The Moody Blues

The Moody Blues are an English band originally from Erdington in the city of Birmingham. Founding members Michael Pinder and Ray Thomas performed an initially rhythm and blues-based sound in Birmingham in 1964 along with Graeme Edge and others, and were later joined by John Lodge and Justin Hayward as they inspired and evolved the progressive rock style. Among their innovations was a fusion with classical music, most notably in their seminal 1967 album Days of Future Passed.

Moody Blues has had numerous hit albums in the UK, U.S., and worldwide. They remain active as of 2009. The Moody Blues have sold in excess of 50 million albums worldwide and have been awarded 14 platinum and gold discs.

The Moody Blues formed on 4 May 1964, in Erdington, Birmingham, England. Ray Thomas, John Lodge, and Michael Pinder had been members of El Riot & the Rebels, a regionally-popular band. They disbanded when Lodge, the youngest member, went to technical college and Pinder joined the army. The pair recruited guitarist/vocalist Denny Laine, band manager-turned-drummer Graeme Edge, and bassist Clint Warwick. The five appeared as the Moody Blues for the first time in Birmingham in 1964. The name developed from a planned sponsorship from the M&B Brewery and was also a subtle reference to the Duke Ellington song, “Mood Indigo”.

Moody Blues have a lot of variation in band members. Many people joined The Moody Blues and many left, the current members in The Moody Blues starts from Justin Hayward at guitar & vocals, John Lodge at bass, guitar & vocals, Graeme Edge at drums & percussion with Norda Mullen at flute, guitar, percussion, harmonica & vocals, Paul Bliss at keyboards & guitar, Bernie Barlow at keyboards, percussion & vocals, Gordon Marshall at drums & percussion.

The Moody Blues have announced 2010 UK Tour, taking place at 14 venues in the UK. Whether or not the band plan to tour outside the UK is unknown as yet. Moody Blues 2010 UK Tour starts from 7th Sep, 2010 at Brighton Centre, Brighton, UK and ends at O2 Arena, London, UK on 25th Sep, 2010.

Moody Blues Tickets for nominal price are available at Sold Out Ticket Market. Sold Out Ticket Market is ideal for Moody Blues Tickets at affordable rates. Check out the Ticket Market for Moody Blues Tickets.

Moody Blues Tickets – £95.00
The Moody Blues Tickets – £95.00

Moody Blues Tickets at Sold Out Ticket Market
Sold Out Ticket Market for Moody Blues Tickets

Days Of Future Past was one of rock’s earliest concept albums, in many ways the Moody Blues’ answer to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Released on November 10, 1967, Days Of Future Past chronicles a day in the life of a common Englishman, dawn to dusk in a masterpiece of heavily orchestrated, flowing British psychedelic rock. It was the second studio album by the band, but bears little resemblance to the R&B tinged blues-rock sound of their first album (1965’s Go Now in the U.S. and a slightly different but simultaneous U.K. release, The Magnificent Moodies). Frustrated with the inability to score a follow-up hit to the massively popular (#10 U.S., #1 U.K.) 1964 single “Go Now!”, Denny Laine and Clint Warwick left for greener pastures (Denny to McCartney & Wings and Warwick to carpentry). Remaining members Graeme Edge, Mike Pinder and Ray Thomas recruited John Lodge and Justin Hayward to the band in late 1966, which led to a redirection of sound and style that was introduced on Days Of Future Past. The success of the album (#3 U.S., #27 U.K.) spurred the Moodies forward, and it became the first of nine straight Top 30 albums that stretched into the 1980s. Edge, Hayward and Lodge continue to practice the sound and style begun in 1967 with frequent concerts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Days Of Future Past features the hits “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Nights In White Satin.” It’s #20 on my Top 25 for 1967 and is available as download tracks from iTunes (click here) and as a CD from Amazon (click here).

Muchas veces hay músicas que desde muy pequeño se meten en nuestra mente y no sabemos de donde proceden. La que hoy os presento, quizás sea una de ellas.

Bajo “La Guerra de los mundos” se funden diversas imágenes y sonidos a lo largo del tiempo. Los jóvenes cinéfilos la asociarán a una película donde el binomio Steven Spielberg – Tom Cruise, intenta amedrentarnos de nuevo con una invasión extraterrestre, como ya lo hizo Byron Haskin en el año 1953, donde su película ganó el Oscar a los mejores efectos visuales.

Jeff Wayne

Los ávidos lectores nos apuntarán que ambas películas están basadas en el libro de Herbert George Wells del mismo título, que junto con La máquina del Tiempo, supusieron sus dos grandes éxitos. Tampoco hemos de olvidar la adaptación radiofónica de Orson Welles. Pero muy pocos se acordarán de una obra musical, una autentica joya creada por Jeff Wayne.

En el año 1978, el compositor Jeff Wayne decide realizar su particular versión musical de la Guerra de los Mundos, rodeado de grandes de la materia. Para la ocasión contó con Phil Lynott, cantante y bajista de los Thin Lizzy, con Justin Hayward, cantante y guitarrista de los The Moody Blues, con David Essex y  Julie Covington. La guinda a tan magnífico reparto, la puso el actor Richard Burton, que hizo las veces de narrador.

Richard Burton

Musicalmente esta obra iba contracorriente a los cánones de la época (finales de los 70). Esto no impidió que se vendiesen millones de copias de su trabajo. Bajo riffs de guitarra y teclados que nos evocan en cuanto los oímos a los primeros sintetizadores, se esconde una auténtica obra de rock sinfónico, que junto con las narraciones de Richard Burton, envuelven al oyente en una atmósfera de inquietud permanente. Se convirtió en la banda sonora más vendida en el Reino Unido, a pesar de que no fuera al uso banda sonora de ninguna película.

Fue tanto su éxito, que se realizaron versiones adaptando las narraciones al idioma de cada país y dejando inalteradas las partes cantadas. En España fue Teófilo Martínez, doblador muy conocido de la época, quien tuvo el honor de doblar a Richard Burton.

El siguiente paso que siempre quiso dar Jeff Wayne, fue el de representar su obra en directo, pero las muertes de Richard Burton, y de Phil Lynott truncaron en parte su sueño. No obstante Wayne no abandonó nunca su gran anhelo, y en el año 2006, obtuvo su recompensa.

Con un espectacular despliegue multimedia, Wayne decidió combinar para la representación de su obra, intérpretes originales con nuevas incorporaciones. Pudo contar con Justin Hayward y Chris Thompson de la formación inicial e incorporó al grupo Black Smoke Band y al  ULLAdubULLA Strings, que junto con un Richard Burton virtual, e imágenes multimedia sorprendentes, supusieron un éxito rotundo, en todas las representaciones que se dieron de la obra.

Aquí os dejo una parte de la representación de la obra musical de Jeff Wayne ( Si os da error, pinchar en HQ). Espero que os guste.

Y finalmente los más curiosos pueden descargar la obra de Jeff Wayne.

Disc 1 – The Coming of the Martians

1 The Eve of the War
2 Horsell Common and the Heat Ray
3 The Artilleryman and the Fighting Machine
4 Forever Autumn
5 Thunder Child

Disc 2 – The Earth Under the Martians

1 The Red Weed (Part 1)
2 The Spirit of Man
3 The Red Weed (Part 2)
4 Brave New World
5 Dead London
6 Epilogue (Part 1)
7 Epilogue (Part 2) NASA
The New Files 1996
8 The Spirit of Man
9 Forever Autumn (remix 96)
10 Forever Autumn (dark autumn dub)
11 The Eve of the War (mix)

http://rapidshare.com/files/27144854…sc_1.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27147564…sc_1.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27149429…sc_1.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27145640…sc_1.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27151487…sc_2.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27159875…sc_2.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27161370…sc_2.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27163262…sc_2.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27165052…sc_2.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/27149750…sc_2.part6.rar

مرد غمگین از آهنگ‌های زیبای گروه انگلیسی‌ The Moody Blues است که در دههٔ ۱۹۷۰ در آلبومی با نام The Question of Balance (مساله تعادل) عرضه شد. اما در این پست، اجرای دیگری از این آهنگ مدّ نظر است.

آلدوش (Aldoush)، خواننده متولد ایران و مقیم آمریکا است که هم اکنون در اواسط ۴۰ سالگی به سر میبرد. آلدوش خوانندگی را از سن ۱۶ سالگی آغاز کرد و در سن ۲۱ سالگی شروع به یادگیری و نواختن گیتار کرد. ادامه معرفی آلدوش رو به نقل از وبلاگ “خوشنوازان” با هم میخوانیم :”آلدوش در سال  ۱۹۷۸ (۱۳۵۷) از ایران به آمریکا مهاجرت کرد و پس از ۹ سال در سال ۱۹۸۷ (۱۳۶۶) به ایران بازگشت.او می گوید : در ایران و در آن فضا یکباره خودم را غرق در موسیقی و فرهنگی دیدم که همه سالهای جوانیم را دور از آن بودم، فرهنگ و موسیقی ایران زمین. این مسئله طبع موسیقیایی و دید من نسبت به موسیقی را کاملا عوض کرد بطوریکه پس از بازگشت به آمریکا سعی کردم در فضایی گسترده تر به موسیقی بپردازم  و با ورود به صحنه موسیقی ملل کار خود را در مسیری تازه شروع کردم.  قابل به ذکر است كه آلدوش قبلا به سبک غربی گیتار می نواخت و هیچگونه ارتباطی با موسیقی ایرانی برقرار نمی کرد.”

