Isle of Wight/Atlanta — a CBS 3 record set

The drabness of the outside packaging extends to the programming of the music itself. No attempt is made to knit the performances into an organic documentary unit. While the original "Woodstock" album inclined (perhaps pardonably) to the other extreme, "loW/Atlanta" is sliced with silences between songs, and features no stage announcements worth speaking of. At times, the Isle of Wight seemed to feature more dialogue than music. A truly authentic loW album would indicated at least fragments of that memorable shouting match between Jean-Jacques Lebel and Rikki Farr Out, the moment when the speed-freak interrupted Joni Mitchell, Jeff Dexter's brilliant handling of that hideous incident when the stage roof caught fire, Jimi's farewell, the exuberant Latin-American jammers who took over the stage on the Thursday, and all the other shit that made the loW such a traumatic event. All that this package contains is music.

The Atlanta album concentrates fairly heavily on blues. It opens up with a consummate Johnny Winter Band performance of 'Mean Mistreater'. A classic slow blues, it features much better singing than 'My Own Fault', its twin on Johnny's own live album, though the guitar isn't quite as amazing. Now that Rick Derringer has split to work with Johnny's brother Edgar, and Johnny himself is in a Texas mental home getting off smack, this cut will have to last Winter freaks a long time. Suffice to say, it's beautiful.

A brief leap through space and time and it's 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning at the Isle of Wight and Sly is leading the Family Stone through a half-hour set for a bunch of frozen people, most of them asleep. The mixing engineers have taken the distortion off the sound, and the scanty applause has been mixed in loud enough to sound like an ovation. As always, it's exquisite. Then Cactus are here to play da Blooze. The rhythm section is a lot better than the front line. Rusty Day plays a nice harp, but his singing combines the most irritating aspects of Edgar Winter and Robert Plant. Finally, David Bromberg's gentle, charming 'Mr Bojangles', Bromberg appeared playing guitar behind some undistinguished lady folksinger, did one song by himself and got such a reception that he was given his own set later that night. This was either his fifth or sixth encore.

Leonard Cohen's usual quite desperation gives way to a raucous good-time melancholy complete with 'Don't Pass Me By' fiddle on "Tonight Will Be Fine'. Then Jimi. At the Isle of Wight that Sunday evening, I think we all knew that Jimi would not be with us much longer. The collective bad energy was strangling him, and the tortured amplifiers squeezed the sound into horrible echoes of bum trips and hard times gone. Predictably, Columbia have copped out again. The three songs included here have been carefully selected to show virtually nothing of what had happened.

Finally, Miles. All that needs saving is that his eighteen-minute segment is probably the finest music on the whole set. At the festival, I would have enjoyed it more if the people sitting around me had not picked that time to indulge in paper-plane throwing and community singing, but no matter. The piece is entitled 'Call It Anythin' ', and you can probably guess why.

All in all, an essential item. The only drag is that with a little imagination, a little commitment and (yeah!) a little love, it could have been even better than that.

© Charles Shaar Murray 1971

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