After monsoon-like rain temporarily stopped ’s final day, Country Joe’s had primed the crowd nicely when commenced their 60-minute set at 8.15pm. Although is routinely cited as the Woodstock movie’s defining moment, at the time it was Ten Years After’s frenetic rampage through , which precipitated the London blues band’s US breakthrough.
Previously, only buyers of 2009’s 38-CD mega-box would have possessed the five tracks Ten Years After played before the balls-out closer that started life on 1968’s UK-conquering live album . Restored and remixed for vinyl (with a tie-dye pressed Indie store exclusive), it’s interesting to hear the band ignoring recently released third album , mainly with epic workouts around 1967’s debut album. Announced by singer/guitarist as “a bit of old blues to warm us up”, ’s follows the template of using its stop-start riff as an improvisatory gateway.
Over seven minutes, Lee boils up into the ‘fastest guitarist in the west’ that made the band’s name but would dog him into feeling like a one-trick rock god. Previewing upcoming fourth album , a defiantly lascivious (and somewhat unwoke) version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s endures two crowd-testing false starts before becoming another seven-minute axe-twiddling showcase. shows how times have changed, with an eight-minute drum solo before 18 minutes of ’s arrangement of Blind Willie Johnson’s displays jazz leanings before Lee ascends into fretboard-melting overdrive.
On a roll, Willie Dixon and Sonny Boy’s is stretched into another rapid soloing tour de force lasting nearly 20 minutes before ’s breakneck lift-off. This sort of seat-of-the-pants indulgence would never fit the corporate cosiness of today’s major festivals, but back then it could make a band like Ten Years After. As endless as some of the extrapolations that prompted Lee’s frustrated departure from the band six years later may seem, there will be those who will treasure such evidence of this often-overlooked British guitar hero.
Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 38 years in music industry, online for 25. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365.
Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.
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