SEPTEMBER, 2024
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
ELECTRONIC EDITION: Now free to email subscribers and supported by tasteful, music-oriented advertising with a unique news-format approach.
A monthly guide to early rock, blues, country, folk, and traditional jazz in the Seattle area and beyond.
Editor and Publisher: Doug Bright
Web: httpwhheritagemusicreview_com
Email: subscribe@heritagemusicreview.com
Editor's Note: Links to the books and albums mentioned in this issue come from my participation in the Amazon Associates affiliate program, which enables me to earn commissions on the products I recommend when readers buy them through this website. The links represent my judgment of the most relevant and reasonably priced musical packages available. Heritage Music Review does not collect, store, or share confidential information generated by its readers' purchases. Enjoy!
CONTENTS—SEPTEMBER, 2024
PART 2:
Woodstock Turns 55 This Year, But ThankffRhino Records, You Can Still Experience It
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN, OUT THE SOUNDS: September MusicCALENDAR (next message)
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PART TWO:
WOODSTOCK TURNS 55 THIS Year, BUT THANKS TO RHINO RECORDS, YOU CAN STILL EXPERIENCE IT
By Doug Bright
In August 1969, nearly half a million people converged on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near Bethel, New York, 43 miles southwest of the larger arts-oriented town of Woodstock. Billed as "an Aquarian exposition: 3 days of peace and music,” the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was the biggest and most prestigious outdoor rock festival of its time. universally recognized as the defining moment of the hippie counterculture, it was immortalized in a 1970 documentary film and an accompanying soundtrack album set. Of course, that footage constituted only a fraction of the 35 hours of music contributed by the 32 acts that participated, but in 2019, Rhino Records marked the festival's fiftieth anniversary by unearthing nearly every performance in chronological order, from Richie Havens' opening set to Jimi Hendrix's closing one, in a deluxe 38-disc package called WOODSTOCK--Back To The Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive. In celebration of its release, a Philadelphia public FM station, WXPN, aired it from August 15th to the 18th, timing the broadcast to coincide as precisely as possible with the date and the hour when the performances took place.
The limited-edition superbox was released on August 2nd, but well before the end of the month, all 1,969 copies had been snapped up. Fortunately for this roots-music enthusiast and a host of other subscribers on TuneIn.com's email list, we learned about the WXPN stream in time to hear every show that interested us. Nevertheless, even if you missed out on both opportunities, you're still in luck. In addition to the sold-out deluxe set, Rhino is still offering smaller packages. BACK TO THE GARDEN:
50th Anniversary Experience
is a ten-CD version that includes something from all 32 festival acts. BACK TO THE GARDEN:
50th Anniversary Collection
is a three-disc compilation that's also available on five vinyl albums.
Johnny Winter
Although blues-rocker Johnny Winter had been playing and recording in his native Texas since the age of fifteen, he didn't come to national attention until nearly ten years later when a couple of ROLLING STONE writers raved about him in an article exploring the local music scene. As a result, he was picked up by Columbia Records in February 1969 with an advance payment of $600,000, the biggest signing bonus the label had ever given to a new solo artist. He cut his first Columbia album, simply entitled
Johnny Winter,
the following month, but by then other labels had discovered his earlier work. Consequently, by the time he appeared at Woodstock, the newly discovered blues-rocker had two albums to his credit.
It was midnight on the morning of Monday, August 18th, when Winter took the stage with his power-trio rhythm section: bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer John "Red" Turner. They opened with "Mama, Talk To Your Daughter", a good, uptempo shuffle gleaned from Chicago bluesman
J.B. LeNoir.
After a couple of selections from his two existing
albums,
Winter launched into an extended take on B.B King's "You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now", demonstrating lightning-fast dexterity without succumbing to the instrumental exhibitionism that characterized all too many guitarists of the psychedelic era.
"We'd like to try something a little different," he then told his audience. "We just finished cuttin' our next album in Nashville. My brother Edgar's been workin' on it. We'd like to try one of the tunes from the album and bring out my little brother Edgar to do some sax and piano for you."
The song that followed was "I Can't Stand It", an original blues-rocker that sounded considerably more contemporary than the material that had preceded it. As for the project, it doesn't show up in either brother's album discography, so it apparently never materialized.
