Ten Years After - Woodstock 1969 (2024, Chrysalis Records Ltd.); What's Old Is New Again

 

Photo: Ten Years After

This week's batch of new releases was interesting, to say the least, but aren't they all. Amongst what came out on Friday, August 16th, I pulled out a few albums to listen to. These included new albums by Devon Allman, Ray LaMontagne and Charly Bliss, among others. But, the album that rose to the top of my list to listen to first was a live album recorded almost exactly 55 years ago in August 1969 by Ten Years After at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival.

Full Disclosure: I have been all about all things Woodstock ever since missing the festival because (at the time) I was not quite old enough to drive. However, I was right there when the movie opened in 1970. Not only was the Woodstock documentary movie so well made that it was easy to feel like you'd been there, but two of the most amazing performances in the movie were those by The Who and Ten Years After.

The arrangements for the festival have been well documented, but of all the things that the organizers got wrong and got right, if nothing else the best thing they did was to record the entire thing. I'm not talking about running a reel-to-reel tape deck on the PA. They recorded everything in multi-track, the same as was done in recording studios at the time. These recordings have been used over the years for all the soundtracks and other Woodstock releases. 

Perhaps the most fortuitous development in the history of these tapes took place a little over five years ago when some really capable and knowledgable producers and sound engineers mixed and mastered the entire tape archive for CD release in a gargantuan box set to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Even though the set was super expensive and super limited, this package may have protected the copyright and it may have paved the way for releases like this new one by Ten Years After.

I was a wee lad of about ten when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. The world changed and my record collection began when my mom bought me the first Beatles album on Capitol, Meet the Beatles. From there, I picked up every new Beatles album and single upon release. By high school, rock music had found its way to FM radio and my album collection was branching out to include artists like the Doors, Steppenwolf, the Mamas and the Papas, and British blues bands such as John Mayall, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Savoy Brown, and Ten Years After, among others. In the early 1960s, John Mayall had pioneered playing the American blues in an electric band format, especially on electric guitar as played by a succession of amazing talented guitarists in an ensemble called John Mayall's Blues Breakers. As a result, electric guitarists and bands (all playing the blues) proliferated especially in Britain. 

Ten Years After was your basic guitar, keyboards, bass and drums band, with vocals by frontman and lead guitarist Alvin Lee. In those days, albums were pressed on 12" wide platters of vinyl and my Ten Years After albums included Stonedhenge, Undead, which was so named because it was a live album and it featured a solarized psychedelic cover, and Cricklewood Green, which had a textured cover and graphics to match the cool original material inside. As good as those early albums were, in my memory they don't hold a candle to what the band laid down at Woodstock.

Their set at Woodstock consisted mostly of the American Blues, played on electric, eschewing the original material that was their stock and trade up to that point (except for one song). They opened with the very familiar "Spoonful," which Eric Clapton had popularized with Cream. What follows is as it happened: The band began "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," they played it for a couple minutes and then Alvin Lee stopped the song, quickly apologizes and they start again. After about a minute they stop again, pausing for what sounds like a quick band discussion. They then play the complete song. The beauty of all this is that we can hear it with impeccable sound quality. It doesn't take much to realize that we are hearing it better than most of the Woodstock audience.

After playing the set's one original song, "The Hobbit," they returned to the classic blues for the duration of the hour long set. They had seemingly struck a nerve with the crowd, which wasn't quite done with them yet. At that point, they came back with their most incendiary encore (as seen in the film), "I'm Going Home," which included a medley of old time rock 'n roll along with Alvin Lee's incredible guitar work and vocals.

The beauty of having an album of straight ahead quality rock music in 2024, somehow cuts through the noise, no offense to the rest of this week's new releases. I, for one, am glad that this recording exists to add to our enjoyment regardless of how much post-Woodstock it is.   

Listen to "I'm Going Home"




Band Members
  • Alvin Lee: guitar, vocals
  • Chick Churchill: keyboards
  • Leo Lyons: bass
  • Ric Lee: drums

Setlist:

  1. Spoonful
  2. Good Morning Little Schoolgirl (including two false starts)
  3. Hobbit
  4. I Can't Keep from Crying Sometimes
  5. Help Me
  6. I'm Going Home



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