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.
You can read the Wikipedia page about the concert here:
Isle of Wight Festival 1970 - Wikipedia
I'll write more about the concert in general in later posts. But I want to mostly focus on the music in this particular album. The concert was five days long, but the fame of the artists steadily grew from very low on the first day to very high on the last one.
Here are all the performers from the first two days of the festival:
Judas Jump
Kathy Smith
Rosalie Sorrels
David Bromberg
Redbone
Kris Kristofferson
Mighty Baby
Gary Farr
Supertramp
Andy Roberts’ Everyone
Howl
Black Widow
The Groundhogs
Terry Reid
Gilberto Gil & Caetano Veloso
I'm guessing that you've never heard of most of those. Kris Kristofferson and Supertramp had just started their music careers and only got famous later. The Brazilian musicians Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were popular in Brazil already, but little known in Britain at the time. So this was basically two days of little known and unknown artists while the massive crowd slowly arrived.
Perhaps somewhere in some vault, recordings of the full sets of all these acts still exist. In retrospect, it would be great to hear some of them, such as Supertramp. But in terms of publicly available recordings with worthy sound quality, this mostly consists of Terry Reid's full set, since that had been officially released on album, plus a few other songs here and there.
Apparently, David Bromberg was the highlight of the first day of the festival. But only one song of his is here, because it was featured in "Message of Love," the movie about the festival. It seems to be the only song here from the first day, August 26, 1970. So for simplicity's sake I only have August 27, 1970 in the album title.
I would be especially intrigued to hear the full set of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. Both of them were in exile in Britain at the time due to the fact that a repressive dictatorship was in charge of Brazil. Frustratingly, all there is here is about a minute and a half of music, not even one complete song. They were experimenting with writing songs in English at the time, and this one is in English. I figure it's better to have this little bit than nothing at all, if only to remember their involvement in the festival.
By the way, Rolling Stone Magazine reported this about the Gil and Veloso set: "With 13 pals, 11 of whom clapped and sang along, from within a gargantuan party-sized red plastic dress, they beat half an hour’s beautific bossa nova. One by one those in the red dress shed it, naked, but coyly avoiding full fronted exposure as they swayed off stage, leaving behind a delighted audience."
By 1970, Kris Kristofferson was already making waves as a talented country music songwriter, and he later would become quite famous. But his first solo album had only been released two months prior to this concert, and it had sold poorly in Britain. By all accounts, his set was a disaster. The crowd wasn't keen on country music, and apparently he really lost them with the song "Blame It on the Stones." The song was a satire, and he was actually defending the Rolling Stones, but just judging from the chorus, the audience thought he was attacking the Stones. To make matters worse, there was a problem with the sound system at the time, so the audience could barely hear him.
Things went so badly that he was given another time slot a couple of days later in the festival. That went much better. But chance has it that we have three songs from his first set, and none from his second set. Even though he was practically booed off the stage, you can't really tell from the audio here, other than some of his banter between songs.
I know for a fact that his entire set is publicly available, and with the same excellent sound quality as the three songs here. However, it's very rare. I tracked down one person who commented about having it in a social media post, but that person wasn't willing to share it with me. If any of you have it, please share, so I can add it in. I also found reference to the full Sly and the Family Stone set from later in the festival being publicly available, but very hard to find. I'm lacking the first three songs ("Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," "M'Lady," and "Sing a Simple Song"). So if anyone has that, or anything else I'm missing in worthy sound quality, please let me know!
Anyway, 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.
Note that this album is kind of a strange one, with a bunch of different artists often with only a couple of songs. But the vast majority of the Isle of Wight albums to come will feature one set per album, usually full sets. Taken as a whole, if you're a fan of the music from this era, it has to be one of the greatest concert recordings of all time.
This album is an hour and 37 minutes long.
01 Mr. Bojangles (David Bromberg)
02 Introduction (Gilberto Gil & Caetano Veloso)
03 Shoot Me Dead (Gilberto Gil & Caetano Veloso)
04 talk (Kris Kristofferson)
05 Blame It on the Stones (Kris Kristofferson)
06 The Pilgrim, Chapter 33 (Kris Kristofferson)
07 talk (Kris Kristofferson)
08 Me and Bobby McGee (Kris Kristofferson)
09 talk (Terry Reid)
10 Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace (Terry Reid)
11 Things to Try (Terry Reid)
12 C'mon Mary (Terry Reid)
13 talk (Terry Reid)
14 Silver White Light (Terry Reid)
15 July (Terry Reid)
16 Without Expression (Terry Reid)
17 Dean (Terry Reid)
18 No Good Situation (Terry Reid)
19 talk (Terry Reid)
20 Rich Kid Blues (Terry Reid)
21 To Be Alone with You (Terry Reid)
22 talk (Gracious)
23 Super Nova (Gracious)
24 talk (Gracious)
25 Once on a Windy Day (Gracious)
26 Amazing Grace (Great Awakening)
https://www.imagenetz.de/e4pWq
The cover is a photo of Terry Reid taken at this exact concert.
