Woodstock at 51

As you all know, about a year ago I spent a three and half frenetic days recording XPNStock, WXPN's real-time broadcast of the entire 1969 Woodstock Festival in honour of its 50th anniversary. I'd missed out on the 38-CD box, and this was my one and only chance to grab its treasures—for free, no less. I then spent the better part of August and September painstakingly evaluating almost 36 hours of recorded audio: editing, trimming, patching and polishing it up until it positively sparkled. Problem was, by the time I was finished I was so burnt out that I couldn't bring myself to actually listen to it.

That's what 51st anniversaries are for. I'm a bit early, but I did all of Day 1 today: just cranked up the old computer speakers and (finally) got to kick back and enjoy the music. I'm still amazed at how good it sounds, and so grateful to have procured the lot for nothing but dedication and diligence. Takeaways: Richie Havens' opening set was, well, groovy. Sweetwater featured a unique sound and some great jamming, but must work on the harmonies, kids. Bonus points to them for the flat-out weirdest song performed at the festival, "My Crystal Spider." Bert Sommer was a top-rank songwriter, and it's a shame his career never took off. His is the great "lost" performance of the festival. Tim Hardin's performance, though wildly uneven, really had its moments. Ravi Shankar? Less talk, more rock. I loved what was played but grew impatient with the musicology class he threatened to turn his set into. Melanie is not my cup of tea at all, but even she had a couple of gems amongst the caterwauling. Arlo Guthrie's performance was by turns ragged, hilarious and inspired, and Joan Baez capped off the day in fine form.

WXPN is reprising XPNStock, but they're playing the sets over a full week, in prime time, in what looks to be a bit of a random order. Had I missed anything last time I'd tune in, but I'm pretty sure I got all there was to get. Now it's time to enjoy. Day 2 coming up ...

Woodstock: Loose End Tied

Just a quick wrap-up (for now) on my Woodstock obsession. When we last rapped, man, our hero had compiled a nearly complete set of recordings from the Woodstock Festival, thanks to WPXN's radio broadcast over the 50th anniversary weekend, XPNstock.

As you'll recall, two songs were missing from the Jimi Hendrix set. They weren't broadcast by WXPN because they're not on the 38-CD box, and they're not on the box because the Hendrix Estate won't authorize their release. Enter the good folks at "non-label"—i.e., bootleggers—who've put out a double CD of Hendrix's entire Woodstock set. I took the plunge and now have the missing songs: "Mastermind" and "Gypsy Woman/Aware of Love," both sung by rhythm guitarist Larry Lee. Though the official release's booklet dismisses them as "slow, haggard filler" they sound fine to these ears, and it's a treat to hear Hendrix as an accompanist.

The bootleg brought another pleasant surprise: in addition to the Larry Lee songs, it contains 20 minutes of material absent from Live at Woodstock and the 38-CD box. Much of this consists of Lee solos that were inexplicably cut from the official version. Of course, it is a bootleg, so the sound is somewhat muddy and boxy. But if you tune your ears to it, so to speak, it's perfectly acceptable, and I'm grateful to now have every single note played by Hendrix and his band at Woodstock.

So, what am I still missing? What everyone else is, apparently: the one-and-a-half Sha Na Na songs that weren't recorded back in 1969. I wonder if audience tapes exist, or perhaps the fabled mono soundboard reel that was used as backup when things went awry. In any event, I'm sure that geeks greater than me are on the case, and if there's anything floating around out there it'll turn up someday. When it does, I'll be first in line.

The (Nearly) Complete Woodstock

This August marked the 50th anniversary of the iconic Woodstock Festival, and though the proposed commemorative concert failed to materialize, Rhino Records put out a nearly complete chronicle of the original this summer.

And I, noted Woodstock obsessive, couldn't afford it. And only 1,969 were made. And it sold out within weeks. And they're not making more. Ever. As stagehand Muskrat intoned on the original triple album, "Hmm. Bummer, bummer!" Want to weep along with me? Here's a glowing review of that 38-CD set.

But! The good Lord intervened just in time. First, I discovered a geeky forum replete with fellow obsessives: some who'd bought the box, others who wished they had. And a few days before the anniversary, some kind soul posted this magic sentence: "Full Woodstock recording to air on WXPN at exact time of original festival."

Like many FM stations, WXPN streams live, 24/7—one of the advantages of living in 2019, not 1969. The advance notice gave me a few days to figure out how to connect my Zoom H1, laptop and speakers. I also did a test to make sure my Zoom would record without shutting off for eight hours, because some sets would be broadcast while I was asleep. Make no mistake: I was in it to win it. And on Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 5:07 p.m. EDT, 50 years to the second, my three and a half days of recording began with Richie Havens' opener, "From the Prison."

