Grace Slick explains why Joni Mitchell got Woodstock all wrong:
Jefferson Airplane were billed as the Saturday night headliners, but the festival was famously marred by major delayed due to a huge rainstorm in the middle of the day.
Santana was due to perform at 1pm on Saturday, but was too busy tripping on mescaline and wasn’t mentally there yet. So instead, they brought in someone else, shuffled him to 2pm and thus began a whole day of push-backs and hold-ups, eventually leading to bands playing throughout the night and Slick only hitting the stage as the sun was rising.
The only thing bands could do was surrender, and so that meant one thing: drugs. “Our road manager had a box with about 16 little segments in it, and he had different drugs in each of the little segments. And we took what we thought was cocaine — snorting it, not shooting it — snorting it backstage just before we went on,” Slick recalled as the band thought they were doing their typical routine.
They were mistaken, though, as they quickly realised that the white substance was the wrong one. “We took it out of the wrong box, and we took LSD. So, about 15 minutes into the set, we looked at each other and went, ‘Oh boy. Oops.’”
With way more people than planned for, the facilities weren’t up for the job either, meaning that there was just mass filth everywhere from leaking toilets and overflowing bins. A lack of clean water was the cherry on top, too.
“We are stardust, we are golden,” Mitchell sings on her theme tune for the event, claiming “Everywhere was a song and a celebration.” However, Mitchell wasn’t there.
“Joni Mitchell got all, you know, sugary about it and said we got to get ourselves back to the garden, and we’re stardust, and we’re golden and all that kind of stuff, which is a little bit over the top,” she said in 2019 when her own real memories were of dirt and drugs.
To her, Woodstock was as sleazy of a scene as any other chaotic festival, adding of Mitchell, “I’m surprised that her take on it was so sweet.”
Catch the stream at k-zap.org, on the k-zap apps or at 93.3 FM in the metro Sacramento area.
In the interest of the betterment of your overall pop music knowledge/ability to spout random trivia…here’s another installment in the always popular (with me) I Didn’t Know That Was a Cover! series. Part 2 is subtitled: I Didn’t Know That Would Become a Series! Let’s dive in:
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Our first three songs are examples of artists covering themselves; that is, revisiting songs they’d previously recorded with less well-known bands.
“Do Ya”-Electric Light Orchestra
Years Before Jeff Lynne’s “Do Ya” appeared on ELO’s 1977 A New World Record LP and peaked at #24 on the pop chart, he recorded a less polished version with The Move, a band that included English rock legend Roy Wood and another ELO member, Bev Bevan. Their version came with no strings attached–but plenty of cowbell.
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“Somebody to Love”-Jefferson Airplane
Grace Slick’s band The Great Society recorded the original version of her “Somebody to Love”, as well as “White Rabbit”. Both later appeared on Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 Surrealistic Pillow album and are probably that band’s two most important/popular recordings. This clip suggests that Airplane was much the better band.
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“Cherry Bomb”-Joan Jett & The Blackhearts
Another member of The Runaways was mentioned in the previous post on this topic. This time it’s Joan Jett, whose “Cherry Bomb” was first recorded with that band. While both versions have their fans, neither exactly blew up (blew up I say) on the pop charts.
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“Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me)”-The Doobie Brothers
The Doobies proved their versatility in 1975 by following up their first #1 single–the bluegrass-flavored “Black Water”–with an old Holland-Dozier-Holland chestnut originally recorded ten years earlier by Kim Weston.
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“They Don’t Know”-Tracey Ullman
British actress/comedienne and sometimes singer Tracey Ullman was a one-hit wonder in the U.S. although several of her singles were well-received abroad. Her schtick was to update the 60’s girl group sound, and “They Don’t Know” was an irresistible nugget of retropop. The backing vocals were supplied by the same woman who provided the song itself, Kirsty MacColl. Kirsty’s version is much the same–Tracey just upped the cute factor some.
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“Big Ten Inch Record”-Aerosmith
This song certainly clashed stylistically with the rest of the classic 1975 Toys in the Attic album, but I think that was the point. It’s a safe bet to be the only Bull Moose Jackson song in most Aerosmith fans’ collections.
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“Unchained Melody”-The Righteous Brothers
What we have here is your all-purpose guide to “Unchained Melody”, starting with the Righteous Brothers and moving backward in time. (We will ignore versions by LeAnn Rimes, Heart, The Sweet Inspirations and even Elvis Himself, all of whom recorded versions after the Righteous Brothers, none of whom should have bothered.)
The above clip is a little medley, a Bill Medley if you will, of snippets of the six versions of this song that matter. Here’s what you hear in succession:
The newly recorded 1990 version done by the Righteous Brothers in response to demand created by the song’s inclusion in the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore film Ghost. This is not, however, the version which appeared in that movie. This version charted at #19 in 1990.
The Righteous Brothers’ first hit version, which went to #4 in 1965 and climbed to #13 in 1990 after its inclusion in Ghost. Yes, incredibly they had two different recordings of their song chart at numbers 13 and 19 in the same year.
Vito & The Salutations’ fast doo wop version from 1963. Sounds like a parody of the Righteous Brothers, but it actually came two years earlier.
Roy Hamilton’s #6 hit from 1955
Al Hibbler’s #3 hit from 1955
Finally, Les Baxter’s #1 version, also from 1955 and the only time the song has gone to the top of the charts. If you count June Valli’s #29 hit of the same year, the song had four top 40 versions in 1955 alone, three of them top ten.
If you’ve always wondered why this song carries around such a strange title, it’s because Les Baxter’s original version was from the movie Unchained (which starred football star Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch).
p.s. Why don’t football players have nicknames like “Crazylegs” anymore?
Every Moment Has A Song 