Internet Concert Venues

By Steven Rosen

(This article appeared in the Summer, 2009, issue of GRAMMY [a registered trademark] Magazine)

This seems like a good day to attend a concert – at 6 a.m. In fact, it seemed like a good day to spend the whole morning attending concerts...on the Internet. Because of webcasting and archiving of audio and video information, the Internet has become an international concert venue – ongoing 24/7.

So I start by going to Live From Daryl’s House (www.livefromdarylshouse.com), a monthly live-performance program – presented like a homey television show – featuring Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates fame. The newest episode is a retrospective designed to drive traffic to past shows, but it nonetheless features some wonderful new music.

Hall and his four-piece band bridge older segments by performing live some favorite oldies, like Ruby & the Romantics’ ethereal “Our Day Will Come,” Dylan’s intense “You’re a Big Girl Now,” and Paul Butterfield Band’s imploringly bluesy “In My Own Dream.” With the camera so close, it’s like being front row in an intimate folk club…with a superstar singing.

After Hall, it’s time to go to Paris for a short concert on La Blogotheque (www.blogotheque.net), one of a number of international video music blogs in which music enthusiasts in various cities film visiting acts – often indie-rockers – performing short sets in unusual settings.

I choose to watch I’m From Barcelona, a much-praised English-singing Swedish band. The concert features the group’s shaggy Emanuel Lundgren walking down a busy street at night with acoustic guitar, singing the irresistibly tuneful “We’re From Barcelona” as young people follow behind him clapping and chanting. It is so magnifique I go to They Shoot Music, Don’t They (www.theyshootmusic.at) to watch Lundgren do something similar outside a Vienna shopping center.

I move to London’s Black Cab Sessions (www.blackcabsessions.com), with its motto “One Song. One Take. One Cab.” Among its many mini-concerts is a must-see featuring Brian Wilson and four members of his band (including one with a mini-keyboard) jammed into a cab and singing the standard “That Lucky Old Sun” barbershop-style. (It’s the title song from his recent album.) The camerawork is dim and shaky but manages to focus on a relaxed Wilson enjoying himself so much he shifts to “California Girls” before arriving at his destination.

Following that, it’s over to the audio selections at Wolfgang’s Vault’s Concert Vault (www.concerts.wolfgangsvault.com), which has just added a 1987 soundboard-recorded outdoor show by the Jerry Garcia Band from French’s Camp in Piercy, Calif. Among his songs is a plaintively soulful version of the same “That Lucky Old Sun.”

Here in the U.S., National Public Radio (www.npr.org) has enthusiastically embraced the Internet for all sorts of live-music programs, including full concerts recorded on location. I find a brand-new 1½-hour audio-streamed New York club date by veteran New Orleans pianist Allen Toussaint and his four-piece Bright Mississippi Band. He elegantly performs jazz classics from his new album, “The Bright Mississippi,” and even does “Southern Nights,” the hit he wrote for Glen Campbell. (The concert was also broadcast live on New York’s WBGO-FM, a jazz station.)

After that, it’s a quick visit to NPR’s delightful Tiny Desk Concerts site to watch the timelessly sexy Tom Jones promoting his recent “24 Hours” album by doing four songs before a wowed NPR office staff in Washington, D.C.

For one final concert before a break, I find the My Damn Channel network (www.mydamnchannel.com), where the hipster record producer and musician Don Was has his own channel. There, I tune into a Jill Sobule concert shot in black-and-white from a furniture outlet in North Hollywood. (Was produced Sobule’s new album, “California Years.”) This is a pilot for a planned Internet series called Wasmopolitan Dance Party, a spoof on 1960s-era local rock-music shows. Sobule performs four acoustic songs for fans and furniture-shoppers alike. At one point, she sings from a dinette chair that’s part of a seven-piece set retailing for just $650. The whole thing is surreal – doubtlessly what Was had in mind.

Not bad – eight concerts before lunch!

Review: Michael Lang's The Road to Woodstock

Woodstock Festival organizer Michael Lang recalls how it was born, and its cultural and political legacy
By Steven Rosen
Special to The Denver Post
(This ran 07/19/2009)

At the conclusion of "The Road to Woodstock" — a memoir by the prime organizer of the famous rock festival published on the eve of its 40th anniversary — the author says the road from Woodstock led to President Barack Obama's election.

"During a time of great challenges in America, a community grew out of Woodstock," Michael Lang writes. "Stemming from similar values and aspirations, a sense of possibility and hope was born and spread around the globe. . . .You see it in the many green movements, in grassroots organizations like MoveOn, and in what some pundits have called a Woodstock moment, the election of our first African-American president. As Jimi Hendrix recast the national anthem (at a Woodstock performance)in the mud, he gave voice to a future where a Barack Obama could bring change to America and hope to the world."