اما اکنون آلدوش آلپانیان سعی در ترکیب موسیقی غربی و ایرانی‌ دارد و نام گذاری برای سبک موسیقی او سخت است، اما به هر روی آهنگ Melancholy man با وفاداری به متن اصلی‌ اجرا شده و در اون رگه‌ای از موسیقی ایرانی‌ به چشم نمیخورد. در ادامه میتونید کلیپ این آهنگ زیبا که از دست پخت‌های خودم است رو ببینید. اما قبل از اون باید به ۲ نکته اشاره کنم. اول اینکه آهنگ Melancholy man با اجرای The Moody Blues جهت شنیدن شما دوستان در ادامه مطلب قرار داده شده است و دوم اینکه موزیک شنیدنی بدون کلام این آهنگ از Paul Mauriat رو نیز از دست ندید.

در صورت تمایل یا اگرسرعت اینترنت‌تون اجازه تماشا‌ رو نمیده، میتونید آهنگ رو اینجا گوش کنید:

اجرای گروه The moody Blues رو میتونید در اینجا بشنوید:

آهنگ بدون کلام ترانه Melancholy man ازPaul Mauriat رو میتونید اینجا بشنوید:

دیگر کلیپ‌های دستپخت من:
به منو سمت راست صفحه مراجعه کنید.

آهنگ‌های مرتبط:

Demis Roussos- Fallin & Faraway
Demis Roussos- We Shall Dance
Bill Withers- Ain’t no sunshine
Alexander Rybak- Fairytale
Nick Cave- Where The Wild Roses Grow
Doves- Kingdom of Rust

Lyric

I’m a melancholy man, that’s what I am,
All the world surrounds me, and my feet are on the ground.
I’m a very lonely man, doing what I can,
All the world astounds me and I think I understand
That we’re going to keep growing, wait and see.

When all the stars are falling down
Into the sea and on the ground,
And angry voices carry on the wind,
A beam of light will fill your head
And you’ll remember what’s been said
By all the good men this world’s ever known.
Another man is what you’ll see,
Who looks like you and looks like me,

]]> http://lynnrockets.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/sunday-night-music-byte-and-halloween-party-photos/ Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:33:54 +0000 lynnrockets http://lynnrockets.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/sunday-night-music-byte-and-halloween-party-photos/

Belcourt Castle, Newport, Rhode Island

Apologies to all for the lack of newsworthy posts this weekend. The Lynnrockets were busy attending a lavish Halloween party at the Belcourt Castle in Newport, Rhode Island. New Englanders take their Halloween rituals very seriously in light of the Salem Witch Trials and the large Irish population (Halloween is actually an Irish Pagan ritual). The castle itself is the third largest mansion in Newport and is a private residence with only one occupant remaining and is presently for sale. Perhaps this is the Rhode Island property that Sarah Palin was rumored to be interested in. The photos above are from this weekend’s party.

Now for the music byte…

The first incarnation of The Moody Blues formed on 4 May 1964, in Erdington, Birmingham, England. Ray Thomas, John Lodge, and Michael Pinder had been members of El Riot & the Rebels, a regionally-popular band. They disbanded when Lodge, the youngest member, went to technical college and Pinder joined the army. Pinder then rejoined Thomas to form the Krew Cats and enjoyed moderate success. The pair recruited guitarist/vocalist Denny Laine, band manager-turned drummer Graeme Edge, and bassist Clint Warwick. The five appeared as the Moody Blues for the first time in Birmingham in 1964. The name developed from a planned sponsorship from the M&B Brewery and was also a subtle reference to the Duke Ellington song, “Mood Indigo”.

Soon, the band obtained a London-based management company, ‘Ridgepride’, formed by ex-Decca A&R man Alex Murray (Alex Wharton), who helped them land a recording contract with Decca Records in the spring of 1964. They released a single, “Steal Your Heart Away” that year which made it onto the charts. But it was their second single, “Go Now” (released later that year), which really launched their career, being promoted on TV with one of the first purpose-made promotional films in the pop era, produced and directed by Wharton. The single became a hit in the United Kingdom (where it remains their only Number 1 single to date) and in the United States where it reached #10.

Denny Laine left The Moody Blues in 1966, well prior to hitting stardom. He then formed and toiled with a number of obscure bands through 1970. In 1971, Denny joined Paul McCartney to found the group known as Wings, and would stay with them for a full ten years until they officially disbanded in 1981; Denny provided lead & rhythm guitars, backing vocals, keyboards, bass, writing and co-writing skills, as well as being a solid solo performer. Together with Paul and his wife, Linda, they formed the nucleus of the band, being called that “strange, 3-winged beast”. It was with Wings that Denny enjoyed the biggest commercial and critical successes of his career, including co-writing the smash hit “Mull of Kintyre”.

Here are the early Moody Blues featuring Denny Laine as lead singer performing, Go Now.

Justin Hayward, English musician (Moody Blues)

5. Nights In White Satin. The Moody Blues

4. Dust In The Wind. Kansas

3. The Grave. Don McLean

2. Cats in the Cradle. Harry Chaplain

1. The End. The Doors

The Mistake By The Lake

I don’t know why I even bother getting agitated anymore. 

I don’t take it seriously, and it’s been a long time since I have gone out of my way to look for the list of nominees, let alone actually root for someone to make it in. It’s a sham, a political clusterfuck of a process, and certainly bears no resemblance to a recognition of the truly worthy. But the other day an email hit my mailbox listing some of the nominees, and well…here we go again.

Some of the finalists this year include The Stooges (again), and KISS (finally), two bands that have obviously made an impact on rock’n'roll, albeit in very different ways. Even The Hollies surfaced after being eligible for over two decades.

But Donna Summer? Disco-thumping, heavy-breathing Donna Summer? Are you kidding me? Sure, she sold a lot of records in the 70s, but so did Cheap Trick and Deep Purple. She might get in before them? They haven’t even hit the finalists list yet! Hall and Oates were way bigger than Donna Summer could ever dream of, with a long string of hit singles that dominated the charts, but I don’t see their name.

And L.L.Cool J? Why- because he stars in a new CSI spin-off show? I like the guy, but not only does his music have nothing to do with rock, there are tons of deserving artists with longer careers who sold more records – what’s the criteria here? And how are rap artists more rock than progressive rock veterans like Yes and King Crimson? Where are The Moody Blues and  Procol Harum?

And before you start tossing the race card at me, I’m not rushing to send Laura Nyro in there, either. At least she has been an influence on a number of rock artists, but until the day Carole King walks through that door, don’t talk to me about great female songwriter/performers. (I wouldn’t have voted Bonnie Raitt in that quickly – yes, she’s had a lengthy and brilliant career, but she’s far from a household name. John Hiatt is a far better songwriter and he’s not in; and if you want to talk underappreciated musical geniuses, where’s Rory Gallagher’s name on that wall?)

And I’m still appalled that bands like R.E.M. – worthy eventually – are in while earlier artists aren’t.  No J. Geils Band, Humble Pie or Johnny and Edgar Winter? All those record sales and The Guess Who, The Turtles and Tommy James are waiting? No Small Faces? Where the hell is Lou Reed?

Some of the elections are artists who also have success as producers, but Todd Rundgren and Rick Derringer have done both – where are their names on the ballot? And if the anything-but-rock Madonna is in because of cultural impact and huge record sales, why not The Monkees?

No idea who the final five will be, but since it’s the 25th Anniversary you can be sure that fanfare will trump honest voting (just ask The Dave Clark Five about that one) because they gotta sell those dinner tickets. Predictability? You’ll see a female artist or female fronted band, a disco or rap artist, a blast-from-the-early-days, a hugely famous artist/band, and one crapshoot. That’s how they roll in Cleveland…well, actually New York, where Jann Wenner and his cronies run the floating crap game. They need to uproot the damned thing and move it to Detroit where it belongs.

The absurdity can be summed up in five words: Alice Cooper isn’t in it.

Here’s a list of the current inductees. For a list of the truly worthy artists and a real Hall of Fame, do what I do – look at your record collection.

If not, enjoy your Eminem and Beyonce inductions. Maybe you can hang on until 2034 when Chickenfoot is eligible.

Without some of this kind of DNA, you ain't rock'n'roll

PREVIEW: Download 20 Watts’ PROG ROCK MIX on Mediafire

Like epic compositions, time signature changes and songs that can last for more than 15 minutes? Progressive rock is for you. Emerging primarily in Britain in the late 1960s, the oft-critically maligned genre (commonly known as “prog”) has persevered with the simple goal of adding artistic credibility to rock music. Founding fathers like Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis set themselves apart from their contemporaries by featuring classical and jazz influences in their songwriting. The innovation continues today, as bands like Porcupine Tree and Opeth incorporate hard rock and metal into their own experimental, progressive sounds.

