3 DAZE OF PEACE & MUSIC; MANY RECORDED VARIATIONS THERE OF

Take your pick, man

On www.boomermediareview.com , we featured the many different Woodstock reissues and first-time offerings.

For the non-hardcore Woodstockonians-and even for some of them-the various incarnations of the music from the storied festival can be rather confusing.

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I hope I don't make it more so.

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First this year we had a newly remastered Woodstock 1&2, identical to their 1970 album releases.
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The 21st century remastering certainly made them sound better than ever before. And as produced and edited by Eric Blackstead, are the versions that most people know, and love.

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Next came 5 versions of "The Woodstock Experience," featuring the full sets-never before released-of Santana. Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Jefferson Airplane, and Sly and the Family Stone.

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These are mostly warts and all mixes, although some editing has been done as well a good remastering.

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Then, the granddaddy came on August 11, 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm, a 6 CD extravaganza featuring at least one track from all but 3 of the 30 odd performers.

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Producer Andy Zax took a quite different approach to previous Woodstock mixing, dropping the studio spit and polish, whilst restoring the rawness and truth to the performances. (Listen closely to how many of the vocals lack any kind of limiting.)
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And going back to 1994, we have the 25th anny Woodstock 4CD box, which was sort of a stiff,

even if it did have previously unreleased performances from the Band, CCR, and Mountain, most

Woodstock music fans did not like the mixes which was rather muddy, and contained unedited versions of songs-eg: Soul Sacrifice and I'm Goin' Home-that suffered some of their original sloppiness.

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So, what is the best way to listen to Woodstock?

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Well, although the original Woodstock 1&2 have somewhat flat sounding mixes, Eric Blackstead did do a yeoman job at editing together the raw tapes into multi-golden albums.

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The Woodstock Experience series is also a good bet as hearing the full sets of these to say the least iconic performers seem to give new life to their performances, and the mixes are quite good.

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Finally, if one wants to get as close as possible to actually being there, 40 Years On, with it's honestly flawed version of the music at Woodstock-and as a bonus, this limited edition is nearing a sell-out-may be the best one to partake of.

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Yes, far out, man.