All posts by Woodstock Whisperer

Attended the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, became an educator for 35 years after graduation from college, and am retired now and often volunteer at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts which is on the site of that 1969 festival.
Birthdays, Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

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Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

September 8, 1941 – March 25, 1992

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

From the start…

It is interesting how we “discover” a musician only to find that they were far larger and wider than we ever suspected. Think Columbus and his “discovery” of the Americas.

I first saw his name when I started listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, but Phillips was well-established already when he joined Butterfield in 1967.

Wilson had made his recording debut in 1962 on with Sam Lazar on Playback. In the mid-’60s, Wilson became a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, an avant-garde jazz group. He cut albums with it as well as the band’s co-founder Roscoe Mitchell.

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

Paul Butterfield Blues Band

Joining Paul Butterfield and Gene Dinwiddie in 1967, Wilson soon found himself playing at the first most famous rock festival: the Monterey International Pop Festival.  Though the audience and resulting movie gave Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Who the stellar ovations, Paul Butterfield Blues Band garnered recognition as well.

Phillip Wilson was also with the band when it played early that august sunny Sunday morning in Bethel, NY just before Sha Na Na and Jimi Hendrix. One of the songs featured was Wilson’s “Love March.”

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

Post Woodstock…

Wilson remained with the Butterfield until the early ’70s. From there he always remained active as a player, a producer, a composer, and occasional vocalist with:

  • Anthony Braxton
  • Full Moon
  • Julius Hemphill
  • Lightin’ rod
  • Roscoe Mitchell
  • David Murry
  • Hamiet Bluiett
  • INTERface
  • Martha and Fontella Bass
  • Lester Bowie
  • Peter Khuh
  • James Newton
  • Elliot Sharp
  • Bill Lasell
  • The Last Poets
  • Deadline
  • Soren Anders
  • Frank Lowe
  • Blues Brass Connection
  • The Rance Allen Group
  • Art Ensemble of Chicago
  • Paul Zauner’s Blue Brass

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

Dogon A.D.

In 1972, Wilson was part of band that Julius Hemphill had for the Dogon A.D. album.

In a Do the Math article, David Sanborne said of Wilson: Wilson is one of the ultimate insider’s insiders, a brilliant force of possibly unprecedented range, unknown to many despite playing with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (including at Woodstock, where they played the Wilson composition “Love March”) and contributing one the most important drum performances to the avant jazz canon on Julius Hemphill’s Dogon A.D.

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

Phillip Wilson Project

He also released a few of his own albums including The Phillip Wilson Project.

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson

 Untimely death

Wilson was still actively pursuing his musical career when he was murdered on March 25, 1992.

Marvin Slater was convicted 1997 and sentenced to 33 1/3 years in  prison.

Slater appealed the conviction and on  January 11, 2000, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, First Department upheld the verdict.

The Court said in part, “The verdict was based on legally sufficient evidence and was not against the weight of the evidence. We see no reason to disturb the jury’s determinations concerning credibility.”

Remembering Drummer Phillip Wilson
Feminism

New York Radical Women 1968

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New York Radical Women 1968

September 7, 1968

Miss America Pageant, Atlantic City, NJ

New York Radical Women 1968

Second-wave Feminism

Time’s passage allows society to mistakenly think that something is new when it is not. The feminism of the 1960s may have seemed like a new movement, but of course 19th and early 20th century Suffragists such as Lucy Burns had in many ways a more difficult time (see Suffragists Tortured).

That era is known as the first wave of US feminism. [see Four Waves of Feminism article]

By the early 1960s, alongside the civil rights movement, women again marched and raised their voices to demand equality in the face of hypocrisy.

That “all men [and women] are created equal.”

New York Radical Women 1968

Boomer moms and their daughters

New York Radical Women 1968

As had happened during World War I and more so in World War II, many women realized that while being a homemaker was an acceptable choice, so were all the other occupations.

More and more women entered college and not just to get their MRS. You can see by the chart below that while the number of men and women with a Bachelor’s degree continued to increase for both sexes, it was in the 1960s that woman began to outnumber men.