So what’s the very best in progressive rock? 20 Watts’ DAN KAPLAN has the answer in our fifth 20 installment. Watch for new 20s each Thursday, only on 20 Watts, and check out our previous 20s below!

Seven video selections from the Digital Video Singles catalog have been promoted on the Music Video section of the iTunes store under the heading “Oldies But Goodies.”  Music fans who click on the button will be offered a choice of classic video performances, including new releases by Otis Redding (Try a Little Tenderness) and the Four Tops (Reach Out I’ll Be There).  Other featured artists include Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, Phil Collins, and The Moody Blues.

Here’s the screen of Oldies But Goodies that make up the special iTunes promotion:

So did you hear about who’s being nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for 2010? Here’s a list…

ABBA
The Chantels
Jimmy Cliff
Genesis
The Hollies
KISS
LL Cool J
Darlene Love
Laura Nyro
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Stooges
Donna Summer

Now… Okay. Some of these are a no-brainer. KISS is a big duh, along with Genesis. The Red Hot Chili Peppers? Mmmmaybe. They’re definitely someone who should be there at some point, but I’m not sure if it should happen just yet. But seriously, DONNA SUMMER? LL COOL J? Look, I like these artists as much as the next guy, but really? In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? That’s just silly, friend! I mean, good grief, how many legends of Rock are being overlooked so we can get these people on the list? Oh look, another list!

Thin Lizzy
Blue Oyster Cult
The Doobie Brothers
Kansas
The Steve Miller Band
Billy Squier
Journey
The Cult
Rush (I’m not their biggest fan ever, but I do acknowledge where they belong in history)
The Moody Blues
Def Leppard
The Marshall Tucker Band
Heart
Ringo Starr (the ONLY Beatle that hasn’t been inducted yet)
Stevie Ray Vaughn!

The list goes on. Now granted, I understand they don’t want to cram everyone into a single year. They wanna space ‘em out. But does that really mean we should be giving non-rock and roll artists the opportunity to be inducted? Not that it’s gonna happen, but what if LL Cool J gets voted in over KISS?

You’d look stupid, 500 people who get to vote on this. Yes, you. I will blame you all. Shame on you, 500 people. Shame. On. You.

So, to summarize, vote for KISS. Because that’s the American way.

Or write in the Electric Light Orchestra. That’d be pretty dang sweet.

Anyway, I’m outta here at 11:30. Gotta go take my Computer Skills Placement Test, or whatever it’s called. After that, I’m going to go pick up my tux for Troll’s wedding. Rehearsal’s tomorrow night, and Troll’s big day is on Saturday. I really hope it works out for him, and I wish him nothing but the best. I’ve been mulling over my best man speech (I did tell you I got “promoted,” right?…), and I have a pretty good idea of the challenge I’m going to issue them as part of my toast. I just hope they take what I say to heart, because the stuff I’m going to say is the stuff that all married couples should remember if they want to live a long and happy life together.

Little blurb about the iPSotD… My brother, Mark, is in the special ed program here at the high school where I work. They have their own PE room where they go to work on a preset list of physical goals. Today the teacher had Mark on the stairmaster, which as you can see, Mark can do in his sleep. LOL! (he stayed up all night last night)

Wait wait wait. ABBA? ABBA!? That’s… well, I don’t know what to think of that.

iPSotD:

My brother, the Sleepwalker!

Alright, here is my moment to vent… here is a list of things that irk me. You might find the talking points on this list may irk you too. If none below irk you, all the power to you.

1. The rising price of toilet paper as each passing year goes by. Do not get fooled into buying the budget brands of T.P. either, it is a gotcha by the toilet paper industry… they want the inferior T.P. to disintegrate in your hands as you wipe away… forcing us all into buying the premium brands.

2. Why can’t the United States of America just have a universal law passed abolishing the yield sign? From my daily observations of traveling by car, no other motorists seems to understand that yield is equal to or means STOP!!

3. Why hasn’t there been another trip to the Moon? I mean, like, it’s been practically 40 years since we made the last trip… forget about frequent flyer miles, NASA.

4. Why does the U.S. Congress get a PAID Summer Recess when these politicians already get numerous paid vacation days, holidays, sick days and goof off days – courtesy of our tax dollars? Oh, I forgot, we the people are not supposed to question our elected officials.

5. This has bugged me for eons now…  why do television golf commentators whisper while giving the coverage of a tournament? 

6. What exactly is the excitement of televised poker? Obviously, I must be missing something here. 

7. Reality television, (non-celebrity), dads who all think and act like they are the ultimate dad. My point is well made here, just ask Kate.

8. Hybrid cars… yeah, they are so easy to buy, there are so many hybrid auto dealerships to choose from too. Plus, as a bonus, they are so inexpensive. Right.

9. Is it cloud to ground lightning or ground to cloud lightning? Huh? I wish professionally paid meteorologists would finally decide on which one to call it… they all reference both, I have finally come to reason and just call it dangerous lightning myself.

10. If styrofoam is known to take light years to decay in landfills and very few municipalities recycle it, then, uh, why is it still made and used?

Oh, yeah, what would a list of things that irk me be without Rock Music? Here it is… #11 on this list: How come The Moody Blues and The Electric Light Orchestra are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? 

Ahhh. I feel much better now. Maybe this list was thought provoking, maybe it was a waste of your time. Regardless, if you are reading this line, then that means you at least read the list… thank you for visiting.

Preaching love to a sea of heads

When Woodstock is discussed, one of the anecdotes that most often surfaces is how Crosby, Stills and Nash took the stage in front of a mammoth crowd in only their second live gig, and as per the famous quote, were “scared shitless“. Odd to think that a year later and an ocean away, a studio-oriented band like The Moody Blues must have had the opposite feeling their second time around at the Isle of Wight. Crammed in front of The Who’s stage gear to perform for a few hundred thousand people, heads as far as the eye could see, they were at once out of their element and in the moment.

For here were five musicians who despite their massive success, remained very isolated in their process. “All we did was music”, recalls Justin Hayward in one of the DVD’s interview segments, “we were just living the music we were playing every day. It was an expression of what was in our hearts and minds.” Certainly that was a vast change from their start as an r’n'b band playing “Bo Diddley” (an early clip with Ray Thomas playing harmonica is included as an example, although oddly no mention is made of their massive hit “Go Now”). Instead their complex musical arrangements spoke to the open, exploratory nature of the times. ”None of us had ever seen a bale of cotton, let alone picked one” mused Grahame Edge. “Didn’t even know what smokestack lightning was“! Obviously reaching within for material worked out well in the long run.

Their performance in 1970 was extraordinary in that they were an album band whose set was largely unfamiliar to the crowd, and as a studio band stripped of overdubs and sweetening they relied on Mike Pinder’s mellotron to carry the load. Indeed the mellotron changed everything for the Moodies and gave them incredible freedom in or out of the studio; Pinder states that he was “the orchestra behind the drums, bass and guitar…the landscape of it all.” (There’s a short clip where Pinder demonstrates how the mellotron functions; I learned more in that thirty seconds than I had ever known before).

The quality of the performance is obviously dated – Hayward was surprised that any footage even existed – but director/producer Murray Lerner (who has been bringing several great films to market) does an excellent job stitching it all together. The first sections of the program mix recent interviews with some related footage before settling down into the performance itself. Sound and visuals don’t always sync – there are several sections where relevant footage is spliced in to cover gaps – but for the most part it’s a solid presentation considering the technical limitations of the time. The seventy-five minute DVD is shot in widescreen and boasts 5.1 sound that more than compensates. And what a visual time trip! Looking young and angelic, Hayward’s ballads are earnest and powerful; Ray Thomas is appropriately animated during “Legend Of A Mind (Timothy Leary’s Dead)” and the rock-oriented numbers like “Question” and “Ride My See Saw” thunder away thanks to John Lodge’s fluid lines and Graeme Edge’s thunder. The sweeping crowd shots remind one of how different the festivals were perceived and experienced in the days before corporate domination.

Thirty nine years later, the remaining members of the band still bring the music to the masses as a whole new generation turns on to their majestic sound. But with Threshold of a Dream, Eagle Vision has captured an excellent snapshot of the band approaching its artistic peak, unafraid to tinker with some arrangements. As the final track plays, a montage of clips from Montreaux, Color Me Pop and a recent US concert drive home the point that great music is timeless, after all.

And Then There Were Three

Eagle Vision link for this title.

The Moody Blues official site

Moody Blues wiki.

“Face piles of trials with smiles”-The Moody Blues

Getting clean is a bitch, no matter how you slice it. It’s frustrating and often painful, both physically and emotionally. 

Facing it with a smile isn’t just polyanna crap, it actually helps a little bit. Smiling sends a message to the brain that things are good (or at the very least on their way to being good). So I’m smiling as much as possible, at least when I remember to.

What’s the alternative? Being an ugly, grumpy sob…which I’m sure I am at least part of the time. Just ask my family.

An added bonus of facing trials with a smile is that it makes other people wonder what you’re up to.

As Phil Lesh said, “Believe it if you need it, if you don’t just pass it on.”

