Favorite Woodstock Performance
DrWu
4,021 Posts
I know most are going to say Sly Stone but I'm going with......
Shit is just plain fun.
Shit is just plain fun.
Comments
I always thought this was the inspiration for Animal House.
I read somewhere that this was the actual opening act at Woodstock. The stage looks half built.
I hope Fatback was kidding, that shit sucks.
That performance blew my mind when I first saw the movie on PBS in the 80s. Unfuckwithable.
Then Jimi played.
I'm not a Sha Na Na FAN, per se, but this is my favorite PERFORMANCE.
Seeing them in the movie, they're almost like a welcome relief...all that peace, love & dope, then here comes THIS...they were the next to last act on stage, and I'll bet there must have been some VIVID acid flashbacks when they showed up.
The whole experience of seeing this movie on PBS when you're young is seminal. The breadth of styles and quality gives you some much to dig into. I spent months following the threads that I discovered after watching it when I was 12 or 13.
You must have seen the same broadcast I did. I think I might still have the same videotape I made back then. I still giggle when I think of my mom's reaction to seeing Joe Cocker for the first time, doing his air-guitar schtick...she thought he got dosed with some bad acid: "he thinks he's playing his guitar, but he ain't playing SHIT!"
As with Wattstax, I owned the soundtrack long before I saw the movie. Even though I think the Monterey Pop Festival from '67 was far superior (more diversity of acts, actual seats, better-looking girls in the audience), Woodstock was intriguing for what it was. I was hoping the Butterfield Blues Band would be in the movie, because on the first Woodstock album they sounded WASTED, and I would have liked to have seen the video portion...especially saxist Gene Dinwiddie and his stoned monologue, while introducing the "Love March" early Monday morning: "if y'all wasn't so tired, we could just march around this whole area here..."
IMO--in terms of watching/listening. (I was born in 1971.)
Woodstock had too many sick performances. The drama of the multitudes makes it more interesting beyond just the music. In either case their both required reading. I have only seen snippets of the IOW. Thought most of it was pretty turdish. But honestly haven't seen enough.
There's so many highlights in the film, the last hour is just incredible. This is one movie I still hope to see on the big screen, as I've seen it in every other home video variation and TV edits.
Also, I had inquired about the possibility of any footage of Mountain playing "Long Red", since it is this performance that would become one of the more sampled songs in hip-hop. According to one of the guys involved in the restoration/remastering process, only two Mountain songs were filmed since they were considered a "low priority" band at the time.
Or at least no known Michael Wadleigh-directed footage. I don't know if the guy who documented the concert on one of the early black & white video cameras shot them and/or the song.
As for performances, outside of the expected replies, I always liked this addition from the Director's Cut. It's just one camera centered on Canned Heat.
Jimi v Jimi
Airplane V Airplane
Dead v Dead
etc
Jimi at Monterey
Airplane at Woodstock
Crosby at Woodstock
Canned Heat at Woodstock
Shankar at Monterey
Country Joe at Woodstock
Who at Woodstock
Airplane at Monterey
Dead at Monterey (this is a pretty ill informed opinion, heard one song from each show, maybe)
Bonus beat:
Sly at Woodstock over Otis at Monterey
Woodstock wins
by a country mile
where the hell was John Entwhistle decked out like THAT?
even during the hippie era, he was a smart dresser...i dont recall him ever looking that goofy. not in Monterey Pop, not in Woodstock, unless i missed sonething
By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer
BETHEL, N.Y. ??? Welcome to middle age, Woodstock Baby ??? if you're really out there.
The babies reportedly born at the Woodstock festival 40 years ago remain the most enduring mystery from that chaotic weekend that defined a generation. Depending on the source, there was one birth on that patch of upstate New York farmland between Aug. 15-17, 1969. Or two. Or three. Or none.
