It couldn’t have been more than two hours after writing Woodstock revisited and stating it was unlikely I would be purchasing the latest re-release of the rock festival that I walked into Costco and found a copy of the 40th anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition at a price I wasn’t expecting. So low, that is. Of course, I picked it up and bought it.
My main interest was not in the Director’s Cut, which I had bought back in the early ’90s, but in the Extras disc, Woodstock: Untold Stories. It includes about three hours of material with nearly 150 minutes of previously unreleased performances, the rest consisting of documentary video segments.
The inclusion of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was the main attraction for me, despite the band performing only one song, but the disc also includes The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Joe Cocker and first-time appearances on a Woodstock disc by Johnny Winter and Creedence Clearwater Rivival.
The viewer will have to sit through a somewhat painful first half of the disc though to get to the good bits. That may affect your decision on buying the set at all. You can skip over most of that of course, but it does reduce the portion of the footage that will draw you back for repeated viewings.
A bunch of memorabilia comes in the Ultimate set, all of which is pretty negligible with the exception of a mini-reprint of Life Magazine’s special edition on the festival published just after the event.
The disc opens with Joan Baez, whose talent I have great respect for but have never been particularly enamored. She does a very nice job on One Day At A Time with her two accompanists. She’s followed by the always surprisingly good — at least as a solo performer — Country Joe McDonald, who plays Flying High on acoustic guitar. I never cared for his albums with The Fish, but he’s always struck me as a talented and humorous musician giving the right circumstances. This was one.
Santana’s Evil Ways is a good performance if somewhat short. The doubled lead vocal between Carlos Santana and Gregg Rolie is a little rough — they’re not exactly in perfect synch or intonation with one another — but the playing is good. There have been reports though, many confirmed, that Santana’s contributions to the Woodstock albums and film have been doctored in the studio.
Next come below-par contributions by Canned Heat and Mountain. The Bear, Bob Hite, and company play a not-quite-passable I’m Her Man that has a lot of energy but little virtuosity. This is followed by On The Road Again, sung by Alan Wilson, whose vocal charms, an out-of-tune falsetto, never quite impressed me much.
Perhaps it’s an off night for Wilson, but his slide solo in On The Road Again also fails to deliver. His Goin’ Up The Country was a big hit from the original film, but the band’s charm and fascination is somehow lost on me.
Mountain is slightly better but only just. I now know why Leslie West’s guitar tone live always bothered me. It’s too edgy, much too much high end for a Les Paul junior. It must be his amp setup, which I believe were Marshalls from the one time I saw one song of a Mountain set at the Fillmore East. I know he can play as witnessed as far back as his sitting in with The Who on a long unreleased version of Love Ain’t For Keeping, which is absolutely brilliant. But not here.
His sound is a little better on Southbound Train, but his singing is one-dimensional, all screaming, no technique. The best part of watching Mountain is seeing Felix Pappalardi, rest his soul, playing a very neat looking bass that appears to be a Gibson EB-1, which has the shape of a violin.
Finally of the dismal performances perhaps none rivals that of the Grateful Dead doing Turn On Your Love Light for a painstaking, interminable 38 minutes. Nobody in this band can sing in tune and their improvisations are endless and lifeless. The best qualities about the Dead are guitarist Jerry Garcia and drummer Mickey Hart but they’re buried in the background. Even when Garcia shines a little it’s in the context of playing with musicians who can’t keep up with him.
OK. You can breathe easy, the rest of the disc is quite good.
I’ve never been a big Creedence fan, but their arrival is a welcomed sight. Three songs are included in this first-time appearance from the festival and John Fogerty is in high gear on all three. He plays tastefully and his singing hits a raw nerve with its throaty, near holler but his intonation is just fine. A singer who sings in tune! His bandmates do their best to keep up and drummer Doug Clifford is competent but displays only one mode, muscle rock. The talent gap between Fogerty and the rest of the band is very apparent.
Creedence reminds me a little of Crazy Horse in that it is anything but a well-oiled machine. They’re rusty and rough around the edges but it suits their style of roots-oriented rock.
Creedence delivers a good take on the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins classic I Put A Spell On You with Fogerty playing a solid solo in his roots-rock, blues-oriented style and delivering more than a creditable vocal in a song on which it’s tough for most singers to put a personal stamp.
Keep On Chooglin’ though is overlong and we see that when Fogerty delves into an extended solo the ideas seem to run out fairly quickly and he keeps revisiting similar phrases and licks throughout rather than breaking new ground. But that’s tough with limited accompaniment.
The highlight of the disc, as it may be in the concert film proper, is next — The Who. We get a full version of We’re Not Gonna Take It, which was edited down in the feature film, with new camera angles, seemingly different lighting somehow and a new audio mix. It’s a commanding performance that shows one of the best bands of the era in flight. Roger Daltry is pitch perfect and exudes staggering stage prescence while Peter Townsend soars between his rhythmic guitar genius and short bursts of single-string soloing.
The Who also perform their encore My Generation, which transitions into a dynamic three-chord structure that builds to a sonic climax. Townsend pounds the tale of his guitar into the stage but doesn’t destroy it.
Jefferson Airplane produces a more than acceptable version of 3/5 Of A Mile In 10 Seconds with strong playing from guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady. The Airplane have always seemed to lack a little something live but Woodstock was definitely one of their better performances and this track is no exception.
Joe Cocker’s Something’s Coming On and Johnny Winter’s Mean Town Blues are also stellar efforts. Cocker is the center of attention but members of his band get to shine a bit here as well and Winter, whose making a first-time appearance on Woodstock-related releases, is in fine voice and plays a stunning slide solo on his Fender 12-string that is strung with just six strings.
Other than The Who, the highlight of the disc is Paul Butterfield’s Morning Sunrise from his Keep On Movin’ album. This is a later version of the band with a full-fledged star-to-be horn section featuring Gene Dinwiddie on tenor sax, David Sanborn, alto, Trevor Lawrence, baritone, and Keith Johnson and Steve Madaio, trumpets.
They play a smooth, jazz inflected chart over the soulful, R&B feel of the song with Butter in splendid voice, hitting all the high parts perfectly, and Buzzy Feiten playing a funky, clean sounding rhythm on a Gibson ES-335. Dinwiddie takes a stunning jazz-flavored solo and the band is as tight as a drum head.
Sha Na Na provides the anti-climatic finale. Their take on Teen Angel is plagued by the lead singer’s flat vocal on most of the talking-singing melody. The only thing that saves the sequence is seeing Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and other stars grooving on the side of the stage, but it appears to be more over the novelty of the act than the content.
The Extras disc also has a documentary on the making of the feature film, which has some interesting insights from director Michael Wadleigh and many other participants, but it’s really not a doc. Instead it consists of separate three-to-four minute sequences that actually have a production credit at the end of each one. So there is absolutely no flow to it at all. Very annoying.
If you don’t have the Director’s Cut, which I haven’t discussed because it’s been widely available for more than 15 years, it is definitely worth picking up. If you are buying this set just for the Extras disc be forewarned, it’s a mixed bag and only about half of it is really worth seeing.