A Mellotron M400 in clear lucite

The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical, polyphonic keyboard originally developed and built in Birmingham, England in the early 1960s. The heart of the instrument is a bank of parallel linear magnetic audio tapes, which have approximately eight seconds of playing time each. Playback heads underneath each key enable the playing of pre-recorded sounds. (Info via Wikipedia)

The Mellotron was used by British rock artists Graham Bond and Mike Pinder before it was used and brought to public popularity by The Beatles in the song “Strawberry Fields Forever”

Check out the Mellotron below in action:

A special section – Woodstock Nation. Second of a three-part series. Part 1 | Part 3

August 16, 2009 – The first of the “3 days of peace and music” – and mud – had been just a prelude to Rock ‘n’ Roll Survival Weekend.

BY THE TIME CARLOS Santana finished playing Soul Sacrifice Saturday afternoon at Woodstock, he was a major star.

“Every band changed the vibes,” recalls Dena Quilici, one of the many there from southeastern New England. And the crowd came alive for Santana. The by-now broiling sun, the hunger and thirst and mud, the Army helicopters intermittently turning fire hoses on us full-force to cool us off – “all those troubles kind of went away once you just settled down and started listening to the music,” says Ty Davis.

Santana was a salsa band without a contract, who came at the Dead’s insistence. “Santana came out and just blew everyone away,” says Ron Gamache. “We kept saying, ‘Who are these guys?’ We’d never heard such rhythms.”

Quill had opened Saturday’s show about noon. Only Ty Davis seems to remember them, “as one of the totally unimportant bands. But they were one of the first Boston bands to get any notice.”

Michele Keir had a tremendous time at Woodstock, even though she heard only one band and doesn’t recall which one.

Many of us who were there don’t individually remember much of the music for which Woodstock has become a synonym.

The quality of the sound was fantastic near the stage, deteriorating to terrible at about half the depth of the crowd and beyond. And the bands were faraway specks to many, competing with the human kaleidoscope around us.

Musicians had to touch and amplify some powerful human chord just to get our attention.

“You knew you were there more for the experience than for the music,” says Dennis Lemoine.

There were bubbles and banners and weirdly dressed people. Many of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters were evolving into the Hog Farmers, members of a New Mexico commune who cooked, and counseled and taught survival skills. Both groups were at Woodstock.

Mel Ash didn’t know who the Pranksters were then, but he later read Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of their bus trip across America playing theatrical cosmic jokes, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “The next year, I said, ‘These are famous people.’ “

The experience was intensely visual. The Hell’s Angels arrived, and started ferrying medical supplies.

“I remember one guy with an American flag headband and a flag cape, going around with some sign about ‘If we all coordinate our energies, we can end the war this weekend’ – a very intense wired cat,” remembers John Haerry.

“We were next to a blanket containing a really huge guy dressed only in athletic shorts,” Tom Mulligan recalls, “getting his body painted by his girlfriend. That was my first exposure to body-painting.”

“I don’t remember the music so much as the people, but it was a background,” says Dena Quilici.

“It got so big the music was just a little part of it,” says Walter Williams.

Food lines

We seemed to be spending as much time searching for food as our ancestors had.

Joe Caffey lined up to buy overpriced tomatoes. “You knew you were gonna get ripped off, but you’re starving. And the guy had a 10-gallon can of tuna fish. Then a guy comes out of nowhere, naked, sticks his hand into the pot, grabs a handful and goes off into the woods.”

“Somebody came in with a soda truck and started selling cans for a buck,” David DelBonis recalls. “Everybody got really ticked off, and kind of confiscated the truck, passed out the soda. But they started handing the guy what he should have been selling it for – a quarter, at that time. They just starting throwing the money at him, saying ‘This is what the can’s worth, you got it.’ He tried to scalp everybody . . . but they didn’t steal it.”

I had a half-full bottle of Vin Rouge Superieur left from Friday night, and I desperately wished for a miracle that would turn the wine into water. When the water truck arrived, I dumped out the wine. For two days that empty bottle was my most precious possession.

“There was a premium on cold things,” Tom Mulligan remembers. “People with beer and soft drinks were held in high esteem. Someone nearby had a basket with raw carrots and shared it, but nothing went very far.”

Mel Ash of Providence, a vegetarian, had the foresight to bring about 2 1cans of sardines to barter with. “I hated fish, but they could be opened with keys, so they were convenient. We traded for watermelons.”

At the Hog Farm across a road from the music area, where street signs read High Way, Groovy Way, and Peaceful Way, Woodstock Stew was on the menu. It was a sticky vegetable and grain glop that tasted strange to those of us raised on canned soup casseroles, but was very filling. They served free brown rice and vegetables all weekend, and more.

When Ash went there looking for food, “They were handing out cones of granola, and Wavy Gravy (the commune’s leader) was saying some Zen saying, ‘A day without work is a day without eating.’ So we volunteered to clean the pots. Then we went closer to the crowd at the stage and said, ‘Free food this way, eat all you can, if you can’t eat it, give it away.’ Over and over again for a couple of hours.”

Demand for pay

We settled in to wait for Bob Dylan.

With every helicopter that landed behind the stage, rumors spread that it was Dylan, who lived in Woodstock – the town, not the nation – 50 miles away. He never came. He was playing the Isle of Wight on the English Channel for $87,000, a booking he had before Woodstock asked him to play.

Jimi Hendrix, the highest-paid act at Woodstock, got $18,000. Santana earned less than $2,500. The Who ($6,250) and the Grateful Dead got nervous about the free concert and refused to play unless they were paid in cash. A local banker was roused after midnight and whisked by helicopter to the bank in his pajamas to get $25,000 cash.

The performers didn’t share our physical hardships. Helicopters were delivering delicacies and champagne to the performers’ area. David’s Potbelly Restaurant from New York City catered and offered to ferry them back to the hotel and the party in the bar.

But they had to face the biggest, most distracted crowd in rock history and were looking at major flop sweats.

If other bands griped about facing a crowd too big to reach, Creedence had a different problem. They followed the Grateful Dead at 3:30 a.m. and the biggest crowd in rock history was dead asleep. John Fogerty has said he saw one guy flash his lighter, and played the whole set to that one person.

Power acts

Rock’s power lineup was on Saturday night’s bill, but by then many of us were exhausted. “The music was 24 hours, so you had to pick and choose,” says Mel Ash. “My friend and I took turns waking each other up. There was a lot of sharing of blankets and what not.”

Still, with all the distractions wrenching our attention from the music, among us we have a composite memory good enough to reconstruct most of the action.

To many, Janis Joplin was the only woman really out there on the edge alone. The reigning folk and rock women – Baez, Grace Slick, Joni Mitchell, Michelle Phillips of the Mama and Papas, Judy Collins – were romantic figures, and Mama Cass was a 300-pound hot ticket in a quartet. But Janis was beyond the pale, a brazen hussy singing her soul out as she swigged Southern Comfort. A lot of us were rooting for her, but the woman who wailed, “I’m gonna show you that a woman can be tough,” seemed born too soon and too alone.

She is reported to have said, “Me, I was brought up in a middle-class family; I could have had anything. But you need something more in your gut, man.” Her emptiness seemed bottomless, and the more she battled the blues with hard liquor, heroin and one-night stands, the deeper she seemed to sink.

Woodstock isn’t generally considered one of her great performances. She seemed genuinely distraught as she wailed and sobbed in a skimpy dress with spangles instead of her customary feathers. Her band – neither Big Brother and the Holding Company nor Full Tilt Boogie but the Cosmic Blues Band with saxes and trombones – didn’t seem to work with her.

To some it didn’t matter.

“When Janis sang Ball and Chain . . . We all felt tied down like that,” says Carmino Scaglione.

David Weinrebe had plopped down in a ditch to sleep. “I woke up to Janis Joplin shrieking. She was a goddess. To be waking out of a dead sleep to Janis . . .”

When Sly Stone followed, he did something with I Want to Take You Higher, that had the entire crowd on its feet shouting “higher” for 45 minutes.

Dawn Jabari-Zhou remembers Sly for the “enthusiasm and energy it created in concert. Everybody was up, paying attention, shouting and clapping, Sly in a bright white outfit, an Indian jacket with tassels long the sleeves. He almost looked like he was a bird and like he was gonna take off and fly.”

The Who and Abbie

The Who played at 2 in the morning. What everybody remembers is Pete Townshend bashing Abbie Hoffman with his guitar.

Abbie had seized the mike to urge the crowd smoking flowers so freely to mobilize on behalf of John Sinclair, head of the White Panther Party, who was serving a 10-year sentence for having passed a joint to a narcotics officer. Somebody turned the mike off and Townshend made like a bayonet with the guitar and jabbed Abbie in the head and off the stage.

In Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, Abbie wrote, “Townshend, who had been tuning up, turned around and bumped me. A nonincident.”

But Townshend told Rolling Stone magazine, “I kicked him off the stage. I deeply regret that. If I was given that opportunity again I would stop the show. Because I don’t think rock and roll is that important. Then I did. The show had to go on.”

Rico Topazio of Bristol, who now plays in a band called the Pink Cadillacs in Los Angeles, says, “I liked Abbie, but it was the wrong time for Abbie to be on stage. As a guitar player, I knew that. Pete didn’t know who Abbie was. Woodstock wasn’t political in that way. It was as if Bob Hope were at a USO show, time to get away from all that, to see how many of us were together.”

