Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys at the Woodstock farm
During the spring of 1968, Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys lived on Manhattan’s lower east side. They were the house band at the Electric Circus. The way banjo player Charlie Chin tells it, Bob Smith, the keyboard player, began to promote the idea that everybody was going up to the country. The band’s mantra became, “Yeah, let’s move up to the country.” Charlie was a city cat and hated the country. His space was defined by a bustling cityscape, but he was outvoted. The band soon rented Pan Copeland’s farmhouse on the outskirts of Woodstock for $90 per month. They later learned that it was haunted, but they were penniless so they stuck it out. The field back of the house was a natural amphitheater. Cat Mother became the host band for the Woodstock Sound-Outs in the summer of 1968. They invited acts of their acquaintance to perform, like Tim Hardin, Jerry Jeff Walker, and David Bromberg. No money was exchanged, but the acts could camp out or stay at the band’s 17-room farmhouse and eat from the huge stewpot that was always warming on the range. The word went out via the underground. The Sound-Outs were all about peace, love, and sharing.
This was all happening in the summer before the 1969 mega-festival in Bethel. According to Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock,” Michael Lang attended these Sound-Outs, and they sparked his thinking about doing a similar “Woodstock” event.
~ Weston Blelock
i’m more often than not scurrying about the internet the majority of the evening which means I usually tend to peruse a bunch, which is not commonly a good option as a large amount of the sites I visit are composed of unproductive waste copied from several other websites a trillion times, however I have to give you credit this blog is really not bad at all and also supplies some genuine substance, for that reason thanks for stopping the trends of basically duplicating other peoples’ websites, if you ever want to play a few hands of facebook poker with me just send me a message – you have my email address 🙂
Will do.
As Cat Mother drummer Michael Equine tells it, they didn’t make it to the big Woodstock festival because their manager refused to authorize a helicopter to fly them in from London, Ontario, and the radio news said the roads were impassable. Michael said the manager told them (paraphrasing) Look, you just played the Atlanta festival, the ____ festival, and the one in Ontario, so what’s so important about one more rock festival. As a result, the band soon packed up their families and belongings in a collection of old vans and school buses and headed west, where they recorded their 2nd album at a studio in San Francisco. Then half the band headed north to Mendocino, while the other half, including Chinn and Larry Packer, returned to New York. Cat Mother recorded two more albums for Polydor before splitting up in 1973, then holding reunion gigs for the next 10 years or so. Bob Smith and Roy Michaels, the two leaders, have both died. Michael Equine just moved to Arkansas. Find him on Facebook. He has CDs of the four Cat Mother albums. Cat Mother was famous for holding “outdoor boogies” in Mendocino, no doubt inspired by the Sound-Outs. They dominated the music scene in Mendocino for several years, and toured West Coast clubs from there. More info on my website. I registered http://www.catmother.com, but have not developed a site yet.