The first time you see a performer or a group in action goes a long way towards forming your opinion of them and their work, no matter what you see and hear of them anytime after. Well, that's the case with me anyway. Whether its fair or not, if they suck the first time I see them it's going to take a whale of a performance in the future for me to change my opinion of their music. That first exposure will have made an indelible impression on my memory banks, and somewhere in the back of my mind I'll always carry the awareness of that lousy gig and be waiting for them to repeat it. Than again, if they are magnificent the first time, it will take a lot for me to give up on them.
The first time I saw Santana in action was also the first time I saw the movie Woodstock. It looked like Santana was the first group to go on after the infamous rain storm which had turned Yasgur's farm into a mud bath. In the movie the crowd had started to do their own percussion thing to entertain themselves with people playing on everything from fence posts to beer bottles in order to participate. After a couple minutes of that the movie segued into Carlos and the boys playing "Soul Sacrifice". While I had heard them play the same song on the soundtrack, actually seeing them perform it was completely different experience.
Although both the movie and its soundtrack only have Santana playing the one song, like everyone else who played "The Woodstock Music & Art Festival" they played between forty-five minutes and an hour. Now, for the first time, the whole set Santana played Saturday, August 16,1969 has been released on one recording as part of Legacy Recordings' Santana: The Woodstock Experience. The two CD package also contains a copy of the group's 1969 release, the self-titled Santana, their first recording, and a poster of the group performing at the Woodstock festival.
I have to assume the eight tracks on the Woodstock disc represent the entire set performed by Santana that afternoon after the rainstorm, and the order they appear in on the CD match the original performance order, as it doesn't say different anywhere on the packaging. There's two reasons that's important to me. One, it means they basically performed, with the addition of "Fried Neck Bones And Some Home Fries" and the subtraction of "Shades Of Time" and "Treat", their album for the concert. Two, "Soul Sacrifice" hadn't followed directly after the audience's spontaneous percussion performance as the movie implies, as it was the second last song in their set. What happened on screen was the result of creative editing on the part of the film makers, not some shared experience between audience and performers.
Article comments
1 - Lou Novacheck
Santana was at another big festival just two weeks before Woodstock, and it was that performance that started the ball rolling for him. I was at both the Atlantic City Pop Festival, which attracted a "measly" 100,000 attendees, and Woodstock. I think just about anybody who was at Atlantic City can vouch that his performance there was even better. But the Atlantic City Pop Festival didn't have the traffic jams, the ODs, the rain, and several others that Woodstock has become noted for. The Atlantic Pop Festival had many of the same acts as Woodstock, and is was the absolute better of the two. Woodstock had the numbers, and more acts [and now, the notoriety], but it was Atlantic City that was, by far, the better of the two.
Atlantic City was Santana's big breakout from the West Coast. I'd seen them in a club there before, so I knew what to expect somewhat. But I can say that literally every person that I spoke with at AC was awestruck by some of the performers. Based on comments after the AC Festival, many of the attendees planned on going to Woodstock. Flyers were being handed out as we left the Atlantic City Race Track, where the AC Pop Festival was held, promoting Woodstock, and people were talking about the similar lineups - Canned Heat, Credence, the J-Plane and, of course, Santana. For Santana fans, also look up Santana's appearance at the Crater Festival inside Diamondhead crater in Honolulu, which I also attended. He appeared with Buddy Miles there. It's another un-well-known appearance of his that was also one of his best. Look for the CD.