Historic live recordings from the Holland Pop Festival held in the Kralingen neighbourhood of Rotterdam, on 26-28 June 1970. The attendance was anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000.
One of the most successful of the first generation of European rock festivals was Kralingen Music Festival. Held less than a year after Woodstock its line-up was a stellar mix of the upper echelons of both British and American rock royalty including Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Byrds, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and the headlining Pink Floyd. The festival was filmed for a movie, usually known as Stamping Ground, which amongst other things featured a very young Al Stewart performing a very assured Zero She Flies, Jefferson Airplane at the height of their magickal powers performing a medley of White Rabbit/The Ballad of You and Me and Pooniel, and, of course Pink Floyd doing a monumentally groovy Saucerful of Secrets. But quite a lot of music was recorded that wasn't in the film, and people purchasing this very very cool 2CD 1DVD set will also be the proud owner of more live material from Pink Floyd, (Set your controls..) and some immeasurably rare artifacts from folk such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Dr John, Family and The Byrds in their most under-rated incarnation.
This festival was actually called HOLLAND POP or the Kralingen Music Festival since it was held in the Kralingen neighborhood of Rotterdam, Holland on the June 26, 27 & 28, 1970. Approximately 120,000 attended and it has often been billed as the European answer to Woodstock. A 100 minute video of some of it, STAMPING GROUND, has been around on and off since the days of VHS and features performances by Al Stewart, Dr. John, Family, T. Rex, Jefferson Airplane, The Flock, It's A Beautiful Day, Country Joe McDonald, The Byrds, and it's main calling card, Pink Floyd. A couple of performances (Floyd, Airplane, Family, Byrds, Dr. John, IABD) were also used in the rare Japanese LaserDisc 'PSYCHOMANIA' (not to be confused with a few films with the same title), a documentary on psychedelic music that originally aired on British cable TV. Some film clips are available on YouTube. The quality of STAMPING GROUND is fair at best and is only watchable due to the great music performances, although it's heads above the DVD debacle included with Akarma's Glastonbury Fayre Festival set. Anyone raving about the Glastonbury DVD must be working for the company! The company releasing this, GONZO Productions, have released some great decent looking DVD's including their The Lost Broadcast Series and YES: Union Live, to mention a few. Here's the track list from the GONZO site:
Interesting footnote courtesy of Wikipedia: "The Festival became an influential event, as it was the actual beginning of the Dutch tolerance policy towards marijuana. The many present undercover cops did not arrest any of the users or small traders: it became clear that there were just too many, and all of them peaceful......"
Forget Lollapalooza, Coachella, Glastonbury, Wacken or Rock in Rio. If an alien landed on Earth wanting to discover the meaning of the term "music festival", what event photo would you show him? If the automatic answer isn't Woodstock, you probably haven't walked this planet in the last 50 years. "Landmark of the Counterculture", "Biggest Show on Earth" or "The Day Thousands of Cool Young People Decided to Show Up for a Free Show on a Farm", the festival held August 15-18, 1969 it went down in history as one of the most important and culturally impacting events of the 20th century. In three days of peace, love and music that defined a generation, the earth stopped - and freaked out. Exactly five decades later, with the surprising cancellation of the half-century-long edition of the world-changing festival, the question looms: could it be possible to make a new Woodstock, with the same or at least part of its original appeal and meaning, in fluid times? Internet and increasingly professional and media events, guided by the numbers of large corporations?
How the Dream Was Born:
Woodstock was born of the desire of a group of hippies who wanted to create an event as grand or bigger than the Monterey Pop Festival, when Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire and caused it to blaze. The head of the venture was Michael Lang, a young New York producer who, a year earlier, had promoted the successful Miami Pop Festival, which brought together 25,000 people. Struggling to find a suitable location in New York State, Lang turned to Max Yasgur, a Republican farmer and free speech advocate, who owns a 600-acre estate 70 km from Woodstock City. The idea was to charge $ 18 for a three-day ticket, $ 24 if purchased on the day - equivalent to $ 120 and $ 160 these days - bringing together a maximum of 50,000 people.
The unexpected that made history:
Due to budget constraints, the original Woodstock was released primarily by people only. Precisely for this reason the surprise of the organizers was the size of the audience that appeared on August 15, 1969, the first of three days of shows. About 400,000 hippies and supporters marched into the region, jamming traffic, tearing down fences and turning the hopeful profit festival into an unexpected free event. Inside the farm, there was a climate of peace, freedom, diversity. Drugs and sex were bush - and caught in the bush. Far from the judgmental eyes of family and society, young people could be as they were and do as they pleased, as long as they did not harm others. For three days, about half a million people experienced the aquarium-era utopia: a harmonious, revolutionary and essentially progressive society, free of what was meant by right (capitalism) and left (communism).
Woodstock's historic shows lined up promising and successful artists in rock and the world that revolved around it, from soul to folk. Psychedelia and peace messages were fuel in a genre that was entering adolescence. The first day of gigs, more Zen and with acoustic performances, had, among others, Richie Havens, Tim Hardin, Ravi Shankar and Joan Baez, who made the small wooden stage a colossal speech platform. Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, The Who and Jefferson Airplane made the blues jet amplified on the second day. The closing brought more historical performances by Joe Cocker, The Band, Johnny Winter, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Last onstage early in the morning with half the audience awake, Jimi Hendrix abused the distortion in an iconoclastic version of the American national anthem.
