Message to Love: Isle of Wight Festival, 1968, 1969, 1970

by Brian Hinton

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1860741479
• ISBN13: 9781860741470
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Not Avail
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Poet's View of the Festival World

I was having a reaction to the hyperbrilliant and fully theorized rock criticism of the present era, having read one too many of those 33 1/3 books, and I needed something with a mindless laidback feel. Did I ever get it in this, Brian Hinton's guide to the first three Isle of Wight festivals of the 1960s, titled, like Murray Lerner's documentary film of the 1970 festival, after a Jimi Hendrix number played during his set. "Well, I travel at the speed of a reborn man./ I got a lot to love to give/ From the mirrors of my mind,/ I sent a message to love." Hinton expands on Hendrix' lyrics to show the appeal of these enormous rock festivals to the youth of the 1960s, and how that love went geometric over the course of the three years in question. The first festival was a homegrown affair that boasted the first UK appearance of the then red hot Jefferson Airplane in its Surrealistic Pillow days--and the first light show seen over there. UK bands included the brilliant folk-based Fairport Convention and the SF Sorrow era Pretty Things. The second festival exploded after the three knucklehead brothers who ran things for the festival corporation had the bright idea to ask Bob Dylan, sidelined since a mysterious motorcycle accident in the summer of 1966, to return to the stage at the Isle of Wight, and oddly he agreed. The Beatles came to stay with him in his rented IOW HQ, and the attention of the world press hovered over the quiet island to see what was happening. The actual concert was, for Dylan, a muted affair, even with the "Big Pink" Band, but Hinton gives it his best shot and makes the reader wish he had been there. The third festival was the death knell, but what a way to go! It was the final appearance for both Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, and so many hippies refusing to pay the entrance fee that the organizers were forced to declare the proceedings a free festival. There would never be another week like it, for all of its crazy misguided eclecticism. Concertgoers were supposed to appreciate Ian Anderson, Joan Baez, Miles Davis, Alvin Lee and Melanie--that's a tall order. But somehow Brian Hinton's book makes it all seem not only possible, but idyllic. He is a poet and reminds us often that the Isle of Wight was Alfred Lord Tennyson's home, and notes that when Dylan was asked at the press conference why the Isle of Wight, he actually cited Tennyson. Cool or what!