Saturday, August 15, 2009

Woodstock

This is Sweetwater, the band originally scheduled to be the opening act at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, held in Bethel New York, starting August 15, 1969, forty years ago today. Sweetwater was late, and so Richie Havens opened instead, starting with a song called Freedom. When Sweetwater finally made it there, they followed Havens and a slew of other performers, as well as an Indian guru who performed a benediction, and Ravi Shankar.

This is one of the last numbers they performed in their set, a song called "My Crystal Spider".

3 comments:

Frank Partisan said...

I saw the movie Woodstock. I knew many people in the crowd scenes.

SecondComingOfBast said...

I was planning to do a series of posts, one for each day of the festival, and still might, I just had other things taking up too much time. I was hoping I could find a shot of Pete Townshend cracking Abby Hoffman in the head with his guitar, but unfortunately nobody caught that on film. It was captured on audio, though.

I'm going to do a post about the festival in general, what it means to me, and why exactly it turned out the way it did. I'm sure many will disagree with me, but that's cool.

Quimbob said...

LOL, I just found that sound clip of Hoffman & Townshend.
y'know Woodstock was just a concert. I think a lot of it's "importance" came from the marketing for the movie.
From everything I have read, Townshend was pissed off the whole time he was there. I hope he appreciates what the movie did for his career.