Isle of Wight 1970 release (October 2009) - all the details

[mutti]

My CD/DVD just arrived in the mail! I am so excited...I just ordered it from skyroo a few days ago.
In 1972 I lived in Amsterdam a year in the Nieumarkt (if anyone knows the area) and met someone who had been at this concert in 1970
and now I get to see it live...
I would rather be in Florida tonight but this is 2nd best...
Mutti

[ladydi]

Mutti...wonderful! I've ordered mine from Amazon and it should arrive right after I return from the New York concert! Perfect timing!

Diana

[sirius]

"While a lot of fuss has been made about Cohen's current tour and what an amazing performer he is today, the slick and sophisticated performance captured on the Leonard Cohen Live In London DVD pales in comparison to the raw passion and intensity revealed on both the CD and DVD parts of Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970. This is a raw and intense vision of a poet at work, wooing his audience with words, music, passion, and intellect. Like those in attendance that night you're pulled into Cohen's vision of the world from his first word and only as the music fades away over the credits of the DVD or the last track on the CD do you find yourself resurfacing. This is an opportunity to experience Leonard Cohen in a way that you've never done so before and its not to be missed. While the DVD doesn't include Cohen's entire set from that night—in fact it doesn't even present the songs in their right order—it's still one of the best concert recordings I've seen for how it captures the spirit and intensity of a Cohen performance."

Music DVD/CD Review: Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohen Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970



http://blogcritics.org/music/article/mu ... rd/page-3/

Author: Richard Marcus — Published: Oct 17, 2009


When 600,000 people showed up for the third annual Isle of Wight music festival in 1970, things quickly got out of hand. The tiny island off the east coast of Great Britain in the English Channel was overwhelmed by this invading army. Compounding matters were the huge number of people who showed up at the concert without tickets in the hopes of a repeat of what happened at Woodstock the year prior. Organizers there had thrown open the gates and declared it a free concert when countless numbers showed up without tickets, ensuring that trouble was kept to a minimum.

Unfortunately those behind the Isle of Wight festival were less understanding and the event disintegrated into an ongoing battle between the people outside the fence squatting on a hill they called Desolation Row after the Dylan song of the same name, and those running the show. Acts who they had supposedly come to see were booed off the stage; Kris Kristofferson can be heard saying, "They look like they're going to shoot us."

It was into this seemingly unsalvageable mess—after five days of insanity—that Leonard Cohen made his way onto stage. During the set that preceded him by Jimi Hendrix, someone had set the stage on fire (not Hendrix), and although the fire didn't faze Cohen, the fact that the keyboards had been destroyed did. He refused to go on stage unless another piano could be found so his producer and band leader Bob Johnston could accompany him and the rest of the band.

In the end, it wasn't until something like two in the morning when he finally headed to the stage, and in spite of the crowd's ire and impatience he didn't rush. Watching him stare out into the darkness, unshaven, and baggy eyed from lack of sleep at the beginning of Murray Lerner's film of the event—part of the two disc DVD/CD package Leonard Cohen Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 being released on October 20th/09 by Legacy Recordings and Columbia Records—you feel a moment of fear that the crowd will tear him to pieces. Then he launches into "Bird On The Wire" and you can almost hear them settling into the palm of his hand.

The DVD is an amazing record of the power of Leonard Cohen as a performer. The cameras never leave the stage, except for a couple of moments when they shoot the darkness to show people lighting matches at Cohen's request—"Can everyone light a match so I can see where your are?"—and that makes you feel as if Cohen and his band are a pocket of light and power within a sea of darkness. If you didn't know about the events leading up to his performance you wouldn't be able to guess that any of it had occurred as you can barely even tell that the crowd is out there. It's only after each song is played and the cheering begins that we are even aware of them. Even when Cohen is simply speaking there's not a sound to be heard, as if no one dares to interrupt him.


Interspersed throughout the original film are present-day interviews with Kristofferson, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Johnston, offering their perspective on both the festival and Cohen. Often times I find interjections like that to be annoying and tend to distract from the original film, but on this occasion the producers have done a very clean job of interjecting the current material into the original footage. They serve as interesting footnotes to what is happening on stage, and help us develop a clearer picture of what we're seeing on the screen.

