Woodstock – Matthews Southern Comfort (1970)

Description

Additional information about this, Matthews Southern Comfort vinyl art.

Matthews Southern Comfort – The Artist

Iain Matthews (born Ian Matthews MacDonald, 1946) is an English musician and singer-songwriter. He was an original member of the British folk rock band Fairport Convention from 1967 to 1969 before leaving and forming his own band, Matthews Southern Comfort, which had a UK number one in 1970 with a cover version of Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock”

Woodstock – The Song

“Woodstock” is a popular song written by Joni Mitchell. Three versions of the song were released in the same year, 1970. This version is by the British band Matthews Southern Comfort and it became the best known version in the United Kingdom, and was the highest charting version of the song, reaching the top of the UK pop charts in 1970. As the name implies, the lyrics refer to the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival of 1969, telling the story of a concert-goer on a trek to attend the festival. Mitchell, who was unable to perform at the festival herself due to scheduling conflicts, was inspired to write the song based on an account of the festival relayed to her by then-boyfriend Graham Nash, who had performed there. The anthemic song, as well as the festival it commemorates, is symbolic of the counterculture of the 1960s.

Woodstock was a music festival held August 15–18, 1969, on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 40 miles (65 km) southwest of Woodstock. Billed as “an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music” and alternatively referred to as the Bethel Rock Festival, it attracted an audience of more than 400,000. Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite sporadic rain. The festival has become widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history as well as a defining event for the counterculture generation.

Woodstock – The Shape

Modelled into a silhouette of Woodstock the fictional bird from the comic strip Peanuts. Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz that ran from1950, to 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. Peanuts is among the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being”. At its peak in the mid- to late 1960s, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of around 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion. The Peanuts franchise also had success in theatre and the big screen, with the stage musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and computer-animated feature film The Peanuts Movie.

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