Hotmail
With the summer festival season winding down, MSN Music offers a coach potato's alternative: Creating your own endless summer of live excitement through worthy DVD features that recapture great festivals.
By Michael Shilling
Special to MSN Music
Since at least the 1960s, music festivals have held a unique spot in popular culture, acting simultaneously as a rite of summer and an occasion to gain a snapshot of the musical trends and acts that define a time. The ascension of digital video has given new life (both sonic and visual) to the films that have captured these varied harmonic convergences. To wit, here's a list of some essential titles across a variety of decades and genres.
"Monterey Pop" (1968)
Captured on film by D.A.
Pennebaker, the Monterey International Pop Music Festival was held on June
16-18, 1967, in the seaside California town of Monterey, and featured the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas and the Papas, and Otis Redding. With a naturalistic style, "Monterey
Pop" captures the dawning of the Summer of Love, and is the film most likely to
make your aging baby-boomer parents get all misty-eyed. Nostalgia aside, the
performances by one legend after the other are utterly stunning, all the more so
considering the primitive stage technology of the era.
"Glastonbury" (2006)
Since 1970, the Glastonbury
Festival, located in southwestern England, has slowly become the most important
annual event for British music fans. Take a look at the roster of English rock
over the past 35 years, and pretty much every act on the list has played
Glastonbury. Twice. Directed by MTV video pioneer Julien Temple, "Glastonbury"
acts as a loose history of the festival, but focuses on the years of 2002-2005.
Temple combines footage by amateur filmmakers with his own, capturing the
strange chaos of festival life, as well as performances by luminaries such as Radiohead, Morrissey, Primal Scream and Coldplay.
"Woodstock" (1970)
If one event is synonymous
with "music festival," it is the hallowed Woodstock Arts and Music Festival,
which took place in Bethel, N.Y., on Aug. 15-18, 1969. With acts such as Janis Joplin; the Grateful Dead; the Band; and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Woodstock was a
watershed affair. To many, it signified the cultural zenith of the 1960s. Big
postulations aside, the film, directed by Michael Wadleigh, shows that Woodstock
was mainly about people coming together in the mud and rain to bask in some
timeless music and get their groove on.
[Editor's note: In honor of the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock, a new DVD set has been released. Search with Bing for more info]
"Festival in the Desert" (2004)
An annual world
music festival in Mali, Festival in the Desert showcases performers of Tuareg
music, which is particular to Saharan Africa, alongside a variety of Western
acts. Documenting 2003's gathering, "Festival in the Desert" does not
disappoint, with a lineup that spans the range of world music, such as Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, and Blackfire, alongside those
you might be more familiar with, such as Robert Plant. Accentuated by the stark beauty of
the Sahara, the eclectic performances take on an otherworldly, shimmering
effect.
"Urgh! A Music War" (1981)
Anarchic in style,
"Urgh! A Music War" is a documentary featuring a who's who of the music world's
new wave uber-cool at the turn of the '80s. There's no narration; instead we get
one high-voltage performance after the next from bands such as the Police, XTC and OMD, as well as Gary Numan, Dead Kennedys, and the Fleshtones in what serves as a virtual
festival for that era. Produced by Miles Copeland and filmed at shows in
America, the United States, and France, "Urgh!" provides a fascinating and
frantic musical time capsule of the period between LSD and R.E.M.
"Wattstax" (1973)
Directed by Mel Stuart,
"Wattstax" documents the Watts Summer Music Festival, which took place at the
Los Angeles Coliseum on Aug. 30, 1972. Featuring performances by Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas and Albert King, the film is politically charged,
contrasting footage of the show with scenes of the Watts section of Los Angeles,
and discussions regarding the struggle of black Americans to achieve equality.
To that end, Jesse Jackson makes a moving appearance, leading
the packed arena in a reading of the poem, "I Am Somebody." With stirring
moments throughout, "Wattstax" is a jewel.
"Festival Express" (2003)
Documenting what might
have been the biggest traveling rock music festival, "Festival Express" captures
a regular caravan of pop royalty in 1970 as they shoot across Canada by train.
The show hit cities across the Great White North, and the film's performances,
including the Grateful Dead, Delaney and Bonnie, and Buddy Guy, are interspersed with recent interviews
of those who rode the rails on this short, strange trip. So incendiary was the
idea of itinerant rock stars that the mayors of Montreal and Vancouver canceled
two of the five shows. Far out!
"Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival"
(1997)
From 1968 to 1970, the Isle of Wight, located three miles off
England's southern coast, hosted a huge music festival. "Message to Love"
captures the goings-on at the 1970 show, and features a number of acts, such as
the Doors, Free, and Jethro Tull, who had missed out on playing
Woodstock the year before. But, unlike at Woodstock, all was not copacetic: Kris Kristofferson was booed off the stage, the
crowds were unruly, and gate-crashing was rampant. This intense film captures
the unrest of an event, and a generation, at a breaking point.
"Coachella" (2006)
Since its 1999 inception, the
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, held annually in the California desert
town of Indio, has rapidly become the American counterpart to Britain's
Glastonbury. Directed by Drew Thomas, "Coachella" rounds up the finest
performances from the preceeding six years, and includes stunning footage of the
acts (Radiohead, the White Stripes, the Flaming Lips) that together define the leading
edge of popular music. At the same time, the film captures the unique manner in
which the festival combines different subcultures, from Burning Man modern
primitives to urban hip-hopsters, into one shining youth tableau.
Related: MSN Music's Live Guide | 2009 Festivals | 2009 Tours
Michael Shilling is a frequent contributor to MSN Music. He is a novelist and short story writer who teaches writing at the University of Michigan.
