On a recent episode of The New Roth Show, Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth unearthed a stunning Woodstock bombshell stating that rare extended sets for original 1969 festival exist including for artists such as Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Joplin. Alternative Nation transcribed Roth’s comments
Roth: As a dedicated follower of all the bands that were at Woodstock – The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, it’s a long, long list and I love, love those bands. However, you gotta admit without a video screen, without suitable sound and without some sort of visual that really allows you to see the act it’s really hard to tell who is playing half the time. When you look at Woodstock and I’ve seen the movie about fifty-five times, you can’t tell who is in the rhythm section. You might have Sly in Sly and the Family Stone because he’s out front, he’s got the biggest hat on and he’s the one singing lead. Carlos [Santana], they focus in on him but if you pull that camera back just a little bit it’s surrounded by families, road-crew, techs, hangers-on, press & media, other musicians and you can’t tell who’s doing what.
Roth continues:
Roth: The music remains spectacular, go back and listen to Woodstock on the disk set. In fact, there is a secondary disc set for Woodstock that a lot of us don’t know about and they have extended sets for Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Joplin, for example. I listen to it and that’s get goin’ music for me in up in the shower every other morning. The extended Sly and the Family Stone set sounds as they played for two nights. I know some of the acts did, all right? The music is explosive but unless you have a complete, direct connection between that audience – between that audience and what’s going on visually, musically, etc, and back then you really didn’t because the sound systems were really struggling, the lighting systems were struggling, people were miserable and having a great time at the same time. That’s a lot of distraction, disruption and a lot of misdirection, okay? So what happens? We find a way to entertain ourselves!