Variously dubbed "Woodstock as It Happened: 50 Years On" and "XPNstock," WXPN played 37 of the 38 discs. (Disc 38 contains no music; it consists of stage announcements and other ephemera that the producers couldn't place in chronological sequence.) And thanks to WXPN, Rhino Records and whoever else enabled this wondrous occurrence, I captured it all. Yes, it's a compressed radio stream, not quite the pristine audio found on the CDs, but for zero dollars, I'll take it. Happily.

Little did I know that my raw recordings would be but the start of my odyssey. At a bare minimum I had to clean up the start and end of each set, having hit "record" early and "stop" late to ensure I got everything. I also brightened the sound a touch with some judicious EQ while rolling off some murk on the bottom end. The stream went down only once, during Arlo Guthrie's "Wheel of Fortune" on Day 1. Thankfully, I was able to patch that song in from my copy of the 40th anniversary box set. There were also numerous instances of stream stutter to fix. No audio was missing, but occasional gaps of silence, lasting anywhere from a tenth of a second to three seconds, needed repair. I stitched these gaps together in Audacity, which took a lot of patience and diligent listening.

Being a good citizen—and wanting to maintain their licence—WXPN silenced any profanity found within the 37 discs. To create an accurate facsimile of the box set, I had to find ways of patching in the dirty words whenever possible. In two instances, this meant finding missing songs: both Country Joe McDonald (solo) and Country Joe & the Fish did the infamous "Fish Cheer," and neither was broadcast on WXPN. (For the uninitiated, the word they spell isn't "fish" but another four-letter word beginning with F.) In addition, I wanted to excise the many station IDs and promos from my recordings, some of which obliterated the first or final few notes of a song. Deleting the IDs/promos was easy, but again, I had to patch in the missing material from other sources. Finally, perhaps because it's such a ramshackle performance, WXPN didn't broadcast Tim Hardin's 16-minute "Snow White Lady." I patched that in from YouTube.

You'll recall that off the top, I said "nearly complete." So, what's missing from the 38-CD box and, by extension, XPNstock? Three and a half songs. Half of Sha Na Na's "Little Darlin'" and all of "Teenager in Love" were not recorded in 1969. Yep, after almost four sleepless days, Eddie Kramer and his onsite team finally screwed up and let the tape run out, and if there's any Woodstock act for which that's forgivable, Sha Na Na gets my vote.

The other two missing songs are from Jimi Hendrix's set. Sung by rhythm guitarist Larry Lee, the Hendrix estate refuses to sanction their release "for aesthetic reasons." Now, I'm not one to lead you into the dark underworld of unauthorized recordings, but if you google "larry lee gypsy woman soundcloud," you just might stumble upon the rarest Woodstock recording of all. And were you to figure out a way to record that audio, you too would be in possession of a song absent from the 38-CD box. (I'm still hunting for "Mastermind," the other Larry Lee song.)

Words cannot express how grateful I am to WXPN for taking three and a half days out of their regular schedule to give us the gift of XPNstock. Kudos are also, of course, due the box set's producers/engineers Andy Zax, Brian Kehew, Dave Schultz for their yeoman's restoration of the entire festival. The deep dives these boys took knew no bounds: for instance, they sifted through photographic evidence to ensure that their instrument placement in the stereo field was accurate. Much of the music performed at Woodstock was magnificent, and thanks to Messrs. Zax, Kehew and Schultz, it has never sounded better.

In interviews, Andy Zax revealed that some of the music was salvaged by technical marvels that have only recently come into existence. Ever heard of de-mixing? How about polyphonic tuning? Me neither, but the former was used to create a stereo mix of Ravi Shankar's performance from a gritty mono soundboard reel. The latter enabled Zax and crew to take Blood, Sweat & Tears' horns, which were out of tune in different directions, and "nudge the tonality of the horns to get them back into a sound range that the human ear would prefer to hear." In both cases, the results are miraculous. Or as Zax said, "To me, this is like magic science fiction stuff. It's like the Great Gazoo descended down, waved a magic wand, and suddenly here's this remarkable thing!"

Oh, and while he was at it, the Great Gazoo, or God if you prefer, gave us XPNstock, enabling me to construct a poor man's version of Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive. I still wish I'd splurged for the box. But with copies now going for close to $3,500 US, that ship has sailed and in the end, I think I've ended up with something more worthwhile—tasty, cleaned-up recordings that I had a hand in creating. I like to think of my painstaking audio editing as a microcosm of the producers' stellar work.

