There were a lot of great rock festivals in 1960s that are largely forgotten now because of the lack of good audio or video recordings from them. Such as this one. If you're a fan of classic rock from that era, the lineup of acts from this two-day-long festival is impressive. First, the big names: the Doors, Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, the Steve Miller Band, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, the Youngbloods, the Electric Flag, Kaleidoscope, Taj Mahal, and Ravi Shankar. There also were lesser knowns: the Sons of Champlin, People, the Loading Zone, Trans Atlantic Flash, Smokestack Lightning, Chrome Syrcus, the Indian Head Band, the Dirty Blues Band, Mint Tattoo, and the New Mourning Reign. Additionally, the Grateful Dead weren't scheduled to play, but performed a set anyway. And apparently, Eric Burdon and the New Animals were on the bill but didn't perform for some reason.
Unfortunately, I don't have most of that music, but I was able to find most of the big names: the Youngbloods, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Steve Miller Band, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, and the Electric Flag. The big miss, unfortunately, is the Doors. Jefferson Airplane was the main headliner (and final act) on the first day of the festival, and the Doors was the same for the second and last day of the festival. But while there's a few minutes of video of the Doors performance that's survived, it has no sound, and there isn't any audio bootleg.
It seems there are two sources that someone put together. One was just an ordinary taper in the crowd. The other was Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, who taped some of the acts from or near the stage. The Kaukonen taped parts sound slightly better, but only slightly. I believe he taped the Big Brother and the Holding Company set, plus just the second half of his own band's set, Jefferson Airplane.
There's a Wikipedia entry about this festival, but it says very little. Here's the link:
Northern California Folk-Rock Festival (1968) - Wikipedia
However, there's a Doors fan website that has a lot more pictures and information about the festival, here:
The Doors | Northern California Folk Rock Festival 1968
The festival was created and promoted by a person named Bob Blodgett. He did the festival again in 1969. I've posted the Jimi Hendrix set from that, which can be found here:
https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2026/01/jimi-hendrix-northern-california-folk.html
That seems to be the only set from the 1969 festival that's available. But there was some controversy about the 1969 festival, because Blodgett claimed some acts like Led Zeppelin would be performing, when they hadn't even been contacted. He did this to help drive ticket sales, but it backfired. It ruined his reputation as a festival promoter, so there was no 1970 version.
That link to the Doors fan site includes a photocopy of an article in the San Francisco Examiner reviewing both days of the festival. I'll quote some interesting parts of it here: "There is little doubt that the capacity of the flat, drab arena was reached both days, especially yesterday when listening and squatting space was at a premium even when the rains came, along with the Doors, at about six o'clock. The sound system was excellent and most of the groups performed splendidly. But overall production was disgraceful, particularly considering the 28,000 tickets sold for a gross of close to $100,000. Refreshment facilities were abominable, relaxation was impossible on the hot, dirty field (no seats, folks), and the clumsy staging required lengthy pauses between each presentation, when a split stage could easily have enabled each succeeding band to set up in advance.
"Yesterday's involvement of the Hell's Angels as a free-loading, swaggering stage guard, treated as honored guests (and announced as "our guardians") was wholly uncalled for and an obvious concession to intimidation. but sour grapes thus strewn, this observer still got great kicks out of all manner of performances. I was regularly surprised that the crowd (about two-thirds from the South Bay area, I'd say) was so passive at the end of magnificent presentations."
Here's a direct link to the entire article, if you're curious:
San Francisco Examiner Concert Review
Now, let me get to the sound quality issue. I decided to try to improve the sound quality of the recordings of this festival because while they come from audience boots, I sensed they had potential to sound a lot better. Plus, a festival from all the way back in 1968 with this line-up deserves to be preserved. So I put a lot of work into this. Typically, I ran each song through audio editing programs multiple times. With the source being an audience boot, one frequent problem was the sound of the crowd being heard during the songs. There was constant background noise. But worse, sometimes one could hear snippets of conversations of people nearby. Running the files through the MVSEP crowd noise filter helped a lot. I also ran the songs through MVSEP to separate the vocals from the instruments. Usually, I boosted the vocals relative to the instruments before putting the two parts back together again. While the vocals were separated, I often was able to delete conversations. But occasionally people would be talking while someone was singing. Sometimes, I was able to fix that, by running that song through MVSEP again and separating out different vocals. But that only worked maybe half of the time, so there's still some annoying talking heard here and there.
