Their albums sold in the millions, and one of their biggest was 4, released in 1981. The band led by journeyman guitarist Mick Jones and leather-lunged singer Lou Gramm scored hit after hit that sounded great on the radio. So here we have “I’m Going Home” in its incarnation as a 1969 single, the Undead track whittled down to about three and a half minutes.įor a long stretch in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, nobody came close to Foreigner for sheer hit-making power. That song originally appeared on the band’s Undead live album from 1968, but after Woodstock the band’s label decided to issue an edit of the song on single. Let’s get crazy right out of the chute … Ten Years After was a British blues/rock/psychedelic band from the late 1960s, most famous of course for their 11-minute boogie “I’m Going Home” at Woodstock. Remember when you had a record player that could stack about five or six 45 rpm singles on a spindle, and they dropped onto the turntable one at a time? I gotta say, sometimes I feel that modern technology has taken some of the romance out of life. I’m a sucker for these late ’60s-early ’70s things with guitar, organ fills and harmonica – and it’s a lot more tasteful than, say, Humble Pie of the same era. It’s a showcase for Alvin Lee’s brilliant guitar work, and he even blows some mean harmonica on this one. “One Of These Days,” which opens the LP, is a slow builder that is more typical of Ten Years After’s blues rock style. Pleasantly surprised, though, I learned it was an Alvin Lee composition like the rest of the album’s 10 tunes – except for the closing “Uncle Jam” which is credited to the entire band. I remember the first time I heard it on the radio, I thought it was Traffic. The payoff was, of course, “I’d Love To Change The World,” which was actually a hit for TYA. A Space In Time reflects that vision – it’s a combination of the usual blues-rock workouts that Ten Years After was known for (“I’m Going Home” from Woodstock, for example) and acoustic, melodic songs side by side. There we posed the theory that by the turn of the decade Alvin Lee and company were looking ahead to take the music forward, along with similarly minded visionaries like Led Zeppelin, Humble Pie and the Rolling Stones. We’ve covered this band once before, when we reviewed Cricklewood Green from 1970. Anyway, we dip back into our own personal collection of “hippie” records and pull out this masterpiece, A Space In Time, the 1971 LP from Ten Years After. Spent a few days without a working computer … it was a virus and thankfully not one of those fearful tornadoes. YouTube: Excerpts from “Oh! Woodstock!” a 1970 documentary on NBC-TV MP3: “Volunteers/With A Little Help From My Friends” by the Jefferson Starship and others Stephen/Turn On Your Lovelight” by the Jefferson Starship (with Cathy Richardson, Linda Imperial and Tom Constanten) MP3: “Summertime” by Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Sophia Ramos) MP3: “50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain” by Ten Years After MP3: “Fish Cheer/Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag” by Country Joe McDonald MP3: “Going Up The Country” by Canned Heat Let’s play some tracks they gave us from the 40th anniversary of Woodstock at Bethel Woods, NY, in 2009: Like the green grass outside Bethel, New York, you just gotta go looking for it. For every one of those clowns there will be a Jakob Dylan, a Justin Townes Earle, a Mumford and Sons and maybe even an older artist finally getting deserved exposure, like Alejandro Escovedo. But it’s a nice pilgrimage for people who profess to love the music – it’s a reminder that no matter how many Sugarlands or Jason Aldeans or Lady Gagas parade before us, there will always be somebody plucking a guitar and writing a song. Not too many people were there on the day we went, and of course it was nowhere near as exciting as the visit we made in 2009. We also strolled through the lush grass where a little more than four decades ago about half a million kids grooved to the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and many more. We drove up there from New York City on a hot July Monday, and we walked through the nice museum and the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts amphitheater. “Sir, you can park up in the parking lot.” He was one of the volunteers who hang around the green, grassy fields where they held the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, about 42 years ago. And I asked him, “Where are you going?” And this he told me: I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road. Yeah, it was 42 years ago this weekend, more or less.
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