Last night (March 29) at 8:30 p.m. Turner Classic Movies ran the film Woodstock as part of a night of Academy Award-winning or -nominated documentaries. Woodstock was the film released in 1970 by Warner Brothers based on the three-day “Peace and Music” festival held at Bethel, New York – after two other upstate New York towns, Woodstock and Wallkill, had refused permission – on August 15-18, 1969. (The festival was scheduled for three one-day concerts on Friday, August 15; Saturday, August 16; and Sunday, August 17; but the performnances were so long the last night extended to the early morning of the 18th and Jimi Hendrix performed his legendary set in the first light of Monday morning.) I remember seeing a PBS documentary on Woodstock from 2019 (reviewed on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/08/by-time-we-got-to-woodstock.html) released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the festival, which detailed the struggles the four promoters – Michael lang, John Rosenman, John Roberts and Artie Kornfeld – went through to build a talent roster for the festival and secure a site. Their original objective was to raise money to build a recording studio in the Woodstock area, wish had already been put on the map by Bob Dyylan and The Band (separately and together). The idea morphed from building a recording studio to holding a series of concerts to raise money for the studio project, and finally to one mega-concert to be held over three days.
Because it took the promoters so long to nail down a site, they weren’t able to build both the fencing to keep people who hadn’t bought tickets (which were quite reasonably priced; they cost $7 per day or $18 for a three-day pass, equivalent to $54 for the one-day ticket or $120 for the three-day pass in 2019 dollars) and a stage for the performers. So they chose to build the stage and the accompanying light towers (which got scaled by some of the concertgoers, much to the consternation of the promoters, who were worried the extra weight would cause the towers to topple and possibly kill or injure audience members;lduring the concert various people took to the mikes to plead with the tower-scalers to come down) because they were worried about being sued for false advertising if they couldn’t present the musical acts they’d promised. That meant that they never finished the fencing – the film includes shots of audience members gleefully walking over the bits of fencing previous indeed had trampled – and eventually the promoters gave up on collecting ticket revenue and declared it a free festival. Ironically, the success of the movie, the accompanying soundtrack LP (there were actually two, a three-LP set marketed in 1970 and a two-LP compilation called Woodstock Two a year later) and sales of merchandise (including the festival’s iconic logo, a dove perching on the neck of a guitar) ultimately bailed them out and enabled the promoters to turn a small profit on the event.
As I argued in my post on the 2019 PBS documentary, “Woodstock” became a carefully constructed and nurtured legend to promote movie tickets and album sales, though it also became a touchstone for a generation. The version of the movie TCM showed was the so-called “Director’s Cut,” released in 1994 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the festival, which added extra performances, including some by at least two acts, the Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin, who hadn’t been shown in the original 1970 release. The Wodostock performances have be3en released in various audio formats over the yeaqrs,a nd my reference copy was a three-CD set issued in2019 to commemorate (and take advantage of) the 50th anniversary). It doesn’t iinclude any of Jimi Hendrix’s magnificent and iconic set (he closed the fe3stival and since his death there have ben so many posthumous moves of his record contract the original company no longer owned the rights to his material), but it did include bands who weren’t in either version of the film, including The Band, Credence Clearwater Revival and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Oddly, the Jefferson Airplane are represented in the 1994 version only by tw o relatively lame songs, “Won’t You Try” and a versionof Oran “Hot Lips” Page’s 1944 “Uncle Sam’s Blues” with updated lyrics, while on the 2019 CD’s they were represented by searing performances of two of their biggest hits, “Somebody to Love”and “Volunteers.”
