THE WOODSTOCK JAZZ BAND THAT WASN'T: THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

Looking yet again at Woodstock for its 50^th anniversary, I was struck by the full lineup of musicians who played – those who missed the cut for the movie have assumed a sort of ghost form in the public memory. What jumped out at me was that you could have formed a nice ECM-style trio there.

Tim Hardin lived in Woodstock, and because he was there the organisers apparently wanted him to open when scheduling acts were showing up late because of the traffic jams. But Hardin had two longer journeys to make that day: first he was a junkie and second he suffered from stage fright. It is not inconceivable those two conditions were related.

He played with a band the first day that included Ralph Towner on guitar and piano and Glen Moore on bass. A year later, those two would found Oregon, which preceded the jazz-rock fusion with a kind of acoustic, eastern-influenced jazz that prefigured both ECM and, at the other end of a similar spectrum, the new age mood music of George Winston. Towner’s Solstice band included Eberhard Weber and Jan Garbarek and was a regular on my turntable as I wrote the poems of my master’s thesis.

Hardin’s use of jazz musicians wasn’t unusual. His album Tim Hardin 3, the year before, had included Mike Manieri on vibes, Warren Bernhardt on piano and Eddie Gomez on bass (as well as warning, in the liner notes, about the bells drummer Donald McDonald was wearing being audible! But I remember Bernhardt explaining once that because of nerves and being strung out, Hardin would rarely play as rehearsed, missing beats, adding things, and there was often as sense of their being out of time with him. This is also how his set at Woodstock was described, and it’s a shame, because the band also included Richard Bock on cello: Hardin was way ahead of his time in bring a wider palette of sounds to what had been 'folk' music: another  junkie Tim, Tim Buckley, was doing something similar too.

Arlo Guthrie played the next day and his drummer was the late Paul Motian, another of the mainstays of ECM but someone who had already played with Bill Evans, Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett before a brief stint with Arlo that included the festival. Interestingly, he would go on to play mainly with guitarists in small group situations, including an amazing trio with Bill Frisell and saxophonist Joe Lovano, and wonderful stuff with bassist Charlie Haden.

Towner, Moore and Motian would have been a fantastic trio. I’m not sure if there would have been a smooth way to fit David Sanborn into that group, but of course he would go on to a huge career in jazz fusion. At Woodstock he was still playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s horn section, with Gene Dinwiddie and drummer Philip Wilson. I’d maybe float them bassist Jim Fielder, one of the overlooked great rock bassists, and trumpeter Lew Soloff from Blood Sweat and Tears and make them some sort of fusion group. 

It's not surprising that google reveals little in the way of pictures of back-up bands from Woodstock. It would have been nice to illustrate this exercise in building fantasy band lineups from 50 years ago...

SUNDAY AFTERNOON WITH BOB DYLAN AND MIKE BLOOMFIELD

The Sunday Times Magazine ran a big Bob Dylan cover story interview last week. It was actually a Rolling Stone interview, as you'd discover if you read the small print, and although RS is sold in the UK, I doubt it reaches many people here (given its extremely odd mix of US mainstream commercial pop and TV with rather good US political coverage that's not surprising). The interview was conducted by the historian David Brinkley--something of an odd choice, but one that indicates in its own way just how mainstream Dylan himself has become.

Yet even as he conducts his 'perpetual tour', Dylan's music works against his mainstream status. It's as if after hearing Ricky Nelson accuse him of being 'Mr Hughes wearing Dylan's shoes' he took the moral of Ricky's song to heart and figured you could please everyone by simply pleasing yourself. It seems as if there is no attitude he can strike, no experiment in music so outre, that he could alienate his core audience. This challenging nature is the mark of an artist who remains active, growing: a serious artist indeed.

Anyone who's read Chronicles would be acutely conscious of just how self-aware an artist Dylan is--and even in that book he's not giving the fact away. His RS interview is the same: Brinkley's questions are academically sound, and Dylan runs circles round the answers, as he's been doing ever since those interviews we can see in the documentary Don't Look Back.

But one thing bothered me. Dylan is talking about his band, how they play differently from anyone else, and then he's quoted as follows: 'The guy I always miss, and I think he'd still be around if he'd stayed with me, actually, was Mike Broomfield,' Dylan says of his collaborator on Highway 61 Revisited.

BROOMfield? OK, Douglas Brinkley could easily mis-transcribe the interview, but if he knows Mike Bloomfield well enough to know he played on Highway 61, then he would have to know his real name. I couldn't check the original RS article, as the issue's off the stands and the interview's not online, but it's possible an eager Sunday Times sub figured Mike was Nick Broomfield's older brother or something, a few years ahead of him at Oxford, before he went on tour with Dylan. (postscript: RS did have Bloomfield's name correct, see the comment below by Peg, so it does appear to be a sub at the Sunday Times correcting Bloomfield's American misspelling of his own name!).

Mike Bloomfield was my favourite guitarist when I was growing up in the 60s: not Hendrix, not Clapton, not BB King, not anyone else. He came up with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, played with Dylan at Newport and on record, and then, not staying with Bob, moved on to found The Electric Flag, whose first album holds up remarkably well today, and then play half of Super Session with Al Kooper, which also holds up well. He had all sorts of problems, which basically coalesced into drugs, and that's what killed him at a cruelly young age.

I'm not sure why I was so bothered. The error may have been just a simple literal. I think it was the idea that Bloomfield is already half-forgotten, and while Dylan's music will live on, at least as long as any pop music we've seen live on already, his contribution will be noted only on the tiny cover notes of CDs that aren't downloaded, and on the bootleg versions of Dylan songs. I was thinking about it, so I went back and put the Flag on, then Super Session (that's Al and Mike pictured right with Norman Rockwell, who painted their portraits for the cover of their live double album, and called them 'nice boys'), then I opened the door to the garden, and sat in the sunshine willing myself back to 1968 and the crazy non-Norman Rockwell world that beckoned ahead. The music didn't quite manage to remove me in time and space, but it sure sounded good.