MATTHEWS SOUTHERN COMFORT – "Woodstock"

It’s not the most exciting version of “Woodstock”–that would be the Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young?) one. I used to like the latter, but growing older has made me realize that its bombast (Steven Stills was never subtle) is completely at odds with the lyrics, which are, as you say “spiritual vibe.”

The Matthews Southern Comfort version does, I think, approximate the feeling while giving it far more life that the Joni Mitchell version. While I like a lot of her work, her own version of “Woodstock” always struck me as a bit moribund. This hits a nice middle ground.

I think the post-Edenic sentiments actually do convey the feelings of many people in my generation as we felt in the early 1970s. I was already becoming quite clear that the utopian dreams of the 60s weren’t coming true. For those of us in the US, Nixon was in the White House and the Vietnam War was escalating ferociously, National Guardsmen were shooting students on college campuses. As JM sings in her song “California,” “They wouldn’t give peace a chance / That was just a dream some of us had.” The “bomber jet planes” weren’t “turning into butterflies above our nation” by a long shot. “Woodstock,” then, is perhaps the last hurrah for our sense of innocence (naivety might be a better word). After that the great cynicism.

And yet, I think that many my age still mourn the fact that we never found “our way back to the garden.”

MSC doesn’t resort to false idealism (or agressive certitude like CSN) nor does it turn the quest for the garden into a lost cause to be mourned. Instead–and perhaps a band functioning at a long distance from the actual event had an advantage here–MSC deliver something that might apply to any incident of mystical experience, not a long ago rock festival.

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Doctor Mod is signing off until next week as I’ll be away at a conference. Or, to paraphrase an old Gene Pitney/Dusty Springfield song:

I am only twenty-four hours from Tulsa

(Forgive me. I’ve always wanted to say that but never had a reason until now.)

Best illustration for a song yet !

The problem that begins to arise in reviewing these songs chronologically is that once you reach the era when you became aware of these songs when they were numer 1 it’s very difficult to disassociate memories and review objectively. The serene pastoral style of the song actually sounds more akin to CSNY than even their own version. The effect is a peaceful gentle optomistic song which struck a chord with people in the UK possibly because like Mitchell & Matthews we too experienced the festival from a distance. I am a sucker for ethereal pop so it certainly registered with me even though I would have been too young to know wot Woodstock was or what it represented. I have some happy memroies associated with it as well which helps as well. I reckon an 8 myself.

PS I also note that the marking seems to have gone astray a little along the way as this merits a 7 which ranks it alongside Kay Starr ! It does seem a little tougher now to get a decent score.

The other problem we have now is trying to find the original recordings to review as via the wonder of the web I have found countless versions of some ‘classics’. Generally these are low budget re-recordings made in order to re-acquire the copyright in the artists name or because the original masters aren’t available. Some are also made to ‘improve’ on the original – here I offer up Lieutenant Pigeons ‘glam’ remake of mouldy old dough. Oh dear. Worth seeking out when you get there !

RE-RECORDING OF LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE ON POPTIMISM CD WITH AL MARTINO ON COVER

Actually it depresses me that the SOME TRACKS PERFORMED BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS curse has now infiltrated the eighties…

Yes well as far as dance mixes go it is a whole minefield. There were/are usually several edits of each tune to choose from anyway. During the 80s these progressed from extended versions of singles to the singles being hacked up version of the 12″. The emphasis would then be on 12 inch mix not the single edit. You may find you have to include all mixes! Oh joy.

question: how is woodstock usually played in brit culture? over here festivals decidedly less common and though there were many more at this time my guess is in the american imagination woodstock = big climax in 3 act play ‘the rise and fall of the hippie’ w/ monterey act one and altamont the exit stage left (hunch: how much do the big prominent movie tie-ins to each play a role, at the time and now, in preserving these 3 fests as ‘important’ while other big american fests – good trips and bad – have been lost to the ether?); when i was a kid and boomer culture was dominant (cf. jerry garcia making more rolling stone mag covers during the 80s than all hip-hop acts combined)(and seemed it would always be that way; one thing i remember really ‘liking’ about the wild palms miniseries was the way even in the future 60s chesnuts would still be unescapable; sadly/gladly this hasn’t come to pass – oldies format dying out and completely dead in much of this country – i don’t think there’s a radio station on my dial that’s ever played ‘i want to hold yr hand’ or ‘house of the rising sun’) the flipside question to ‘were you in nam?’ was ‘were you at woodstock?’ even then, well well after, it had some residue of ‘this is important, this means something’, at the time it must have seemed an obv turningpoint of some sort and genuinely thrilling/terrifying, that some sort of revolution was in the offing must have seemed clear/inevitable and it was of course, just not the one either the old liberal establishment or the young radicals anticipated.

Here is a fine axample of the affectiveness of music, especially popular music. I love this song and I especially love this version of it, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment. As a song it’s ok and 7 is about right, maybe even a 6. But as something that marks a significant moment in my life that I look back on with great fondness, it’s a very personal lay-down 10.

The CSNY version, along with the whole Déjà Vû figured heavily in that magical French summer (along with Mungo Jerry and Ten Years After) and when I hear that verion with its funky, spiky overtones of improvised jamming and dancing I recall balmy evenings under the pines, the sea breaking gently on rocks, and playing tennis under a blazing sun. When I here the MSC version, however, I think of autumn rain clattering on my window and a sense of something I had which was now dissipated – my conviction that I had found love when I thought I never would was coming to nothing but it was a memory to treasure.