Now that my work is done, I can sit back and enjoy Woodstock as a listening experience. I know I've babbled on a bit and not discussed the music much. Suffice it to say that the vast majority of these artists were at or near their peak in 1969, and most of this music is great. Some is truly staggering. I point to one stretch from late Saturday night into Sunday afternoon that's jaw-dropping when heard in sequence. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker not only wowed those lucky attendees in 1969, but gave us some of the most iconic moments in rock history. I heartily recommend you seek out their full sets; all but The Who have now been officially released (beyond the now-unavailable 38-disc set).

Back to the Garden

And I'm not talking springtime planting, folks. The Fonz don't do gardening. As you might guess, I'm speaking of the legendary 1969 Woodstock Festival. Even if you're not into all that hippie music or the attendant counterculture, most observers agree with Wikipedia's assertion that "it is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history."

Me, I quite enjoy that hippie music; indeed, some of my favourites played Woodstock. There were also a few artists on the bill I could do without (hello Melanie, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter and Sha Na Na). But all told, I've been a fan of the mystique ever since I bought the original triple album back in 1980 or so.

Anyway, I recently dragged out my 4-CD box (released in 1994 for the 25th anniversary), enjoyed the highlights and wondered if there's more where that came from. Turns out there is. Much more. First, the fine people at Rhino Records issued a 6-CD box to coincide with the 40th anniversary in 2009, boasting 38 previously unreleased tracks. That same year came The Woodstock Experience, a reissue series featuring complete sets from Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Sly & The Family Stone and Johnny Winter. If I'd had the cash back then I'd have bought three of the five, but as it stood I splurged for the Airplane and no more. Just last week, I scored a great deal on the Rhino box: $40 on amazon.ca.

Armed with all that, I decided to make the ultimate mix tape ... sorry, playlist. Off the top, I realized that the 6-CD box, comprehensive as it was, didn't include everything on the 4-CD set. That had 11 songs missing from the Rhino compilation (mostly due to rights issues or personal choice of the producers). And with that, I thought I was done until I checked YouTube, where I found a treasure trove of material that's not on either box set or the previous LPs. From there, I was able to fill out those sets I wanted more from: 22 additional tunes in all—more if you count some Woodstock Experience material I was able to slot in for Janis, Sly and Santana. And still more was available, but I weeded out iffy performances, material of dodgy quality and stuff I simply didn't want (more Canned Heat, etc.).

Assembling this mass of music into something listenable took a little finagling. For starters, the multiplicity of sources meant wide variation in volume levels. I used MP3Gain to make crude volume adjustments; beyond that, if things still weren't right I imported the mp3s into Audacity and tweaked them there. Audacity also proved useful for creating fade-ins and fade-outs as needed, and most crucially, pasting the stage patter where it belongs chronologically. See, the producers of both the big compilations (as they should) placed emcee intros before the first song and outros after the last song. That's fine, but the first/last songs on that particular compilation may not be true to how the set was actually played. This became an issue when I downloaded something off YouTube that came before or after the "first" and "last" song illusions created by the compilations' producers. How would I know? Well, Rhino's box includes each band's complete set, all in the correct order. And these guys got it from the source: their original intent was to put out a 30-CD box of every note played at Woodstock, so they've gone through the original recordings top to bottom.

I also used Audacity on occasion to EQ the material and spiff it up. I couldn't hope to match the quality of the official compilations, but a judicious touch of high- or low-end (sometimes both) helped the iffier tracks pale a touch less compared to the professional productions. In one instance (Keef Hartley Band), the only known source was an audience recording, so as you can imagine that required some serious sonic work.

Finally, I employed my sound-editing skills to help out a band I really didn't like: Quill. They'd never before appeared on a Woodstock compilation and it's easy to see why, as their two songs on the Rhino box are godawful. But, as I wanted to represent every act that played, I went on a quest to find something bearable. YouTube provided a middling track called "Waiting for You" which sounded like a poor man's T. Rex filtered through third-rate Frank Zappa. (Yes, that's Quill at their best, folks.) As is often the case with bands endowed with a bloated sense of their importance, they meander on and on. The original track was over 11 minutes and featured a clumsy and pointless percussion interlude. I found a good spot, counted off eight bars and chop: gone. At 8:30, the truncated version remains somewhat tedious but at least I've purged the song of its worst excesses.

While we're on that topic, the Rhino overlords saw fit to include a full-length version of Canned Heat's "Woodstock Boogie," a 29-minute snooze-fest to these ears. (I'm not a fan of da blooze, in case you've not gleaned that from my previous posts.) What gems could have gone on there in its place! Alas. Anyway, I trimmed that sucker to its rightful length of 0:00 by keeping it off my playlist.

Speaking of which, in its ten-hour glory, I proudly present ...