Whether you think Woodstock led to Obama's victory, or that the Republicans' mishandling of the economy and war in Iraq had more to do with it, it's a provocative reading of the festival's legacy — his festival's legacy — by Lang.

This book could use more such deep thinking about Woodstock's meaning, not just to American culture at large but to the rest of Lang's personal and professional life. (He has remained in the entertainment business.) Instead it has lots of details about how the fest went down — some interesting, too much dryly mundane.

Lang was only 24, a Brooklyn-born longhaired, laid-back head shop owner in Miami, who had staged one money- losing fest there, when he hatched Woodstock. He and three partners staged the outdoor Woodstock Music and Art Fair in White Lake/Bethel, N.Y., for upward of 400,000 young, countercultural-leaning fans during Aug. 15-17, 1969.
The attendees overwhelmed the site, capturing the nation's attention by braving rainy weather, massive traffic jams and lack of adequate food and shelter to hear the new, psychedelized rock music of the day.

They took solace in the peaceful communal spirit (often aided by drugs) that came from listening to 31 musical acts, among them heroes like Joan Baez, the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Country Joe and the Fish. (There were also a few odder choices, like rock-revivalists Sha Na Na.)

Hendrix closed the show on the morning of the 18th with a set that included his startling deconstruction and revision of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Overall, Lang says, Woodstock was a rare historical moment of mass utopian joy, even though there were three deaths.

But the fest lost money, in part because Lang's Woodstock Ventures had to make it free to handle the arrival of so many kids without tickets. But an Oscar-winning documentary and its soundtrack album helped make the Woodstock enterprise valuable.

Lang's information on how the festival occurred, including the minutiae about the financial, legal and technical challenges, is thorough. This is interesting to a point, but the travails are pretty well known by now. The town of Wallkill, N.Y., where the event was supposed to be held, canceled it at the last moment, creating a panic until the producers found a dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, willing to rent his land.

The author's account of all this wrangling is anticlimactic now. He does reveal that Yasgur got a $50,000 fee plus $75,000 to be held in escrow in case of damages.
It's especially worth noting that the relative peacefulness amid Woodstock's chaos wasn't by accident. Lang worked hard to hire an experienced security force that wouldn't antagonize a crowd that gate-crashed, used drugs and sometimes shed a few more clothes than public decency laws allowed.

Before Woodstock, Lang visited the June 27-29 Denver Pop Festival, where police in riot gear fought with rowdy youths and sprayed the crowd with tear gas trying to clear the entrance. "There I ran head-on into everything I wanted to avoid at Woodstock," Lang writes.

Most interesting in "Road to Woodstock" is how Lang made the musical choices he did for Woodstock — who he didn't want to perform (Rolling Stones, who would overwhelm the other acts); who he wanted but couldn't get (Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues); who wanted to play but couldn't (John Lennon); who did play but acted like jerks (the Who, whose leader, Pete Townshend, clobbered radical activist Abbie Hoffman with his guitar on stage).

There are also strange connections. One of Lang's partners, Artie Kornfeld, got a fest-saving, lucrative film deal from Warner Bros. Pictures because its president had once booked the Cowsills, a family- member, teen-pop band ("Indian Lake") that Kornfeld had once managed. Strangest of all, Lang wanted to close the festival with cowboy star Roy Rogers singing "Happy Trails." He would have followed Hendrix, but turned it down.

Since Woodstock performances made stars out of many musicians (Richie Havens, Ten Years After, Melanie, Joe Cocker, Santana), there is also a fascinating "there but for fortune" aspect to this book.

For instance, one person who never got to play (and never had much of a career) was the one who inspired the whole thing — a bluesy folk singer named Ellen McElwaine. Lang saw her perform at a small outdoor concert in the rural, artsy New York community of Woodstock after moving there in summer 1968. He thought the event so cool he got the idea for a bigger event in the area.

Because Lang waited so long to write this, he needed some help. Co-author Holly George-Warren conducted a lot of secondary interviews with Woodstock-related figures that are interspersed oral-history style throughout the book. She is excellent at research, as she showed in her own Gene Autry biography, "Public Cowboy No. One," but as often as not that material gets in the way here.

And to get insight from the musicians and others who were at Woodstock, the book uses older published material, including excerpts from some, like Jerry Garcia and activist Hoffman, who are long dead.

I'm sure Lang could have filled this book himself if he'd fleshed out his remembrances and ideas about Woodstock's legacy more.

The Road to Woodstock: From the Man Behind the Legendary Festival, by Michael Lang with Holly George-Warren, $29.99