Image of Joe Cock­er by Derek Red­mond and Paul Camp­bel, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Life­hack­er has this great tip. “Start­ing at 5:07 p.m. EST today, August 15, you can lis­ten to every minute of the three days of con­certs, cour­tesy of Philadel­phia radio sta­tion WXPN. It will include all of the festival’s archived audio: from the icon­ic per­for­mances to the stage announce­ments to the rain delays. The exclu­sive broad­cast will fea­ture new­ly recon­struct­ed audio archives of each of Woodstock’s 32 acts, start­ing with Richie Havens’ open­ing set, and con­tin­u­ing through to Jimi Hendrix’s clos­ing per­for­mance on Sun­day morn­ing. Accord­ing to a release from the sta­tion, it will be broad­cast in as close to real time as pos­si­ble.” To lis­ten, go to this page, scroll down, and launch the media play­er.

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I guess it’s easy to be “The Qui­et One” in The Who when sur­round­ed by a preen­ing singer with gold­en locks, a gui­tarist with a wind­mill arm who smash­es his equip­ment, and a com­plete­ly insane drum­mer (on and off stage). But John Entwistle helped root the band by stand­ing still and deliv­er­ing some of the meati­est and beat­i­est licks and melod­ic runs in ‘60s rock.

The above footage sal­vaged from the doc The Kids Are Alright shows the mas­ter at work. “Won’t Be Fooled Again” isn’t known as a bass-for­ward song, so this iso­lat­ed track from a live take show will make you hear it anew. Entwistle plays his bass like an elec­tric lead, dou­bling the drums some­times, oth­er times mim­ic­k­ing the vocals. He plays triplets and runs. He zooms up the neck, slides down, arpeg­giates, the lot. It’s thick. Just hit play.

As some YouTube wag points out, it’s some­thing of a bass play­er joke come to life at the end, where Entwistle leaves his bass onstage and walks off, while a girl rush­es out of the audi­ence to embrace the lead singer. Such is life in a band.

From the same shoot, you can also check out his iso­lat­ed bass from “Baba O’Reilly.” Entwistle has a three-note riff to work with. He stays true to it while fill­ing in spaces here and there with dis­tor­tion turned way up. At the end he has a sip of (I assume) water and looks about as excit­ed as when he start­ed.

In the mid-nineties, Entwistle was inter­viewed for a book on drum­mer Kei­th Moon. Author Tony Fletch­er caught him in an hon­est mood:

“I wast­ed my whole fuck­ing career on The Who,” he said between gulps of Remy Mar­tin brandy, his favourite tip­ple. “Com­plete fuck­ing waste of time. I should be a mul­ti-mil­lion­aire. I should be retired by now. I’ll be known as an inno­v­a­tive bass play­er. But that doesn’t help get my swim­ming pool rebuilt and let me sit on my arse watch­ing TV all day. I wouldn’t want to, but I’d like the chance to be able to.”

Not all rock bands con­sist of best friends, and some are down­right ran­corous. But that’s often what brings out the best in peo­ple. So as you gaze at Entwistle sti­fling a yawn dur­ing these two clips, con­sid­er his con­fes­sion and enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Neu­ro­science of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instru­ments Are Fun­da­men­tal to Music

Lis­ten to Grace Slick’s Hair-Rais­ing Vocals in the Iso­lat­ed Track for “White Rab­bit” (1967)

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

This year’s big event to cel­e­brate the 50-year anniver­sary of the most famous music fes­ti­val in the world has died an igno­min­ious death. As Vari­ety wrote in a scathing “obit­u­ary” last month, “Wood­stock 50 passed away today at the age of 7 months, fol­low­ing a brave and very, very long bat­tle with can­cel.”

Not a few peo­ple have said good rid­dance. What could the tribute—to take place not in Wood­stock but in Baltimore—have in com­mon with its name­sake, save a small hand­ful of the still-liv­ing orig­i­nal per­form­ers? The use of “Wood­stock” as a brand seems cyn­i­cal, but then again, we’ve also grown leery of the leg­end of Wood­stock 1. What was it about? Clas­sic rock stars on a farm? Stoned, naked hip­pies flail­ing in the mud? What jus­ti­fies the fifty years of hype?

