It’s six o’clock Monday morning. The sun is up and the kids are clearing out, going back to their jobs, schools, worried parents. Some are just wiped out from a long weekend of too much music, rain, and dope, and too little food.
Regardless, the crowd is clearing out, which is a goddamned shame because the Paul Butterfield Blues Band is about to kick some ass.
We’ve all seen Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, the Academy Award-winning 1970 documentary about the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. It’s a great film, and it made legends of both the performers that it featured and the festival itself. Don’t believe the film had that much power to shape pop culture history? Tell me all about Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
But even at a hefty three hours there’s no way that the film could capture the entire three days of peace and music. Also, Warner Brothers owned the rights, so non-Warner acts were not favored. Here are the performers whose role at Woodstock is all but forgotten because they didn’t make the final cut:
