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Woodstock – Back to the Garden: 50th Anniversary Experience is a live album by various artists, packaged as a box set of ten compact discs. Released by Rhino Records two weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock, it contains selections from every performance of the music festival which took place on August 15–18, 1969, in Bethel, New York. The discs also include stage announcements and miscellaneous audio material, and the package contains essays by producer Andy Zax and Jesse Jarnow, details about the performers and notable festival figures, and photographs. This box set is a compilation derived from its limited edition parent box set; a smaller three-disc or five-vinyl record sampler is also available.
Background
Although expanded issue sets from the festival had appeared for the 25th anniversary in 1994 and the 40th anniversary in 2009, this set proved more ambitious both in method and scope. Producer and archivist Zax spent more than a decade putting it together from hundreds of tapes that had never been consolidated in one place. In the process of reconstructing the festival for these sets, Zax corrected for some flaws in how the music was issued earlier. To wit:
These recordings have suffered a lot of indignities over the years: bad mixes, poor mastering, vocal and instrumental overdubs, rerecordings, sweetenings, deceptive edits, fake applause, fake cricket noises, fake rain chants, fake audience members yelling along with 'The Fish Cheer,' and entirely fraudulent tracks recorded at [other locations]...[5]
Zax, along with mix engineerBrian Kehew and mastering engineer Dave Schultz, referred to photographic documentation which allowed them to situate the performers within the mix based on where they were standing onstage.[6] Although efforts were undertaken to limit any interference in the original sound of the tapes, Zax and the production team were able to turn the surviving mono recording by Ravi Shankar into a true stereo mix.[7]
Content
Unlike previous collations on record of music from the Woodstock Festival and like its parent box, 50th Anniversary Experience presents music from every performer and in the correct order chronologically they appeared over the course of the festival's three days. Discs one and two include all eight of the mostly folk artists who performed on the first day, starting Friday, August 15. The 14 performers from the second day, starting in the afternoon of Saturday, August 16, commence with the final performers on disc two Quill and end with the first performers on disc seven, Jefferson Airplane. The ten performers on the third and final day starting in the afternoon of Sunday, August 17, continue on the rest of disc seven through disc ten. One artist, Country Joe McDonald, appears twice having played a solo set on day two and another set with his band on day three.
Dispersed among the musical performers are stage announcements, mostly by the festival's unofficial mc'sChip Monck and John Morris. Farmer Max Yasgur, upon whose farm the festival took place, addresses the assembled crowd on day three. Also included is the 'confrontation' between Who guitaristPete Townshend and activist Abbie Hoffman, the latter interrupting the Who's set to pontificate upon the prison sentence of White PantherJohn Sinclair. The edit for the performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" into "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix seems to duplicate that found on the original soundtrack album. Although not appearing at the festival, the presence of counterculture iconsBob Dylan and The Beatles is felt via songs covered in this box set — five artists sing Dylan songs, and three sing the Beatles.
Track listing
Disc one – Richie Havens, Sweetwater, Bert Sommer, Tim Hardin