This 1970 Festival is almost better for me than Woodstock in some ways with a few personal favorites. It also seems to have passed by the blackness covering the American rock scene by then.
There is an innocence that that multinational crowd here retains! A beautiful festival that beat the Woodstock crowd by 100,000!! 350,000 beautiful people!! It had Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd..a bunch of UK bands that Woodstock was missing!
In America the golden season for music festivals ended up in late '69 with the Altamont's accidents, a few months after Woodstock. In the early seventies in Europe there was still space for some "good vibrations", as proved by the Kralingen Pop festival, near Rotterdam, on June 1970. The event, documented by the movie Stamping Ground, is often remembered as the European Woodstock, because of the presence of many artists that had already played on that historical three-days concert, like Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, Country Joe. But the Kralingen festival also showed how vital was the British scene on that period, offering great performances by bands like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, East Of Eden, Caravan, Fairport Convention, Family, T. Rex... -avaxnome
The end of festivals could almost be traced back to the Big Sur/Esalen performance by CSN. It happened almost right after Woodstock, and was infamous for Stephen Stills having it out with a heckler. You can almost feel the bad vibes permeating when they shouldn't have. Altamont everyone knows of.
Sadly that migrated across to Europe as the free festival radicals perhaps signaled the end of the era at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.
