Fact #148400
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Woodstock: Music From The Original Soundtrack, a live album of selected performances from the 1969 Woodstock counterculture festival, is released on Cotillion/Atlantic Records in the USA.Full article:
The Woodstock triple album stands as a glorious audio celebration of the crowning moment of 60s hippiedom, when half a million young people came together on Yasgur’s Farm in upstate New York for a weekend of peace, love and music. Maybe.
Viewed from another perspective, this lavishly-produced, sprawling three album set might be seen as the beginning of the cynical and ruthless exploitation of stoned-out traditional hippies by stoned-out capitalist hippies.
It’s often conveniently forgotten that Woodstock was set up to be a massive money-making enterprise, and only became a free festival after the fences were trampled down. Part of that enterprise was the associated movie and this live album, whose combined effect was to turn Woodstock into the most mythologized rock concert of all time.
It was, undeniably, nicely packaged in a full-colour triple-fold-out sleeve, but was it a great album? No, not really. The recording quality is entirely acceptable, but many of the performances are sloppy and/or lacklustre. With its stage announcements, mini-interviews and crowd chants, it works well as a documentary of the event but, for the most part, the studio versions of most of the songs here are superior to the live versions.
Nevertheless, buoyed up by the burgeoning Woodstock myth, the album went gold two weeks after release, and dollar signs began appearing in the eyes of record executives around the globe as it dawned on them that a triple album recorded live over a period of three days was sitting at No1 on the album charts.
Compared with the costs of putting a superstar band into a studio for six months – which was beginning to become the norm – recording a live album was astonishingly economical, and the profits could be enormous. There had been successful live albums in the past – James Brown At The Apollo and the double Live Dead by the Grateful Dead being notable examples – but there were no successful triple live albums until Woodstock.
What Woodstock said to the marketing departments was that if a live concert could be adequately ‘eventised’ – built up in the public imagination – then there were huge profit margins to be made from recording it.
Woodstock 2, naturally, was released soon after, and 1971 brought a three-LP set entitled The first Great Rock Festivals Of The Seventies, featuring live recordings from the Atlanta Pop Festival and The Isle Of Wight. Before long, no self-respecting festival could consider itself complete without an attendant album of ‘classic’ live performances. A nicely boxed set, The Last Days Of The Fillmore, appeared in 1972, but most of what followed was shoddily produced until 1978 brought The Band’s superb guest-star-studded movie/album tie-in The Last Waltz.
The respective merits of such albums is, however, not the central issue. The real point is that the Woodstock triple spawned an entirely new and lucrative marketing phenomenon which, in essence, was built around the realisation that concert souvenirs could be sold to people who hadn’t actually been at the concerts. This was the birth of instant nostalgia.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)
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Viewed from another perspective, this lavishly-produced, sprawling three album set might be seen as the beginning of the cynical and ruthless exploitation of stoned-out traditional hippies by stoned-out capitalist hippies.
It’s often conveniently forgotten that Woodstock was set up to be a massive money-making enterprise, and only became a free festival after the fences were trampled down. Part of that enterprise was the associated movie and this live album, whose combined effect was to turn Woodstock into the most mythologized rock concert of all time.
It was, undeniably, nicely packaged in a full-colour triple-fold-out sleeve, but was it a great album? No, not really. The recording quality is entirely acceptable, but many of the performances are sloppy and/or lacklustre. With its stage announcements, mini-interviews and crowd chants, it works well as a documentary of the event but, for the most part, the studio versions of most of the songs here are superior to the live versions.
Nevertheless, buoyed up by the burgeoning Woodstock myth, the album went gold two weeks after release, and dollar signs began appearing in the eyes of record executives around the globe as it dawned on them that a triple album recorded live over a period of three days was sitting at No1 on the album charts.
Compared with the costs of putting a superstar band into a studio for six months – which was beginning to become the norm – recording a live album was astonishingly economical, and the profits could be enormous. There had been successful live albums in the past – James Brown At The Apollo and the double Live Dead by the Grateful Dead being notable examples – but there were no successful triple live albums until Woodstock.
What Woodstock said to the marketing departments was that if a live concert could be adequately ‘eventised’ – built up in the public imagination – then there were huge profit margins to be made from recording it.
Woodstock 2, naturally, was released soon after, and 1971 brought a three-LP set entitled The first Great Rock Festivals Of The Seventies, featuring live recordings from the Atlanta Pop Festival and The Isle Of Wight. Before long, no self-respecting festival could consider itself complete without an attendant album of ‘classic’ live performances. A nicely boxed set, The Last Days Of The Fillmore, appeared in 1972, but most of what followed was shoddily produced until 1978 brought The Band’s superb guest-star-studded movie/album tie-in The Last Waltz.
The respective merits of such albums is, however, not the central issue. The real point is that the Woodstock triple spawned an entirely new and lucrative marketing phenomenon which, in essence, was built around the realisation that concert souvenirs could be sold to people who hadn’t actually been at the concerts. This was the birth of instant nostalgia.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)