The crowd seemed to agree with Pete that Abbie was out of line. There were no boos or shouts, and The Who continued playing. “The Who were in their prime, not like they are now,” Haerry recalls. “Roger Daltrey still had his voice, and Pete Townshend still had his voice, and they did a hell of a show.”

It’s unfair that Abbie is remembered for a stupid act at Woodstock. Abbie had organized the medical tent, worked in the bad trips tent, and been an extraordinarily competent man to have around. His death by suicide earlier this year, so close to this anniversary, seems to mark the end of yet another era. Wavy Gravy, the man on the record saying, “There’s a little bit of heaven in every disaster area,” suggested to me this week that if we cared, it would be fitting to “do something for the Yipper.”

Just as dawn broke, the Jefferson Airplane took the stage. They had been waiting to play since 10:30 the night before, and Grace Slick played with her eyes closed.

“I remember waking up at about 5 in the morning,” said Haerry, “and all of a sudden hearing Grace Slick out of nowhere, ‘Good morning, people, it’s time to wake up,’ ” BOINGGGGGGGG, Whoa, yeah] and going down to the stage, treading my way through what looked like the aftermath of a battlefield, all these bodies and getting right down to the front of the stage and there was Jefferson Airplane, 25 or 30 feet away.”

“I had to see Grace Slick,” Mel Ash says, “because I was in love with Grace Slick and I thought the Airplane represented at that moment everything the culture stood for.”

Grace Slick in a white fringed minidress in the blue dawn is an image burned in many brains.

“The sun was coming up over the hills,” recalls Carmino Scaglione, “over the campfires of the people who’d been up all night,” and she sang White Rabbit, the song that let the East know what the West had been up to in the summer of ‘67.

Do You Want Somebody to Love? sent ripples up spines; hearing only Volunteers on the concert tape is one reason to have been at Woodstock.

It was Sunday morning. Time enough to sleep. BY SHEILA LENNON. Source.

A special section – Woodstock Nation. First of a three-part series. Part 2 | Part 3

August 16, 2009 – The Woodstock Music & Art Fair began 40 years ago this Friday afternoon at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. I had seen an advertisement in the July 27, 1969 Sunday New York Times Arts section, and ordered tickets — $18 for all three days, Aug. 15, 16 & 17, 1969.

Twenty years later, I was lifestyles editor of The Providence Journal, and the task of doing the 20th anniversary package fell to me by default, since I’d been there. I interviewed 50 other Rhode Islanders who were also there, and published a 3-day series on the concert.

Two years ago, these stories became part of a college history textbook, Time It Was: American Stories from the Sixties, published by Prentice Hall.

There’s a lot of Woodstock revisionism going on now, so long after. The facts haven’t changed.

Here’s Part 1 of that 1989 series. Parts 2 and 3 will publish Saturday and Sunday.

WOODSTOCK NATION
A special section – Woodstock Nation. First of
a three-part series.

08/13/1989
BY SHEILA LENNON
Journal-Bulletin Lifestyles Editor

The rain of Friday night had turned Max Yasgur’s dairy farm to cowdung mud, and now the August sun was pumping it back up as steam. In little puffs it rose to meet the cloud of marijuana smoke hovering over the sweaty people drawn here by the promise of three days of peace and music.

“The sun was beating and beating with the rhythm of the ‘copters,” says Dottie Clark, one of the many from southeastern New England who answered the call. “It had a jungle look.”

Since the night before, tiny helicopters had been dropping musicians and their instruments behind the stage. The drone was familiar. But now big green Army choppers, the same Hueys that strafed Vietnam on the nightly news, were sweeping in behind our backs, loud and low.

“Nixon could wipe out the antiwar movement in one fell swoop here,” murmured a voice behind me, setting off a nervous ripple in our neighborhood. “Paranoia from the sky,” recalls Jim Edwards. A rustle spread over the peaceable hillside, a wrinkle of bad vibes.

“Everybody looked up. I was just gripped with fear,” remembers Mel Ash. “I was 16, but I was actually thinking about my death.”

From the stage, the deep velvet voice of Chip Monck boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen, the U.S. Army . . . Medical Corps,” as the choppers’ red crosses came into view.

All weekend, the National Guard would drop sandwiches and blankets and performers and instruments, evacuate casualties and laboring mothers, and assault us with fire hoses to cool us off.

Sunday, as we stood 6 inches deep in mud, a tiny private plane swooped down to spray us with daisies, a gift from Festival organizers.

Welcome to Woodstock. These are our war stories.

Rumors of The Woodstock Music and Art Fair had been in the air all summer.

Joe Landry ran a folk club in Cleveland at the time, and hung out with musicians. “Everyone was hyping it as the happening of the century. They were gonna make it as big as they possibly could,” he remembers. “Of course they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.”

By late July, bright posters with a whimsical logo of a dove perched on the neck of a guitar began popping up on telephone poles throughout the East. The magic words were “3 days of peace and music.” It was like broadcasting a radio signal, and anybody tuned in would get it. Somehow they’d find White Lake, N. Y.

This festival was fielding a band list that read like the course description of Rock ‘n’ Roll 101. If we were typed by the music we liked, all kinds of people would show up here, fans of Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Tim Hardin, Richie Havens, The Incredible String Band, Ravi Shankar, Sweetwater, Keef Hartley, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Mountain, Santana, The Who, The Band, Jeff Beck, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, The Moody Blues or Johnny Winter.

With a lineup like this going on in his backyard, it seemed likely that Bob Dylan would drop by and sit in. What the heck, maybe the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, too.

By surrounding the music with an art show, music and craft workshops, a bazaar, food booths and hundreds of acres for camping, festival organizers guaranteed that nearly everybody under 30 except Tricia Nixon would want to be there. Coming together seemed long overdue.

Rhode Island’s ‘beats’

” Woodstock Nation was pre-Vietnam,” says David DelBonis. “There was a beatnik culture on Thayer Street. The guy who lived next door to me in Johnston – Richard Carbone – used to take me to the Tete a Tete coffee house, to Jone Pasha’s. He bought me e.e. cummings’ poems, at 7, 8 years old. That changed my whole life. I knew there was an alternative.”

Jack Kerouac explained the “beat” attitude as “a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world.”

“They were nice people,” DelBonis said of Rhode Island’s beats. “They had their own little business and their own little community and they played music. They were much more sensitive than the people I knew in Johnston. They didn’t want any part of the ‘commercial’ world. They were interesting, and they were interested in art, they traveled and enjoyed the things of the world. Everybody can’t be that way or we couldn’t function, but I saw a whole other world.”

Pop art, Eastern religious ideas, John Kennedy’s Peace Corps and Bobby’s idealism, Dylan and the Beatles, anthropology courses on cultures that ate “magic mushrooms” and peyote buttons for spiritual visions were absorbed along with Buddy Holly, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Percy Sledge and Hermann Hesse’s mystical novel, Steppenwolf.

At Hope High, Shelly Lynch decided a beatnik was something to be. She went to NYU’s theater department in Greenwich Village. “We were gonna grow up and live in a little white house,” she says. “Then the ’60s happened.”

Beginnings

When the ads appeared in the underground press and the New York Sunday Times Arts section July 27, the response was overwhelming. At $7 a day and a pricey $18 for the weekend, the official expectation was a crowd of 150,000. But before the festival opened, Woodstock Ventures had sold 200,000 tickets, and had requests – but no more printed tickets – for 100,000 more.

The festival was almost held in the ominously named Wallkill, but the town balked. Less than a month before the festival was to happen, Yasgur, a prominent citizen of Bethel, agreed to rent his cow pasture, a natural amphitheater, for $60,000 for three days.

In Hebrew, Bethel means a holy or consecrated spot. A good omen. With the help of 80 people from the Hog Farm Commune in New Mexico, a staff who were into the music and into the lifestyle, Woodstock Ventures began to build a city.

By Wednesday night, 50,000 people had already come to Bethel. In Providence, WBRU was announcing that Woodstock would be a free concert. There hadn’t been time to build the gates.

The road to Woodstock

Hope High senior Joseph Caffey and his friends took the bus to New York City, planning to catch a bus to the festival. There was no bus, but there were 250 kids. They improvised:

“We rented U-Haul trucks and hired bus drivers to drive them,” said Caffey, now director of rental rehabilitation for the City of Providence. “We chipped in, collected from everybody and headed up to Woodstock.” The trip was a metaphor for what was to come, physically uncomfortable but high-spirited. At one point they were stopped by police for having the back doors open, and had to finish the trip in the hot, stuffy darkness of the box.

“The water pump went and the truck broke down 20 miles away,” says Mike Kaprielian, who had joined the Navy two months earlier rather than be drafted. “We knew something special was happening, because when we piled out of that truck and stuck out our thumbs, 50 cars must have lined up to pick us up.” They couldn’t get closer than 10 miles, “so we walked in the rest of the way. I had just finished basic so I was in shape,” Mike recalls, “but Joe was huffing.” Five minutes after getting to the field, they got separated and didn’t see each other again for 19 years.

