A 38-disc set lets you hear Woodstock’s stage
NEW YORK – For the first time, an audio recording is available of nearly everything heard onstage at Woodstock 50 years ago – from transcendent music to announcements about lost people and bad acid. It’s the entire Woodstock experience, minus the mud.
List price: $799.98.
History aside, who would buy an exhaustive 38-disc package with 432 songs? Who would even take the time to listen?
More people than you might think. All 1,969 copies (get it?) of “Woodstock – Back to the Garden – The Definitive Anniversary Archive” were snapped up weeks ago. Abbreviated 10-, fiveand three-disc packages remain on the market.
“I was always 100 percent certain that it was going to sell out,” said Andy Zax, the set’s producer. “I lobbied for them to produce some more copies … I knew there was an audience for this.”
He said he’s already spotted copies available for resale online at nearly $2,000 and expects that price will keep rising.
The logistics of running a festival that drew 400,000 people and defined a generation may have overwhelmed Woodstock organizers, but they did keep tape recorders running. It still took detective, technical and persuasive skills to recreate a start-to-finish document, in a way that couldn’t be done when Zax quarterbacked a sixdisc retrospective for the 40th anniversary. Copies of performances were scattered, not everybody wanted all the music released and technology wasn’t up to the level of today.
Of the 432 tracks on the Rhino Records package, 267 had never been made public before.
The Rhino box includes several other curios, including posters, a replica of the original program and a book written by Michael Lang, one of the original festival creators. The audio is being streamed this weekend on SiriusXM and a handful of radio stations, including Radio Woodstock in Woodstock, N.Y.
Most people who consider Woodstock now think of its cultural significance, or the blocked traffic and acres of people.
Zax hopes the box makes people remember the music. He’s spent countless hours listening to it and, if you’re wondering, he wasn’t there. He was 4 at the time and living in California.
“I would have loved to have been there,” he said. “Even if I was damp and mildewy and starving.”