Woodstock: Back to the Garden

William Dart goes back half-a-century to perhaps the most celebrated of all music festivals, Woodstock, and reviews a new 10-CD set of recordings called Back to the Garden.

[Editor's note: A number of the tracks which William features in his programme are not available (yet) as embeddable video or audio from YouTube or similar. Our regrets for not being able to include them here.]

Joni Mitchell makes us wait a while before she actually sings in her own version of her song 'Woodstock', almost teasing us into the song with liquidly seductive piano. It’s a salute to an event that she didn’t herself get to, written around the experiences of her then partner, Graham Nash, who did go and did perform with his band.

This song would become a single for Crosby, Stills Nash and Young in 1970, when memories of that August 1969 celebration of peace and music on Max Yasgur’s farm had become a symbol of and maybe a signing-off on the innocent sixties. 

Here in New Zealand we had our chance to experience Woodstock when Mike Wadleigh’s massive documentary made it to our movie screens. I remember it playing in Auckland’s now-demolished Plaza, ironically the theatre that in the mid-sixties had hosted The Sound of Music seemingly forever.

Woodstock, the film, was a magical experience and its 3-LP soundtrack meant we could live with it, on a daily basis if we wanted, in our own homes. Its opening song, a rather pretty ballad of hope by John Sebastian that echoed the famous words of the late Martin Luther King, seemed back then to be a sort of karanga.

A new 10-CD set of recordings from the festival titled Woodstock: Back to the Garden makes one realise just how much we were deprived of 49 years ago.

Back in 1970, with that John Sebastian song on disc, it was a matter of straight-into-the-music, but now, thanks to Rhino Records, we can hear the singer’s breathless, beautiful welcoming, even if, in fact, it was the third of his five-song set, and the only one to make it on to that original vinyl release.

On the ten discs of Rhino’s Back to the Garden, we can hear four of John Sebastian’s songs, including his Lovin' Spoonful number, 'Darling be home soon', initially introduced by the singer as a kind of goodbye song. But in keeping with the unbridled faith and optimism of the time, he added that it wasn’t an all-the-way goodbye song because he was sure that everyone was to going to stay at the festival and keep it all happening until it was over.

They were indeed charmed times. But Sebastian fans have reason to quiver with quiet rage. One of his Woodstock performances has only been released on an almost instantly sold-out 38-CD collection of the festival’s music. A flabbergasting 432 tracks promising almost every sound that was let loose over the three days.

It’s there that you’ll find John Sebastian’s 'Younger Generation', which provides a memorable moment in the movie when he sings it as the camera roves around fields of hippie parents and their children. An audience that doesn’t respond unfortunately to Sebastian’s rather clunky attempt to rouse them into song.

But what the 10-CD set does offer is the music being performed in the order that the mega-crowd heard it, setting off with a generous six songs from Richie Havens, of which we only heard one in 1970.

Playing order — that is, context — can make a difference. Following on from John Sebastian, as part of that Saturday afternoon line-up, we have an 18-minute taste of British bluesman Keef Hartley with his band. They work through a medley from his latest album, Halfbreed. featuring the legendary British trumpeter Henry Lowther.

Even though the rolling blues of Canned Heat had been one of the highlights of the Woodstock movie and the original LP set, Keef Hartley didn’t fare so well. We’ve had to wait 49 years to hear his full 50 minute performance … and for that you need to get your hands on the unattainable 38-CD set.

But the already unwieldy 10-CD collection that I have in hand does resurrect some of the acts which, for decades, remained a mystery to all save those who caught them on the Woodstock stage.

These include a personal favourite of mine.

Back in August 1969, the Incredible String Band had the misfortune to be the wrong act at the wrong time, sandwiched between Keef Hartley and Canned Heat on a Saturday given over to rather heavier music. Guitarist, singer and songwriter Mike Heron commented a few years ago that a pretty drugged crowd didn’t take to their plinky, British, thoughtful music.

However, a song like 'Gather Round', which they’d recorded for the BBC rather patchily just a few months before, shows how, from a 2019 vantage point, the Incredible String Band comes across as pioneers in a no-man’s-land between alt.folk and alt.country.

This may be too fey for some listeners, but I’m hoping that it’s scrumptiously wayward to others, right down to the gentle wail of Licorice and Rose’s backing vocals.

