I think, and I have seen them all, that this musically the best festival documentary ever. Outstanding performances from every artist. Especially Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull and Ten Years After give their best in this festival. Just Awesome.
sharecompletely agree . Even the performers list was incredible . Leonard Cohen !
... woodstock my axx .
Agree with you both. Also, significantly, this concert spelt the beginning of the end for the free-love movement. Was The Doors' performance strangely prophetic??
shareI still haven't seen Monterrey or Festival Express, but I agree with you cats. The best festival pic ever. I wonder why there aren't more posts here. See my other post.
A great movie about an unavoidable fiasco.
My favorite band--No River City--is on tour this summer. www.norivercity.com
Absolutely the best. Signifying the end of the hippy era, or to put it another way, soon after it became unhip to be a hippy, though we still have many hippies to this day, young and old. Love this movie, which must make me a bit of a hippy. Also own Woodstock on DVD and would like to see the whole Monterey film but this seems unbeatable.
The last good quality Hendrix footage, possibly the same for The Doors with JM. The Who were at their live peak before the 'audience and band become 1' concert experiments that Pete Townshend came out with the next year. Incidentally, just seen the Who at Sheffield last week and they were nothing short of brilliant- still, despite the loss of half the members. It was this very film that first contributed to me becoming a Who fan and also a fan of most of the other acts featured. What a line-up for £3, must only be about £30 in today's money.
The organisers, Rikki, Ray, Ron, etc. along with the interviewees make it more than just a rock concert as there is a juicy plot - not as intended of course, but great viewing. A movie could be made of this, but it actually kind of made itself- if you get what I mean.
I much preferred Woodstock. In this film, they all too often didn't show the whole song performance. Also, more from the Doors was needed.
shareAgreed there on the some of the songs unnecessarily being shortened, perhaps a minus point on that one. The one that sticks out for me is All Right Now - a hefty tempo change on the drum intro shows an edit, then the missing verses/shortened chorus, and that guitar solo should have been left well alone! The Doors should have had the full versions too, but perhaps a full release DVD of the performance may happen as with The Who and Hendrix. Maybe there's a reluctance from the powers-that-be to avoid a release due to JM not being at his iconic best, which would be a shame as from what I've seen it still seemed a strong performance.
Love Woodstock too, but perhaps some of the non-music sections are a bit long-winded - though I've only seen the Director's cut. It's growing on me though, and each time I see it there's less detrimental to say about it. Don't know how that works but it seems so. Always interesting and funny are the guy teaching his "etchercises" to the hippies, the two kids "hangin' out and balling" and the young bearded organiser (the Mike Anthony of Van Halen lookalike) who is permanently smiling in the face of financial ruin. Shouldn't laugh, but hopefully it's all paid off now, as I hope for the IOW 1970!
The IOW movie should be re-released in a remastered 5.1 Director's cut, with the full song versions. Adding 20-30 mins to it's length wouldn't ruin it.
OK folks: I only just now heard about this film so forgive me for leaping in like this... anyway, as a major ELP fan I just gotta ask: How much of their show is included here? Did the editors just pay token lip service to them, cutting away after 30 seconds or do we get to actually see a good hunk of their show?
"Any technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from Magic."
That's ok, quite stilted conversations going on in these threads compared to the Woodstock ones! ELP feature on it, but again only one song (possibly shortened). It's about 3 mins or so (not 100% sure) of Pictures At An Exhibition. Very entertaining to watch nonetheless, with cannons being fired, Carl Palmer going mad on the drums and Keith Emerson jumping around his stuff as expected. This, according to the presenter was "their first début performance ever!", and I believe it was definitely the first big show for ELP having played their first gig at Plymouth Guildhall a couple of nights earlier. They were apparently very disappointed with how it went due to technical problems and not being able to hear themselves, and eachother. The crowd seemed well into it though.
shareHmmm... then I guess I can do without *buying* the DVD for any new ELP content because I already have a DVD of ELP's (full) PAAE show as recorded at the IOW festival. Thanks for the info.
Cheers
"Any technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from Magic."
It was a good one, but not great. As another person posted it was somewhat undone by cutting a lot of the performances. One good example is ELP's performance of "Rondo". That song, as heard on the soundtrack and seen in a posting on YouTube, was a little over ten-minutes long and showed why Emerson was often compared to Jimi Hendrix in terms of what he did to the organ was comparable to what Hendrix did to revolutionize the electric guitar. Also, Family is only briefly heard doing "Good News, Bad News". They are never shown performing "Weaver's Answer", which is on the soundtrack as well.
However, this is still a good documentary showing the end of the 1960's in England.
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The camera work and sound are fine (except for the Doors, because Morrison refused to perform until all the lighting was removed).
The editing is indeed problematic. Murray Lerner should have kept the performances intact. Too many performances with pieces missing. Donovan is only seen for about ten seconds.
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Somewhat more complete performances from a few of the famous acts at this legendary 600,000 strong hippie festival, the biggest crashed party in history, are now available separately:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dmovies-tv&field-keywords=isle+of+wight+