Screeching guitars over a rapid backbeat pierce 50 ears trying to hear 25 stilted conversations. A foot-long needle shoots directly through the beckoning orifices, winds around the ear canals and connects directly with the center of each half of the brain. A throbbing begins at the base of the skull as imaginary brain fluid leaks out of each ear. Each face contorts into wrinkled disgust and the faces move closer together.

“Music is my life!” screams one bearded-with-glasses 20-something into the ear of a young girl with hair framing her face, brown tank top, cut-off jean shorts and several colored tattoos spattered across each arm. Clouds of cigarette smoke linger between them and slowly rise to the tar-stained ceiling. From the other end of the bar, the shapes and cartoons on her arms aren’t distinguishable, but I’m convinced they’re more than just blobs of ink. ”Have you ever heard the first Bad Brains album?” he continues to yell, ”It’s so raw, I can’t get enough of it!”

The band falls into a repetitive pattern of chunky chords, fast, pounding, tribal drums and hollering vocals. A few words sneak out of the mix, “MAKE…APPOINTMENT…TIME…MIND…EXCUSE!” Fuzzed mumbling fills the spaces between the recognizable words.

“I’m so glad you like them, too! Did you go see them at State a few months ago? They were great. I was there for Propaghandi, though!” the girl hollers back.

“What!? I can’t hear a fucking thing with this shit music!”

“Ha! I know! I wish they’d turn it down or something!” she yells in the middle of a song ending. Well, not exactly ending. The thumping tune had devolved into squelching feedback and noise crying memories of ghosts too fresh to even know they were dead.

The bar continues to fill with people lining up for beer and liquor memory tonic promising foggy notions for hours to come. Bodies pressing up against each other and conversations continue. A buffer borders the band a good five to 10 feet in every direction. In the middle of the vacuum, the group bounces off each other, climbs amps, jumps off, falls on the ground in a general hootenany and self-inflicted chaos.

On the other side of town, Johnny Winter fills a medium-sized open-aired venue and plays hits from the ’60s or ’70s or whenever he’s from. A 45-year-old man with greying hair, pony tail and beard turns to his 18-year-old son (in baggy jeans and with flowing long blond hair) to remark, “It’s so important to support local arts, son. If we don’t come out to these local shows, what kind of local scene will we have? Local music is so important.”

Clouds rumble overhead as Johnny looks skyward and pauses thoughtfully following a 12-minute blues jam. “Don’t forget Woodstock, boys and girls. I was there. Chant off the rain, just chant it off. There’s no mud here and you girls aren’t as young as you were back then,” he sputters into the microphone with a big inside joke grin. Cheers erupt as he leads a chant, “NO RAIN, NO RAIN, NO RAIN!” the crowd follows and stomps their feet.

All at once, the sky cracks open and pours dangerous amounts of rain onto the unsuspecting crowd. A few well-prepared concert goers still in their business leisure suits from the Friday 9-to-5 pull out their umbrellas and the rest run forward toward the stage.

In front of the crowd at the bar, I see and hear all these things at once. My wandering brain picks up random transmissions from across town and throughout the room. When I play music I black out in catatonic stupor for better or worse. I can’t control my thoughts as I rip my hand to shreds strumming my guitar and hollering my lungs out absentmindedly. Or completely focused and precise. I can never tell which one for sure.

Uh oh, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is about a month and a half away. Did you remember? If not, it’s probably due to the distinct lack of buzz, seeing as there is no official concert scheduled, although boosters keep adding “as yet” in hopes that original co-producer Michael Lang will manage to put together a show in New York’s Prospect Park.

A handful of mostly lame events are planned for different parts of the country, and a tour called Heroes of Woodstock — featuring Mountain, Jefferson Starship, Tom Constanten (repping Grateful Dead) and others — has 16 dates on the books (none in the Southeast). In all, though, it would seem as if folks have other things on their mind than memorializing the watershed cultural event.

That doesn’t mean it’s a complete wasteland. Sony Music has released a well-thought-out group of reissues called The Woodstock Experience, five two-CD packages pairing a classic 1969 album and a complete Woodstock performance. Sony catalog artists Santana, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Jefferson Airplane and Sly and the Family Stone got the treatment.

Thirty-three acts performed at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair from Aug. 15-18, 1969, including such long-forgotten names as Quill, Sweetwater, Keef Hartley Band and Bert Sommer. (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, The Byrds and a handful of lesser-knowns declined invitations. Jeff Beck, Iron Butterfly and Joni Mitchell canceled.)

Only a handful of the performances have been immortalized, mostly via the 1970 film Woodstock and its soundtrack. And Sony can legitimately boast three of them in this collection: Sly, Santana and Joplin. Winter did not make it into the movie and while Jefferson Airplane were represented with two songs in celluloid, their set has not earned the same historical cachet as the top three.

Let’s have us a closer look at these twofers. I’ve ranked them on their merit as live performances.

Sly and the Family Stone. The runaway winner. Sly’s 50-minute, nine-song show is a balls-out party from the opening “M’Lady” to the closer “Stand!” The group’s rhythm tracks have a collective propulsion that has as much to do with Larry Graham’s rumbling bass and the interlocking guitars as it does with drums. Deep, deep funk — with rock crunch. Sly and company find just the right blend of scripted performance and in-the-moment spontaneity.