"Like I said, We just finished this album and we really haven't been workin' together with Edgar," Johnny confessed, "so we don't have any material. We'd like to do a tune we used to do a long time ago, kind of a jam thing featuring Edgar: he's gonna sing on this one."
An impassioned, slow-grooving take on John D. Lowdermilk's rock'n'roll standard "Tobacco Road" found Edgar playing a dual instrumental role. On keyboard, he contributed some impressive soul-jazz organ that called
Jimmy McGriff
to mind, supporting his brother's guitar work with rich chordal backing. His frenetic but bluesy sax solo demonstrated an ability to match his brother in any contest of notes per second. He concluded the song with a long, drawn-out finale intended to work the crowd for all he was worth, and the resulting applause proved the effort successful.
The set concluded with Ray Charles' gospelesque rocker "Tell The Truth" led by Edgar, with Johnny singing perfect fraternal harmony when the song required it. Predictably, the crowd called for an encore, and the guitar work on "Johnny B. Goode" was, for all practical purposes, a Chuck Berry tribute, showing the depth of Winter's respect for the pioneering rockers who influenced him.
Winter's entire festival performance was released in 2012 by Sony Music/Columbia on a Johnny Winter CD entitled
The Woodstock Experience.
Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Vocalist and harmonica virtuoso Paul Butterfield discovered the blues growing up in Chicago, where he heard the music's now-legendary practitioners on the radio and in live performance. He formed the first incarnation of his Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1963 at the University of Chicago. After a couple of personnel changes, Butterfield and his crew were picked up by Elektra Records, taking the American blues scene by storm with an excitingly authentic debut album simply entitled
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
By the time he played Woodstock, however, he had departed from the classic Chicago blues-band style in favor of a more contemporary R&B sound.
Taking the stage at 6 AM on Monday, August 18th, Butterfield opened with Albert King's "Born Under A Bad Sign", which he had included in his 1967 album
The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw.
After a vocal performance that reflected the inspiration of its composer, the song turned into the kind of one-chord band-jam instrumental grind that made the hippie era ripe for caricature, but Butterfield, lead guitarist Buzzy Feiten, and the saxophonist improvised their solos with enough heart to keep things interesting.
It was followed in a similarly funky Memphis soul groove with the Butterfield composition "No Amount of Loving" from the band's just-released album
Keep On Moving.
As with "Born Under A Bad Sign", the recorded version hadn't included a harmonica solo, but the Woodstock version was a bit more focused. Charles Brown's slow-blues standard "Driftin’ and Driftin'" took the band right back to the classic blues sound that brought it to fame in the first place, enhanced by solid chord support from the tight horn section. Consequently, Butterfield delivered his most meaningful harmonica solo yet, and it was rewarded with all the applause it deserved.
Then it was back to the soul groove with Butterfield's own "Morning Sunshine". "Life can be so strong when you say what you feel," he sang. "Life can be so hard when you don't even know what's real."
"All In A Day", also from
Keep On Moving,
was followed by the album's opening track, the ultimate Butterfield peace anthem "Love March", delivered with conviction by multi-instrumentalist "Brother" Gene Dinwiddie. "We can all get around and march around this whole area," he exhorted the crowd, initiating a fittingly dramatic ending for a Butterfield Woodstock set. The diminished but still-enthusiastic Monday-morning audience chanted for more, and the band was quick to oblige with "Everything's Gonna Be All Right", an energetic shuffle that took the Butterfield band back to its classic Chicago roots. "No Amount of Loving", "Love March", and "Everything's Gonna Be All Right" appear on Butterfield's portion of Rhino's ten-disc
set,
and only "Love March" is included in the three-disc
version.
Sha Na Na
Sha Na Na, a Fifties rock'n'roll nostalgia act that had taken its name from the definitive doo-wop vocal riff of the
Silhouettes’
1958 hit "Get A Job", had formed in 1968 while its founders were students at Columbia University. After catching their act at a New York nightspot called Steve Paul's Scene, Woodstock co-founder Michael Lang invited them to participate. Their 6:30 AM show, preceding Jimi Hendrix on the festival's final day, was only their eighth professional appearance. "By then it was a refugee camp," drummer Jocko Marcellino recalled in Lang's memoir
The Road To Woodstock.
