RECORD REVIEWS
Fifty years, man! By the time you read this, the dates will have passed during which promoters had hoped to stage a 50th anniversary Woodstock Festival—sadly, they failed in their effort—and Woodstock mania, which found full flower in the selling of pieces of the original Festival stage, will have peaked and died. And yet, the artifact at the center of the era-defining event is not some dubious chunks of wood but this extensive, amazing audio document that the organizers had the foresight to record.
A variety of packages is available for the 50th anniversary, ranging from the exhaustive limited-edition 38-disc set (1969 copies released, naturally) to a three-CD recap. In between is a 5-disc vinyl collection and this 10-disc CD set, which is also available as three 24/96 HD downloads. On the 38-CD set are 432 tracks, of which 267 are previously unreleased, with just three short performances missing: one from Sha Na Na (the tape failed—no big loss) and two by Hendrix (his estate would not give permission—bigger loss). I ended up with the 10-disc version, which seemed just right.
The uninitiated will be surprised how intimate many of the performances sound. Early on, Richie Havens, Bert Sommer, Tim Hardin, and—later—John Sebastian provide simple-yet-charged sets that would feel at home around a campfire. But as the crowd grows over the next couple of days, so does the grandeur of the music and the stature of the musicians, until we’ve rumbled through some of rock’s greatest acts, including Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis Joplin, the Who, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills & Nash (and occasionally Young), capped with Jimi Hendrix wailing away to the bleary survivors still left in the trash and mud.
To their credit, this new set’s producers decided to present the sound of the original analog tapes in a largely unaltered state, which they describe as “the sonic equivalent of heirloom tomatoes—slightly imperfect, but delicious.” At the festival, famed recording engineer Eddie Kramer and assistant Lee Osborne endured three continuous 18-hour sessions, recording 64 1" tapes on a pair of Scully 8-track machines. The stage crew also recorded more than 100 reels at the soundboard, providing plenty of impromptu moments to piece things together.
As Kramer sorts out the audio feed, the result is sonically rough and thinsounding in spots. But as singers start to wail, the custom Shure mikes (similar to an SM58) rarely overload and you can hear what’s on stage