And there it is, in this version which is so full of wistfulness and regret for the passing of something big but fleeting which might never be recaptured.

Getting ourselves back to the Garden is full of resonances of the Fall and redemption. I’m sure Joni Mitchell was well aware of this when she wrote the song, and Ian Matthews captured it very well. That slide guitar gets me all shivery too!

Swerving a little – I have half a memory of the gay Ian Matthews recording a cover of The Crystals’ And Then He Kissed Me without changing the gender of the lyric, and causiung a Radio One pundit to get quite outraged!

It wasn’t, in either case, simply a matter of ‘being there’: you had to be at a certain stage in your life too. I was there for ‘Woodstock’ and it was part of my sexual awakening. I was also there for punk, but by 1977 the boot was on the other foot, as it were, and I was part of what was being rebelled against. Actually the kids I was teaching in Hull were largely untouched by punk, they were Northern Soulers and because I was steeped in Motown we had more in common.

late 70s punk explosion not quite a dominant myth on american landscape i don’t think, though it is acknowledged at least – very very often in vh1 type historia de la musica rock docs it (in a move that provokes both roffles and outrage from me) will jump from ramones/patti smith -> nirvana, like the thread just completely died with patti falling off the stage or the ramones calling phil spector and then a decade later kurt cobain just upped and revived it and ladies and gentlemen here’s the 90s. increasingly but still only very slightly i’ve been detecting some golden age haze applied to alt rock Xplosion with cobweb gravy about how music ‘meant something’ and the famous ‘we won’, i heard some spin on this around the time of ‘rock is back!’ and hear it occasionally when someone bemoans the present day rockband as so shallow and facile in comparison to, um, deadeye dick or the crash test dummies. there may be a clinton nostalgia factor there thoguh which would be understandable. boomers fairly absent from pop culture now (the red hot chili peppers qualify as ‘my god the mileage! what legends, what vets! lo they were there at the dawn of stonehenge/woodstock 94!’)(cf. politicians, ugly buildings, whores), but still obv very dominant in the overall cultural landscape (if america is undergoing a ‘a second great awakening’ per dubya a huge number of boomer’s staring death in the eye obv factor #1; cf current ad for retirement plans w/ dennis hopper going on about how ‘we aren’t gonna do retirement like our parents maan, we’re gonna do it cool, we’re revolutionary’), i think a certain segment of my generation (X) are resigned to ‘these fuxx are gonna be in power til we’re pushing 65 and henry rollins is hawking xtreme retirement plans’ though there are potential bright spots on the horizon (edwards and obama both decidedly post-nam/post-boomer if hard to think of as remotely gen x), see also the suv: an object built on a marriage between boomer reality and boomer delusion.

she basically talks about it as the beginning of the end of 60s utopianism, and compares it to the romantics, blake esp. i really like this song, and i know wood stock is a deeply problematic touchstone, but the idea of communalism and changing the world and all of that nonsense gives me a sort of warmth

“Given the degree to which women and people of various colors have moved up and through society in the decades since, I’d argue that belief has turned out to be not exactly wrong, albeit not exactly like the believers at the time foresaw.” – this got me thinking, how much *was* identity politics a part of 60’s hippiedom? Like, it’s probably more or less a given that the views towards race and gender were more progressive than the preceding generation’s, but actual involvement in such causes seems more a post-Woodstock, 70’s thing. Racial harmony and equality tends to show up in 60’s hippie pop culture mostly as just another factor in the larger plan for world peace and whatnot (longhairs always present in reconstructions of Vietnam protests in movies, but hardly ever in reconstructions of Civil Rights marches and such), while feminism of course had to have had an…ambiguos relationship with hippies and “free love”, at best.

In the same way that George W Bush was one of the freshest and most original American Presidents in a long time.

The connection is that both phenomena ease my understanding of what a suicide bomber must feel like.

Yes, that’s about the size of it.

No point arguing with that!

Tom – yes I did like the Sandi Thom record, although I realise the proper time to discuss it is way into the future. Come to think of it, you’re the first person I’ve encountered who had a good thing to say about Stars on 45, but hey, vive la difference!

MC and Alan – disagree with my musical tastes by all means, but random references to Bush, Iraq and suicide bombers are more than a bit silly.

*falls off chair in office sinker you badstar (misprint)!* 😉

An aside…but rather an important one…
One of the posts above mentioned Britain’s “biggest other movement linked to pop”…ie the late-sixties underground and punk were all there was.
One again it seems the biggest pop cultural “movement” of all is airbrushed out of the history of popular culture.
The dance culture of 1988- was far more significant than either of the other two in the significance it made to British youth’s lives. Hippy and punk were only ever adopted by a tiny minority of the youth as a whole.This was particularly the case with ‘working class’ youth (obviously with “hippy” and despite punk’s attempt to falsify proletariat credentials equally with the latter movement .Also it only really effected the same small sector of the music buying public just a younger generation.IE those who believe in the worthiness of “rock”.
Acid house/rave and its aftermath brought a whole new group of people into the equation including a far more significant proportion of females.It changed the whole way a generation (approx those born from about 1964 onwards)spent their time and although classless was and is a genuine working class phenomenon (something punk never really was).