Message to Love - The Isle of Wight Festival
by Murray Lerner
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Moody Blues, The WhoDirector: Murray Lerner
Brand: Sony
Producer: Murray Lerner
Editor: Einar Westerlund
Producer: Avril MacRory
Producer: Geoff Kempin
Producer: Malcolm Gerrie
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 127 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1997-12-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Music Video
Movie Reviews of Message to Love - The Isle of Wight Festival
Movie Review: Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
Certain short moments change everything. One was when the promoters of Woodstock declared the massive concert a free show. Some say that August 1969 weekend was the apex of the hippie dream: a communal and no cost weekend of peace, love, flowers, and music.
People tend to forget that Woodstock was declared a disaster area and that the New York State National Guard was called in to distribute food. The promoters of the festival took an absolute money bath. The Who almost didn't get paid, and it was not until the film and album came out in 1970 that Wooodstock made money.
You know what else can change everything? Hell. That is how Jerry Garcia described what happened four months later, when in December, the Rolling Stones asked the Hell's Angels to provide security at their festival at the Altamont Speedway, which they hoped would be Woodstock West. Every creepo in Calafornia seemed to show up that weekend-I love the imbecile whining outside the Stones trailer like a three-year-old "I wanna see Mick Jagger, G-dammit"- and were beaten with pool cues by the Angels. Paul Kantner of Jefforson Airplane got knocked out, and a fan with a gun, Maradith Hunter, was killed. To see this mess, get Gimme Shelter
Yet somehow, promoters in England sought to try it all again in 1970, and thus held the Isle Of Wight Festival. This show had sets by The Who, Jimi Hendrix,The Doors, Jethro Tull, and Family, among a lot of other rock and folk royalty of the era.
These sets are documented on this DVD, along with the behind the scenes workings of this massive undertaking.
Message To Love is a fascinating look at why the Woodstock Dream did not and could not make it past the 1960s. Not even past December 1969. Even in the counterculture days of 1970, rock royalty expected to be paid. Paid well.
The problem: fans who came to Isle of White did not seem to get that putting on a massive rock concert was a massive financial and logistical undertaking. They wanted Woodstock In England. They wanted communal utopia. They didn't understand why they had to pay to get in.
'
Can you blame them. Maybe. Maybe not. In 1970, rock was politics, money was politics, and rock festivals were, most absolutely politics. Massive showings of hippie potential set to music. It seems laughable in 2010, but there was a real tension between hippies, capitalists, and hippie capitalists. This is best shown when Joni Mitchel sits on stage, tries to calm the crowd, make sense of what was going on.
No one was killed at Isle of Wight. There was no riot. Despite the anxiety about potential disaster that seems to run through the film, the disaster never came. Isle of Wight was unfortunately no Woodstock, and blessedly, no Altamont.
But if you enjoy the music, or if you enjoy the story, Message To Love works either way. A movie about when rock and youth thought they could change the world, and why they actually couldn't, so very long ago.
Summary of Message to Love - The Isle of Wight Festival
MESSAGE TO LOVE: ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIV - DVD MovieThis documentary by Murray Lerner (From Mao to Mozart) was shot in 1970, but for many reasons was not shown to the public until 1995 in Great Britain. In an important way, it is the final chapter in an unofficial trilogy of concert films (along with Woodstock and Gimme Shelter) that together paint a picture of the highest and lowest points of Woodstock Nation politics: from mass goodwill to anarchy to outright stupidity. On the one hand, Message to Love is a rock & roll movie with several performances that are outright revelations (the Who's triumphant show, the Doors' "The End"), some that are awfully good (Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun"), and more than enough that are superfluous (Ten Days After, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Jethro Tull). On the other hand, Lerner's cameras are trained on the increasingly testy relationship between nomadic hippies who travel a long way to see the show but refuse to pay, and concert producers who resort to using guard dogs, cops, and aluminum walls to keep crashers at a distance. Just how bad does the mood become after several days of this? Check out the scene in which Joni Mitchell breaks down in tears after singing her ode to peace and love, "Woodstock," before this lot. In an era when we've become used to extraordinary security and high ticket prices at rock concerts, it's perhaps hard to grasp what the fuss was about at the Isle of Wight. But Lerner's amazing film helps a viewer get a sense of what was really at stake in that period before rock & roll was a corporate matter, and when kids naively thought it was theirs for the taking. --Tom Keogh
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