V E R N ' S   U L T I M A T E   W O O D S T O C K   P L A Y L I S T
(* = unreleased anywhere but YouTube as far as know ... though see addendum at bottom)

Day 1

• Richie Havens: High Flyin' Bird*, I Can't Make It Anymore*, Handsome Johnny, Strawberry Fields Forever*, Freedom
• Sweetwater: Look Out, Two Worlds
• Bert Sommer: Jennifer, And When It's Over, Smile
• Tim Hardin: Hang on to a Dream, If I Were a Carpenter, Simple Song of Freedom
• Ravi Shankar: Raga Puriya-Dhanashri/Gat in Sawarital
• Melanie: Momma Momma, Beautiful People
• Arlo Guthrie: Coming into Los Angeles, Wheel of Fortune, Walkin' Down the Line, Every Hand in the Land
• Joan Baez: Joe Hill, Sweet Sir Galahad, Hickory Wind, Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man, One Day at a Time*

Day 2

• Quill: Waiting for You*
• Country Joe McDonald: Donovan's Reef, Flying High*, The "Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag
• Santana: Waiting, Evil Ways, You Just Don't Care, Jingo, Persuasion, Soul Sacrifice
• John Sebastian: How Have You Been, Rainbows All Over Your Blues, I Had a Dream, Darlin' Be Home Soon*
• Keef Hartley Band: Spanish Fly*
• The Incredible String Band: The Letter, Gather 'Round*, When You Find Out Who You Are
• Canned Heat: Going up the Country, On the Road Again*
• Mountain: Blood of the Sun, Theme for an Imaginary Western, For Yasgur's Farm
• Grateful Dead: Mama Tried, Dark Star
• Creedence Clearwater Revival: Born on the Bayou*, Green River, Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won't Do), Commotion, Bad Moon Rising, I Put a Spell on You, Keep on Chooglin'*
• Janis Joplin: Raise Your Hand, Try (Just a Little Bit Harder), Kozmic Blues, Work Me Lord, Ball and Chain
• Sly & The Family Stone: Sing a Simple Song, You Can Make It If You Try, Medley: Dance to the Music/Music Lover/I Want to Take You Higher, Stand!
• The Who: Amazing Journey, Pinball Wizard, We're Not Gonna Take It, My Generation*, Naked Eye*

Day 3

• Jefferson Airplane: The Other Side of This Life, Somebody to Love, 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds, Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon, Eskimo Blue Day, Volunteers
• Joe Cocker: Feelin' Alright, Let's Go Get Stoned, I Shall Be Released*, With a Little Help from My Friends
• Country Joe & The Fish: Rock & Soul Music, Love, Silver and Gold
• Ten Years After: I'm Going Home
• The Band: Tears of Rage*, Long Black Veil, The Weight, Loving You Is Sweeter than Ever
• Johnny Winter: Mean Town Blues, Johnny B. Goode
• Blood, Sweat & Tears: More and More*, Somethin' Comin' On*, I Love You More than You'll Ever Know*, Spinning Wheel*, You've Made Me So Very Happy
• Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young): Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Marrakesh Express, Sea of Madness, Wooden Ships, Find the Cost of Freedom
• The Paul Butterfield Blues Band: Morning Sunrise*, Love March, Everything's Gonna Be Alright
• Sha Na Na: Wipe Out*, At the Hop, Get a Job (Reprise)
• Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Slight Return)/Stepping Stone, The Star Spangled Banner, Purple Haze, Woodstock Improvisation

The highlights you recall from the original triple LP are, of course, all present and accounted for: Richie Havens' wild strumming on "Freedom," Santana's incendiary "Soul Sacrifice," Sly's high-octane funk medley, Joe Cocker's soulful take on "With a Little Help from My Friends," Ten Years After's romp through "I'm Going Home," Hendrix deconstructing and reconstructing the US National Anthem. But the glut of unreleased material produced new revelations as well. The unknown Bert Sommer wrote some killer songs, and that shimmering organ accompaniment really made them shine. Santana's entire set smoked, top to bottom. The Dead, whose overall performance was sub-par and plagued by technical problems, rose to the occasion with a spacey "Dark Star." CCR cranked out their swamp-rock like a walking jukebox, and BS&T strutted their way through a tight, jazzy set. All in all, I can't help but wonder what else lies in the vaults. Five turkeys for every pearl, probably, but I pine for that 30-CD set. There is a 50th anniversary coming up in a few years; maybe then?

Addendum, May 2, 2016: If you want to seriously disappear down the Woodstock wormhole, try James Stafford's  The (Kind Of) Complete Woodstock series, an exhaustive compendium of bands, set lists and sources. It turns out that most of what I assumed was YouTube-only material has been pilfered from stray semi-official and official releases, mostly on DVD and VHS. See Stafford's posts for specifics if you're interested. A smattering of material unique to YouTube still remains.