Toronto Star Article

http://www.thestar.com/article/693915


"Bigger than Woodstock

40 years ago tomorrow, a concert in Toronto brought together a mind-bending array of rock greats. So why is it all but forgotten today?

Sep 12, 2009 04:30 AM
Peter Goddard
Special to the Star

Tell me if you've heard this one before.

Forty years ago this summer, thousands of longhairs, pot-smokers, acid-trippers and all-round rock freaks, some wearing Day-Glo face paint and little else, jammed together hip to haunch, day and night – all part of the greatest rock concert ever.

Woodstock? Wrong. The right answer – in my opinion at least – is the Toronto Rock `n' Roll Revival Concert at Varsity Stadium, Sept. 13, 1969, less than a month after the last mud-caked hippy staggered out of Max Yasgur's farm, Woodstock's site in Bethel, N.Y.

The Toronto show barely figures as a tiny blip in even this city's collective memory. Yet seen from a 2009 vantage point, Varsity had the musical heft Woodstock couldn't match. Woodstock was about the '60s. Varsity was about the entire early history of rock 'n' roll. Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis appeared on the same stage with Jim Morrison, who turned in a classic performance after a disastrous, drunken year that saw him busted in Miami for allegedly exposing himself at the Dinner Key Auditorium.

Oh, yes – and there was John Lennon and his hastily assembled Plastic Ono Band, featuring Eric Clapton, fresh from Blind Faith, and Ono herself befuddling the crowd with her stratospheric ululations.

Lennon knew the importance of the musical company he was keeping that day. He was flabbergasted when informed by Thor Eaton, one of the concert promoters, that Little Richard wanted to meet the famous Beatle.

"Is he really here?" Lennon asked Eaton. "Is he real?"

In short, Varsity was one of those remarkable moments in the history of a particular art form when many of the major players were together, met, talked and, in some cases, collaborated. It was a real-time version of a time capsule. One is reminded of a similar meeting of seminal figures: Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso inventing cubism as they painted side by side in Paris at the turn of the last century; or Miles Davis and John Coltrane sharing the music stand and the birth of the cool '50s.

Varsity's historical importance was instantly understood by Jim Morrison, who felt the concert represented "the end of rock 'n' roll."

Okay, so Woodstock has hogged the media spotlight in recent months, in part because bigger still does mean better press. Between 300,000 and 400,000 people were at the New York festival over three days. About 20,000 people were at Varsity Stadium. But something other than numbers is at work here. Something more than memory is involved. What matters most is how memory is packaged for contemporary consumption. Woodstock, once the symbol of everything anti-American, has subsequently been polished and preened as one of the great star-studded Yankee moments, right up there with any Super Bowl. The Varsity concert isn't even remembered in its own city. Sweet Toronto is the absurd title for the little-viewed concert film shot by famous American documentarian D.A.Pennebaker.

Jon Pareles, the astute veteran American pop critic, recently described Woodstock as "one of the few defining events of the late 1960s that had a clear happy ending." And he's right, but mainly in the sense that Woodstock's memory has been endlessly repackaged as a feel-good moment, a concept we Canadians seemingly reject unless it comes with a six-pack of beer.

Woodstock was, in fact, a vast muddy misery for tens of thousands.

(Full disclosure: I was offered a private plane ride to go to Woodstock but didn't take it. I could smell the mud from this side of Lake Ontario.) The Varsity Stadium concert was not a particularly happy event either. Lennon was ill. Berry only worried about getting paid in cash.

Indeed, in those rare moments when the Varsity show is discussed, it's generally given a negative spin as "the concert that broke up the Beatles," which is true to a point and certainly true to the spirit of the times. It was the time of revolution in France, Chicago cops whacking protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention, and Richard Nixon's morose presidency. It was a time rightly described as The Age of Paranoia, the title of a collection of Rolling Stone pieces on "how the '60s ended."

John Lennon – then in the throes of an increasingly bilious feud with Paul McCartney – accepted the invitation from John Brower, another of the Varsity concert's promoter, to play the gig on his own. Any Toronto bar band could have outplayed the Plastic Onos that day. Nevertheless, the experience was exhilarating for Lennon, who felt "I could do it on my own," as he later told me.

Yet while memories of Woodstock are being rekindled this summer by lots of new product, from the release of a six-CD set to a super-group tour called Heroes of Woodstock, the Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival has attracted zero media anticipation or attention.

This is worrisome and regrettable. Yet perhaps there's a moral to be found in the ease with which the Varsity Stadium concert has slipped from our memory.

It suggests that Canadians who happily ignore their history will find that Americans are only too willing to fill it in with a version of their own.

Peter Goddard, the Star's former rock critic, covered the Rock `n' Roll Revival for the Toronto Telegram. He can be reached at peter_g1@sympatico.ca"