After monsoon-like rain temporarily stopped Woodstock’s final day, Country Joe’s Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m-FixingTo-Die Rag had primed the crowd nicely when Ten Years After commenced their 60-minute set at 8.15pm. Although Jimi Hendrix is routinely cited as the Woodstock movie’s defining moment, at the time it was Ten Years After’s frenetic rampage through I’m Going Home, which precipitated the London blues band’s US breakthrough.
Previously, only buyers of 2009’s 38-CD Woodstock mega-box would have possessed the five tracks Ten Years After played before the balls-out closer that started life on 1968’s UK-conquering live album Undead. Restored and remixed for vinyl (with a tie-dye pressed Indie store exclusive), it’s interesting to hear the band ignoring recently released third album Stonedhenge, mainly with epic workouts around 1967’s debut album.
Announced by singer/guitarist Alvin Lee as “a bit of old blues to warm us up”, Willie Dixon’s Spoonful follows the Cream template of using its stop-start riff as an improvisatory gateway. Over seven minutes, Lee boils up into the ‘fastest guitarist in the west’ that made the band’s name but would dog him into feeling like a one-trick rock god.
Previewing upcoming fourth album Shhhh, a defiantly lascivious (and somewhat unwoke) version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s Good Morning Little Schoolgirl endures two crowd-testing false starts before becoming another seven-minute axe-twiddling showcase.
The Hobbit shows how times have changed, with an eight-minute drum solo before 18 minutes of Al Kooper’s arrangement of Blind Willie Johnson’s I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes displays Undead jazz leanings before Lee ascends into fretboard-melting overdrive. On a roll, Willie Dixon and Sonny Boy’s Help Me is stretched into another rapid soloing tour de force lasting nearly 20 minutes before I’m Going Home’s breakneck lift-off.
This sort of seat-of-the-pants indulgence would never fit the corporate cosiness of today’s major festivals, but back then it could make a band like Ten Years After. As endless as some of the extrapolations that prompted Lee’s frustrated departure from the band six years later may seem, there will be those who will treasure such evidence of this often-overlooked British guitar hero.