By Friday, thousands of people had converged on the Port Authority terminal at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, lining up under signs that read “Woodstock Festival Load Here.” Among them was John Rossi, who had seen an ad for the Aquarian Exposition in Providence’s underground newspaper, Extra. Rossi, 38, now works for the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., as a computer systems software specialist, devising ways to ensure the security of top-secret information, but at the time he had just graduated from Mount Pleasant High School. The atmosphere of the “party bus” set the tone for the weekend: He recalls a camaraderie never experienced before or since. Rossi’s bus stopped within a mile of the field.

After the festival, the Short Line bus company ran ads featuring pictures of the drivers who manned the party buses, along with little quotes such as “We have a lot to learn from them about getting along together,” “They don’t look at the public the way the public looks at them,” “I don’t understand why they wear long hair but now I don’t care . . . And they’re the most no-griping, no-complaining, patient and generous, respectful kids I’ve ever met. Come on kids and ride with me. It’s a pleasure driving you.”

A bit later in the day, the bus carrying Dena Quilici of Providence, then 19, gave up three miles away. Meanwhile, her future husband, Jim Edwards, who worked at India Imports of Rhode Island, was driving the company van towards Woodstock, accompanied by anybody he knew who needed a ride. He didn’t know Dena.

He found a dirt road and followed it. It led directly to the festival grounds.

‘The endless vans’

Friday morning, the New York State Thruway was jammed with cars, long hair streaming out of every window, peace sign decals on back windows and Make Love Not War bumper stickers. Most amazing were the psychedelically painted vans and school buses with faraway license plates – California, New Mexico. The communes had come East flying their colors.

“The endless vans,” said Dottie Clark, “were kitchens, bedrooms, dance floors.”

Near the site, traffic slowed, and people with guitars, bongos, flutes, pan pipes, whistles or bells clambered up on hoods and trunks, serenading the bumper-to-bumper traffic. There was dancing on van roofs, and anticipation in the air. People tired of walking hopped on your hood and rode with you for a while. These were, as John Haerry of West Greenwich put it, “the days of high hippiedom.”

At the White Lake exit, one lone policeman had closed the ramp, but cars crossed the median strip and exited from the southbound lane onto the gridlock of Route 17. Complicating the mess was a junkyard of overheated cars by the side of the road. Amateur mechanics swarmed over them. If they couldn’t be restarted, their passengers were scooped into any vehicle still moving, and the beat went on.

Michelle Keir of Warwick recalls tossing a deli pickle to the car behind her, never dreaming how precious that pickle would seem the next hungry day.

Chris Heinzmann of Pawtucket, who had piled into his father’s International Travelall with his two older brothers and five friends, remembers that “everybody was yelling back and forth, having a good time.”

Cheri Light spent Friday night in the woods 10 miles away. Saturday she walked and rode to the site on the hood of a car behind a giant moving van. When traffic jammed, the back doors opened up and four bikers zoomed down a ramp and up the road.

John Sousa of Rumford remembers that “When cars got stuck (on the already wet dirt roads), people would literally lift them up. We were spontaneously working together.”

The traffic jam was fun.

Cars were ditched at whatever point their drivers decided this was as close as they were getting. These pioneers circled the wagons and cordoned themselves off in the center of a parking lot with a 10-mile radius.

Rental is right. It a housing job.

Dennis Lemoine parked in a field where he could hear the music. “A farmer came up on a John Deere with a shotgun,” he says. They moved, and the woman who owned the second field came out and said, “Please don’t make a mess, and don’t keep us up all night.”

By Friday night, police blockaded the main roads. Most people who heard what was happening Friday and tried to crash the big party were just too late.

David Del Bonis, who arrived in Bethel on Wednesday to pitch in, watched the crowd swell. “If all the people who were blocked out had gotten in, you would’ve had a mess, from sheer numbers and from the partiers who were trying to get there,” he said. “The people who came early enough to get in were a different kind of people. The authorities did a great job. They blocked it at the right time.

“You had a good balance: The people who were there ahead of time had already gotten into the feeling of the whole thing and the helping and the sharing, and then enough people came to give you the masses. So the powers that ran it had already set the tone, and that’s why it never got out of hand.

“Security was just to keep people mellow,” he added.

For those who did make it, the long walk in the company of thousands made an indelible impression. Dottie Clark, who had parked about 5 miles away, thought the road “looked like an old movie of refugees leaving Berlin.”

Friday, the people who lived by the roadside couldn’t help enough. One middle-aged woman urged me to take oranges and drink from her hose. There had been radio reports that residents were charging a dollar for a drink of water, and she was outraged. “We’re not that kind of people,” she said.

John Sousa remembers families on the lawn flashing peace signs and, amazingly, police doing it, too. “It was the first reassuring element,” he said. Others would follow: A farmer who milked his cows and gave away milk, and hoses that ran constantly.

Six or so abreast, we streamed up a country road lined with streetwise types quietly muttering the menu, “Acid, hash, grass . . . Owsley acid . . . Afghani, gold weed . . . sunshine, blotter . . . red Colombian . . . Vietnamese . . . Thai stick.”

(“New Yorkers,” says David Del Bonis disgustedly. “Hard-core New York City people came up and that’s where all the drugs came from.”)

We exchanged sidelong glances. The dealers were being discreet only in the volume of their voices. The police were directing traffic, discussing crowd control, returning peace signs, accepting flowers, smiling and being polite.

We weren’t in Richard Nixon’s America anymore.

Colors on top of a mountain

Blue and brown were the colors of Woodstock. Blue jeans and sky, tanned skin and mud and bare stage.

Coming up the road and over the hill behind the stage, the first view of the festival field was stunning. Many of our brains could not process what our eyes saw.

The hillside was seething with moving bumps as far as I could see. Cheryl Godek Curran saw colors on top of a mountain. We each asked our friends, “What’s that?”

“That” was rows of densely packed heads stretching to the horizon.

How many of us? The respectable conservative estimate is 400,000. Ty Davis, who was at both Watkins Glen (which officially drew between 600,000 and 650,000) and at Woodstock, says Woodstock was bigger. There was no way to know. Little festivals were going on wherever the traffic stopped. Some people who never heard a note report having a wonderful time.

To Phil Kukielski, it was like “walking onto the set of a Fellini film. I had a sense of what the world would be like if it were run by people 18 to 25.”

Freedom in the air

The concert that came to be called Woodstock began a few minutes after 5 p.m. Friday, August 15, 1969. Black folksinger Richie Havens was tapped, simply because he was available and no other bands were. Woodstock Ventures had rented every helicopter they could book, but the ferrying process was way behind schedule. When the helicopter came for Havens, he was the only performer available who didn’t come with complex equipment that would demand a time-consuming sound check. Havens’s acoustic guitar set could be the sound check for the evening.

The crowd, growing by the minute, was happy it was finally underway. There had been a false start earlier when Swami Satchananda took the stage and talked about peace, but that had merely been the invocation.

Havens sang every song he knew, including Here Comes The Sun and The Universal Soldier, which drew cheers from this group who were facing a test of their core philosophy: make love, not war. Then he made up Freedom, the song on the album, on the spot, because he felt freedom in the air, and nobody was ready to follow him. Woodstock, the concert, was off to a fine start.

‘What’s it spell?’

Country Joe McDonald was near the stage when Havens came off. McDonald’s band, The Fish, wasn’t around, but Michael Lang asked him to kill time with an acoustic set. What happened next is one of the few Woodstock moments everybody who was there remembers. Everybody. It was called the Fish Cheer.

After a lackluster 20 minutes, Country Joe (nobody called him McDonald) was dying out there. With nothing to lose, he called out, “Give me an F. . .”

Well trained by football cheerleaders, the crowd came to its feet and followed along through four letters that don’t spell fish.

Then “What’s it spell? . . . What’s it spell? . . . What’s it spell? . . . What’s it spell? . . . What’s it spell? . . . What’s it spell?”

“Country Joe, like Abbie Hoffman, seemed to understand we had a tendency to take ourselves too seriously,” said Jim Edwards.

Chris Heinzmann recalls, “Half a million people didn’t say that word in public at the same time.”

John Sousa, a member of the Rhode Island National Guard at the time, remembers, “It felt great. I felt free. The F word is horrifying for some people to hear. This was freedom of speech.”

Besides, “The F word was common in basic training.”

With the sound of the liberated word still vibrating in the air, Country Joe segued right into the catchy little ditty called I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag. The audience picked it up, singing along and dancing merrily. It was fun.

If there’s a collective memory for our deathbeds, a song that took permanent root in the consciousness of a generation, this is it. This ditty became the de facto anthem of Woodstock:

. . . Now come on mothers throughout the land

Pack your boys off to Vietnam
Come on fathers, don’t hesitate
Send your sons off before it’s too late
Be the first one on your block
to have your boy come home in a box
Awright]

And it’s one, two, three,
what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s five, six, seven,
open up the pearly gates,

Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

The cheers and whistles rocked the night. For a moment, time had stopped for me. I was stunned. Looking around in midchorus, I realized that some of these joyous, vital young men around me would indeed come home in a box, as had so many before them. The horror of war usually brings the message home, but war had never seemed so senseless to me as at that lighthearted, macabre moment.

