As a 17-band menu of bands
gathered for the three-day Holland Pop Festival in June 1970 outside of
Rotterdam, Bob Hite of Canned Heat summed things up perfectly: “I feel less
uptight here than I ever have anywhere.”
It was that kind of show, as
an overstuffed crowd of some 100,000 in Kralingse Forest took in something that
came to be known as the Dutch Woodstock — mirroring as it did the pot-smoking,
free-loving laissez faire, the wildly varied musical delights and even the
torrential downpours of that memorable 1969 music festival.
The Holland Pop Festival
(featured in a new Gonzo Multimedia DVD/2CD package appropriately dubbed The
Dutch Woodstock) even boasted a few sturdy veterans from its nick-namesake —
including Santana, who opens the film with a volcanic eruption called “Gumbo,”
then returns for a romp through Gabor Szabo’s “Gypsy Queen” before concluding
with this convulsion of rhythms on “Jingo.”
Fellow Woodstock alums like
Country Joe and Jefferson Airplane — the latter of whom’s line “acid, incense
and balloons” from “Saturday Afternoon” couldn’t have been more appropriate —
make signature appearances. In fact, Grace Slick’s bad-trip howls on “White
Rabbit,” captured at the peak of her vocal powers despite being very pregnant,
are simply shiver-inducing. Later, Al Stewart, years before he became a shooting
star courtesy of “Year of the Cat,” offers a delicately constructed solo tune
called “Zero She Flies” before an indistinguishable tangle of humanity.
Into this lysergic fever dream
steps the Night Tripper, as Dr. John brilliantly feints and grooves through
“Mardi Gras Day.” Half-dressed hippies take long bong drags, amid the growing
mountain of concertgoers’ refuse, while T-Rex offers “By the Light of the
Magical Moon.” Roger McGuinn’s ringing Rickenbacker then cuts through this haze
like a hot knife, as the Byrds wander into a country-rocker about an old hound
called “Old Blue.”
Certainly, the event’s
highlight remains the performance by Pink Floyd — whose “Set the Controls for
the Heart of the Sun” trades in its iconic space-journey atmospherics for a
brawny psychedelia. They also add an appropriately apocalyptic take on “A
Saucerful of Secrets.” Still, for all of that high-flying drug-fueled weirdness
— even up to and including Dr. John’s darkly intriguing hoodoo — none of it can
touch the altitude quickly achieved by Elton Dean’s free-form sax-freakout on
Soft Machine’s “Esther’s Nose Job.”
Pity the film crew didn’t
swing around more often to catch the crowd’s reaction. No doubt it would have
been the very definition of “like — wow, man.”
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