Wood­stock was about much more than drug­gy flower chil­dren shag­ging in bedrag­gled tents, yet this stereo­type was prop­a­gat­ed from the start. The fes­ti­val “was a stri­dent­ly anti­war spec­ta­cle,” online his­to­ry project All About Wood­stock explains. “Its mes­sage was dilut­ed by the media. Rather than focus on the polit­i­cal state­ments made, main­stream cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tors talked about hip­pies, long hair, and nudi­ty.” A belat­ed wed­ding par­ty, Wood­stock sym­bol­ized “the merg­er and ambiva­lence of the coun­ter­cul­ture and protest.”

The mar­riage may be in sham­bles in the time of Wood­stock 50 but it held on for sev­er­al decades. Wood­stock “was the ‘com­ing out’ par­ty of the rock ‘n’ roll gen­er­a­tion,” writes NPR. Folk singer Richie Havens, the festival’s first per­former, remem­bers it as “the begin­ning of the world, as far as I was con­cerned.” Booked for a 20-minute set, Havens end­ed up play­ing for much longer when San­tana couldn’t be found, ad-lib­bing “Free­dom (Moth­er­less Child)” as his clos­er.

“The word ‘free­dom came out of my mouth because this was our real par­tic­u­lar free­dom,” he says in an inter­view with NPR’s Tony Cox. “We’d final­ly made it to above ground.” A few months lat­er, in Decem­ber, the decade closed on a much dark­er note, sym­bol­ized by the Rolling Stones’ bloody Alta­mont Free Con­cert. But for three days that year, August 15–17, 1969, it seemed like music fes­ti­vals might change the world.

Maybe they did. Wood­stock orga­niz­er Michael Lang thinks so. “I think Wood­stock proved the world that it was pos­si­ble for peo­ple to live peace­ful­ly,” he said in a 2015 inter­view. “It gave cre­dence to the posi­tions we as a young gen­er­a­tion took on per­son­al free­doms, end­ing a war we felt unjust, respect for the plan­et, the fight for civ­il rights, women’s rights, and human rights in gen­er­al. The impact on soci­ety con­tin­ues to this day.”

The fes­ti­val was also, of course, a mas­sive­ly star-stud­ded event filled with career high­light per­for­mances like Hendrix’s rad­i­cal, blis­ter­ing “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner.” Not every act showed up to make a state­ment. The Who were pret­ty sour about the gig, Lang remem­bers. “They were not part of the ‘hip­pie’ thing and Pete Townsend had to be talked into tak­ing the date.” But those who came to make a state­ment weren’t shy about it. Jef­fer­son Air­plane called for vol­un­teers for the rev­o­lu­tion in their anti-war anthem “Vol­un­teers.” Coun­try Joe and the Fish end­ed the sec­ond set on Sat­ur­day with their satir­i­cal “I‑Feel-Like‑I’m‑Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” an explic­it­ly anti-Viet­nam War song that asked, “what are we fight­ing for”?

Joan Baez, six months preg­nant at the time, sang tra­di­tion­al folk songs, Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and Gram Parson’s “Hick­o­ry Wind.” Her clos­er, spir­i­tu­al “We Shall Over­come,” bridged the music of the Civ­il Rights move­ment with that of the anti-war move­ment, pro­claim­ing in her glo­ri­ous sopra­no, “We shall live in peace some­day.” The moment, fifty years ago this week, can nev­er be recre­at­ed, no mat­ter how much mon­ey orga­niz­ers throw at Wood­stock retreads. But we don’t need mil­lions to remem­ber what the orig­i­nal Wood­stock stood for. Sex, drugs, and mud got all the press, but the festival’s inten­tions were to protest war over­seas and hatred and mur­der at home with three days of peace and music—a vision, as Havens extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly sang out, of anoth­er kind of free­dom.

