Music Before the Money

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As the 40th anniversary of the The Woodstock Music & Art Fair (An Aquarian Exposition) approaches there is the memory of failed attempts to recapture the feeling and history. As many historians agree Woodstock was the pinnacle of the 1960′s flower-power surge. (After that even Madison Avenue executives were wearing their hair over their ears and celebrities were wearing peace signs on chains around their necks)

The last attempt to put on a big concert, for a 30th anniversary festival, was in 1999. This ended in a completely opposite drama, complete chaos with hundreds of police officers going after rampaging idiots who were doing everything from torching the stage to looting the overpriced vendors.

This summer, on August 14th & 15th, music fans from the Chicago area and from throughout the Midwest (and beyond) will converge on Galt Airport to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. The neat thing about this festival is that it includes 9 tribute bands:

• Jimi Hendrix
• Janis Joplin
• Joe Cocker
• The Who
• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (2 of these)
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• The Grateful Dead
• Santana

Friday

On Friday evening Kelven Dyson, as Jimi Hendrix, will open the show with a set scheduled to begin at 7:00. Following Hendrix, direct from New York City, will be Lauren Bernal, who will deliver an uncanny tribute to Janis Joplin. Woody James and “Ohio” will perform its tribute to CSN&Y. Abraxas, the world’s finest Santana tribute band will close the show.

Saturday

Saturday’s music will begin in the afternoon at 3:00. Saturday afternoon and evening acts will include: Creedence Clearwater Revival, performed by “Creedence Again” featuring Rich Perez as John Fogerty; Boneyfingers, an extraordinary talented Grateful Dead tribute band; The Who, performed by The Wholigans and Marrakesh Express who will pay tribute to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Headlining Saturday night’s show will be Joe Cocker, performed by Alan Kaye and his Mad Dogs Band.

This should be a great concert. Anyone interested in going should go to A Woodstock Illinois Tribute

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Music never began in bars but liquor establishments became the showcase for bands in the 1970′s through the 1990′s.  Before this time the mighty juke box and the the pool table ruled the roost. During the 30+ years when live bands plied their trade in the bars bar managers became promoters as bars grew bigger and began to resemble theaters.

Sometime in the late 1990′s this all began to fade away. Big screen televisions and gambling machines became the opiate of the bar patron. In addition drinking-and-driving penalties were getting stiffer and slowly live entertainment was downgraded. Live music in bars downhill following music in record stores. And nopw the record store is becoming a rare occurrence.

But wait a minute – I never bought my first recording in a record store. There weren’t any in the early 1960′s. I bought it at the store that sold appliances, televisions and lawnmowers. The 45 rpm discs were up on the pegboard wall at the back and the LP’s were on a swivel stand.

Our first gig was a house party. Our second one was another house party. Our third was playing for a few hours in the lobby of the local skill hill . .  .and so on. We were too young to play liquor establishments even if they would have allowed bands at the time.

Famous R & B singer, Sam Cooke, began as a gospel singer and played the church circuit across the American midwest. These groups recorded and sold their records from the back of their cars. Churches paid big money for these groups  – and still do. Amy Grant began singing on a circuit much like this.

For up-and-coming bands no it is a lot easier than it was in the 1970′s. Even though the money was better the equipments cost a fortune. As a keyboard player in 1980 I paid $5,000 for a heavy Yamaha Electric Grand, $1500 for an ARP string machine and $1500 for a Minimoog. The equivalent can be purchased for $200 now and weighs 8 pounds. Today a new PA system is under $1,000 whereas ours cost $9000 and we needed two vans to pack everything around.

My advice is:

1. Play wherever you can for free until you get a good set list.
2. Video is really cheap now so get a good video recording.
3. Many private clubs are screaming for money so rent one of these places for $100 and throw your own dance.
4. Read the biographies of the old bands and get hints on where they usedto get gigs. Believe it or not it still applies today.

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“What we did, what made me extremely proud, was sing a lot of non-parallel stuff. I did some of my best work moving the middle parts around in internal shifts that kept happening. That’s what made me proud. Those harmonies came out of Everly Brothers, late-fifties and early-sixties jazz, and classical music. A lot of classical music. A ton of classical music.”

- David Crosby

The year 1969, the year of Woodstock, was also the year of the guitarist. Jimi Hendrix had started the tend at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and new names like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Johnny Winter were starting to rise above the names of their respective bands. With FM music stations favoring this trend over band work the year started out as a swan song for the traditional bands.

