Woodstock

WOODSTOCK – BACK TO THE GARDEN – 50th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION features 42 tracks across 3 CDs and is the first Woodstock collection to feature some of the live recordings of various performers at the festival. Newly remastered audio. Includes 24-page booklet with photos & memorabilia, plus essay & producer's introduction. Quad-gatefold digipak.

Like most products issued from the Jimi Hendrix archive in the '90s, several separate releases featuring identical recordings of this one performance have been issued. 1994's Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock on MCA is the first formal packaging of this most famous of rock shows. Other, more collectable discs followed, often with much more extensive track lists. The Woodstock show that these discs commemorate was supposed to be a headline performance for Hendrix and his band, but after many delays and a fan exodus, the guitarist ended up playing to only a fraction of listeners a full day after the event was scheduled to end. The first performance with new backing outfit Hendrix's Gypsy Sun & Rainbows, this expanded outfit is often difficult to hear over Hendrix and his guitar on this recording…

Taking Woodstock is the funny, touching, and true story of Elliot Tiber, the man who was instrumental in arranging the site for the original Woodstock Concert. Elliot, whose parents owned an upstate New York motel, was working in Greenwich Village in the summer of 1969. He socialized with the likes of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and yet somehow managed to keep his gay life a secret from his family. Then on Friday, June 28, Elliot walked into the Stonewall Inn—and witnessed the riot that would galvanize the American gay movement and enable him to take stock of his own lifestyle.

When musicians in the New York folk scene of the 1960s grew tired of city life, they decided to "get it together in the country." They headed for Woodstock-not the site of the infamous music festival of 1969 but to the Catskills, to Bearsville, to Woodstock proper. Counterculture revolutionaries like Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, and Paul Butterfield got "back to the land," turning the once sleepy hollow into a funky Shangri-La. Small Town Talk tells the town's musical history, from its earliest days as a bohemian arts colony to its ongoing life as a cultural satellite of New York. Woodstock, the bucolic artists' enclave, has earned its place in rock music history; Small Town Talk is a classic study of a vital music scene in a magical place during a revolutionary time.