•
Rating: There is no doubt that the four-day outdoor festival called Woodstock, held in Bethel, New York, starting from mid-August 1969, constitutes the most famous, important, and symbolic musical event in history. This is due, albeit not exclusively, to the film/documentary derived from it, which, released in the standard first-run cinema circuits of the entire free world, opened up globally what a certain musical avant-garde, until then confined within the borders of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, was creating.
But let's give Caesar what belongs to Caesar: Woodstock was a magical and unrepeatable event not so much for its particular musical quality (there will be many other extended festivals filled with excellent music), but for the historical happening where about 500,000 (five hundred thousand) people, during those days, desired to converge and coexist peacefully, shoulder to shoulder, in the fields of Bethel, completely devoid of facilities to accommodate them (communication routes, food, water, sanitation, medical aid, security, etc.) for three, four, five days without causing any harm and without anything bad happening, helping one another and sharing food, water, shelter, medical aid, support, and joy of living, beyond naturally sex and drugs.
A thing unheard of, before and after that historical period completely impossible with the prevailing intolerance, prejudice, and greed: the hippie mentality, so for many aspects out of this world, utopian, superficial, childlike, created there its absolute masterpiece ensuring, in an incredibly critical and potentially devastating situation, perfect tolerance, coexistence, joy, and mutual respect.
There are numerous books and a very recent, passionate, and tender film ("Motel Woodstock") that narrate and describe the human and social uniqueness of this event, to which I gladly refer also to avoid turning this review into a novel.
Limiting myself to writing about the album (triple LP, then double CD), I choose to report a simple series of curiosities and some personal reflections, considering that a track by track of the songs linked to such a notable event would be uninteresting for many:
_The three LPs constituting the work had sides divided as follows: 1-6 + 2-5 + 3-4. This was to allow stacking them one on top of the other in changers (then the state-of-the-art of music reproduction) and enable playing the entire album straight through with just one pause in the middle of the listening, necessary to flip the pack and reposition it on the turntable.
_From these six sides (and especially from the film), about half of the thirty-plus performing artists at the Festival were left out, whose careers then developed more or less significantly, but certainly would have been different with an adequate appearance on film. The names: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Winter, The Band, Janis Joplin, Mountain, Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Keef Hartley Band, Grease Band, Blood Sweat & Tears, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Sweetwater, Melanie, Incredible String Band, Bert Sommer, Tim Hardin, Ravi Shankar, Quill, and finally, by his precise will, Neil Young. Several of them will appear the following year (1971) in a double LP (then double CD) sequel called "Woodstock Two", but again: only a solid appearance in the film would have changed their lives or at least the collective memory of them, not certainly the inclusion in this second album.
_For various reasons that today can be summarized with a gigantic and comprehensive "we never thought what seemed to be an ordinary poorly organized country concert for a few people would turn out to be the musical event of the century", the management of the following famous artists did not accept the invitation, officially received by them, to participate at the festival: Led Zeppelin (gulp!... and they were already in the area, on tour), Doors (gasp!), Bob Dylan (resident in Woodstock, nearby), Byrds, Jethro Tull, Moody Blues, Spirit, Joni Mitchell… Names that would have made the already unique memory of this event even more legendary.
_Crosby, Stills, and Nash were presented and performed as a quartet alongside Neil Young, but the moody Canadian held one of his erratic and uncompromising attitudes, not joining his companions for much of the acoustic set and demanding and obtaining not to be filmed by cameras during the electric one "because they distracted him from the music".
_The Who took the stage at four in the morning. The performance progressed full of strength and spectacle as the sky began to color with the dawn, until, at the very moment the group paused to allow Roger Daltrey to intone the immortal "See Me, Feel Me" (from "Tommy", the rock opera narrating the redemption of a blind boy), the first ray of sun appeared on the horizon, behind the four hundred thousand packed on the grass, radiantly shining on the stage and into the singer’s eyes. No lighting technician could have done that, and Daltrey still recounts it as the most incredible and magical moment of his entire performing career.
_On the record and in the documentary, it was decided to qualify Jimi Hendrix’s performance simply by his name; in reality, the genius from Seattle, fresh from the dissolution of the Experience and still far from assembling the subsequent Band Of Gypsys trio, had decided to tackle Woodstock with an expanded six-member lineup, including a second guitar and two percussionists, registered at the festival as "Gypsy Sun & Rainbows". He even allowed Larry Lee, the second guitarist, to propose two of his own pieces, sing them, and perform the solos: sheer heresy; thus, it ended up with the festival emcee simply announcing Jimi Hendrix (immediately corrected by Jimi, but the documentary ignores this passage...), that in the portion of the performance immortalized by the film the three “intruders” hardly appeared, that the sound engineer Eddie Kramer, tasked with mixing this album, relegated the second guitar and percussion to an almost unintelligible volume. The ostracism continued even in recent times: listening to the entire, splendid Hendrix concert at Woodstock officially released a few years ago, it seems like a guitar/bass/drums trio is playing, and those two tracks with Larry Lee as the absolute protagonist were simply omitted.
To conclude, those who by chance or youth have not yet seen the film and/or heard the record are clearly invited to do so, as they are an essential page of culture, society, art, and history of the last century. For many artists immortalized there (Richie Havens, Ten Years After, Joe Cocker, Country Joe, Sha Na Na, Arlo Guthrie, John Sebastian...) it constituted the lucky break of a career otherwise much less brilliant, regardless of musical value considerations. For all the others, it is simply, but surely, the crowning achievement of their artistic trajectory.
Loading comments slowly