A band has to be really tight to play this loose. They accelerate the pace of “Everyday People,” giving it a gospel-tent fervor. The sing-along during “I Want to Take You Higher,” one of Woodstock the film’s crescendos, benefits from the leadup tune “Music Lover” and Sly’s spoken set-up. Even the song “Love City,” in my view a second-tier Sly tune, has an uncommon crackle. The set’s companion CD, Stand!, is a terrific bonus, the best Sly album this side of Greatest Hits.

Santana. The band’s self-titled debut, which is the companion CD in this twofer, was released in May ’69 and reached No. 4 on the charts in late September, so it’s safe to say that a scintillating performance at Woodstock played a big part in putting Santana on the map.

The group’s use of Latin rhythms must have been an exotic treat for the hippie hordes in upstate New York. Santana plays a fairly rote version of the hit-to-be “Evil Ways,” but excels in the dynamic Latin jams, especially “Soul Sacrifice,” with its relentless groove, roil of hand percussion, monster riff and hair-raising guitar solo.


Janis Joplin. The damaged blues-rock songstress had made her bones two years earlier at the Monterey Pop festival. A few months before Woodstock she left the sub-par Big Brother and the Holding Company, went solo and transformed her show into kaleidoscopic R&B revue, heavy on the horns. I generally find Joplin’s vocals akin to a razor blade scraped against a rock, but I’ll give her credit for the unhinged energy and commitment she puts into her ragged performance.

Of all the live CDs in this series Joplin’s most effectively captures the flavor of Woodstock. Before closing with “Ball and Chain,” she launches into a spacey speech, in which she says, “Music’s for grooving, man, and music’s not puttin’ yourself through bad changes. You don’t have to take anybody’s shit, man, just to like music. So if you’re getting more shit than you deserve, you know what to do about it.” Uh, OK. If Joplin’s caterwauling in her Woodstock set wears you out, load up the companion CD, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, where she tones it down considerably.

Johnny Winter. Very few people knew of the reed-thin albino when he took the stage and pumped out an hour of raucous Texas blues, boogie and early rock ’n’ roll. Winter’s set thrust him into pantheon of late ’60s guitar heroes. He played fast, and fast was much revered in that era. As his career has worn on, Winter has spewed so many notes that it’s devolved into chattering, but at Woodstock he brought a lot of slides, slurs and bends into play. His bottleneck work on “Mean Town Blues” still raises goosebumps.

Winter, joined mid-set by his brother Edgar on sax and keyboards, played a show in front of a few hundred thousand people in much the same way he would’ve performed at a roadhouse outside Fort Worth. The second album in the package is Winter’s self-titled debut.

Jefferson Airplane. The San Francisco band’s ensemble vocals always sounded precariously held together, even on this set’s companion CD, the stridently anti-war Volunteers. At Woodstock, the singing came unglued. Grace Slick’s pitch wavered and her already shrill voice turned into a yelp.

The blend of instruments is mushy — and not just because of the recording quality — and the guitars consistently slide out of tune. The rhythms wander, and the extended jams — especially on “Wooden Ships” — come off as rudderless noodling. The band gets a foothold near the end of the set with a sharp “White Rabbit,” but by then it’s too late.

New World Brewery on a Saturday night boasts a healthy built in-crowd of conversationalists and music lovers.  Even with the threatening cold snap on the horizon and very little local media coverage, quite a few people made it out to support the local post-punk rock band Dumbwaiters and show promoter New Granada Presents.

With the audience drinking cold beer while huddling, humping or gyrating near conveniently located space heaters on the New World patio, I wondered how many people got drawn away from this local show to see the moldy blues rock of Johnny “I played at Woodstock” Winter at Jannus Landing or Guns N’ Roses’ heroes Nazareth crust rocking at the Largo Cultural Center.  Probably none, but our continued cultural emphasis on these old bohemoths roaming the lands and garnering top dollar for performances of contrived, dated music marketed for the sake of nostalgia gets under my skin…

Back at the New World Brewery, Orlando band Kingsbury opened up the show.  Playing with a few genre names that are too loaded for me to know what I’m talking about, the “shoegaze” rock band converted me to their mix of noodling lead guitar, controlled feedback, solid Roger Watersy bass lines, stomp box controlled light show and practically whispered, intimate vocals.  Their intstrumental breaks worked especially well, mostly due to constant crescendos following “down-tempo” leanings.  My two criticisms of the band (too many songs began with singer playing one guitar or one keyboard while singing and sometimes the sound of the band was a little too late Pink Floydish for my tastes) did not tarnish their performance that much. Download a free EP at www.kingsburymusic.net

The second band, Woven from L.A., took a long time to set up two electric drum kits and began their set with music I wasn’t in the mood for at all. Being the shitty concert reviewer that I am, I left before the first song finished and went with some friends to get some Mema’s nachos. Woven might have gotten a lot better, but I’ll never know. I got back just in time for Dumbwaiters.

Before reading this next passage, understand my bias: Dumbwaiters remains one of my favorite local bands.  That being said, their mix of raw guitar, pleasant yet caucaphonous keyboard, bass, drums and crisp vocals really sounded great at the New World last night.  Dumbwaiters took the stage right as the cold wind really took hold of the evening/early morning with unreasonable intensity compared to the previous three hours.  Its not every day the breath of a singer becomes visable with every exhale in the Sunshine State.  Through their angular sound with lots of cross chatter and interplay between instruments, their deconstructed songs carried them through the pitfalls of a pirate hat that kept floating around, numbness from the cold and a brand new bassist.  The “lead” guitarists’ meanderings and violent strummings really affected the mood of the set in a galvinizing way for me.  All in all, a really fun and engaging performance.

Or you could have gone to see Nazareth…