This has to be the biggest music festival I've posted here in terms of the amount of music, bigger even than the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. I've found 36 hours of music from this festival that's worthy of posting, divided into 35 albums! I think this festival has been generally overlooked. I certainly overlooked it. I didn't realize how many great musical acts took part. There were two really big Woodstock anniversary festivals. This one took place in 1994, on the 25th anniversary of the legendary 1969 Woodstock Festival. Another big one took place in 1999. The 1999 one was a fiasco, with violence and mayhem. I think this one tends to get confused with that one. That happened with me before I started gathering together the music for this festival.
I think another reason this festival gets overlooked is that there hasn't been much in the way of official releases for it. The original Woodstock was quickly made into a hit album and movie. More albums from it followed, as compilations and by individual musical acts. Eventually, the entire festival was released in a massive box set.
By contrast, very little has been released from Woodstock '94. A double album was released later in 1994. But not only was that a tiny release for such a massive festival, but it wasn't well done, with the songs seemingly chosen at random. A film about the festival was released, but only direct-to-video on VHS and Laserdisc. It's never come out on DVD, Blue-Ray, or any digital format. In recent years, Green Day officially released their entire Woodstock '94 set as part of a deluxe edition of their 1994 album "Dookie." But that's the only full set to be released so far.
Luckily for us, the vast majority of the festival is available on bootleg today, with excellent sound quality. This is mainly because most of it was broadcast on a pay-per-view format on cable TV at the time. However, much of this seems to have fallen into a memory hole. It took me hours of searching to find what I found. I hope by posting what I have from the festival, I'll play at least a small role in bringing the music from the festival to a larger audience.
Woodstock '94 was originally planned to be just a two day long festival. I'll write more about the festival in general in a later post. If you want to know more ASAP, Wikipedia has a good entry about it:
It turned out so many bands were eager to play at the festival that the organizers added a third date, which came before the other two. But the musical acts slotted for the first day were generally much less famous, and that day wasn't included as part of the pay-per-view. So while I was able to find virtually all the sets from the other two days, I only found a few full sets from the first day.
I'm posting the albums from the festival in the chronological order they were performed (with a couple of exceptions of partial sets I've bundled together). The first musical act to have a surviving full set is Blues Traveler. Here's their Wikipedia page:
They put out their first album in 1990, and they're still in existence today. But their clear popular peak was in 1994, the same year as this festival. However, that happened after this festival. In late 1990, they released the album "four," which contained the two hits "Run-Around" and "Hook." It sold six million copies. Because that album hadn't been released yet, the band wasn't well known at the time of this festival. That's why it only got a slot on the first day of the festival and relatively early in the day to boot.
I only found this music as a video on YouTube. As I often do, I converted the video to mp3s. I deemed the sound quality worthy of inclusion. However, the lead vocals were relatively low in the mix, so I fixed that with the UVR5 audio editing program.
This album is 41 minutes long.
01 Crash Burn (Blues Traveler)
02 talk (Blues Traveler)
03 Support Your Local Emperor (Blues Traveler)
04 But Anyway (Blues Traveler)
05 talk (Blues Traveler)
06 Low Rider - Go Outside and Drive (Blues Traveler)
07 The Star-Spangled Banner [Instrumental] (Blues Traveler)
08 Optimistic Thought (Blues Traveler)
09 talk (Blues Traveler)
https://www.upload.ee/files/16750818/VA-WODSTCK94_8-12-1994_01BlusTrvelr_atse.zip.html
The cover shows John Popper, the lead singer and expert harmonica player in the band. It's from this exact concert.
By the way, the text and related artwork at the top and bottom of the cover is based on the promotional artwork from the festival. For instance, the guitar neck with two birds sitting on it was the festival logo. (It was similar to the logo from the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which only had one bird.) The font type, font colors, and red background all come from the promotional artwork too.
I think this may be the first festival series from you that I will grab all. Woodstock 1994 was amazing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this. I was in the '99 edition, which despite what the documentaries show, I remember kind of fondly, though seems the '94 edition was a much better ordeal.
ReplyDeletethank you!
ReplyDelete