While festivities celebrating Woodstock’s 40th anniversary are still being hammered out, Rock Daily reported that Rhino will do the six-CD Woodstock – 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur’s Farm box set, stocked with previously unreleased performances from the famed 1969 festival, which will be released on August 18th.
According to Rollingstone.com, the 77-song package reconstructs the festival’s 33 sets chronologically, starting with Richie Havens’ opening performance through Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Woodstock set, with selections from the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, CSN&Y, Jefferson Airplane and many more filling out the six discs.
Among the highlights of the six-CD, are a 19-minute rendition of the Dead’s “Dark Star,” “Amazing Journey” and “Pinball Wizard” by the Who, “Feelin’ Alright” by Joe Cocker, CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising,” Blood Sweat and Tears’ “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and tracks from Sweetwater, Bert Sommer, Tim Hardin, Ravi Shankar, Joan Baez, Melanie, Country Joe & the Fish, Sha Na Na, the Butterfield Blues Band, Johnny Winter and others.
The set, which lists for $79.98, also restores full-length performances of Canned Heat’s “Woodstock Boogie” (to a whopping 30 minutes) and the Who’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” and it includes the never-released Woodstock performances of Arlo Guthrie’s “Coming Into Los Angeles” and Mountain’s “Theme For an Imaginary Western,” which were replaced by better-sounding recordings from other concerts for the original “Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music” soundtrack.
The track lineup is accurate to the actual running order of the legendary 1969 festival, and it also includes stage announcements (you still need to check the brown acid, apparently), Wavy Gravy’s announcement of “breakfast in bed” for the crowd estimated at 500,000, Max Yasgur’s famous speech to the crowd and audio of Abbie Hoffman’s encounter with Who guitarist Pete Townshend.
In compiling the box set, producer Andy Zax went through tapes of each performance, selecting the best material from each of the 33 sets at Woodstock. “The way we approached all of the material was as if it was a cinéma verité documentary — the raw record of the event,” Zax said in a press release.
“This will be the most comprehensive collection of Woodstock music yet,” Rhino Vice-President of A&R Cheryl Pawelski tells Billboard.com. “The goal was to make it as real as possible…as authentic an experience as possible. It feels like dirt. It feels like a field. We wanted to take you there. We worked very hard to make it a true document of that time.”

source Billboard.com; Rollingstone.com

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under News.