The Rockologist: Woodstock Forty Years After - Page 4

It's also great to see Janis Joplin's Woodstock performance on screen at long last. The one time I saw Janis in concert — as a wide-eyed thirteen year old kid just a few months before she died — I also got to meet her. I can remember asking her then why she wasn't in the movie. Taking a deep swig of her signature Southern Comfort, Janis replied "probably 'cause I didn't do the editing." She looks and sounds great here, belting out a nice version of "Work Me, Lord."

Some of the other nice additions to the original film here include Jimi Hendrix doing "Voodoo Child" and the Who doing "Summertime Blues" and "My Generation" (well okay, that one's on the bonus disc).

Personally, I'd have loved to have seen or even heard the way Townshend famously told sixties radical Abbie Hoffman to "get off my fucking stage" with his boots here. But as the Stones would say, I guess ya' can't always get what you want.

Outside of all the extras here, the rest of the Woodstock film is pretty much the same as I've remembered for some forty years now. The career making performances from Santana, Ten Years After, and the rest remain as great now as they were back then.

However, Sly And the Family Stone's performance still stands in a class entirely its own. In fact, if I have any beef at all with this box, it is with the strange editing and even stranger sound drop-offs here of that very same performance. As I said from the onset of this article, you just don't fuck with that kind of greatness.

Over the next few days, I will be reviewing Sony/Legacy's Woodstock Experience CDs from Sly, Santana, Janis, the Airplane, and Johnny Winter.

In the meantime, happy 40th birthday Woodstock.

Article Author: Glen Boyd

You'll find Blogcritics assistant music editor Glen Boyd sharing his Thoughtmares on his personal blogs The World Wide Glen, and The Rockologist. In a previous life, Glen was a music professional and journalist whose work has appeared in The Rocket, SPIN, Pulse!, and The Source. …

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