Musically Cohen is at the peak of his prowess. He was thirty-five years old and his record, Songs From A Room, had just hit number two on the British pop charts. The concert at Isle of Wight was just one stop on his very successful European tour that year and he was accompanied by a band that included Charlie Daniels on fiddle and bass. In spite of the fact that they were all obviously feeling the strain of the weekend's events and the lateness of the hour, the band never once flagged and played beautifully. There's a great moment during "Tonight Will Be Fine" when Charlie Daniels gets up from his chair and joins Cohen center stage for a fiddle solo. The juxtaposition of the two men is extraordinary and has to be seen to be believed, as Daniels looks like a hulking bear next to Cohen and far too big to be playing anything so small as a violin. Yet there they are sharing a microphone, playing and singing their hearts out respectively.

While the DVD doesn't include Cohen's entire set from that night—in fact it doesn't even present the songs in their right order—it's still one of the best concert recordings I've seen for how it captures the spirit and intensity of a Cohen performance.

The CD half of this two-disc set contains the complete concert performed in the exact sequence as Cohen played that night in August of 1970. Here again the producers have done a great job in capturing the energy of the live performance by not attempting to make the sound quality perfect. By leaving in a great many of the glitches that used to be standard in the days of analog recording of live concerts, they have made it possible for the listener to gain a more accurate experience of what it must have been like to be there.

While a lot of fuss has been made about Cohen's current tour and what an amazing performer he is today, the slick and sophisticated performance captured on the Leonard Cohen Live In London DVD pales in comparison to the raw passion and intensity revealed on both the CD and DVD parts of Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970. This is a raw and intense vision of a poet at work, wooing his audience with words, music, passion, and intellect. Like those in attendance that night you're pulled into Cohen's vision of the world from his first word and only as the music fades away over the credits of the DVD or the last track on the CD do you find yourself resurfacing. This is an opportunity to experience Leonard Cohen in a way that you've never done so before and its not to be missed.

[brightnow]

My copy from Amazon is "In transit" with UPS, for a scheduled delivery on the 20th.... can't wait.

[maltmom]

My copy arrived today; just fabulously great. Although I have all of Leonard's cd's this is a new perspective. Love the DVD and haven't listened to some of the songs in quite awhile. Hope he performs lots of old stuff this Thursday and Friday.
Lorraine

[bridger15]

...Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970. This is a raw and intense vision of a poet at work, wooing his audience with words, music, passion, and intellect. Like those in attendance that night you're pulled into Cohen's vision of the world from his first word and only as the music fades away over the credits of the DVD or the last track on the CD do you find yourself resurfacing.

Thanks for posting the review, Sirius. Wow. These are powerful words! I can hardly wait to see it on the movie theatre big screen on Monday night. And then again when my order arrives.

[elcord]

Oh come on, this is too, too hard to take. The CD/DVD is not available yet in Australia - I've been to every store in the last few days in the hope of one of them letting it slip through. This is the normal nonsense we have to suffer for being at what one of our former Prime Minsters described as living in the #@%s end of the world. Sure it will be be here soon enough, but my ire is hightened by the copyright nonsense on the promotional videos available on the net and linked too from these page. These are not available to to antipodeans to view, even from YouTube, because of, believe it or not, copyright restrictions - what abject absurdity. It is a promotional video to encourage you to buy the CD/DVD - not necessary in this case certainly - but you can't view it because of copyright! This is basically the ridiculous parallel import laws we have in Australia that for the most part are irrelevant - I buy mostly from overseas for books and CDs - and simply irritating. In another week's time when I can finally see the DVD and hear he CD all we be forgiven and forgotten, except of course the disappointment of not *seeing* a performance of You Know Who I Am.

[sirius]

UNCUT REVIEW: LEONARD COHEN - LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970
by NEIL SPENCER

(Columbia Legacy)

*****
5 Stars

His legendary performance, delivered in full on audio, and in part on DVD

http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/leonard_co ... iews/13710

It was gone two in the morning by the time he finally got on stage after being woken from a nap in his trailer. Out front the mood among the throng – an astonishing 600,000 strong – was a mixture of blissed-out and fired-up after five days of music, ragged sleep and running battles between the organisers and the ‘free festival radicals’ occupying ‘Desolation Row’, the hill overlooking the site. Backstage there were jitters – already that night there had been an onstage fire, a wilful act of arson, during Jimi Hendrix’s slot.

