Woodstock
The music that defined a generation they say, though I’m not sure what the poor sods did to deserve some of this.
I’ve only seen the film of Woodstock once. One of our girls, possibly Amy, was still a baby and wouldn’t settle; I was a student for the second time and it was easier for me to be up in the night and let Kirstin sleep, Channel 4, I think, was showing the film into the early hours so I watched it, baby on my shoulder. I remember doing it, but I don’t remember much about the film. I don’t believe I’d ever listened to the whole album before this project.
The album is a bit like watching a slide show of a neighbour’s holiday in Cleethorpes in that you really had to be there for the photos to have any meaning or interest. This is Doreen with an icecream, this is Mary with that strange young man she met, this is Canned Heat sounding dreadful…
I’ve mentioned my antipathy to live albums as a genre previously; that’s not to say there aren’t some good ones, and a handful of truly great ones, but his triple LP (double cd) does nothing to change my mind. If stoned musicians playing to a stoned crowd in a field is your bag, you might get something out of this, especially if you are not of the straight world persuasion, as Doc Sportello would say; but it didn’t do a lot for me.
That’s not to say there aren’t things worth having a listen to, but what the performances do, it seems to me, is to point you to better recordings of the same artists performing the same songs. I liked CSNY, Country Joe’s Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die is memorable; it’s no surprise that Santana were the breakout act, even if Carlos was somewhere in a parallel dimension at the time; Sly and the Family Stone make me wish I’d actually seen them on stage. And that’s it.
The soundtrack album is not on Spotify or complete on YouTube. I downloaded a copy to listen for this, and don’t expect that copy to be on my hard drive for much longer.
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