seventeen minutes of a single rock jazz theme dissected to the utmost, before extinguishing. Here then my personal aversions also come forward... extremizable by a famous quote from Police drummer Stewart Copeland, more or less: "Jazz is a genre good for people who have nothing to say with music!"
The performances of Hendrix, the Allman Brothers, and Cohen can be better appreciated in their respective albums released at the time containing the full setlists of those same concerts. In this album, a couple of episodes are reserved for the Allman Brothers, three for Hendrix and (luckily... out of tune from start to finish) only one for Leonard Cohen. It is common opinion that Hendrix's performance at Wight was quite lackluster... it is indeed so, the master "nicks" every now and then during the solo phases losing the thread, but Jimi is and remains unique, even an underwhelming performance of his manages to convey the memorable and sensual approach he had with music, his fluid and unmistakable sound, his enjoyment, his heart. Especially here, less than three weeks away from his cruel and stupid death.
In the folk sector, the Poco always stand out, primarily due to the mastery of Rusty Young on the various string instruments, virtuously handled by him. Ridiculous instead is the performance of future actor (and poor in that art too!) Kris Kristofferson, who the festival chronicles narrate was literally chased off the stage by the howls of the audience. Good instead is David Bromberg, while the Procol Harum play in a schoolbook manner... probably the choice of "A Salty Dog" for this record is not the most suitable: the role of the orchestra is too important (and sublime) in this absolute gem of pop, with the organ failing to be a valid substitute.
Johnny Winter and Sly & The Family Stone do what they know how to do, in their respective (and different) roles, without infamy and without praise. Particularly tiresome, on the contrary, are the little brothers of the Chambers Brothers, a group of which in Italy a truly minimal echo has arrived, even in their heyday: their pretentious, poorly sung, and repetitive gospel, you can't wait for it to end.
The only truly unmissable thing about the work consists of the couple of pieces offered by Cactus, nearly ten fiery minutes in favor of the best live blues rock imaginable: atomic energy, powerful instrumentalists, a sandpaper throat howling obsessively or clinging to the harmonica as if it were an oxygen mouthpiece. Then Jim McCarty is a sensational lead guitar, a kind of Jimmy Page but crazier and swifter. The first five minutes are dedicated to a slow blues ("No Need To Worry") where everything McCarty does should be taught in conservatories, then seamlessly Carmine Appice initiates a tempo at 200 beats per minute, rhythm mate Tim Bogert follows, and soon after the aforementioned mythical Gibson player: "Parchman Farm" has begun... almost immediately a sensational stop arrives and Rusty Day's high bray returns to cut through the air and hurt the throat, thinking about what he is doing to his own. The guitar solo, totally improvised and instinctive, is a bomb and so are all the fills that precede and follow it. Total chaos but the instinct is so good it even exercises control... the essence of rock is fully captured in these ten minutes of Cactus, a group that couldn't compose and didn't know how to sell themselves but that, in an unknown triple live album from forty-two years ago, shows what stuff you have to be made of to thrill people with rock.
To conclude, here are the noble absentees: for the record, these two festivals also featured performances by Jethro Tull, Joni Mitchell, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Grand Funk Railroad, Free, Chicago, Supertramp, and Doors... Some did not want to be recorded (Morrison, for instance), for others surely commercial incompatibilities between record labels came into play... certain performances have however emerged on records in their own name (ELP as known, but also Grand Funk with their thundering "Live Album"). In short, this live assembly could have been done much better, with better groups, better selections from their performances, and more accurate recording and production. It still remains however a valid and "atmospheric" immersion into the taste, philosophies, joys, craziness, and excesses of that unmissable era, both musical and human.
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