Country Joe soon found it hard to get bookings, perhaps because booking him was not only political, the Fish Cheer might be part of the package. The IRS audited him. He suspected his phone was tapped. His career stalled. He had become identified with one song that summed up an era people would soon try to forget.

The veteran whose Woodstock performance is burned in our brains says he never said they wouldn’t fight; he just wanted to know – and still does – “What are we fighting for?”

John Sebastian followed Country Joe. He had just left the Lovin’ Spoonful – the San Francisco band that sang “The magic’s in the music and the music’s in me” – but was not booked for Woodstock. He had just come to hear the show, but couldn’t resist the chance to play this crowd, despite having just swallowed God knows what chemical compound. He wore tie-dye from head to toe, and sounded spaced out and hokey – hippie-dippie – to me. But Cheryl Godek Curran felt the combination of Country Joe and John Sebastian left the crowd feeling unified against the war.

Tim Hardin, who wrote If I Were a Carpenter and Reason to Believe, seemed too fragile for this population. I liked his songs, but he played a disappointing set.

Chris DeLuca especially wanted to hear the Incredible String Band, a Scottish band whose work is described as avant-garde folk. They had played at Newport, opened for for Judy Collins and Tom Paxton, and were riding a crest after a lovely album entitled The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

But “the audience was unresponsive to them,” says a disappointed DeLuca, who heard rude comments about their performance in his neighborhood.

Nobody seems to remember Bert Sommer, a folksinger who had been in the Broadway musical Hair, which introduced the notions of the Age of Aquarius and hippie nudity to the masses in 1968.

Skinny-dipping

The long road to the stage passed by a pond full of unself-conscious skinny-dippers. Most of this multitude of middle-class kids had never seen groups of people of both sexes take their clothes off together. It was apparent that we were about to examine our taboos.

Most of the nudity that so shocked the older generation about Woodstock came as a result of being mud-crusted and ripe-smelling, hot and miserable. Bathing in their birthday suits became, for many, the lesser evil.

Several people we talked to volunteered that they were among the nude bathers. But the 1980s, like the 1880s, are Victorian enough that we present their comments without attribution, to spare them both their good names and obscene phone calls.

* “I remember going swimming, washing up. I took my clothes off to wash up and cool off. No one watched. Everyone did things at their own pace,” said one woman.

* “I was taking a bath. That’s all it was. I would rather be nude than dirty,” said a practical man.

* “I was naked, or maybe wore just underpants. I felt completely at ease – as if skinny-dipping with best friends. I didn’t feel I was naked among half a million strangers. It was truly wonderful.”

* One festival worker had been standing all day in the hot sun, and was getting sunstroke. She was ordered by a festival honcho to get cooled off.

* “You took your clothes off and went in the pond because you didn’t want to get your clothes totally wet. That was basically the nudity, except for isolated incidents. When the sun came out, some women took their blouses off, but it wasn’t craziness. We didn’t even pay attention to it. It didn’t mean anything.”

Although it seemed important to passers-by to be nonchalant, different things were going on inside them.

“I didn’t see anybody getting intimate together, but I did see a little bit of nudity,” Chris Heinzmann says. “Being 14, I thought it was great. I wasn’t gonna take off my clothes, but I thought it was neat. There weren’t that many people doing it.”

Phil Kukielski wasn’t shocked. “It wasn’t lewd. There was a gentle, nonpredatory ambiance to it,” he recalls. “It was a celebration, an expression of being comfortable enough to take off your clothes without embarrassment, like brothers and sisters.”

Susan Vogler saw some bare-breasted women, and remembers walking over people making love. “I was embarrassed, but I thought ‘Good for them.’ I couldn’t do it but look at them – that’s what everything was about. Be free, don’t worry about what the future brings.”

John Haerry’s first response was, ” ‘Wow, naked women]’ But after a while,” he says, “it was ‘Hey, nice pond, chuck your clothes and go swimming.’ “

Al Puerini says he “felt like a voyeur. We’d look in amazement, shake our heads and say ‘This is unbelievable.’ They were totally self-unconscious.”

John Sousa remembers “one guy doing cartwheels in the nude all the way down to the stage.” His was perhaps the only way to get all the way from the back of the crowd to front, and quickly, too. He was roundly cheered.

‘Friendly people’

All this freedom didn’t really lead to “Why don’t we do it in the road?” It depended on who you were, how old you were and with whom you had come.

Certainly, lovers who had been intimate at home probably found a way to be so at Woodstock, but without a tent, it wasn’t easy. Maybe on the West Coast people were freer, but making love in the mud surrounded by a half-million people trying not to step on you was not most people’s idea of a good time.

Joe Landry was 29. He spent a lot of time at Woodstock with the people from New Mexico’s Hog Farm Commune, who were older and much less conventional than the college students still living at home. David DelBonis, who also hung out at the Hog Farm, said “The Hog Farm people were totally outrageous. They were in another universe.”

“There was a lot of love going on,” says Landry.

But “free love” didn’t mean a free lunch.

“I got turned down by more women at that time,” DelBonis chuckles. “I don’t think the ’60s were as wild as everyone thought they were. People made easier attractions, maybe. I never thought of it as a sexual revolution.”

Mike Kaprielian, who was 19, says, “I went to Woodstock a virgin, and I left a virgin.”

“It wasn’t the type of environment that was conducive to forming really close personal bonds,” said John Haerry. “A lot of people came with a group they were hanging out with, and they tended to stay together and keep an eye on each other. Other contacts were just ships passing in the night.”

People were constantly roaming, all day, all night. “Everyone was so friendly to each other. It was a constant movement of people, hooking up with a group of people for a while, sharing with them, then moving on,” says Dena Quilici.

Cheri Light remembers, “There was never a pass the whole weekend, not even a suggestion of it. Men walked up and talked to me, but it was just friendly people making conversation.”

A soaking

Friday night, Woodstock almost felt like a pretty normal outdoor concert. Jim Edwards remembers actually buying a hamburger (from an ad hoc group of New Yorkers misnamed Food For Love who, the day before the concert, threatened to pull out unless they could keep all their profits, and threatened the promoters enough that they called in the FBI. By Saturday, their staff was trading burgers for anything useful, then giving them away.)

Then it began to rain hard during Ravi Shankar’s set. Phil Kukielski, who had come with his future wife just for “folk night,” was holding a wool blanket over their heads as an umbrella. As the rain soaked in, “The blanket got heavier and the smell of wet wool got stronger, to the point of misery,” he remembers.

The rains whipped for about 15 minutes, and then died. The concert resumed, with everyone wet and a mountain chill in the air.

Then Arlo Guthrie came on, and his cheerful good humor changed the vibes. He goofed on how many freaks there were, on how the New York Thruway was closed – something most of us didn’t know. We were unaware of the million or so people trying desperately to get to the exact spot where we shivered miserably.

“Arlo made the crowd totally relax. It was like, ‘Thank God, he’s funny, we can relax.’ If all those people ran, you knew you’d get trampled,” said Dena Quilici.

Troubles went away

“All those troubles kind of went away once you just settled down and started listening to the music,” Ty Davis says.

Sweetwater came and went, leaving no mark on the memory of anyone we spoke with.

About midnight, Kukielski, who lived not far away in Newburgh, N.Y., left the festival. During the long walk to his car, the mud sucked his shoes off his feet. He drove barefoot, taking whatever passable road seemed to lead away from the site.

He pulled into a field and slept in the car with his girlfriend under an airplane beacon that revolved all night with a bright white light, and went home in the morning. After hearing the news reports, his parents hadn’t expected to see him for days.

A new kind of freedom

The only real taboo at Woodstock was violence. Hundreds of thousands of people roaming the woods at night could have meant real trouble.

Despite an atmosphere which John Haerry describes as “The only rule was that there were no rules other than what people established for themselves,” there was no real trouble. The announcers, the bands, all said “We’re in this together. It’s up to us to make it work.”

“You knew you really had to cooperate with the people next to you,” says Dena Quilici.

Kathleen McDevitt remembers, “It was a little bit frightening to have such freedom, like another world where you could do anything, say anything, be anyone, nobody would stop you. It was hard on all of us having that much freedom, it could have gone the other way and been really dangerous. The balance was unnerving, and everybody at the end said, ‘We did it.’ “

“It would be so embarrassing to (be violent) in a sheer crowd that was obviously enjoying itself and full of good feelings. There was a feeling that you were among a select group of people who could gather in such huge numbers without any problems,” said Stephen Shechtman. “We probably thought that half a million of our parents couldn’t get together and do as good a job with it.”

“I knew something could go wrong, but I didn’t feel that it would, same Chris Heinzmann, and about a dozen others.

Points of light

From the stage, announcer John Morris asked us each to light a match, just so we could see how many of us there were. At first, the response was slow but then little lights appeared, far, far away, and we began to get the idea. The cynicism faded. Your light was a gift to everybody else, and marked your place in the big picture. All along the hillside and into the woods as far as you could see were tiny fires.

Michael Craper lit his match and just watched in awe. “I had never seen anything like it,” he reports. “I was mesmerized for about an hour.”

Melanie was on stage next, and and all this incendiary business went on during her set. She later wrote a song about Woodstock called Candles in the Rain, and audiences lit matches whenever she sang it. Now, flicking one’s Bic is a polite way to request an encore.

