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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. (Story Continues On Next Page...) |
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