In any group, even the Beatles, there are the experimenters. Just like hockey or basketball players who show up for practice an hour before eveyone else and then leave hours afterward certain musicians cannot be sidemen. In spite of all the success of the group they have to explore beyond the sum of the parts. This is what happened with David Crosby of The Byrds, Graham Nash of the Hollies and Stephen Stills of  Buffalo Springfield. They began a trend where talented and creative forces are brought together for projects and concerts but are also exploring their own individual paths.

When Crosby, Stills and Nash took the stage at Woodstock with acoustic guitars the concert-goers were tired, soaking wet and famished. They had already been listening to the greatest selection of music the world had ever heard:  The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Cleerwater Revival, The Band, and so on.  But from the first nervous announcement by Stephen Stills : “This is the first time we’ve ever played in front of people, man, and we’re scared shitless!” the crowd was revitalized.

The group was coming off a sucessful album that sported hits on both AM and FM stations: ” Marrakesh Express” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and without guitar lead solos they expounded their madrigal harmonies to an amazed audience. This was live and acoustic with Stills’ vituosity raising the bar for acoustic guitar performances.. Then they introduced Neil Young for a whiny, but fitting, fourth voice and music history was made. So when people remeber Woodstock 40 years later, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are right beside Hendrix and Janis as the most memorable acts.

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The year summer of 1969 was arguably the most event-filled in modern world history. There was the first man on the moon; the first death of a rock star (Brian Jones); the Charles Manson murders; and there was Woodstock.

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair (An Aquarian Exposition) was the brainchild of Michale Lang and Artie Kornfield, backed by financiers John Roberts and Joel Rosenman. The open-air music and arts festival was actually designed as a profit-making venture and was officially called “Woodstock Ventures”. Around 186,000 tickets were sold beforehand and organizers anticipated approximately 200,000 festival-goers would turn up. The “free concert” idea came about after it became obvious that the event was turning into a monstrous human wave as hundreds of thousands more people showed up than the organizers were prepared to handle.

The idea to use the original site in Orange County was voted down by the town’s people so Lang approached a middle-aged farmer named Mat Yasgur and they used his 600 acres for the site. As fate would have it Yasgur’s land formed a natural bowl sloping down to Filippini Pond so the stage would be set at the bottom of the hill with the pond behind it.

The throngs of people who set upon the rural concert site in Bethel created a massive traffic jam and literally closed the New York State Thruway. For that many people the food and sanitation, as well as the first aid, facilities were not adequate. And when it rained the hundreds of thousands of people found themselves mired in mud with no food and or bathroom facilities.

Yasgur’s farm became, for four days, a mini-nation of counterculture.  The world watched while drugs were used, people bathed nude in the pond and love was free. The world and music changed forever in the months following that weekend as the domination of post-World War II ideas slowly began to slide away. It was almost as though John F. Kennedy had predicted it 8 1/2 years before when he proclaimed that a man would walk on the moon before the end of the decade. It would all come to a head the next April at Kent State, when National Guardsmen opened fire on anti-war demonstrators, but Woodstock shifted the huge boulder.

Most of the fairly unknown performers like Santana, Sha-Na-Na, Ritchie Havens  and Canned Heat became instant celebrities and the filmed Woodstock documentary became the defining chronicle showing the end of one generation and the emerging of a new one.

The Bill

Friday, August 15th

• Richie Havens
• Swami Satchidananda
• Sweetwater
• The Incredible String Band
• Bert Sommer
• Tim Hardin
• Ravi Shankar
• Melanie
• Arlo Guthrie
• Joan Baez

Saturday, August 16th

• Quill
• Keef Hartley Band
• Country Joe McDonald
• John B. Sebastien
• Santana
• Canned Heat
• Mountain
• Grateful Dead
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Sly & the Family Stone
• Janis Joplin with the Kozmic Blues Band
• The Who
• Jefferson Airplane

Sunday and Monday (16th and 17th)

• Joe Cocker
• Country Joe and the Fish
• Ten Years After
• The Band
• Blood, Sweat and Tears
• Johnny Winter (with Edgar Winter)
• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
• Paul Butterfield Blues Band
• Sha-Na-Na
• Jimi Hendrix

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Dave Carroll is a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based singer-songwriter who has sprung to international fame because of his funny video about a not-so-funny episode where baggage handlers at O’Hare Airport in Chicago damaged his Taylor guitar. In fact Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars has appointed a special representative from his company to Carroll to help with the PR.

One of the main things that Taylor advises to anyone taking a guitar on an airplane is that most airlines allow the instruments to be brought onboard. However, many of their employees have not been alerted to this fact. The Taylor website also has great tips for anyone who has a guitar damaged due to the negligence of a carrier.

Check out this link!

Taylor Guitars Responds to \”United Breaks Guitars\”