Sure, the harmonies were rough, but they were still beautiful.

And I didn’t even like “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes!” As far as I was concerned, the first CSN album was an overproduced folkie wankfest, and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” was a reason to see if maybe another radio station was playing something better.īut, at Woodstock, where Steven Stills famously said they were “scared shitless,” they were stripped from all of the studio gloss and overdubs, and - augmented by some clever lighting and that infamous split-screen - what was left was three dudes with guitars singing for their lives. But it was “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by motherfucking Crosby, Stills & Nash (Neil Young was nowhere to be found on this song) that blew me away. Of course, those performances were awesome. It wasn’t close to where I lived, and it didn’t have a lot of choices on which films you could see, like the UA theaters did.īut they were showing a revival of Woodstock for cheap, and that meant that we could see those legendary performances by The Who, Sly & The Family Stone & Jimi Hendrix we’d been reading about our entire lives. I don’t remember much about the Country Squire, except that it wasn’t a place I went to very often.

In practical sense, this usually meant going to the midnite movies at the Tower Theater, where we’d saw everything from Jimi Plays Berkeley to D.O.A., but it also meant seeing a double bill of Rust Never Sleeps and Rock ‘n’ Roll High School at the Moon-glo Drive-in and renting a VHS of Blow-Up just to fast-forward to the part where Jimmy Page & Jeff Beck were playing together.Īnd one time - gonna guess it was either 1979 or 1980, the tenth anniversaries of the festival and the film, respectively - we went to the Country Squire Theatre at First and Ashlan to see Woodstock. It was secondary to our quests to see every concert and buy every record, but it was still definitely a thing.

We never really described it as such, but during the late 70s and early 80s Tim & I were on a quest to see every rock n roll performance that had ever been captured on film. Album: Woodstock – Music From The Original Soundtrack

Judy blue eye