Unfazed, Leonard Cohen wandered onstage cool as an English summer. Shaggy, stubbled, tanned, and sporting a tightly belted safari suit (possibly the only time said garment has seemed dashing), he looked more film star than rock icon. At almost 36, he was, Miles Davis aside, the oldest act on a sprawling, stellar bill.

Cohen’s subsequent performance was remarkable for its poise, its passion and the way it defused the tension crackling in the air. Before he had even played a note Cohen had seized his moment by reminiscing about his childhood visits to the circus and getting the audience to hold up a lighted match (a gesture yet to descend into cliché) and by singing, ad lib, “It’s good to be here alone in front of 600,000 people”.

When Cohen finally swoops into a solemn “Bird On A Wire”, the crowd’s collective exhalation is almost tangible. Thereafter, Cohen never lets his grip slacken over 80 minutes, towing his audience through songs that were already causes célèbres – “So Long Marianne”, “Suzanne”, “Lady Midnight” – and startling them withintroductions that are sometimes poems, sometimes narratives. “I wrote this in a peeling room in the Chelsea hotel… I was coming off amphetamine and pursuing a blonde lady whom I met in a Nazi poster,” is his lead-in to “One Of Us Can’t Be Wrong”.

The confidential introductions and Cohen’s tousled appearance lend proceedings a drowsy intimacy, though whether Len’s half-closed eyes and sleepy manner are due to his recent nap or the ingestion of some festive substance is unclear. In this early part of his career, long before the more detached and oblique commentator of the 1980s emerged, the confessional was, in any case, Cohen’s default position, the sense of his nakedness enhanced by minimal backings.

Here he’s accompanied by a classy quartet of US session players (including producer Bob Johnston) whose acoustic guitars strum and ripple gently behind him while Johnston sounds hymnal organ parts and a trio of female singers provide harmony and gospel choruses. Incongruously, Cohen dubbed the group ‘The Army’.

The commanding presence, though, remains Cohen’s voice, never a thing of supple beauty for sure, and prone to wander into the wrong key, but by turns sensual and fervid and always perfectly paced for lyrics that chime with poetic grace. The versions here of “The Stranger”, “The Partisan”, and “You Know Who I Am”, to mention just three, have a steely exuberance absent from the more mannered takes on his first two albums. Whether singing, reciting or talking, Cohen never misses a phonetic beat. At times even the band, who had just accompanied him on a European tour, seem as mesmerised by his spoken forays as the crowd.

There’s a clever underlying structure to the set, too, that alternates a jolt or two of slow, lingering romance with more uptempo offerings. Hence, after “…Marianne” comes a bounding “Lady Midnight”, while “The Stranger” is followed by a countrified take on “Tonight Will Be Fine” featuring banjo and fiddle, the latter by Charlie Daniels. In a wry preface to “Tonight”, Cohen sings of his “sad and famous songs” alongside a cheery dedication to “the poison snakes on Desolation Hill”. Ouch!

“That’s No Way To Say Goodbye”, forlorn as ever, is pursued by a riotous version of “Diamonds In The Mine”, one of three tracks here that would ultimately see release on 1971’s Songs of Love And Hate, said album also including the Isle of Wight performance of “Sing Another Song Boys”. This would have been the crowd’s first encounter with both songs, as with “Famous Blue Raincoat”, rendered here with gruff, arresting determination. After that, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” seems almost an afterthought to a set that, across a 40-year chasm, still astonishes.

NEIL SPENCER

[bridger15]

http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment ... 1-sun.html
Here is a brief description with a humorous twist from the Toronto Sun.

Leonard Cohen
Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
Folk-Poetry
****
You've seen Cohen's comeback; now see him in his prime on this archival treasure. In front of filmmaker Murray Lerner's cameras, the shaggy field commander -- picture Adam Sandler with Jimmy Page's hair -- leads his acoustic Army through a late-night set of intensely hushed folk-poetry that captivates an unruly mob of 600,000. Between the DVD and CD, you get the whole gig.