There is some tantalizing evidence. Singer John Sebastian is captured on film announcing that some cat's old lady just had a baby, a kid destined to be far out. A couple of surviving eyewitnesses say there were births. The concert's medical director told reporters at the scene there were two births: one at a local hospital after the mother was flown out by helicopter; the other in a car caught in the epic traffic jam outside the site crowded with more than 400,000 people.
But no one has come forward with a credible public claim of giving birth to a Woodstock baby or being born there. No one has produced proof that it happened. If babies were born at Woodstock, they have lived their lives ignoring ??? or unaware of ??? the fact that reporters and researchers have been on their trail for decades.
"I've searched, I've spoken to the doctors and nurses from the main hospitals that were there," said Myron Gittell, who wrote the new medical history, "Woodstock '69: Three Days of Peace, Music, and Medical Care."
Like many before him, he found nothing.
"Almost statistically, you'd think if there are a half-million people, and half of them were women, and 95 percent of them were of childbearing age, and fertile, and active. Just statistically, someone would have had to pop a baby."
Problem is: No one has been able to dig up a birth record.
Rita Sheehan, town clerk for Bethel, which hosted the concert, said there is no local birth certificate on record. Still, it's possible the birth was recorded in one of the surrounding towns. Gittell says there were births recorded in neighboring towns in that period, but the records are sealed under state privacy laws. There's no way to check whether the birth mothers were locals or out-of-towners (the likely pool of Woodstock Moms).
That leaves a few eyewitness accounts, like that of Gladys Devaney, who was a member of the volunteer ambulance corps in nearby Liberty. She answered an ambulance call to a tent at the festival and saw a young woman in labor. Her overriding concern then was that other medical workers took her stretcher as they rushed the woman away. But Devaney knew labor when she saw it.
"I heard her screaming," Devaney said. "I didn't get a good look at her, she was thrashing."
Devaney never found out whether they took the young woman to a waiting helicopter or somewhere else.
Elliot Tiber, the subject of Ang Lee's new movie, "Taking Woodstock," tops Devaney. He says he helped deliver a baby that weekend.
Tiber, who has a reputation for being a raconteur, said the woman gave birth at his parent's hotel near the site, which ??? like the entire area that weekend ??? was mobbed. The woman wore a leather jacket, came in on a motorcycle and just flopped down.
"I see she's starting to give birth," Tiber recalled. "It was like the quote from `Gone With the Wind': `I don't know nothing about birthing no babies, Miss Scarlet' ... I was screaming, just screaming. Everybody was standing around stoned saying, `Yeah, groovy!' They thought it was cool."
Tiber said the baby was taken away, though the mother came by in a cab a few weeks later with her baby in a blanket. He didn't get any names. He never heard from them again.
After four decades, the Woodstock baby trail has gotten colder. The young people who packed into Woodstock are retirement age now. A number of the emergency and medical workers involved, including the concert's medical director, Dr. William Abruzzi, are dead. And if a baby was born onsite, there are curious gaps in the record.
Press accounts at the time mentioning the births did not provide names. Abruzzi wrote an exhaustive account of the event in which he tallied six pages of medical incidents over the three days (11 rat bites, 16 peptic ulcers, 707 drug overdoses, among them). The paper, now in the collection of the Museum at Bethel Woods, the onsite museum, does not mention a single childbirth.
"It could be one of those myths that grow out of major events," said Bethel museum Director Wade Lawrence. "It could be like the story of the New York State Thruway being closed. It wasn't."
Maybe the best argument against a Woodstock baby is that no one in the past four decades has stepped forward to publicly and credibly claim they were born or gave birth at Woodstock. There is a theory that neither mother nor child particularly want Woodstock to define their lives, and have chosen to keep their distinction a private matter.
But it bears saying as the 40th anniversary of Woodstock approaches. If you are a Woodstock baby or a Woodstock mother, please consider contacting The Associated Press at woodstockbaby"at"ap.org.
People have been looking for you.