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Confession time. I was not at Woodstock for the three-day festival of "peace, love and music" (and drugs and mud and traffic jams) in the Summer of Love 1969. How could I go, when I was warning readers to stay away, warning that the abruptly shifted site would never be ready to support the trampling hoards?
My other rationale for not Woodstocking was that the vast majority of significant acts that played in that cow pasture full of people also showed at the Atlantic City Rock Festival, held a couple weeks earlier. To be sure, the Jersey setting wasn't nearly as "earthy" as the Catskills locale, but the sound at the AC race track was excellent, the support systems (food, rest rooms, health facilities, etc.) were all in place, and at show's end, you could drive home in an hour.
This hot weather season, many hearty souls (including Daily News writer Deborah Bergman) are venturing West to catch the vibes at the Woodstock-like "US Festival" happening next weekend in the smog-infested foothills of San Bernadino, Calif. Me, I'll be content to hang out at a couple of major concerts cooking in Philadelphia this week. No, there won't be anywhere to camp out. But between them, these two local events will present much of the trend-set-ting and artistically valid sounds happening in contemporary rock today. And guaranteed, the on-site creature comforts will be at least acceptable.
Particularly well balanced is tomorrow's 2 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. concert gala at JFK Stadium. The show headlines Genesis, the heartiest survivor of the 1970s progressive music boom: whose richly arranged material is steeped in classical allusions, and whose convoluted, elliptical stories often reveal a mythological or Dickensian spirit.
Still growing in popularity, Genesis has learned to trim away its fatty excess, and slide into the mainstream without losing its distinctive identity, with sweet and clearly romantic songs like "Follow You, Follow Me" and "Misunderstanding," kicky, no-nonsense rockers like "Turn It On Again" and exhilarating fusion breeds such as the horn-scorched "Paper Late."
"We've gone through lots of changes in the last three years, concedes Genesis guitar player Mike Rutherford in a phone chat. "I know that some people see us as an odd mix with the rest of the acts on the JFK show, but we think we're compatible and that our audiences will overlap pretty well with theirs."
Genesis' two-hour, show-closing set at JFK will harken as far back as "Supper's Ready," the band's first extended suite (circa 1971), "since we still have a lot of fans from way back," notes Rutherford with obvious pleasure.
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