The Band - Woodstock Festival, Max Yasgur's Farm, Bethel, NY, 8-17-1969

In 2019, all the music from the famous three-day-long 1969 Woodstock Festival was officially released.  It was called, "Woodstock - Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive." That's great, but it was a huge box set, containing a few dozen CDs, and it was only made available in limited numbers for one time only. Apparently, exactly 1969 copies were officially available to be sold, to mark the year of the concert. Of course, all of those were sold, and it's been out of print since then.

In the years prior to that, the complete Woodstock sets of some famous artists were officially released on a wider basis, and even more came out around the time of that box set. Here are the artists that I believe have had their performances released on individual albums:

Santana
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Janis Joplin
Sly and the Family Stone
Jefferson Airplane
Joe Cocker
Johnny Winter
Butterfield Blues Band
Jimi Hendrix

I don't want to post the sets from any of those artists, since they are easy to get. But the rest of the festival is very hard to find, and now that it's been a year since the release of that already out of print box set, it seems that's all that is likely to come out. So I want to post the sets of some other artists that I like. (I've already posted the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young set.) One great thing about that festival is that the whole thing was recorded in soundboard quality, so we have excellent recordings from a time we might not otherwise have them.

So here's another Woodstock performance, from the Band. There is one really great live album by the Band from relatively early in their career, "Rock of Ages." But even that comes from concerts at the very end of 1971. In mid-1969, their set list was very different. Their second album - "The Band" - was due to be released only a few weeks after this concert, but they didn't play any songs from it. So their concert set list was largely based on their landmark 1968 album "Music from Big Pink," plus a couple of Motown covers ("Don't Do It" and "Loving You Is Sweeter than Ever"). But most intriguingly, they did a couple of songs from "The Basement Tapes," recorded in 1967, that wouldn't get released until 1975: "Don't Ya Tell Henry" and "Ain't No More Cane." (Note that I included both of those exact performances on my Band stray tracks album "The Basement Tapes.")

The concert is 48 minutes long. It's well performed, and as I said, the sound quality is great. The only odd thing, in my opinion, is there was virtually no talking from anyone in the Band, except for a couple of "thank yous" at the ends of songs. There doesn't seem to be the usual emcee announcement at the start or the end either, though there is one before their encore.

01 Chest Fever (Band)
02 Don't Do It [Baby Don't Do It] (Band)
03 Tears of Rage (Band)
04 We Can Talk (Band)
05 Long Black Veil (Band)
06 Don't Ya Tell Henry (Band)
07 Ain't No More Cane (Band)
08 This Wheel's on Fire (Band)
09 I Shall Be Released (Band)
10 The Weight (Band)
11 talk (Band)
12 Loving You Is Sweeter than Ever (Band)

https://www.imagenetz.de/j7Ly6

The cover art photo comes from the concert in question. Unfortunately, it only shows four of the five members of the Band.