Dates 29-30–31 August 1969 | ||
Genre Rock, folk, country, blues, jazz Location(s) Woodside Bay, Wootton, Isle of Wight, England Founded by Ronnie Foulk, Ray Foulk | ||
The 1969 Isle of Wight Festival was held on 29–31 August 1969 at the English town of Wootton, on the Isle of Wight. The festival attracted an audience of approximately 150,000 to see acts including Bob Dylan, The Band, The Who, Free, Joe Cocker, the Bonzo Dog Band and The Moody Blues. It was the second of three music festivals held on the island between 1968 and 1970. Organised by Ronnie and Ray Foulk's Fiery Creations, it became a legendary event, largely owing to the participation of Dylan, who had spent the previous three years in semi-retirement. The event was well managed, in comparison to the recent Woodstock Festival, and trouble-free.
Contents
The 1969 festival was considerably larger and more popular than the previous year's. Dylan had been little heard of since his allegedly near-fatal motorcycle accident in July 1966. Shunning the Woodstock Festival, held near his home in upstate New York, Dylan was initially reluctant to perform his comeback show on the little-known Isle of Wight. After weeks of negotiations, the Foulk brothers showed him a short film of the island's cultural and literary heritage; this appealed to Dylan's artistic sensibilities, as he was enthusiastic about combining a family holiday with a live performance in Tennyson country. Before the festival, Dylan and his fellow Woodstock residents The Band rehearsed at Forelands Farm in Bembridge, and were joined there by George Harrison, the only "outsider" to have visited him in his enclave in the Catskill Mountains. On Saturday, 30 August, the day before Dylan was to take the stage, Harrison's fellow Beatles John Lennon and Ringo Starr arrived on the island, along with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. Also seated in the sealed-off VIP area in front of the stage would be Beatle wives Pattie Harrison, Yoko Ono and Maureen Starkey, together with celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Françoise Hardy, Georges Moustaki, Syd Barrett, Donald Cammell, Elton John and others.
Bob Dylan's performance
Thanks to rumours that one or all of the Beatles would be joining him on stage, Dylan's comeback show had become, in the words of music journalist John Harris, "inflated into the gig of the decade". On 31 August, a nervous Dylan arrived on stage in a cream suit recalling Hank Williams, with a haircut and a short beard. Backed by the Band, he performed recent pieces from his Nashville Skyline and John Wesley Harding albums, as well as countryfied versions of earlier songs such as "Maggie's Farm", "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Like a Rolling Stone". The contrast in musical style between this performance and his 1966 concerts led to surprise and consternation among both the festival crowd and the throng of international journalists who had descended on the island to cover the event. Levon Helm of the Band later commented: "Bob had an extra list of songs with about eight or ten different titles ... that we would've gone ahead and done had it seemed like the right thing to do. But it seemed like everyone was a bit tired ... the festival was three days old by then."
Lennon opined that Dylan's performance was reasonable, though slightly flat; and that expectations were such that the audience was "waiting for Godot or Jesus". Clapton was mesmerised, however, having already been inspired back to blues and country, post-Cream, by Dylan's change of musical direction and by The Band's album Music From Big Pink. "Dylan was fantastic," Clapton later said. "He changed everything ... [The audience] couldn't understand it. You had to be a musician to understand it." Another champion of both The Band and Dylan, Harrison wrote a country song inspired by the event and dedicated to Dylan, "Behind That Locked Door", released on his 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass. Folk singer Tom Paxton has referred to the "negative reaction in the British press" as "downright fabrications: like saying he had run off stage half-way through". Paxton also recalled: "I went with him and The Beatles to the farmhouse where he was clearly in a merry mood because he had felt it had gone so well … The Beatles had brought a test pressing of Abbey Road and we listened to it and had quite a party."
Dylan's setlist was as follows:
- "She Belongs to Me"
- "I Threw It All Away"
- "Maggie's Farm"
- "Wild Mountain Thyme"
- "It Ain't Me, Babe"
- "To Ramona"
- "Mr. Tambourine Man"
- "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine"
- "Lay, Lady, Lay"
- "Highway 61 Revisited"
- "One Too Many Mornings"
- "I Pity the Poor Immigrant"
- "Like a Rolling Stone"
- "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"
- "The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)"
- "Minstrel Boy"
- "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"
Four performances from this concert were included on Dylan's 1970 album Self Portrait: "Like a Rolling Stone", "The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)", "Minstrel Boy" and "She Belongs to Me".
In 2013, the complete recording of Dylan's performance was released on the Deluxe Edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971).
The Who's performance
The Who presented their standard set at that time, which included the rock opera Tommy, as they had recently released that album and were touring in support of it. The group had just returned from a tour of the United States, where they had performed at Woodstock about two weeks earlier. They opened with "Heaven and Hell", followed by "I Can't Explain", "Fortune Teller", "Young Man Blues", and then performed the opera nearly in full, finishing up with "Summertime Blues", "Shakin' All Over"/"Spoonful" and two tracks as the encore: "My Generation" and the finale of "Naked Eye".