Imagine hurtling yourself back in time to the original Woodstock festival in 1969, finding a good, relatively dry spot to chill, and settling in to hear more than three straight days of music. No, not possible, but the closest anyone may come to that experience will arrive this August. Pegged to the 50th anniversary of the event, Woodstock 50 Back to the Garden The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive, a 38-disc box set,will include every note of music played at the festival (save for three songs), some of it released for the first time ever.
Previous Woodstock collections, starting with the original 1970 triple LP and continuing through a 2009 multi-disc box, cherry-picked select songs (or didnt include certain acts altogether). By comparison, Woodstock 50, to be released by Rhino, has it all: every act and 432 songs, 267 of which have never been officially released before, for a total of nearly 36 hours of recordings, along with crowd announcements (Somebody somewhere is giving out some flat blue acid, Please meet Harold at the stand with the blood pills) and other sonic memorabilia from the festival.
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Complete performances of the Who, Joe Cocker, Sly and the Family Stone, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and others, along with acts who werent in the movie or the original Woodstockalbum, like the Band, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Janis Joplin will be available for the first time. The tracks are also arranged chronologically, by day and set times, from Richie Havens opening set that August Friday in 1969 to Jimi Hendrixs festival-closing set on Monday morning. To ease the overwhelming listening experience, each act is accorded its own disc.
There have been large boxed sets devoted to particular eras or tours the Grateful Dead do a great job of that sort of thing but theres never, to my knowledge, been an attempt to present a large-scale durational experience of this sort, says Andy Zax, the Los Angeles producer and archivist who co-produced the set with Steve Woolard. The Woodstock tapes give us a singular opportunity for a kind of sonic time travel, and my intention is to transport people back to 1969. There arent many other concerts you could make this argument about.
The box which will also include a Blu-ray of Michael Wadleighs Woodstockmovie, a guitar strap and a replica of the original program, among other items will cost $799. More condensed versions a 10-disc set and a 3-disc one will also be available. In the mega-box, the 38th disc includes various audio flotsam. The Groesbeek Reel, named after festival sound recordist Charles Groesbeek, includes comments from random attendees taped by Grosbeaklike, Zax laughs, this one guy moaning about what a disappointing experience it was and that it was a sell-out. Its a great slice of real people in the moment reacting to it, which pleases me immensely.
In late 2005, Zax visited a Warner Brothers storage space in Los Angeles, where a pile of tapes from the Atlantic Records vault in New York had been shipped. There, he found dozens of boxes of one-inch eight-track recordings from Woodstock. From the moment I saw those tapes, I was like, Oh my God, theres so much more than Id ever thought, he says. It was clear to me that no one was exploring this stuff and dealing with it in totality. Here was this vast trove of material not treated correctly.
Zax said he initially considered a complete festival box but didnt have institutional support back then and opted for the 40th anniversary 2009 box, which at least contained more unheard songs than ever before. But Zax and Woolard still had their work cut out for them. They had to deal with what Zax calls the Woodstock first-song curse. There are tons of instances where they would forget to turn on a vocal mic, he says, so the song starts and someones voice isnt audible until 45 seconds in, or the drums disappear. To compensate, Zax used alternate tapes from the soundboard to fill in certain gaps.
Zax also found that the reel of Sly Stones performance was cut up and spliced into 100 small pieces, he says. It was like old-school film editing bits of tape hanging like a million No-Pest Strips. The original tapes of Havens set, which were handed over to the late folksinger about 20 years after the festival, mysteriously vanished, so Zax and his team had to opt for a superior copy instead of the original tape.
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For Zax, the experience of hearing the unreleased music was often revelatory. There was always this perception that Joplins set was poor and didnt represent her at her best, he says. It may not have been the greatest night of her life, but listening to it on tape, it really sounds powerful. The same, he says, goes for the Dead. The band has famously denigrated its Woodstock performance, in part due to electrical problems onstage, but Zax says, They were a formidable performing unit in 1969, so its not an embarrassment. And Zax calls Creedences never-heard full set one of the best performances at Woodstock top 3 or top 5, for sure. The fact that it wasnt out in its entirety until now is flabbergasting.
According to Creedence leader John Fogerty, the reasons for the band being MIA on the Woodstock record and film varied. Fogerty, who says he didnt even know Creedence were being recorded that night, says his group followed the Dead, who played inordinately long. As a result, Creedence began its set just after midnight, instead of 9 p.m., to the worlds largest slumber party. When we rushed out onto the stage to set the rock & roll world on fire in front of this huge audience a huge opportunity they were all asleep, he says. It took us 35 minutes to get everyone up and awake again. It was a frustrating experience. Youre playing your heart out but no ones awake to see it.
When the original Woodstockalbum was being compiled, Fogerty says he was sent a recording of Bad Moon Rising for inclusion and rejected it. There was no audience participation at all, he says. It was a wonderful performance, but there was no reason to show Creedence having to struggle, so I opted out. Why show the people a weakness? Not surprisingly, Fogerty says hes never seen the Woodstock movie, either.
But starting with a slightly expanded 1994 Woodstock box pegged to its 25th anniversary, which included four Creedence tracks, Fogerty became more willing to let the public hear how his band sounded that very late night. That mindset change culminated in his approval (along with that of his former bandmates, now in the offshoot band Creedence Clearwater Revisited) to include the bands entire 11-song set on Woodstock 50. Nobodys been willing to show the true force of it, they just wanted snippets, he says. So Ive been open to [that] since the Nineties.
In general, Zax admits that some of the acts had less than pleasant recall of playing the festival, which colored their memories of the performances and made some hesitate about signing off. There was some skepticism, like, You want to issue the whole performance? Are you insane? he says. Theres not one person at Woodstock who was entirely happy with what they did. Ambivalence is about the best you tend to hear from people. And others are like, That was a horror show every minute was torture. But its a big part of peoples legacy, and 50 years is the kind of number that makes people think of ones legacy. (As for the missing numbers: the Hendrix estate asked that two of his songs not be included, for aesthetic reasons, and one of Sha Na Nas performances is missing due to a tape gap.)
But according to the producer, one pragmatic argument helped convince the artists or their estates to give the go-ahead for their tracks on Woodstock 50. This January, any unreleased performances or recordings from 1969 will go into the public domain and will thereby be legal and exploitable in Europe. Not bootleg, but legit, he says. So theres a pragmatic reason for protecting your copyright on a performance.
Looking back over the 14-year journey to the most comprehensive Woodstock set, Zax feels the arduous work was worth it. The movie is one version of Woodstock, he says. This is an audio verite documentary about the Sixties.