Then there are the short-lived groups such as Sweetwater and Quill. Quill, who would release its one and only album in 1970, is easily forgotten, but Sweetwater less so.

This Los Angeles group had announced themselves in 1968 with an album that, true to the fashions of the time, blended music and styles from wherever they could be found. One track from their Woodstock set is a little like a late sixties lute song.

Nancy Nevins is on her best vocal behavior alongside August Burns’ cello. A rendition with its nervous, and nervous-making moments.  

Sweetwater is not only sweet — there was a wilder side to the group. This bursts out in a longer track titled Two Worlds that ends with an extraordinary free-ranging jam that almost seems to take us into an aviary in a Brazilian rain forest.

Two years before Woodstock, in the summer of 1967, Janis Joplin had been one of the standout acts at the Monterey Pop Festival. Her electrifying performance was caught on DA Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop (incidentally, a superb movie and time capsule that has always languished in the shadow of the later Woodstock film).

By 1969, Joplin had amassed quite a fan-base and you can hear them chanting for her to come on. She transforms the Bee Gee’s simple pop song, 'To Love Somebody', into a soul-drenched heart-wrencher. Up there on the stage at Woodstock, you can feel the adrenalin pulsing, with the tempo just a shade faster and lighter than the studio performance, and Joplin determined to take no prisoners.

The seven men behind her are mostly the band that we heard on her 1968 Kozmic Blues solo album, including sax men Terry Clements and Cornelius Snooky Flowers.

But there’s no hiding behind Gabriel Mekler’s smooth production that made the album into a classic. This is live and not so tight perhaps on the instrumental side, but with a nervous energy and a sense of occasion that makes it unique.

Just a year and a few months after Woodstock, Janis Joplin would be dead.

So too would be Jimi Hendrix, whose blistering guitar assassination of the national anthem was a goosebump scene in the movie and a reminder that America was fighting a very unpopular war in Vietnam. I remember gripping the armrests of my seat back in 1970 as those searing, almost exquisitely painful dissonances seemed to reach down inside my bones.

The new Jimi Hendrix song on the Woodstock: Back to the Garden is an original blues titled 'Hear my train a comin’'. It’s a number that proved to be one of his most worked on pieces: there are live performances from Atlanta and Miami to San Francisco’s Fillmore West.

It was, as were other Hendrix pieces, an ever-fluctuating entity, opening this time with a staggering, stalking duet for voice and guitar, after some playful banter about issues of tuning and noise levels.

I opened with Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, which would become a hit for the then supergroup of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And although it could hardly have been performed at the festival, it does turn up under the credits to the Michael Wadleigh film.

However, the four men were there and gave the crowd two generous sets, one with and one without Neil Young. Out of the six songs now made available, one is a Beatles cover that must have surprised a few on the day.

David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash had been playing around with Paul McCartney’s 'Blackbird' since early 1969, and as late as their 1988 album, Allies, they gave their followers a live concert account of it. Another earlier live performance online has Stephen Stills laughing when he mucks up the opening guitar riff.

The three men were not in perfect musical accord at Woodstock. But they are live, not only playing the song but playing with it. The occasional chord is awkward, vocal harmonies not quite finessed. But the life in its delivery perfectly catches that of the occasion – a festival that, in the words of Grace Slick, represented a new dawn, even if the days that followed might not be as rosy as some of us imagined.

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'Woodstock' (Mitchell) – Joni Mitchell
Ladies of the Canyon
(Reprise)

'I Had A Dream' (Sebastian) – John Sebastian
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'Halfbreed Medley' (Hartley et al) – Keef Hartley Band
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'Invocation' (Williamson) – The Incredible String Band
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'Gather 'round' (Williamson) – The Incredible String Band
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'Day Song' (Nevins) – Sweetwater
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'Two Worlds' (Nevins) – Sweetwater
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'To Love Somebody' (Gibb, Gibb) – Janis Joplin
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'The Star Spangled Banner' (Smith arr Hendrix) – Jimi Hendrix
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'Hear My Train A Comin'' (Hendrix) – Jimi Hendrix
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)

'Blackbird' (Lennon, McCartney) – Crosby, Stills & Nash
Woodstock: Back to the Garden
(Rhino)