The orig­i­nal fes­ti­val, “essen­tial­ly a mass move­ment pro­mot­ing peace,” gets yet anoth­er look in a new Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence doc­u­men­tary, Wood­stock: Peace, Love and Music, which pre­miered last Tues­day on PBS. (Stream it free here.) With “nev­er-before-seen footage” and tes­ti­mo­ni­als from “those who expe­ri­enced it first­hand,” the film doc­u­ments the even­t’s highs and lows, includ­ing the many “near dis­as­ters” that “put the ideals of the coun­ter­cul­ture to the test.” Also see the New York Times arti­cle, “How to Relive Wood­stock From the Com­fort of Your Couch,” which fea­tures “six movies, 12 album col­lec­tions, two songs and 17 books that will take will­ing trav­el­ers back to August 1969.” This includes, of course, Michael Wadleigh’s icon­ic doc­u­men­tary, Wood­stock: 3 Days of Peace and Music.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix Live at Wood­stock: His­toric Con­cert Cap­tured on Film

David Cros­by & Gra­ham Nash at Occu­py Wall Street; Echoes of Wood­stock

Wattstax Doc­u­ments the “Black Wood­stock” Con­cert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

In an NPR inter­view, Caitlin Hor­rocks, author of a nov­el about Erik Satie called The Vex­a­tions, remem­bers the first time she encoun­tered the composer’s work. “As a piano stu­dent, my teacher assigned me one of the ‘Gymnopiedies.’ And as a kid, I just imme­di­ate­ly loved it.” Yet when Hor­rocks dug deep­er into Satie’s cat­a­logue, “very quick­ly I was run­ning into things like ‘Flab­by Pre­ludes (For a Dog)’ or ‘Dried Embryos,’ one of which con­tains essen­tial­ly lines of dia­logue from the point of view of a sea cucum­ber. And as an aspir­ing pianist, I was annoyed. I was dis­ap­point­ed.”

Hor­rocks essen­tial­ly describes the way Satie has been remem­bered by pop­u­lar culture—as the com­pos­er of the extra­or­di­nar­i­ly pop­u­lar “Gymo­pe­dies” and “Gnossi­ennes,” and a lot of oth­er strange pieces of music few peo­ple care to lis­ten to. (The title of Hor­rocks nov­el comes from a Satie com­po­si­tion meant to be played 840 times in suc­ces­sion.) He wrote bal­lets, stage, orches­tral, and choral pieces, cham­ber music, and, sev­er­al com­po­si­tions for solo piano—and he would per­haps be a lit­tle annoyed by his lega­cy: music he com­posed in his ear­ly twen­ties has defined his entire career, though “Satie’s lat­er out­put… is arguably more ‘impor­tant,’” writes Meurig Bowen at The Guardian.

Satie was “a torch­bear­er for the avant-garde in his lat­er years.” Described by his con­tem­po­raries Rav­el and Debussy as a “precursor”–a label that fits per­fect­ly giv­en how much he came to influ­ence com­posers like John Cage–Satie did not fit in his time, and he does not fit in ours. The pref­er­ence for what Bowen calls “easy on the ear” music per­sists, and for good rea­son. We intu­itive­ly respond to melody and har­mo­ny, to music with nar­ra­tive-like struc­ture and stir­ring emo­tion­al con­tent. We so often come to music for exact­ly these qual­i­ties: to be lib­er­at­ed from think­ing and give our­selves over to feel­ing.

Satie under­stood this, and his genius in his most famous pieces was to make music that appealed to both the intel­lect and the emo­tions, not slight­ing one in favor of oth­er. The ani­mat­ed scores above for “Gymno­pe­die No. 1” and “Gnossi­enne No. 1” make this point vivid­ly, with col­ors and shapes illus­trat­ing the dura­tion and pitch of each note played by pianist Stephen Mali­nows­ki. These del­i­cate, abstract, short pieces may have reached the lev­el of “pop clas­sics” as Bowen writes, but our famil­iar­i­ty with them masks how rev­o­lu­tion­ary they were. “Gymno­pe­die No. 1,” is a “piece that relies heav­i­ly on how sym­pa­thet­ic a musi­cian you are,” Clas­sic FM explains, since “there are hard­ly any notes!”

