Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, Varsity Stadium, Toronto, Canada, 9-13-1969, Part 1: Chicago

It's time to post another big and famous rock festival. This one is the "Toronto Rock and Roll Revival" festival from 1969. It has a fascinating history, and was particularly important for the music careers of the Beatles, most especially John Lennon. Some music from it has been lost, or at least isn't publicly available, but I was able to gather up the vast majority of music from the important acts with good to excellent sound quality. Most of this has been gathered together before, but I was able to make drastic sound quality improvements to most of the music. There's enough for eight albums, presented in the correct chronological order. Here's the first one, Chicago. (Just for that year, they were known as "Chicago Transit Authority.")

Before I get to talking about the music on this album, I find want to set the scene of the festival as a whole. I found an article with an excellent summary, so I post a section of that here:

Promoters John Brower and Kenny Walker, fresh off producing a two-day event at Varsity Stadium at the University of Toronto that June, were intrigued by an event held a few weeks earlier in Detroit. Billed as the First Annual Rock and Roll Revival, the gig featured local heroes the Stooges and the MC5, along with Chuck Berry, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and Dr. John. Could they pull off something similar in Toronto?

They set about planning the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, focusing on booking acts from the early days of rock and roll. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Screaming Lord Sutch, and Gene Vincent were contracted to perform. A new group called the Alice Cooper Band signed on for double duty. Not only would they get their own set, but they would act as the back-up band for Vincent. The Chicago Transit Authority (later just plain Chicago), brought some jazz-rock fusion to the bill. The Doors were brought in as headliners at great expense.

A stellar lineup in retrospect, but at the time no one cared. Advance ticket sales were awful. When backers George and Thor Eaton (owners of a Canadian department store chain) pulled their support, Bower and Walker, now deep in hock and facing total financial obliteration, came close to cancelling the show.  

Here's the link to the whole article:

https://globalnews.ca/news/5855287/toronto-1969-music-festival-beatles-john-lennon/

And while I'm at it, here's the Wikipedia page about this festival as a whole:

Toronto Rock and Roll Revival - Wikipedia 

At this point, the producers were desperate. To at least break even, they needed to sell 9,000 tickets out of the 20,000 available for the venue, but so far they'd only sold 2,000. The problem was the 1950s stars making up most of the festival were considered has-beens in 1969. (This concert would be the start of a revival of 1950s rock music that would get a lot bigger in the 1970s.) And the main headliners, the Doors, were at a low point in 1969, due to lead singer Jim Morrison getting arrested for public indecency earlier in the years. Most of their concerts that year had to be cancelled altogether.

But then, producer Kim Fowley, who had been hired to be the official emcee of the event, had an idea: why not call up John Lennon of the Beatles and see if he'd want to attend the concert? After all, the lineup was packed with his musical heroes. The promoters didn't dare hope that he would actually perform, since none of the Beatles had been performing live since 1966. But they hoped that his mere presence would create excitement and boost ticket sales. Promoter John Brower later said, "It sounded like a Hail Mary. Which it was."

Brower managed to reach Apple Records in the middle of the day on September 12th, London time, only a day before the concert. Luckily for him, Lennon happened to be there. Even more luckily, a journalist from Toronto named Ritchie Yorke happened to be in the building, waiting to interview George Harrison. Lennon knew Yorke was there, and was from Toronto, so he found Yorke and asked him about these promoters who were calling. Yorke was able to confirm they were legitimate promoters who had a good track record. Brower later said, "Had Ritchie not been at Apple, John Lennon might have thought that we were just a couple of crazy kids calling him on the phone."

Brower told Lennon about all the 1950s stars already signed up, knowing those were his musical heroes, and asked Lennon to be the emcee. Lennon got excited. "Really? You have all these acts?" Brower replied, "Yes. I can't pay you, but I can get you first-class plane tickets." To Brower's very great and happy surprise, Lennon replied, "Yeah, I'll come, but I want to play." He didn't even ask to be paid.

I'll explain more about what happened with Lennon and his performance later. But due to Lennon's participation, it was decided not to cancel the festival after all. The only problem was, nobody could really believe that Lennon was going to show up, much less participate. It was common for rumors to spread about famous guest stars showing up at rock festivals at the time. Often, promoters pushed outright lies like that to boost ticket sales. The Toronto mainstream media assumed that was the case here, since having Lennon perform seemed so unbelievable. To make matters worse, Brewer was known for previously lying about Beatle George Harrison attending a Toronto movie premiere he was promoting in order to boost disappointing sales.

Brewer even went to the manager of the most popular rock radio station in Toronto and played him a recording he'd made of a phone call to a secretary at Apple Records to prove that Lennon was coming. The manager assumed the recordings were fake since the call was to a woman, who could have been anybody, instead of one of the earlier calls with Lennon himself. (Apparently, Brewer didn't think to record those calls.) The recording added that guitar hero Eric Clapton would be playing with Lennon as well, which made the claim seem even more improbable. Just to be sure, the manager called up Allen Klein, who was kind of managing the Beatles at the time, and asked if this story was true. Things were moving so fast that Klein wasn't aware of what Lennon was doing, and stated that the Lennon would not be coming. Thus, the manager refused to play the tape recording on air or otherwise promote the festival. 

Thus, by the time the festival started, ticket sales were still disappointing. However, a radio DJ in Detroit believed Brewer and heavily promoted the festival, telling the audience that Lennon (and Clapton) would perform. So that meant more than half of the tickets were sold by the time the festival started, mostly consisting of people from Detroit. 

Chicago wasn't the very first act to go on stage at the festival, but they were one of the first. Keep in mind that while their debut album, "Chicago Transit Authority," had been released in April, and it had been critically acclaimed, sales were slow at first. Only one single was released from this album before this festival happened, "Questions 67 and 68," and that only made it to Number 71 on the U.S. singles chart. Another single, "Beginnings," would be released a month later, and it wouldn't make the singles chart at all. Only later, after the band's sales soared in 1970, were those two singles re-released, finally becoming big hits.

Note that there are some other bands who performed where I wasn't able to find any recordings of them from this festival at all: Whiskey Howl, Milkwood, Flapping, Nucleus, Junior Walker and the All Stars, Doug Kershaw, Gene Vincent, and Screaming Lord Sutch. The first four names I just mentioned were Canadian acts. It would have been especially nice to have recordings of Junior Walker and the All Stars and Gene Vincent, since they are well known names, but alas, I couldn't find any. Milkwood, Doug Kershaw, and Gene Vincent performed much later in the show. I don't know about the timing of the other acts, except that Nucleus went on first.

The festival started around ten in the morning. Although I don't know the exact timing of the acts, I'm pretty confident that when Chicago went on stage, it still wasn't confirmed that Lennon would be attending. The confirmation came when Lennon gave a quick press conference in London right before he got on a plane to cross the Atlantic Ocean. That took place about two in the afternoon, Toronto time. Thus, when Chicago performed, there were about 5,000 unsold tickets out of 20,000, so it was still a pretty good crowd.

There are many great rock festivals that are all but forgotten today due to a lack of audio and/or video recordings from them. But in this case, we got lucky because D. A. Pennebaker, who had already made the documentaries "Don't Look Back" about a 1965 Bob Dylan tour and "Monterey Pop" about the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, decided to make a documentary about this festival too. It would be released in 1971 under the title "Sweet Toronto." It wouldn't do well, however, because he wouldn't get permission to use footage from Lennon's set. However, because of Pennebaker's involvement, the performances of most of the artists were recorded and filmed with soundboard quality, although only a couple of sets have been officially released.

This Chicago set has been released, kind of. I believe it's only come out as a "grey market" release, meaning it's one the band didn't approve and doesn't get any profits from (thanks to loose copyright laws in Europe). I found a couple of versions, and used the best one. This appears to be a soundboard source. However, the vocals were mixed low. I boosted them for all the songs with the use of the UVR5 audio editing program. 

Another problem was the last song, "Beginnings," faded out with less than a minute to go. I found another soundboard bootleg of a concert in San Francisco from the same year and used that to patch in the missing portion. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in its title. 

Yet another problem was that there often wasn't a reasonable amount of time for cheering at the end of each song. So I took bits of applause that did exist from some ends of songs and patched them in to the ends of other songs. There should be a more natural flow from song to song now.

By the way, in addition to the 1971 "Sweet Toronto" documentary mentioned above, in 2022, a new documentary movie about the festival was released, called, "REVIVAL69: The Concert that Rocked the World." It uses lots of footage from the original documentary, plus footage of Lennon's set not allowed in the original, plus interviews with surviving musicians. I highly recommend it.

Here's a review of the documentary in the Guardian, which also provides more interesting stories about the festival:

The other 1969 concert that changed music: ‘one of the most important stories in rock history’ | Documentary films | The Guardian 

This album is 58 minutes long. 

01 talk (Chicago)
02 Introduction (Chicago)
03 South California Purples (Chicago)
04 talk (Chicago)
05 25 or 6 to 4 (Chicago)
06 Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is (Chicago)
07 I'm a Man (Chicago)
08 Questions 67 and 68 (Chicago)
09 Liberation [Instrumental] (Chicago)
10 talk (Chicago)
11 Beginnings [Edit] (Chicago)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/9J7NxMWL

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/ATu1bZHxopXYYDR/file

The cover photo of singer Peter Cetera is from this exact concert. It's a screenshot I took from one of the documentaries about this concert.