On the other hand, Janis Joplin – whose biographers have noted how terribly she felt she had performed at Woodstock., to the point that no footage of her appeared in the 1970 version of the film (released while she was still alive and therefore able to stop it) – appeared on the CD’s sin perofmrnaces of “Kozmik Blues” and “Piece of My Heart” that soundbite as lame as she’d always said the set was. In the 1994 film, however, she’s represented by a great performance, Nick Gravenites’ “Work Me, Lord.” (Gravenites was a white Chicago blues singer who replaced Janis in her original band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, on the grounds that if they’d hired another woman she’d just have had to face invidious comparisons) Coming in the 1994 version right after Sly and the Family Stone’s iconic performance of “I Want to Take You Higher,” in which Sly and the band exhort the audience to flash the peace sign and sing along with the song’s catch word, “Higher,” Janis’s impassioned rendition of Gravenites’ openly religious song emphasizes how all blu9es, rock and soul music is rooted in the Black church. Woodstock the movie, in either form, is a cultural artifact of a generation that made its mark on the world for both good and ill; as I noted in my commentary on the 2019 PBS documentary, ever since the 1960’s the American right in general and the Republican Party in particular have defined themselves in opposition to the racial, gender and cultural liberation that the 1960’s and the so-called “Woodstock Generation” represented.
Certainly my own perceptions of some of the Woodstock performances have changed over the years even while others have remained pretty much the same. I still don’t care for Joe Cocker’s slowed-down version of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” – when I first saw the movie I thought, “Another white guy who thinks he’s Ray Charles,” and when Cocker sang the line, “:Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song,and I’ll try not to sing out of key,” my husband Charles joked, “Try harder.’ – but I’ve made my peace with it a bit more than I did then. (It helped that at least two members of Cocker’s band – keyboard player Leon Russell and backup singer Rita Coolidge – later became stars on their own, and Russell’s superb organ playing gives this song most of what power it has.) Some of the homages to 1950’s rock ‘n’ roll – not only Sha Na Na’s cover of Danny and the Juniors’ 1958 hit “At the Hop” (of which the original Rolling Stone reviewer of the soundtrack album said that leaving it off would have made the album two minutes shorter, “but otherwise would not have affected it in any way”) but The Who’s “Summertime Blues” (I got to know this song from the heavy-metal versions by Blue Cheer and The Who, and so I was startled when in the late 1970’s I finally heard the original by Eddie Cochran and noted it was driven by acoustic guitar and was far more infectious than those elephantine 1960’s covers) and the knockoffs of both Black and white blues and rock songs in Ten Years After’s almost interminable “I’m Goin’ Home” – date pretty badly. But then there are a lot of records I really liked in the 1960’s’ and 1970’s that don’t sound as good as the artists were ripping off.
On the other hand, I like Santana’s hot instrumental “Soul Sacrifice” quite a lot better than I did then; when I first saw the Woodstock movie I thought it was just noise, but I’ve grown to appreciate Carlos Santana’s killer guitar and the interplay between him and the rest of the band. And the Hendrix set – bolstered in 1994 by the insertion of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” in the “director's cut” – remaini amazing, a testament not only to Hendrix’s genius as an improviser (however much he owed to previous Black singer-guitarists like Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, from whom he learned how to play guitar behind his back and pick it with his teeth) but to Wadleigh’s skill as a filmmaker that he keeps his camera on Hendrix front and center and for the most part avoids the annoying cutaways other directors who filmed Hendrix indulged in so our attention was taken away from what we really wanted to see: his fingers on his guitar producing those amazing sounds. The name of the group Jimi Hendrix performed with was "Band of Gypsys, Suns and Rainbows," later shortened to just "Band of Gypsys" [sic]. The band featured conga player Juma Sultan, who had also played with jazz legend John Coltrane on his final concert on April 23, 1967, three months before Coltrane's death on July 17, 1967. Juma Sultan is the only musician who recorded with both Coltrane and Hendrix. The film’s ending is a bit sad – we hear Hendriz playing a jam but most of what we see takes place after he’s finished and attendees are responding to calls from the stage to start the seemingly impossible task of cleaning up – but then that’s a sign of human nature that you can’t dump a whole bunch of people on a farm for three days and not expect them to leave a giant mess behind, no matter how well they got along during the event.