The invent­ed names “Gymno­pe­dies” and “Gnossi­ennes” sig­nal that Satie is invent­ing new forms of music, most­ly with­out time sig­na­tures or bar divi­sions, and with some very eso­teric sources of inspi­ra­tion. Their haunt­ing, wist­ful qual­i­ties are evoked as much by the absence of musi­cal con­ven­tion as by the pres­ence of pleas­ing­ly melod­ic lines and chords. In these ani­mat­ed scores, the few notes Satie did write become bursts of flo­ral pat­terns and dec­o­ra­tive shapes, and the silences become neg­a­tive spaces, preg­nant, like the long shad­ows in Gior­gio de Chiri­co’s paint­ings, with inex­press­ible long­ings and gnos­tic mys­ter­ies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vel­vet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vex­a­tions on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

Hear the Very First Pieces of Ambi­ent Music, Erik Satie’s Fur­ni­ture Music (Cir­ca 1917)

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Look­ing back on the Pink Floyd of the late 60s, the fledg­ling band first led by Syd Bar­rett can seem a bit like Britain’s answer to The Vel­vet Under­ground. Idio­syn­crat­i­cal­ly druidic, mys­te­ri­ous, and play­ful, but also inspired by lit­er­a­ture (though Bar­rett was much more Ken­neth Gra­ham than Del­more Schwartz), drawn to exper­i­men­tal film and hyp­not­ic stage effects, inspired to turn the expe­ri­ence of being on spe­cif­ic drugs into a dis­ori­ent­ing new way of play­ing music.

The com­par­i­son may seem odd, espe­cial­ly giv­en the Vel­vets rep­u­ta­tion as the most famous band no one heard of until after they broke up and Pink Floyd’s rep­u­ta­tion as one of the biggest-sell­ing bands of all time. But before they filled sta­di­ums, they were scrap­py and strange and psy­che­del­ic in the ear­li­est sense of the word.

Sad­ly depart­ed singer Chris Cor­nell remem­bers dis­cov­er­ing their first record, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in the mid-80s, and meet­ing a very dif­fer­ent Pink Floyd than the one he’d come to know: “It could almost have been a British indie-rock record of the time.” Indeed, Syd Barrett’s work, includ­ing the solo albums he record­ed after leav­ing the band, left a long, last­ing impres­sion on indie rock.

[T]he impor­tant thing about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was the music’s strange jux­ta­po­si­tion – some­times whim­si­cal and pas­toral, but simul­ta­ne­ous­ly des­per­ate and sad. I don’t think I ever found anoth­er record which that type of dichoto­my worked so well. With Syd Bar­rett, it nev­er felt like an inven­tion.

The BBC’s Chris Jones put it a lit­tle more suc­cinct­ly: “this is Edward Lear for the acid gen­er­a­tion.”

If all of this sounds appeal­ing and if, some­how, like Cor­nell, you missed out of the ear­li­est incar­na­tion of Pink Floyd—with elfin savant Bar­rett first at the helm—you owe it to your­self to watch the hour-long com­pi­la­tion of footage above fea­tur­ing some of the ear­li­est live per­for­mances, first with Bar­rett, then a fresh-faced David Gilmour tak­ing over for their sec­ond album, A Saucer­ful of Secrets.

As Barrett’s spi­dery Tele­cast­er lines give way to Gilmour’s grit­ty Stra­to­cast­er riffs, you can hear a more famil­iar Floyd take shape. They clear­ly always want­ed to reach an audi­ence, but in their first sev­er­al years, Pink Floyd seemed total­ly uncon­cerned with fill­ing are­nas and sell­ing albums in num­bers mea­sured by pre­cious met­als. Songs like “Astron­o­my Domine” and “Set the Con­trols for the Heart of the Sun” are all about heady atmos­phere, not the gut-lev­el hooks and brevi­ty of pop.

Though they start­ed out in 1965 like every oth­er British clas­sic rock band, obses­sive­ly cov­er­ing Amer­i­can blues songs, Pink Floyd took their rock chops to anoth­er galaxy. “If you look back at some of the great psy­che­del­ic albums that came out that year”—writes Alex Gaby in an essay tour of the band’s entire cat­a­logue—The Piper at the Gates of Dawn “doesn’t quite sound like any of those…. It’s as if Pink Floyd were the piper and they are open­ing up the gates to a new dawn of psy­che­delia and music.” Watch the gates open live, on film, above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Psy­che­del­ic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Ear­ly Days with Syd Bar­rett, 1967

Pink Floyd Plays With Their Brand New Singer & Gui­tarist David Gilmour on French TV (1968)

Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Bar­rett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with House­hold Objects: Hear Two Sur­viv­ing Tracks Made with Wine Glass­es & Rub­ber Bands

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness