DAY THREE(of woodstock 1969)

"Good morning,"said a remarkably sunny-sounding Grace Slick as the band started a scintillating set at around sunup on Sunday morning in front of 400,000 muddy, stoned, hungry, and exhausted fans. Opening up with a hopped-up take on Fred Neil's "The Other Side Of This Life" that may be the strongest performance of the song ever captured on tape, the Airplane blazed through a set that included their hit "Somebody To Love." "Who't You Try"/"Saturday Afternoon," and the recently penned fist-waver "Volunteers."

The weather was scorchingly hot by early Sunday afternoon, and so were Joe Cocker and the Grease Band -- despite the fact that two of the band members had been so freaked out by the mass of humanity spread out below as they descended on the venue that they threw up out of the windows of the chopper. The gritty Englishman's first album had been released that April, to glowing reviews, but it took the Woodstock film to make Cocker a rock star, since his improbably craggy voice and whirling dervish body language captivated moviegoers. Cocker and the band kept the pedal to the metal throughout one of Woodstock's most fully realized performances, as evidenced by the newly released "Feelin' Alright." 

By the time Cocker's set ended, the rain was coming down in sheets, forcing a delay that lasted several hours. When the worst of it was over, Country Joe&The Fish appeared in front of the thoroughly soaked throng, cheering them with a high-spirited performance containing much more than just "The 'Fish' Cheer." It turns out that they were extraordinary, as the previously unreleased "Love," extended reprise of "Rock & Soul Music," and others make abundantly evident. Now, at long last, we're getting a good look at one of the era's most underrated psychedelic bands.

Then Years After built their rep on the speed-riffing of guitarist Alvin Lee, and that's exactly what their set was all about. Their playing is a reminder of an era when fleet fingers and flash meant a lot more than they do today.

The Band were at the top of their game in the summer of '69,  devoting the bulk of their set to the songs of Music From Big Pink. Like Creedence, the group would have provided the film with some top-notch music had manager Albert Grossman allowed it to be used. Theh Primary problem wasn't musical or techical but the fact that people were screaming for Dylan through the entire set, creating a desconnect between The Band and the crowd. "It was like a ripped army of mud people - we felt like a bunch of preacher boys looking into purgatory," quipped Robbie Robertson.

"300,000 at Music Fair Find Mud Plentiful and Food Scarce"

--The New York Times, August 17, 1969

Albino guitar hero Johnny Winter and his cooking band, including his keyboard-playing brother Edgar for most of the set, provided the weekend's most electrifying blues workout, as the previously unreleased "Leland Mississippi Blues" and "Mean Town Blues"(first heard on Woodstock 25) so viscerally demonstrate.

These Texans seemed much more in their element than the next group, Blood, Sweat & Tears. The jazz-trained horn section was flummoxed by the faulty monitors, leading to ongoing tuning issues. Still, they sound great on their set closer, "You've Made Me So Very Happy."

It isn't easy to sing tightly interwoven three-part harmonies to begin with,and well nigh impossible to do it when the vocalists can't hear each other, so Crosby, Stills & Nash can be forgiven for their intermittent raggedness during the initial acoustic part of their set. It's understandable that they later doctored their performance of Graham Nash's "Marrakesh Express" in the studio; what's odd isthat the actual performance is just as good - and certainly no worse - than the "enhanced" version.

After Neil Young joined his sometime cohorts, providing a preview of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the pitch problems were blown away by the phalanx of electric guitars. This is one group that has shown its prowess whenever the four musicians have come together over the decades, and their performance demonstrates that they had it right from the start, with the ebb and flow of their rarefied dynamics fully in evidence.

This latter-day lineup of The Butterfield Blues Band no longer had guitarist Mike Bloomfield or any other original member with the exception of Butterfield, but they could hammer out Chicago Blues. Their "Love March" was another of the defining moments of the original Woodstock soundtrack - a sort of seventh-inning stretch before the big finish - and here, in this chronological sequence, their performance retains that function.

Forty years later, it seems odd that oldies groups existed as far back as the late '60s, but Sha Na Na's presence at the fest - and in the penultimate slot - gives morden-day listeners some  perspective on the enduring appeal of early rock'n'roll and doo-wop. Like Blood, Sweat & Tears, the band seems miscast in hindsight, but they took care of business with lighthearted covers of the Silhouettes' "Get A Job" and Danny & The Juniors' "At The Hop."

