Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music

2009 marks the 40^th anniversary of Woodstock, the festival that would inspire all modern music festival to this day. While I understand 25^th or 50^th, but 40 seems kind of an odd milestone to me. Who can argue with Warner Brothers for re-releasing this epic 1970 documentary.

Perhaps they felt that they have the technology to remastered the original film onto high definition bluray (even though I doubt the Woodstock generation would care so much about technology), but nevertheless the DVD and Bluray packages are pretty impressive. Standard releases includes 4-discs (yes: that’s right, nearly four hours), two bonus discs (additional concert footage that was ended up on the cutting floor, plus featurettes), leather (fake?) clothing, Life Magazine replica, a lucite lenticular display, and a patch. There is also a limited edition Target version, which comes with a full-sized canvas tambourine (instead of the patch) and oversized circular box.

Although the music festival only lasted three days, you can tell that director, Michael Wadleigh, started his work weeks before that August 15^th date. The daunting task of editing all the footage ended up on Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker’s laps (who was nominated for Academy Award for Film Editing, but lost to Hugh S. Fowler for his work on “Patton”).

The documentary opens up with an old gentlemen, who talked frankly about how in all his life, he’s never seen anything quite like it. For a show that was only meant to house 50,000 people in a field at best, about a million people showed up. It slowly cut in “the kids” showing up days early in anticipation for the show, as they’re still building the center stage. The music they used in the background was mostly Crosby, Stills & Nash (“Wooden Ships”, “Long Time Gone”) – who would later appear to end the first part of the documentary.

Incidentally, the band later had a major hit a Joni Mitchell-written song called “Woodstock”, inspired by her then-boyfriend Graham Nash and seeing Woodstock on television. Mitchell never went to Woodstock, herself, she had a conflict on those dates by appearing live on The Dick Cavett Show for ABC television (you can actually see her appearance on the The Dick Cavett Show – Rock Icons (3 DVD Set)).

Back to Woodstock, the live performance are up close and personal, you can see every sweat & tear from the performers. Unfortunately, due to the limitation of technology, some of the filming looks soft and not as crisp as modern recording devices. You see a lot of film grains, and on occasion, spots and cuts. Colors are not as vibrant, but overall, most people are not going to notice these imperfections. Audio-wise, I had no problems with the audio.

Some key moments in the documentary you should look out for: Joe Cocker’s version of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends”, Sha Na Na’s version of Danny & the Juniors’ “At the Hop”, Janis Joplin’s “Work Me Lord” and Jimi Hendrix’s unforgettable “Purple Haze”.

Like many of you, this release of Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music is the only means of giving us a glimpse an era gone by. Unfortunately, the only drawback is the pricing of this product retails for $49.95, which is a bit of a luxury for most people. You can probably netflix this, but the way it’s packaged (with all the goodies), it is marketed to be owned by consumers.