Isle of Wight '70: Between Woodstock and Altamont

For decades, the narrative about the great rock festivals of the 1960s has centered on two from 1969: Woodstock and Altamont. Yin and yang.

The first symbolized everything great about these mass events and the counterculture that supported it. An impromptu community based on peace, love and music. The second, the dark side -- brutal intimidation (and murder) of meek innocents by a violent organization, the Hell’s Angels, able to gain control through unchallenged brute strength.

Aiding that story line has been the ongoing popularity of films about each -- Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 Woodstock won an Oscar for its footage of the exciting music and ecstatic half million or so attendees. The Maysles Brothers’ Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour and also released in 1970, captured the frightening events of Altamont, including the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter amid a crowd of some 300,000.

But lately, a third festival -- and an alternative view of the 1960s rock gatherings -- has been emerging as equally important: Isle of Wight 1970. It was where violence was negotiated and tempered by the crowd and performers, proof that the youth culture of the era could face adversity without either being scared or turning into a mob. It could also stand up to intimidation by police dogs meant to scare people.

And a brand new DVD/CD package of Leonard Cohen’s strangely mesmerizing, middle-of-the-night set there -- Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 -- provides valuable new material for our emerging Isle of Wight studies.

Cohen faced a testy, potentially disruptive crowd -- it had chased Kris Kristofferson from the stage earlier that night and may have started a stage fire during Jimi Hendrix’s set -- and touched its need for contemplative quietude. And art.

“When he came on, his banter identified himself with the audience and their ideals,” recalls Murray Lerner, the documentary director whose footage was used for the Cohen DVD. “He was saying he was sympathetic to their radical ideals -- that helped. And I think the magic of his lyrics helped; they get into the psyche. That’s a little different from most other performers -- they’re not poets.”

Cohen was touring with a band of Nashville studio musicians called the Army -- led by his producer, Bob Johnston, on keyboards -- doing mostly material from his first two albums. He brought his talents as a published poet to his finely crafted yet mysterious lyrics. He had to go on at 2:30 a.m. on the last night, after the Hendrix set. He looked half asleep, unshaven with his thick curly hair unruly. He wore a safari jacket and slacks -- hardly a hippie. But, as the new DVD shows, he was accepted as one of them.

Since it was the third -- and last, for a long time -- of the Isle of Wight rock festivals off the coast of Great Britain, the 1970 edition very much belongs to the 1960s. Isle of Wight overall is probably best known in the States for its 1969 edition, where Bob Dylan chose to resume performing after a three-year absence by performing in his short-lived sing-songy croon phase.

But the five-day 1970 festival at the end of August drew some 600,000 people. Its line-up was as diverse and interesting as Woodstock’s -- including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Jethro Tull, Donovan, Ten Years After, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Sly & the Family Stone, Free, John Sebastian, Procol Harum, Doors, Pentangle, Richie Havens…even Tiny Tim.

And like Altamont, it was troubled. Hippies and radicals, believing that music should be free and angered that the promoters used dogs to patrol, eventually battered down a makeshift wall to get inside. There, some harangued staff and even performers -- driving Kristofferson from the stage (he told his band to prepare to be shot) and almost reducing Mitchell to tears when one unhinged fellow interrupted her after she finished “Woodstock” and tried to make a speech. It was frightening.

And, yet, music occurred and hundreds of thousands of fans had the time of their lives. Nobody died -- unlike Woodstock (where three died) and Altamont (four fatalities). The crowd and the performers, somehow, were able to negotiate the rough spots without making it worse and, in some cases, making the music redemptive.

This hasn’t been realized about Isle of Wight 70 because there had been very little documentary footage available for a long time. This despite the fact Murray Lerner, the American director of Festival, about the Newport Folk Festival, was there with a crew of nine shooting as much as possible. And producer Teo Macero, sent by Columbia Records to record Davis’ set, taped much else.

Only 25 years after the festival did Lerner’s Isle of Wight film emerge -- 1995’s Message to Love -- and even then it was basically a straight-to-DVD release, with just limited theatrical distribution. (There was an accompanying CD.) It featured music, but kept cutting to the violence and the behind-scenes business dealings -- at one point promoters count stacks of money—minimal.

“There was violence. We were scared when we went into the crowd,” Lerner says. “From time to time, they yelled, ‘Get the camera.’ But interestingly, there were no fatalities and at Woodstock there were. Partly I made my film in reaction to the Woodstock film, which I didn’t think was an accurate picture. It didn’t show the negative side, which I thought there was.”

Lerner’s film didn’t feature a lot of uninterrupted performances of songs -- many were mere snippets. So while it prompted new interest in the festival, it also left unfulfilled the demand from those who wanted to see the historic performances by so many now-classic artists.

Seemingly every year since has brought a new DVD drawn from Lerner’s footage devoted to individual sets. There are ones by Hendrix, Davis, the Who, ELP and Jethro Tull out there. And new this year are ones by the Moody Blues and Leonard Cohen, both of which feature bits and pieces of new interviews. (Cohen was not interviewed for his DVD.)

The newly available Cohen film is especially interesting for its look of a performer far different from the self-assured septuagenarian master who has been touring this year, after a long hiatus. You might think he would be the wrong guy to entertain a half million+ rock-festgoers, many of them in a foul mood, given his extremely introspective approach to music and his struggling-for-tunefulness voice.

Yet his honesty and poetic sensitivity won them over. Looking at the Isle crowd, after asking them to light matches so he can see them, Cohen intoned “it’s a large nation” but must get stronger before it can claim its own land -- like the Isle of Wight. Even the suicide tale preceding encore “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” had a sense of compassion to it -- “she was right where you are now but there was no one else around,” Cohen told the crowd. And his band played just the right tempo for his voice.

The music on the Moody Blues DVD -- Threshold of a Dream -- doesn’t hold up as well as Cohen. It’s too overtly pretty. However, in a new interview for the DVD, Moody John Lodge does get at something important about Isle of Wight:

“People wanted peace, a nice life, harmony,” he says. “That’s why the radical element didn’t take over. The power of the audience actually stopped them -- the power of the music, the power of the energy within the people.”

Incidentally, Lerner tells an unusual story about why this Isle of Wight footage took 25 years to start to emerge (there was an earlier Hendrix package available). Unlike Woodstock or Altamont, there was no film contract in place before the event. He says the promoters didn’t want one.

But, he says, CBS Films had a right to first refusal because Columbia Records had recorded the sets. So sometime in the early 1970s he brought his footage to CBS Films, which liked it and arranged for a screening with the record label -- headed by Clive Davis.

“(He) walked into a screening with like 20 people and when Tiny Tim came on, he got up and walked out, because he didn’t like him,” Lerner says. “That was the end of it; the record company didn’t want it. From then on we were struggling.”

His film finally came out with funding from the BBC when the 25th anniversary was approaching.

Lerner would now like to do a Live at Isle of Wight DVD devoted exclusively to -- who else? -- Tiny Tim.

“I have a lot of footage of Tiny Tim and would love to do a Tiny Tim at Isle of Wight, Lerner says. “You would think he’d be the most commercial performer in the world from his reception at Isle of Wight, but it was a campy kind of positivity. But it was a great act, a great set he gave.”

— Steven Rosen
SonicBoomers.com
10/23/2009