Neil Young "Restored" In New Woodstock Documentary

Woodstock: 3 Days of Music, Peace & Love

Neil Young is to be "restored" in a new Woodstock documentary.

In an interview with Warner Bros executive Bill Gerber in After 11 Years Pushing ‘A Star Is Born’, Producer Bill Gerber Is Restoring Neil Young In New Woodstock Documentary | Deadline by Mike Fleming Jr.:

One of them solves the lingering mystery of the absence of Neil Young in Woodstock, the 1970 Michael Wadleigh-directed documentary. Young will be seen in a new docu that Gerber is producing as a companion piece to the original, and the singer is reunited onscreen for the first time with ex-bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. Gerber is hard at work on a documentary that will be released within a re-release of the 1970 Michael Wadleigh-directed documentary chronicle of – sorry, Live Aid, Queen and Freddie Mercury — the most famous and infamous mass rock concert in history. Woodstock’s 50th anniversary arrives in August and Warner Bros is finalizing rerelease plans.

“The film has new interviews and is also the Young Men With Unlimited Capital story of John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, these two young guy who started Woodstock as a capital raise to build a recording studio,” Gerber said.

“There is also material no one has ever seen. Neil Young was not in the movie for a variety of reasons, until now. There is unseen footage of Janis Joplin and performance footage that hasn’t been seen. There are some great stories, like how Nelson Rockefeller was going to send in the National Guard to shut the festival down. Roberts and Rosenman had family in finance and banking and they got on the phone with the governor and pleaded with him to call off sending in the National Guard on that first Saturday.

Otherwise, the festival never would have happened.

And it would seem that's Neil Young's feelings towards that "helicopter day" only seemed to harden over the years. A quote from biographer Jimmy McDonough's Shakey has been bouncing around the blogs driven by a look at the flip-side of Woodstock in The Globe and Mail:

“Woodstock was a bullshit gig. A piece of shit. We played fuckin’ awful. No one was into the music. I think Stephen [Stills] was way overboard into the huge crowd. Everybody was on this Hollywood trip with the fuckin’ cameras. They weren’t playin’ to the audience as much as to the cameras…I could see everybody changing their performances for the fucking camera and I thought that was bullshit. All these assholes filming, everybody’s carried away with how cool they are…I wasn’t moved.”

In an interrview on Howard Stern Radio in 2014, Neil Young said about Woodstock:

“I didn’t like the fucking cameras, they didn’t have to be on stage. They’re cameras, ‘Hello! Use your zoom, dickhead!”

“Who cares? It doesn’t matter, I was there, I saw it. Who gives a shit? I couldn’t care less.”

More on Woodstock: The Day After with CSNY.

Also, see Tales of Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young at Woodstock.

Also, more on whether it was all just a hippie dream?

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