Joan Baez Isle Of Wight 1970
T he last days of August on the Island of Wight, the atmospheric condition off-white, the island relishing the height of summer holiday flavour. If there was trepidation among the local community regarding the imminent music festival – the island'south third – information technology was hoped it might be quelled by a site relocation to Afton Downwards, a stretch of farmland near Freshwater Bay where the hippies and freaks could revel far from the holidaymakers, retirees and yachters.
It was a ticketed event, promising Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Free, the Who, Sly and the Family Stone and the Doors, and, going on the previous year's success, 250,000 attendees were expected. Quickly, withal, more than 600,000 people flocked to the festival ground, knocking down security fences, setting up their blue and orangish tents on a hill overlooking the site, and edifice an encampment out of hay bales in an expanse they named Desolation Row.
The mood was different this year: the crowd was disgruntled by the price of tickets (the equivalent of almost £40 today), the increased security measures, and the rumoured steep fees of the performers, all of which seemed at odds with the era's anti-capitalist movement. Fights broke out, objects were thrown, and a lot of bad acid was taken. In desperation, the organisers threw up their hands and declared it a complimentary festival.
Information technology did not assistance that several of the performers rolled up to Afton Down in especially ostentatious modes of travel: Rolls-Royces and sports cars that flaunted their new-constitute wealth. Donovan arrived in an antiquarian stagecoach that would also serve as Joni Mitchell's dressing room.
Mitchell had been scheduled to perform in the evening, but it was mid-afternoon when she walked on to the stage in a long yellow dress and squinted at the crowd. "It looks similar they're making Ben Hur or something," she said, and played The Gallery. The crowd jeered. Some years later, asked why she had agreed to move her set time to that less alluring hour, Mitchell seemed resigned to her fate: "I have a feminine cooperative streak," she said. "So I said yeah. And they fed me to the brute."
Then in the ascent of her career, she moved betwixt acoustic guitar and piano to draw on fabric from Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, and the yet-to-be-released Blue. Merely the atmosphere was curdling, and Mitchell seemed ill at ease. She began the vocal Chelsea Morning, and then chop-chop muttered that she did not "feel like playing that one" and began afresh. She was, as the Guardian review at the time noted, "harassed by a reckless crowd", facing heckles, interruption, shouts; a flailing homo on LSD, another playing bongos. A physician was summoned for someone. Even her efforts to enjoin the audience in singing the chorus to her hit Woodstock seemed to fall flat.
When the vocal finished, a man named Yogi Joe, who had been sitting near Mitchell'southward pianoforte (and had taught the singer in her first yoga course at the caves of Matala on Crete) commandeered the microphone and began a speech about the community camped upwardly on Desolation Row before being hauled away. "Permit him speak!" called the crowd. "Permit him speak!"
Mitchell's 12-song set up would bear witness a pivotal moment in the festival. Several times she beseeched the crowd to quieten downwards, gently at first, imploringly: "It really puts me uptight and I forget the words and I become nervous," she told them three songs in. "It's really a elevate, so I don't know what to say. Then but requite me a little help, will you?" Later she grew steely. "Give us some respect," she said manifestly.
She gathered herself for renditions of My Quondam Man and Willy, and then the five-song run that followed – moving through A Case of Yous, California, Hunter, Big Yellow Taxi and Both Sides Now – proved so electrifying, then transformative, that the crowd acquiesced. This is near music, this stretch of her fix seemed to say, not the camp on the hill, or the curry powder sold equally marijuana, or the kaftans and capes or even the reviled capitalism. Merely music.
This would be the last event of its kind on the Isle of Wight for 32 years. But it marked, too, a shift in the spirit of festivals. They would crave more system, more forethought, more security, and there would develop, too, more of a split up betwixt audience and performers.
That August in Afton Down, that new sense of partition seemed clear. Information technology was at that place in the have-tickets and have-non, in the sight of Yogi Joe, silenced and dragged off stage, in the stagecoaches and drug busts and the fights in the crowd. "At that place's a dankness and gloom about this festival," i attendee told the New York Times equally he waited for the ferry at Yarmouth. "Don't tell me at that place was any kindness or sharing or love," added another. "It was cold, man, cold, and I didn't similar it one bit."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/07/joni-mitchell-isle-of-wight-1970-iconic-festival-sets?CMP=share_btn_fb
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