As I mentioned in the write-up for the previous album, the huge crowd grew troublesome during Joni Mitchell's set, although it was not the fault of Mitchell or her excellent performance. Then, somewhat improbably, Tiny Tim put the crowd in a good mood again. The crowd of over half a million people then stayed in a good mood for the rest of the day, including having a positive reaction to Miles Davis, despite his jazz style being quite different from the music of nearly all the other acts.
Tiny Tim has to be the most unlikely star of the 1960s. Who could have imagined that playing ukelele and singing falsetto versions of songs from the 1920s and earlier would be a winning formula? But he had a hit with the song "Tiptoe through the Tulips" (which was first released in 1929).
Unfortunately, when it comes to Tiny Tim's set, only three songs are available here. "There'll Always Be an England" is from "Message to Love" documentary about the festival. The other two songs are from bootleg and have rougher sound quality, but still sound acceptable to my ears.
Murray Lerner, who made the "Message to Love" documentary, had this to say about Miles Davis' performance: "Miles Davis was a surprise - and really unusual. It was a revelation. The crowd really liked it. He went on, played, waved his hand at that audience and walked off. He played for approximately 38 minutes straight, without stopping."
By the way, a story goes that when Davis walked off stage, he was asked the name of the song he'd just played, and he replied, "Call It Anything." As a result, a portion of his set was available under the that name on the 1971 album "The First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies." But that's really just the last few songs of his set lumped together. We know the actual names of the songs because a DVD of his entire set was released in 2004.
This album is 41 minutes long.
Note that the track count continues where the last album left off. I keep going with that numbering through the rest of the August 29th sets. Also note that the track numbers have an extra digit. That's because there are over 100 songs in total for the whole day.
051 There'll Always Be an England (Tiny Tim)
052 Two Times a Day (Tiny Tim)
053 talk (Tiny Tim)
054 Love's Ship (Tiny Tim)
055 Directions [Instrumental] (Miles Davis)
056 Bitches Brew [Instrumental] (Miles Davis)
057 It's About That Time [Instrumental] (Miles Davis)
058 Sanctuary [Instrumental] (Miles Davis)
059 Spanish Key [Instrumental] (Miles Davis)
060 The Theme [Instrumental] (Miles Davis)
The cover photo of Davis comes from this exact concert.
What I liked about Tiny Tim's performance at the time is that the Woodstock movie had recently come out from the year before, and everyone was going around talking about the Isle Of Wight festival as "the new Woodstock" and using American hippie slang. Then Tiny Tim comes on and (despite being American) sings "There'll Always Be an England", and suddenly the crowd forgot about emulating America and felt all British again in a "Last Night of the Proms" sort of way. Hard to explain the feeling, but it was fun.
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