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Saturday, August 26, 2023

ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL 1970 | ALBUMS THAT SHOULD EXIST [COMPLEAT!]

 The brilliant Albums That Should Exist is on his summer holidays but has left us some real doozies dedicated to the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970 and some 18 separate sets from participants from Leonard Cohen to Free, Joni to which we went to back in the day (allegedly! it’s along story I have documented before and there are some doubts as to what we collectively recall and whether we made it at all post car crash and getting to the island Jimi we certainly didn’t see, loads of others too, Miles, Leonard Cohen and Joni and John Sebastian) and yet this includes sets I loved from Terry Reid, Rory Gallagher and Taste and of course The Doors  [This is one of the best quality versions of the set from Jim and the boys I have ever heard and I have heard many!]

 I had vinyl bootlegs of the Doors set which frankly are unplayable, I had heard of the existence of a Terry Reid Superlungs set but never found a playable copy and the one thing that Albums That Should Exist does is find superb quality versions of boots of the period.If they don’t cut the mustard Paul the proprietor is given to tweak them himself! 

Dig in people! Read what Paul says throughout the entire selection

This post is the start of something big. I've decided to post all the worthy music from the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, and there's a heck of a lot of it. 

There were dozens and dozens of big rock festivals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the vast majority of them are fading from memory because there's no audio or video to help remember. The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival is an exception. Apparently, ALL of it was professionally recorded. Furthermore, because it was a five-day long festival, all the big acts had plenty of time to play, often playing the equal of a full concert they would have performed somewhere else. Many of these professional recordings have remained in the vaults. But a whole bunch of official albums from individual artists have been released over the decades. Furthermore, some or all of some of the other sets have been leaked to the public. My goal was to post all the music that had soundboard-level quality, in chronological order, with all the sonic flaws fixed. And it turns out there were many, many sonic flaws. 

The end result is nearly 20 albums, which I will post here over the next few days. I'm even posting the officially released stuff, because I think it's important to have all of this music easily accessible in one place, so one can hear the concert in its full glory. On purely musical terms, I think it's the equal of Woodstock or any other festival from that era.

The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival has had a pretty poor reputation over the years. It was the largest festival of its era, with about 600,000 to 700,000 people attending. The hope was that it would be seen as the British version of Woodstock. But there were some bad vibes, often related to conflicts between the promoters, who wanted to make money, and the audience who often expected everything to somehow be free. It didn't end up a total disaster like Altamont in 1969, but it wasn't an unabashed success and cultural milestone like Woodstock either.

The Afton Downs Isle of Wight Festival - TERRY REID 1970


Paul says:

 . . . most of the music here is from Terry Reid's set, which is complete. Around this time, Reid was seen as a very talented lead vocalist who could also write songs and play guitar. He seemed poised for stardom, but it never happened. Most famously, in 1969, Jimmy Page asked him to be the lead singer of his new band, which would later be known as Led Zeppelin. But Reid had to decline, since he was already booked as the opening act for two tours. Reid told Page to consider another singer, Robert Plant, and the rest is history.

By the way, a member of Reid's band in this concert was guitarist David Lindley, who would go on to have a long and successful music career of his own.

Although Reid's set was officially released in 2004, in my opinion his lead vocals were still low in the mix. So I boosted them using the audio editing program UVR5.

There are three more songs after Reid's set. Two of them are by the British band Gracious. I'd never heard of them prior to putting this album together, but they put out two albums, in 1970 and 1972, that are very well regarded by prog rock fans. It's a shame there are only two songs here. But they never released an official live albums, and I couldn't find any bootlegs by them, so this may be the only live versions of their songs publicly available. 

Finally, the last song is by the band Great Awakening. I looked them up, and it seems the only record they ever released was a single with a mostly instrumental version of "Amazing Grace" on the A-side. And that's the song performed here. 

Afton Downs Isle of Wight Festival - Rory Gallagher and TASTE 1970

 

Paul says:

Taste. This trio had been in existence since 1968, but at the time of the festival they were on the verge of breaking up. This ended up being one of their last concerts, but they went out with a bang. The band liked their performance so much that they released much of it as an official album a year later, called "Live at the Isle of Wight." The complete performance was eventually released in 2015. Furthermore, some filmmakers were filming parts of the festival in order to make a music documentary. They were supposed to film only one or two songs from lesser known acts like Taste in order to save on the costs of the expensive film stock, but they were so impressed with the performance that they wound up filming nearly the entire set. So that can be found on DVD. 

Despite the Taste set being released, I still thought the lead vocals were low in the mix. So I fixed that using the audio editing program UVR5.


The Afton Downs Isle of Wight Festival - THE DOORS - 1970


 Paul says:

The next musical act on August 30, 1970 of the Isle of Wight Festival were the Doors. 

It's fairly remarkable the Doors were able to play this festival. At the time, lead singer Jim Morrison was in the middle of a trial in the US, for allegedly exposing himself on stage in Miami. But apparently, they had booked this concert appearance before those troubles began, so they were granted permission to leave the US briefly to perform at the festival.

Murray Lerner, who directed "Message to Love," a music documentary about the festival, later recalled: “Jim Morrison said to me: 'I don’t think you’re going to get an image, because our lights are low. We’re not going to change it.' But in fact I got some beautiful images by looking into the light and making it look surrealistic and abstract. ... The Doors were hypnotic, but they had to leave right after their performance – they were on trial in Miami. They were let out just for that performance. So they had to leave right away."

The band's most recent album was "Morrison Hotel," released in February 1970. But they only played two songs from it, "Ship of Fools" and "Roadhouse Blues." Instead, they generally leaned on classic songs dating back to 1967. It was pretty late at night by the time the band took the stage, and Morrison later complained about how cold and windy it was. So perhaps they relied on the songs they knew best to get their through a tough situation.

The sound quality is excellent, because the whole performance has been officially released on album and DVD as "Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970." However, I felt the lead vocals were rather low, so I boosted them in the mix using the UVR5 audio editing program.

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

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there are loads more to enjoy over at Albums That Should Exist and frankly any muso worth their salt would be foolish to to explore the offerings there that Paul has diligently scored and tweaked and posted there.


here's what Peter Daltrey of Fairfield Parlour / Kaleidoscope has said about the festival:

"All I remember is the view from the stage: the endless blue sky, the endless audience, the thousands camped for free on the rolling hills to the right, the heat, the clouds of red dust, Joan Baez wandering by looking stunning, the movie camera thrust in my face as I was told our set was to be cut in half, the terror, the sublime lift after the first wave of applause, the evenings in the Red Indian camp with the fires burning, the thump of distant music, crouching below the stage waiting for the nod so I could leap up and be allowed to play an acoustic 'Let the World Wash In' to half a million hippies, the leaden realization that we'd been conned and ripped off and stuffed and abused by the [festival promoters] brothers Farr, the sleepless nights of total physical and mental exhaustion, breakfast at Herbie Snowball's hotel in Shanklin -- and returning there thirty years later on a family holiday and standing across the road and looking up at the window where three decades earlier a young man once stared at the orange moon... No, I don't recall much."

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