Nearly 40 summers ago on August 31, 1970, 35-year-old Leonard Cohen was awakened at 2 a.m. from a nap in his trailer and brought onstage to perform with his band at the third annual Isle Of Wight music festival. The audience of 600,000 was in a fiery and frenzied mood, after turning the festival into a political arena, trampling the fences, setting fire to structures and equipment – and stoked by the most incendiary performance of Jimi Hendrix’s career, less than three weeks before his death.
As Cohen followed Hendrix’s set, onlookers (and fellow festival headliners) Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins and others stood at the side of the stage in awe as the Canadian folksinger-songwriter-poet-novelist quietly tamed the crowd. Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner, whose footage of the 1970 festival did not begin to see release until 1995, was able to capture Cohen’s performance. Likewise, Columbia Records staff A&R producer Teo Macero, who was actually there to record Miles Davis’ set, did a brilliant job of supervising Cohen’s live recording.
The CD/DVD format of this release contains the new documentary by Lerner and the full performance on CD. All tracks are previously unreleased, except for a part of "Suzanne" which was featured in the documentary Message To Love, also by Lerner. Included are live versions of classic songs from the first two Cohen LPs as well as spoken word and poetry.
