Message To Love: The Isle Of Wight Festival 1970

Performers of every stripe showed up on the tiny Isle Of Wight, off the coast of England, for the annual music festival that ran there from 1968 to 1970. The final festival, which came a year after Woodstock, was both the most star-packed and idiosyncratic of them all. It featured The Who and Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis and Tiny Tim. And it heralded the end of one era and the beginning of another: Jimi Hendrix died three weeks after this peformance; the Doors' Jim Morrison was gone within a year. Enter the '70s: The 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival also featured the debut of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who immediately made some sort of name for themselves by covering Dave Brubeck's jazz classic "Take Five" and Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures At An Exhibition" (though only a small bit of the latter can be heard on this disc).
This compilation of performances from that final year, most of them previously unreleased, accompanies a 1996 documentary film on the festival, and, like the film, takes pains to acknowledge the festival's dark side. Like Woodstock, the Isle Of Wight Festival lost money, and promoters blamed waves of free-living hippies who crashed the gates without paying. Between the odd musical juxtapositions on this two-disc soundtrack are snippets of locals and festival promoters commenting on the growing fiasco.|