Joan Baez finished it all off, pregnant and sweet.

Dawn Jabari-Zhou had earlier met someone who knew of an empty chicken coop she and her friends could sleep in. They followed him into the woods, where there was an abandoned coop that didn’t smell. Rain poured in. She rolled her bag out on a plank that was probably a former chicken roost. “Back then, we trusted each other completely,” she says.

Woodstock, Day One, was over.

Bid goodnight from the stage with a solemn reminder that the person next to us was our brother, hundreds of thousands of wet, tired people crept off to the woods, under or into vans, or stayed on the field, sleeping where they had roosted.

Tens of thousands of others, too keyed up to sleep, milled all night by firelight. This convention of the unconventional had just begun.

There were easily 500,000 points of light in Woodstock Nation that night.

By Sheila Lennon. Source.

Denny Laine has made a lasting impact on rock music.  He was a founding member of The Moody Blues, sang “Go Now” and influenced the early direction of the band.  He also co-founded Wings with Paul McCartney and co-wrote some of the Wings songs including the giant world-wide hit “Mull Of Kintyre.”

Regarding Denny Laine, Bruce Eder of All Music Guide (www.allmusicguide.com) writes:

“For a few months at the height of the British invasion, Denny Laine was one of the most recognizable voices on the entire British music scene.  As the lead singer on the Moody Blues’ recording of “Go Now” — a worldwide multi-million seller — he stood out in a large pack, and did so splendidly.  His soulful, agonized lead vocal performance, coupled with Mike Pinder’s chiming piano, proved irresistable on the radio.”

“…in 1971, Paul McCartney announced that he was forming his first permanent band since exiting the Beatles.  The group, christened Wings, was McCartney (joined by his wife Linda McCartney) on bass, guitar, piano, and vocals, with (Denny) Laine at the core on guitar, bass, and vocals.”

The Cryers’ website (www.myspace.com/thecryersrockon) describes them as follows:

“The band’s sound is based deep within the roots of Rock ‘n Roll. It features a solid beat, captivating harmonies, and powerfully written songs.  Sid Berstein, the man responsible for bringing the Beatles to America, calls this band “Magical!”

Denny Laine (www.myspace.com/dennylaine) brings his musical experience and legacy to The Winchester in Cleveland, Ohio.   He will be performing Moody Blues and Wings songs along with his original material with The Cryers as his band.  Admission is $20.00.  Showtime is 9:00pm.  Visit www.thewinchester.net for more information.

Denny Laine singing “Go Now” in an early promo video for The Moody Blues:

Wings (Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Laine) performing “Mull of Kintyre” live on the BBC:

Denny Laine, Wings, Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, The Moody Blues, Rock

According to T-Bone Walker they may call it STORMY MONDAY but Tuesday’s just as bad. Wednesday and Thursday don’t get much of a  rap either. And with Sunday set aside for Church, I’m sure T-Bone was mighty grateful for Friday and Saturday. Yes, DAYS OF THE WEEK, was our theme this week. Lots of songs available for Friday and Saturday and even Sunday, Monday and Tuesday delivered a few choices but poor old Wednesday and Thursday didn’t offer up much at all. Mind you, the songs that did get included were goodies.

Queen moved the show along with the cheery little ditty called LAZING ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON, followed by Louis Jordan & His Tympany 5 telling us all about the SATURDAY NIGHT FISH FRY. Rounding out the bracket, Eskimo Joe gave us one of those rare songs about Wednesday: RUBY WEDNESDAY.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, (left), who have been performing in one incarnation or the other since 1966, delivered  the toe-tappin’ LOUISANNA SATURDAY NIGHT. I’ve played this song before but I never tire of it: Tom Waits with one of his best, THE HEART OF SATURDAY NIGHT. I also never tire of the great Neil Young so OUT ON THE WEEKEND, from the Harvest album, was a shoo-in for this show.

Tori Amos does a great cover of the Boomtown Rats song I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS but my favourite piece of nostalgia this week was the Moody Blues classic TUESDAY AFTERNOON. Check out this video from 1970. Looks like they are playing at the pub down the road on a Friday night. Ah, those were the days!

De La Soul know how to party on SATURDAYS. But Stevie Wonder, having been dumped by his girlfriend, calls the 2nd day of the week TUESDAY HEARTBREAK. Saving the day, The Young Rascals know which day of the week promises some laid-back relaxing: yes, it’s all about Sunday in their smash hit song of 1967: GROOVIN’.

Here’s some trivia for you about Sunday: Did you know that the The Gregorian Calendar repeats every 400 years, and no century starts on a Sunday? Also, the Jewish New Year never falls on a Sunday. And only those months beginning on a Sunday will contain a Friday the 13th.

And talking of Fridays, here is a great video clip of  The Easybeats performing FRIDAY ON MY MIND.  

I like to include movie and TV themes whenever I can because its essentially a nostalgia show and nothing takes you back to a time and place better than the theme music from an iconic television series. This week it was the theme to HAPPY DAYS. Here’s the show’s intro for your trip down memory lane:

Cold Chisel’s 1984 hit SATURDAY NIGHT was written by Don Walker who I’m looking forward to hearing from at the upcoming Writers Festival here in Byron Bay. I bet he’s got a few good stories to tell!

There was a lot to choose from when it came to the weekend – obviously everyone’s favourite time of the week. There was The Specials with FRIDAY NIGHT, SATURDAY MORNING, Oliver Cheatham with GET DOWN SATURDAY NIGHT and the Sam Cooke classic, ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT. 

Monday, on the other hand, is not a songwriters favourite day of the week, that’s for sure.  Fats Domino can only see it as BLUE MONDAY and the Mamas & The Papas claim, in MONDAY MONDAY, that “Every other day of the week is fine, yeah, but whenever Monday comes it finds me crying all of the time”. Yep, you can’t trust Mondays if you’re aiming to avoid misery. Mind you, the Mamas and Papas look pretty happy in this video clip from 1966, a year that saw this tune at #1 for 10 weeks in the Billboard Top 40. Check it out:

The Cure don’t care about any other day than Friday because, as the song goes: FRIDAY, I’M IN LOVE.  The Rolling Stones offered up a song about my favourite day of the week, RUBY TUESDAY. The Bangles find Monday all a bit manic, (don’t we all?), while Loverboy are WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND. And then it was another oldie but goodie – Chicago’s SATURDAY IN THE PARK: Check out this clip that was filmed in Chicago in November, 1972. 

I closed the show with one more song about Tuesday, from one of my favourite female artists, Michelle Branch with TUESDAY MORNING. Here’s the complete playlist:

Call It Stormy Monday - T-Bone Walker

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon - Queen

Saturday Night Fish Fry - Louis Jordan & His Tympany 5

Ruby Wednesday - Eskimo Joe

Tuesday’s Gone - Lynard Skynard

Louisianna Saturday Night - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

The Heart of Saturday Night - Tom Waits

I Don’t Like Mondays - Tori Amos

Tuesday Afternoon - Moody Blues

Out On The Weekend - Neil Young

Groovin’ - The Young Rascals

Tuesday Heartbreak - Stevie Wonder

Saturdays - De La Soul

Friday On My Mind - The Easybeats

Happy Days - TV Theme Song

Friday Night - Lily Allen

Lonely Weekends - Charlie Rich

Thursday  - Morphine

Saturday Night - Cold Chisel

Get Down Saturday Night - Oliver Cheatham

Friday Night, Saturday Morning - The Specials

Another Saturday Night - Sam Cooke

Blue Monday - Fats Domino 

Monday, Monday - Mamas & The Papas

Friday I’m in Love - The Cure

Ruby Tuesday - The Rolling Stones

Manic Monday - The Bangles

Saturday in the Park - Chicago

Working for the Weekend - Loverboy

Tuesday Morning - Michelle Branch

Trying to get work done before (hopefully) heading off to trade in a clunker for a new car; here’s what’s popping up on the media player:

1. “Komm Süsser Tod, Komm Sel’ge” - Gordian Knot, Gordian Knot
2. “Deadly Nightshade” – Brand X, Masques
3. “Homecoming” – Yellowjackets, Samuria Samba
4. “Life’s Incredible Again” – Michael Giacchino, The Incredibles soundtrack
5. “Pixel Dream” – Ozric Tentacles, Live at the Pongmaster’s Ball
6. “Girls with Guns” – Tommy Shaw, Girls with Guns
7. “The Doomsday Machine/Goodbye Mr. Decker/Kirk Does It Again” – Fred Steiner, Star Trek TV soundtrack Vol. 1
8. “I Go to Rio” – Pablo Cruise, Worlds Away
9. “The Balance” – The Moody Blues, Question of Balance
10. “Dead Already” – Thomas Newman, American Beauty soundtrack

Back to the grind!

Cantaretii britanici Coldplay vor fi angajati în serial de personajul Homer Simpson sa sustina un concert privat pentru el si pentru fiul sau, Bart. Pretul cerut de artisti nu va reprezenta o problema pentru familia Simpson pentru ca Homer va castiga la loto o suma impresionanta. citeste tot articolul aici -> Coldplay in concert