[sturgess66]

Review from TheRippleEffect The best music you’re not listening to™ blog -

http://ripplemusic.blogspot.com/2009/10 ... -isle.html

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Ripple News - Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight CD/DVD is released

LC-IsleOfWight.jpg (16.14 KiB) Viewed 4209 times

As legend has it, nearly 40 years ago on August 31, 1970, a 35-year-old Leonard Cohen was awakened at 2 a.m. from a nap in his trailer and brought onstage to perform with his band at the third annual Isle Of Wight music festival. The audience of 600,000 was in a fiery and frenzied mood, after turning the festival into a political arena, trampling the fences, setting fire to structures and equipment - and stoked by the most incendiary performance of Jimi Hendrix's career.

How would you like to be the act that had to follow that?

But Cohen was up to the task. Onlookers and (fellow festival headliners) Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins and others stood sidestage in awe as the Canadian folksinger-songwriter-poet-novelist quietly tamed the crowd. His understated, near monotonous baritone struck deep into the crowd, striking a collective nerve deep within their chests.

The CD captures Cohen's complete performance, and all the tracks are previously unreleased (sans bits of "Suzanne" which were featured in the documentary Message to Love). Included are live, definitive versions of classic songs from the first two Leonard Cohen LPs: "So Long, Marianne," "The Stranger Song," "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye," "Suzanne," "Bird On The Wire," "You Know Who I Am," and "The Partisan" as well as spoken word and poetry.

Just listen to the plaintive honesty in Cohen's rendition of "Hey That's no Way to Say Goodbye," or the tender fragility of "Suzanne, " and it becomes immediately apparent why Cohen was already a budding legend.

This CD/DVD package also contains the new, beautiful film documentary by Lerner featuring interviews with fellow festival performers, and vividly captures Cohen's performance.

Also available as a double vinyl LP

Buy here: Live At The Isle of Wight (CD/DVD)
Posted by The RIpple Effect at 12:59 AM
Labels: classic rock, folk rock, leonard cohen, live at the isle of wight, Live Cd, music download, new cd new music, podcast

[Afton]

Author: Richard Marcus — Published: Oct 17, 2009

When 600,000 people showed up for the third annual Isle of Wight music festival in 1970, things quickly got out of hand. The tiny island off the east coast of Great Britain in the English Channel was overwhelmed by this invading army. Compounding matters were the huge number of people who showed up at the concert without tickets in the hopes of a repeat of what happened at Woodstock the year prior. Organizers there had thrown open the gates and declared it a free concert when countless numbers showed up without tickets, ensuring that trouble was kept to a minimum.

Unfortunately those behind the Isle of Wight festival were less understanding and the event disintegrated into an ongoing battle between the people outside the fence squatting on a hill they called Desolation Row after the Dylan song of the same name, and those running the show. Acts who they had supposedly come to see were booed off the stage; Kris Kristofferson can be heard saying, "They look like they're going to shoot us."

It was into this seemingly unsalvageable mess [...]

Obviously this is a journalist who's been viewing "Message to Love" and could only speak from that !? Why did Murray Lerner had to see this in a such negative way. Myself, I had to view the I.o.W DVD to find out it has been troubles.

[mutti]

Just drove up to Canada this morning and spend the whole 3 hours listening twice..its is absolutely great! Amazing to listen to Leonard in 1970 and then listen to him now...I love both..it seemed new and intimate at the same time..
I am so happy with it..can hardly wait to watch the DVD...
Its well worth buying..
Mutti

[sturgess66]

Anyone in Shreveport, LA?

From Twitter:

rfcmovies Tonight at 7:45 PM, we're screening Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight, 1970 in HD with Happy Hour drink prices, give-aways and more! about 1 hour ago from web

RFC is the Robinson Film Center -
http://www.robinsonfilmcenter.org/

Or Jacksonville, FL?

Special Pre-Release sneak preview of "Leonard Cohen Live at Isle of Wight 1970". Tonight at 8:00 and encore... http://bit.ly/1uecX916 minutes ago from Facebook

5 Points Theatre Special Pre-Release sneak preview of "Leonard Cohen Live at Isle of Wight 1970". Tonight at 8:00 and encore tomorrow at 9:00. 2 shows only. Raffle prize package including: "Book of Longing" by Leonard Cohen and "Leonard Cohen Live in London" DVD RAFFLE IS TONIGHT ONLY.

