Monday, August 21, 2023

Isle of Wight Festival, Afton Down, Isle of Wight, Britain, 8-27-1970 to 8-30-1970 - 8-29-1970: Part 6: The Doors

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.

087 talk (Doors)
088 Back Door Man (Doors)
089 Break On Through [To the Other Side] (Doors)
090 When the Music's Over (Doors)
091 Ship of Fools (Doors)
092 Roadhouse Blues (Doors)
093 Light My Fire (Doors)
094 The End (Doors)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15911899/IsleofWghtFestivlAftnDwnIsleofWghtBrtain__8-29-1970_Pt6_TDors.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. Most of the pictures I found were very dark and just featured Morrison, but this one had more light and showed the whole band.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for sharing the image on this page.
    It was taken by my Father-in-Law Charles Everest, who was there at the event that weekend.
    More of his photos from the event can be found at the link below and are all ©cameronlife
    www.cameronlife.co.uk

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