New York Radical Women 1968

New York Radical Women 1968

NYRM

Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch, Shulamith Firestone, and Pam Allen founded New York Radical Women in the fall of 1967 in New York City. The women viewed the hierarchy of protest groups to be male-dominated and that that hierarchy kept women in subservient positions rather than allowing them to have positions of power.

The NYRM’s first action was on January 15, 1968 with in led a protest event, a “burial of traditional womanhood.” held in Arlington National Cemetery.

The action was also a counter-protest to the  Jeannette Rankin Brigade peace march in Washington D.C. That march was a gathering of women’s groups protesting the Vietnam War as grieving wives, mothers, and daughters. The Radical Women rejected the protest. It said it was simply a reaction to those who governed the male-dominated society.

New York Radical Women 1968

1968 Miss America Pageant

No bras burned

The New York Radical Women’s held their most famous protest on September 7, 1968 at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City.

The group called the pageant a “cattle auction” and displayed a “Women’s Liberation” banner. Most famously, women placed into a trash can bras, girdles, Playboy magazines, mops, and other items representing their oppression.

They did not burn the items.

New York Radical Women 1968

Dissolution of NYRW

In 1969, ideological differences led Robin Morgan to leave and form Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). Shulamith Firestone started Redstockings.

New York Radical Women 1968
Jimi Hendrix, Music et al

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

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Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

September 6, 1970
Hendrix’s last live concert song

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

Open Air Love and Peace

Isle of Fehmarn, Germany

4, 5, & 6 September 1970

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

Isle of Wight

Just as Woodstock had inspired other young entrepreneurs to try their hand at organizing their own festivals, the Isle of Wight’s festivals, particularly 1970’s, inspired Helmut Ferdinand, Christian Berthold, and Tim Sievers to do the same.

And just as the Isle of Wight was an island concert (duh), these three young men chose the Isle of Fehmarn, between West Germany and Denmark. The idea was a sensible one: book the artists appearing at the Isle of Wight after that event on August 28, 29, and 30.  Such Woodstock names as Melanie, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, John Sebastian, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, and most importantly of all, Jimi Hendrix.

Interesting financing

Like any young men with an idea, they needed money to back it. Beate Uhse put up 200,000 German Marks in advance and offered the use of her 20 German sex shops as additional ticket sale offices. She was a stunt pilot and opened the first sex shop in the world. [Beate died in 2001. Her company,  Beate Uhse AG is listed on the Frankfort Stock Exchange.]

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

German Max Yasgur

Ferdinand, Berthold, and Sievers selected an area called  Flueggerstrand and rented a field belonging to a farmed named Störtenbecker. They converted a nearby school into a temporary hospital.

With unpleasant echos of Woodstock in the air, they…

  • had to ask local breweries and dairies to provide beverages as the company they hoped to contract refused. 
  • asked the German Red Cross to provide a mobile kitchen for the warm meals.
  • built two fences around the festival area
  • installed a few telephone boxes.
  • rented a gigantic sound system from England
  • Joan Baez and John Mayall cancelled because they feared non-payment after learning of poor ticket sales.

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

Bad Weather Bonus

As if the pre-festival similarities to Woodstock weren’t enough, the day the festival started, so did the rain.  Unlike Woodstock, a German biker group called the “Bloody Devils” arrived and supplanted the planned security.

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Hendrix, Billy Cox on bass, and Mitch Mitchell on drums) were on Saturday’s schedule. Rain cancelled that appearance, but Hendrix, already paid, played the next day.  Bootleg copies of that performance existed for year, but on December 13, 2005 Dagger Records released the best-sounding recording.

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

It was his last concert. Hendrix died in London on September 18. The monument pictured below now commemorates that performance on the Isle of Fehmarn.

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song

see Club 27 for more

It was a difficult month for rock fans, particularly those who had attended Woodstock. On September 3 Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson died. Hendrix on the 18th. And Janis Joplin on October 4.

All were 27 years old.

Classic rock story link

Jimi Hendrix Swan Song