Jimi Hendrix came onstage around 9 a.m and played till around 10:45 to a by-then dramatically diminished crowd(though practically everyone who was at Woodstock insists that he or she was there for Jimi's mythmaking performance). Poised be-tween the disbanding of the Experience and the formation of Band Of Gypsys, Hendrix was working with a one-off band calling itself Gypsy Sun And Rainbows and consisting of holdover Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, future Gypsys bassist Billy Cox on bass, and rhythm guitarist Larry Lee, along with percussionist Jerry Vele and conga player Juma Sultan. 

To the ears of critic Tom Moon, listening 30 years later, it was "a ragged ensemble playing in a weird time slog...and a musician in the middle of profound transition, grappling with big, still-coalescing ideas about fusing blues and rock and jazz improvisation. It becomes clear, after hearing this performance next to others in the 'Experience Hendrix' series - notably Live At The Fillmore East - that while the restless Hendrix was dertermined to radically recast his material each time out, not every one of his sojourns ended up as a brilliant archive highlight."

As Moon suggests, the players struggled to fine the vibe, let alone maintain it, on "Jam Back At The House" and elsewhere. But they managed to fuse their separate vectors around Hendrix's exploratory solos and the corrosive power and reach of his improviesd "The Star Spangled Banner," which still boggles the mind, just as it did on that surrel morning.

"He had a kind of alchemist's ability," Townshend wrote of Hendrix in a remembrance for Rolling Stone. "When he was on the stage, he changed. He physically changed. He became incredibly graceful and beautiful. It wasn't just people taking LSD, though that was going on, there's no question. But he had a power that almost sorbered you up if you were on an acid trip. He was bigger than LSD."

Photographer Henry Diltz, one of the several thousand diehards still on hand as Hendrix struck the opening chords of his immortal "Star Spangled Banner," described it as "just a moment that was wonderful. Suddenly it was all over, and this was the strange, haunting end - just his guitar ringing out in the still morning air in this field of mud."

Rather than reveling in the moment, Hendrix high-tailed it out of the ravaged farmland on the next available helicopter, as the stragglers slogged through the mud and scattered, trying to retrace their step to the abandoned Mustangs and VW buses they'd abandoned on the side of the road. The crowd had left tons and tons garbage in their wake. The cleanup crew, most likely as zonked as the attendees, shaped a mound of putrid refuse into a colossal peace symbol before carting it off by the truckload.

Wavy Gravy, founder of the Hog Farm commune, left us with an untoppable boilerplate summationof Woodstock weekend. "Let's face it," he said. "Woodstock was created for wallets. It was designed to make bucks. And then the universe took over and did a little dance."

"All right, friends, you have seen the heavy groups, now you'll see morning maniac music. Believe me, yeah...it's a new dawn."

--Grace Slick, onstage Day 3

"I never expected this festival to be this big. But if the generation gap is to be closed, we older people have to do more than we've done."

--Max Yasgur, The News-American, Baltimore, Maryland

"That sequencein the movie when somebody's screaming, 'No rain! No rain! No rain!' I'm doing the screaming.Definitely induced. In the altered state. I tried to convince the audience that if they all put their thoughts together, they could stop the rain. There were enough people there to physically achieve the result. It did stop raining. Eventually."

--Barry Melton of Country Joe & The Fish

"We made it into the film, mainly because I think they were waking up the crew to film Jimi. It was like a refugee camp, and we had waited all weekend, and acts kept showing up. Finally they said, 'Sha Na Na, you've got 35 minutes,' and we dragged our little equipment up there and luckily made the movie. We made the edit,and the rest is rock 'n' roll history."

--Sha Na Na founding member Jocko Marcellino

"Like we only had about two rehearsals, so we'll only do a primary rhythm thing."

--, onstage Day3 

这就是Woodstock的40周年纪念专辑中关于3天的全部回忆，再过两年，就是Woodstock的50周年了，到时候不知道Rolling Stone这个摇滚先驱媒体是不是还活着。你很难不去想，当年的3天是不是真的有天助，那种纯粹的神圣感，在此之前未曾发生，在此时候消失殆尽，上天一定是派了一群天使走入那片泥地了吧，携起渴望爱却躁动希冀未来却绝望的这群人的手，注入了某些世人无法获取的能量。远离尘嚣，远离世界，远离人类，远离地球，远离时空，远离存在，让3天的时间真正的停滞了，不在执拗于钟表设定的那12格划分的区块之中。如今，摇滚已经成为了一种老古董，嘶吼和粗糙，不羁和愤怒，已经并非光鲜亮丽优雅的年轻人们所追寻的了。事实上，我们已经失去了追寻的能力，终有一天，没有人会再纪念这3天，历史，历史究竟是什么？无人问津的不留痕迹，还是自私写就的美丽谎言。

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