cktimes.ca Archives for Classic Vinyl


Classic Vinyl

With John Gardiner

Woodstock: The biggest arts and music festival in the history of the planet.....

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

With regular Classic Vinyl columnist Al Day on the sidelines for a short while, I thought I'd take up the challenge of trying to come up with a Classic Vinyl of my own. Hard to believe I wrote this column for the first couple of years of cktimes' operation. Al has set the bar high and I'll have to try to do my best....

So, what to write about? And being a child of the Sixties and it being the 40th anniversary of the greatest arts and music festival in the history of the planet, that seems like the obvious topic. And considering I watched the four-hour DVD last week, I'm primed. The Woodstock movie, the director's cut which I have, is a wonderful piece of cinema, but I owned the Woodstock album away back when and it's a pretty good piece of vinyl in its own right.

I was 16 during the summer of 1969, plenty old enough by the standards of the good, old days to hit the road and ride my thumb all the way to the big festival. But I didn't even really consider it. Was not nearly that adventurous. So was content to watch the news reports of what looked like a very chaotic and dsorganized scene. These days, it would perhaps be great to be able to brag that you were at Woodstock, but watching the TV images I was glad I missed it.

The music at Woodstock was dazzling. I was mentioning this to someone last week and they agreed wholeheartedly. It was like the performers fed off the emotion of the immense crowd, giving it their everything, somehow realizing that they were involved in something that was larger than life.

Richie Havens set the tone with his emotionally-charged anthem "Freedom" and things just took aff after that. Joe Cocker's "With a Little Help From My Friends" is a jaw-dropper for sure. Even watching the movie 40 years later, you could feel the enormous electricity he generated. Folks at the Festival had to know after watching Joe perform that they were in for an amazing weekend of music.

Can't really talk about everybody in one column, but how about Sha Na Na, how about John Sebastian, Buffy St. Marie, Country Joe McDonald........Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash.....huge variety in the music, something that was common in the music back in the old days. On their radios, the hippies were listening to everything from Johnny Cash to Jimi Hendrix....an age for very wide musical tastes and Woodstock reflected that to some degree.

Speaking of Janis, this is one of her most powerful performances, but I've watched footage of her at the Monterey Pop Festival and she was amazing at it......Janis, by the way, was the highest priced performer at Woodstock at a cool $15,000.....imagine getting someone of that calibre for that kind of money today.

Jimi Hendrix was also awesome at the big Festival. I have long thought that his "Star Spangled Banner" was one of the great strokes of brilliance in the history of rock music.....Not only was it so appropriate for the times, it remains hauntingly relvant even in today's America as the wars rage on. The whole Festival, set against the backdrop of the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights movement and other politically-charged issues, was itself somewhat politically charged. Hardly a performer failed to make some comment of a political nature, but Hendrix said it all with his version of the U.S. anthem....

Anyway, if you're looking for an interesting way to spend four hours this winter, the Woodstock DVD is a wonderful way to journey to the past.......and if that's not your cup of tea, check out the big triple album that has been part of my collection for many years – even a few decades......

Thanks to Al for letting me fill in for this week.....but we need him back...get well soon, Al....



John Gardiner is a 25-year-veteran of the community newspaper business, but he is also a prolific writer of moralistic short fiction he refers to as "emotional thoughtscapes" or "adult fables". Samples of his fiction can be found at:

He has also produced a noteworthy piece of humanist philosophy which can be found at:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~aboiten/ad502.htm

He welcomes comments on his work.