Not Everything Was Flower Power:
The gathering of so many legendary artists eclipsed serious logistical problems. On the first day, the Sweetwater group was stopped by police on their way to Woodstock and failed to open the festival. Several other artists were late. The rain gave no respite, and the Incredible String Band refused to play through the storm. On the second day, the Grateful Dead amplifiers failed in the middle of the show. Janis Joplin was not in her best condition, and on the closing day, after Joe Cocker's performance, a fresh heavy rain interrupted the festival for hours. Hendrix had to play in the early hours of the morning. The infrastructure was minimal enough to hold only 50,000 people: there was mud, lack of toilets, food and sanitary conditions in camps. Outside, chaotic traffic. The perrengues did not tarnish the dream. The happening happened, the festival became a movie, and the buzz generated by it served as a spring for the new generation and for the counterculture. The utopia of a new society, however, would be hit hard in the coming months, with the Hell's Angels murdering a man at the Altamont Festival - which made the event safe - during the Rolling Stones concert and the breakup of the Beatles. . Woodstock's accounts are numerous and often contradictory. Records at the time say a hundred people were arrested and there were no reports of incidents of violence. Other than at least one person would have died of an overdose, and a tractor would have crushed a person lying in his sleeping bag. And many witnesses describe the festival as a much more chaotic than emblematic experience, with rain, mud and drugs.
Jimi Hendrix / Gypsy Sun & Rainbows 9:00 am – 11:10 am
BACK TO THE GARDEN is intended to let people hear the festival as it really happened.-
Producer Andy Zax says he, sound producer Brian Kehew and mastering engineer Dave Schultz avoided interfering with the tapes as much as possible in order to preserve their authenticity. “It’s not surprising that other producers’ first reaction to these tapes over the years has been ‘uh-oh,’ immediately followed by ‘we’ve gotta find a way to fix this.’ I'm not unsympathetic to that approach, but if there's a single overriding lesson that Brian Kehew and I have learned since we began working with the Woodstock tapes in 2005, it’s this: you can't fix them… That’s less grim than it seems, because once you’ve accepted the idea that there is no way to make these recordings sound slick, you realize that these tapes are the sonic equivalent of heirloom tomatoes — slightly imperfect, but delicious.”
Woodstock 50 - Back To The Garden [50th Anniversary Experience] (2019)
Diamond Head Crater is a place of exceptional beauty located on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It is also the name of a festival, type Woodstock, which was celebrated from 1969 to 1977 and through which people like Santana, Journey, America, Frampton, etc. passed. In these same pages we already talk about the performance of the COSMIC TRAVELERS in the edition of 72. Today we will remember a mythical concert of 73.
In 1973 Neal Schon had already participated in two Santana albums, "Santana III" and "Caravanserai". and with three more friends he decides to participate in the Diamond Head Crater Festival. Later he would form with Gregg Rolie (keyboards), Ross Valory (bass), George Tickner (guitar) and Prairie Prince (drums), Golden Gate Rhythm Section the embryo of what would later be Journey with which he would record more than a dozen albums .
The recording shows us the concert of an ephemeral band where the main protagonist was Neal Schon. The performance was held on December 1, 1973 at the Diamond Head Crater Festival. The setlist consists of six totally instrumental themes where a young Schon, 18 years old, overwhelms us with his guitar expertise. Compositions loaded with virtuosity and good rocker. Themes like "Tonight" and "Storm" leave us knocked out musically. We can also listen to two notable versions of "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" and "Black Magic Woman". The rest of the band is composed by Gregg Rolie (Santana, Journey) on keyboards, Pete Sears (Rod Stewart, Jefferson Starship, Hot Tuna, etc.) on bass and Greg Errico (David Bowie, Santana, Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone) Good sound.
"1972–73. N.Y.E. We played our set on December 1st, 1973. This is from a YouTube recording of a band I formed with Neil Schon (Santana), Greg Errico (Sly & the Family Stone). It was called “Sears, Schon, Errico” as written on the posters for the few shows we played together (Journey was formed later). We had no singer and were basically a power rock trio…it was a fun band and went down well. The New Years Eve recording is from the “Diamond Head Crater Festival” in Hawaii, Greg Rolie sat in on B3 for a couple of songs including “Black Magic Woman”. I later introduced Aynsley Dunbar to Neil at a session I was producing in Los Angeles. I had left Sears, Schon, Errico to co-produce and arrange the music for an album Kathy McDonald was recording in San Francisco. I then went back to England to record “Smiler” for Rod Stewart…the last British made album Rod would make. I joined Jefferson Starship right after that. I had met Grace and Paul through David Freiberg and had written and recorded “Better Lying Down” with Grace Slick for her album “Manhole recorded at Wally Heiders." (Pete Sears - https://petesears.com/1972-73-diamond-head-festival-sears-schon-errico-live/)
