Valvulado: The Dutch Woodstock

Historic live recordings from the Holland Pop Festival held in the Kralingen neighbourhood of Rotterdam, on 26-28 June 1970. The attendance was anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000.

One of the most successful of the first generation of European rock festivals was Kralingen Music Festival. Held less than a year after Woodstock its line-up was a stellar mix of the upper echelons of both British and American rock royalty including Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Byrds, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and the headlining Pink Floyd. The festival was filmed for a movie, usually known as Stamping Ground, which amongst other things featured a very young Al Stewart performing a very assured Zero She Flies, Jefferson Airplane at the height of their magickal powers performing a medley of White Rabbit/The Ballad of You and Me and Pooniel, and, of course Pink Floyd doing a monumentally groovy Saucerful of Secrets. But quite a lot of music was recorded that wasn't in the film, and people purchasing this very very cool 2CD 1DVD set will also be the proud owner of more live material from Pink Floyd, (Set your controls..) and some immeasurably rare artifacts from folk such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Dr John, Family and The Byrds in their most under-rated incarnation.

This festival was actually called HOLLAND POP or the Kralingen Music Festival since it was held in the Kralingen neighborhood of Rotterdam, Holland on the June 26, 27 & 28, 1970. Approximately 120,000 attended and it has often been billed as the European answer to Woodstock. A 100 minute video of some of it, STAMPING GROUND, has been around on and off since the days of VHS and features performances by Al Stewart, Dr. John, Family, T. Rex, Jefferson Airplane, The Flock, It's A Beautiful Day, Country Joe McDonald, The Byrds, and it's main calling card, Pink Floyd. A couple of performances (Floyd, Airplane, Family, Byrds, Dr. John, IABD) were also used in the rare Japanese LaserDisc 'PSYCHOMANIA' (not to be confused with a few films with the same title), a documentary on psychedelic music that originally aired on British cable TV. Some film clips are available on YouTube. The quality of STAMPING GROUND is fair at best and is only watchable due to the great music performances, although it's heads above the DVD debacle included with Akarma's Glastonbury Fayre Festival set. Anyone raving about the Glastonbury DVD must be working for the company! The company releasing this, GONZO Productions, have released some great decent looking DVD's including their The Lost Broadcast Series and YES: Union Live, to mention a few. Here's the track list from the GONZO site:

Interesting footnote courtesy of Wikipedia: "The Festival became an influential event, as it was the actual beginning of the Dutch tolerance policy towards marijuana. The many present undercover cops did not arrest any of the users or small traders: it became clear that there were just too many, and all of them peaceful......"

The Dutch Woodstock