For all the attention that the big rock festivals of the ’60s and ’70s get (Woodstock, Altamont, etc.), I’ve always been more interested in their black equivalents from the period.

I’ve written before about Soul to Soul, the 1971 concert of black American musicians held in the freshly decolonized Ghana. Hell, I wrote the damned Wikipedia entry for the thing. (Featuring Wilson Pickett, crabwalk.com fave Les McCann, Ike & Tina, and the unjustly forgotten Staple Singers.)

So I was interested to read this Smithsonian piece on “Black Woodstock,” a massive concert in Harlem in 1969. (Featuring Sly & the Family Stone, B.B. King, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, the Staple Singers, and Pigmeat Markham. Geez, that’s some talent.) A film of the concert is supposed to be released sometime soon (when it will be purchased by me):

The footage shows seas of some 100,000 blacks whose dress and manner blend a Fourth of July picnic, a Sunday Best church revival, an urban rock concert and a rural civil rights rally. “You see the generations teetering,” said [producer Morgan] Neville. “As opposed to, say, Wattstax, where you see a kitschy funkifying of 70s America. This is different: the tension between soul and funk, civil disobedience versus Black Power, the tension of Harlem itself at the time.”

Ah, Wattstax — another great “Black Woodstock” of the period. (Music available for download. It’s solid, and Rufus Thomas’ “Do the Funky Penguin” has made it onto several of my mix CDs. Also featured: the Bar-Kays, Albert King, Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, and again the Staple Singers, who must have had a good booking agent back in the day.) Here’s the trailer:

Most interesting to me in that clip is the appearance (at 0:49) of Ted Lange, who apparently was an activist in the early 1970s. He seems like a cool guy, with quite a few directing credits and such. (Graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, author of 17 plays, etc.) But since he’s best known to white folks like me as the oversmiling bartender Isaac (1:23) on The Love Boat, it’s still a pretty dissonant image.

15 February 2007

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