"Most of the people were gone."
The opener, the aforementioned "Get A Job", was taken at such an absurdly fast tempo that the lead singer was hard put to get all the verse syllables in, and his punkish delivery didn't help. Although the vocal and instrumental background was faithful to the original record, the result made an obscene mockery of a Fifties doo-wop classic. Nevertheless, the audience, apparently too ignorant or stoned to know the difference, received it enthusiastically.
The
immortal 1957 hit "Come Go With Me" fared better, and the Rays’ "Silhouettes", popularized the same year, fared better still, pitched a step lower than the original record but sung convincingly. Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel", the era's most universally remembered tragic ballad, was greeted with a cheer of recognition, but Sha Na Na's overdramatized treatment sounded more like a comedic put-on than a sincere effort. Nevertheless, the crowd loved it.
Despite the band's characteristically authentic arrangements, the tempo of everything else on the program was speeded up to such a ridiculous extent as to call the band's artistic sincerity into serious question, utterly offending anyone who, like me, has always loved this music on its own terms. Still, the crowd liked it all well enough to call for an encore, and the result was a similarly forgettable caricature of
Gene Chandler's
1962 hit "Duke of Earl".
At the time Sha Na Na played Woodstock, it was the only band on the bill that wasn't yet contracted to a record label. Their Kama Sutra Records debut
album,
named after
Danny and The Juniors’
1958 anthem "Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay", had come out later in 1969 as a result of the Woodstock show, and the performances were generally more believable. Rhino's ten-disc Woodstock
set
offers, among others, the two best efforts of the show: "Come Go With Me" and "Silhouettes". Only "At The Hop" appears on the three-disc
collection.
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WHAT'S IN STORE: News From The MUSICAL Marketplace
Find The Merle Haggard Story At Phinney Books
"There's the guy I'd love to be and the guy I am," country music legend Merle Haggard once confided to biographer Marc Eliot. "I'm somewhere in between, in deep water, swimming to the other shore." All the complexity of the circumstances and choices that shaped him are revealed with unflinching honesty in Eliot's recent book THE HAG: The Life, Times, and Work of Merle Haggard. Your copy is waiting for you at Phinney Books in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.
Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Avenue North
Web: www.phinneybooks.com
Phone: 206/297-2665
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Iona Fyfe Presents Scottish Song Workshop At Dusty Strings
Dusty Strings Music Store and School in Seattle's Fremont district, long known for its array of fine stringed instruments, instructional workshops, and folk concerts, presents award-winning Scottish balladeer Iona Fyfe at 3 PM on Saturday, September 28th, for a workshop entitled "Scots Language and Song". "This fun workshop is for anyone who loves to sing and has an interest in Scottish singing, music, and Scots language, and language in general," the website proclaims. "Students don't have to be amazing singers, just comfortable enough to sing in a group."
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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1988 Fender Vintage Series '62 Stratocaster At Emerald City Guitars
Emerald City Guitars in Seattle's Pioneer Square, well known for its fascinating selection of new and vintage acoustic and electric guitars, amps, and accessories, has recently acquired a 1988 Fender Vintage Series '62 Stratocaster electric. "This is a great tribute to Fender's golden era," the website proclaims. "Includes original hardshell case, original manual, and cable."
Emerald City Guitars
83 South Washington Street
Phone: 206/382-0231
Web: www.emeraldcityguitars.com
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On The Newsstand: Heritage Music Review
The print edition of Heritage Music Review is available by subscription for $15 per year and on sale at the following Seattle newsstands and music venues:
FREMONT:
American Music: 4450 Fremont Avenue North
Dusty Strings Acoustic Music Shop: 3406 Fremont Avenue North
UNIVERSITY DISTRICT:
Bulldog News: 4208 University Way Northeast
GREENWOOD:
Phinney Books: 7405 Greenwood Avenue North
CAPITOL HILL:
Elliott Bay Book Company: 1521 10th Avenue
PIONEER SQUARE:
Emerald City Guitars: 83 South Washington Street
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