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?s ... 788?ref=nf

[sirius]

Memories, Dreams and Reflections - Isle Wight 1970 - DVD/CD 2009.

Me and... Leonard Cohen at Isle of Wight 1970 and 2009

By Peter Solomon 1970 and 2009
(Sirius)

I was just two months shy of my seventeenth birthday at 4 am on August 31 1970 and I knew all the words, I was maybe 50 to 75 yards from the stage just outside the overrun VIP and Press enclosure and Leonard Cohen was about to appear on stage at the Isle of Wight Festival.

My older brother Chris was to blame for me being there, for he introduced me to Leonard Cohen, and I had become smitten, I had caught the Leonard Cohen bug big time, which I would be unable to shake off for the rest of my life.

I knew all the songs and all about Marianne, Suzanne and Nancy. And I knew Tonight Will Be Fine, for I had waited 5 days and nights with hardly any sleep, after hitch hiking 250 miles with a friend from Manchester in the north of England to be there. I had just slept through most of Jimi Hendrix’s set, though disappointed to have missed him, that was unimportant as I had come to see Leonard Cohen, and was slowing moving forward to get as close as possible to the stage.

Looking back now after nearly 40 years it seems like a dream and I have woken up and am watching the DVD of my Dream, compulsively, 3 consecutive times so far and also listened to the whole CD. It’s as if time had become dislocated and the warp and woof of reality expanded to include a 40 year Present Moment.

As I watch I am really identifying very intensely with almost spiritual longing with that young man at the beginning of the DVD who was about my age, it was like coming to Bethlehem to see baby Jesus he says, except Leonard Cohen is no 'baby Jesus', and it also felt as much like Babylon as Bethlehem, with Fires, Chaos and Free Love all on display. But it was still like a holy pilgrimage for me.

I wanted so much to connect the 2 time-streams, as I watched Leonard on the DVD, the present with the past, to be there again, with my 17 year old self who was waving matches in the night, through the cold mists of time, trying to signal his presence to his future self. The strangeness of being a mere part, a cell in the huge Beast of Babylon that was the crowd, a Body of 600,000 people. You Know Who I Am, You’ve Stared at the Sun, sang the poet and prophet in the middle of the night and we stared at the stage where there was a human star burning with such bright intensity, as we stood in awe in the vast dark, small points of light, our matches in our hands.

The 1970 Leonard Cohen never looked so prickly and real, so unshaven, so raw and human yet so sensitive and spiritual, so powerful and yet so frail. So spaced out yet so centred in the moment. Speaking and singing from the heart with words and songs that communicate with the souls of men. He looked like some suffering Christ like figure that came to tell the world the truth but had just been woken up and did not really want to bother.

This was the biggest rock festival in the history of the world and there has not been anything like it since. I was there to see Leonard Cohen in 1970 at the Isle of Wight and feel after viewing the DVD in 2009 that events like these go beyond their stated purpose and moment, reverberate through time and become cracks in the fabric of the world and as Leonard would say, ‘that's how the light get’s in’, we enter a Communion with the Higher Powers. “We pray for the angels and then the angels pray for us” to misquote LC. The negative forces on Devastation Hill become insignificant, they had played their part to pump up the intensity and now are just another part of the story, another part of the myth... of how the artist calms the savage beast and opens a spiritual channel for transcendent love to flow and manifest in the world.

Leonard Cohen's words and songs are mined from the very deepest heart and soul. They are like the golden thread from some magical loom, which weave their way through time and remain with us from moment to moment, as we grow older they make our lives richer, more meaningful and bearable.

I am so pleased to have had this chance to be transported back 40 years in time and relive my younger days again. It‘s been an experience full of unique and extraordinary memories and emotions. And thanks to Leonard Cohen for being a beacon of light in the darkness of the world, truly he transcends past and present, to bring us the timeless truth of the heart.


By Peter Solomon 1970 and 2009
(Sirius)

[drsing]

thanks Sirius, wonderful report!
I was too young in 1970 (born 1956) but I can image your experience as I watched the DVD.