So that was a lot of fixing there. But there were additional problems. One really annoying problem was that there was a fair amount of hiss, and worse, a high buzzing sound that came and went. I ran all the songs through an MVSEP denoise filter. That got rid of most of the hiss. I took extra steps to deal with the buzzing sound. Luckily, it usually was the worst during the times between songs. That meant I could use a noise reduction filter against those parts, since I only use that during talking, not music, because it damages the music. Also, for the songs with the most buzzing, I used MVSEP yet again to separate each instrument onto its own track (guitar, bass, drums, piano, etc...). Sometimes I got lucky, and the buzzing would only be on a track that otherwise was silent, so I was able to wipe more of the buzzing that way. But still, there's some buzzing that remains, often at a lower volume than before. It's not on all the sets from this festival, but one can still hear some of it in this Youngbloods set.
There were other problems as well. One common problem with bootlegs with this era is that tapers would frequently turn tape recorders off and on between songs in order to save tape. That did happen a lot in this case, but at least the taper managed to turn the recording back on in time to capture much of the banter. But also, occasionally the taper didn't resume taping until after the song had already started. That happened here with the song "Let's Get Together." About the first minute was missing. So I filled that in with another recording from the era. It sounds somewhat better, so you can probably hear the difference between the two parts. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in its title.
I edited these albums months before posting them, so I forget why "Rain Song" also has "[Edit]" in its title. But I think it's because I copied and pasted one part of the song over another part in order to get rid of some loud talking or some other problem like that. Whatever I did, I can't tell what it is anymore from listening, so I must have done a good job! ;)
I had yet more problems with the applause at the ends of some songs. Again, due to the tape recorder getting turned off and on, the applause often got prematurely cut off. So I patched in applause from the ends of other songs to make sure all songs had a reasonable amount.
One last point. I'm not entirely sure about the order of the performances. But if you look at the images from that Doors fan site I linked to above, there are a couple of images that show the scheduled order of the bands in the festival. So I went with that order. But it's possible there were some changes to the schedule, I don't know. And the Youngbloods were listed as performing on both dates of the festival. I don't know if that's what they actually did. But the bootleg source says this is from the first day, so I'm assuming that's true unless I get evidence otherwise.
This album is 35 minutes long.
01 talk (Youngbloods)
02 Ain't that Lovin' You Baby (Youngbloods)
03 Rain Song [Edit] (Youngbloods)
04 talk (Youngbloods)
05 Beautiful (Youngbloods)
06 talk (Youngbloods)
07 Reason to Believe (Youngbloods)
08 talk (Youngbloods)
09 On Sir Francis Drake [Instrumental] (Youngbloods)
10 talk (Youngbloods)
11 Four in the Morning (Youngbloods)
12 talk (Youngbloods)
13 Wine Song (Youngbloods)
14 talk (Youngbloods)
15 Darkness, Darkness (Youngbloods)
16 talk (Youngbloods)
17 Too Much Monkey Business (Youngbloods)
18 talk (Youngbloods)
19 Let's Get Together [Edit] (Youngbloods)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/c6sEDcNX
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/quXaD58YIG3oECi/file
I believe the cover image of Jesse Colin Young is the only one not actually from this festival. Instead, it's from Carnegie Hall in New York City, on May 30, 1970. The picture was taken indoors, but I removed the background and replaced it with blue sky to match the other ones from the festival.
The text at the top comes from a poster for the concert. I added some color to some of the words. The festival took place over two days, as I mentioned above. This is from the first day, May 18. I highlighted that date in red in that text at the top. For the sets that took place on May 19, I highlighted that text instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment