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1
Move Over - Live at McMahon Stadium, Calgary, Canada - July 1970
Janis Joplin
06:37
2
White Rabbit - Live at the Fillmore East, New York, NY - May 1968
Jefferson Airplane
02:59
3
Archangels Thunderbird - Live
Amon Düül II
03:16
4
Sympathy For The Devil - Live
The Rolling Stones
06:51
5
Young Man Blues - Remixed Live At Leeds Version
The Who, Andy Macpherson, Jon Astley
05:56
6
Born On The Bayou - Live in London
Creedence Clearwater Revival
04:46
7
Eight Miles High - Live at Colden Center Auditorium, Queens, NY - February 1970
The Byrds
16:02
8
Mona
Quicksilver Messenger Service
07:01
9
Death Don't Have No Mercy - Live at the Fillmore West San Francisco, 1969; 2001 Remaster
Grateful Dead
10:28
10
California
John Mayall
09:31
11
Old Black Snake - Live at Bickershaw Festival 07/05/1972
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
03:22
12
Down by the River - Live at the Cellar Door
Neil Young
04:24
13
Suzanne - Live at Isle of Wight Festival, UK
Leonard Cohen
04:18
14
Pleasant Street/You Keep Me Hanging On
Tim Buckley
07:58
15
Wake Up - Live
The Doors
01:24
16
I Don't Live Today - Live San Diego Sports Arena, May 25, 1969
Jimi Hendrix
07:21
17
1970 #4
The Stooges
02:38
18
Weasles Ripped My Flesh - Live At Town Hall, Birmingham, 5/30/69
The Mothers Of Invention
02:07
19
96 Tears - Live at CBGB
Suicide
03:48
20
The End
Nico
09:18

Love to Death (Live Version)

The rise and fall of the hippie movement... on stage.

The psychedelic movement followed three common stages of the LSD trip: come up, rush, come down. Three stages narrated in music through live recordings.

Come up

Singing with a warm and broken voice, Janis Joplin invites the Canadian audience to come and booze with her at her house in San Francisco. Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick thanks a spectator for offering her a cookie, before she starts singing a Lewis Caroll and Ravel-inspired ode to LSD. Amon Düül II are playing in London. Renate Knaup’s voice shouts a mystical delirium, accompanied by two drums in unison and an alien-sounding guitar. “You alright?” Jagger asks, sounding like he’s embodied the devil.

The Who transmute an old Mose Allison song into an electrified cymbal-charged hymn. The heavy and bewitching sound of John Fogerty’s guitar transports us to Louisiana, a land inhabited by spirits and sorcerers.

Rush

Swirls of notes and percussion... The Byrds improvise a long raga-influenced rock, inspired by Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane. Intense, mind-blowing, and even at times demanding.

Come down

The descent begins. Quicksilver Messenger Service revisits a Bo Diddley standard by slowing it down considerably. In a similar manner, Grateful Dead extend Reverend Gary Davis’ blues to turn it into a gigantic memento mori. John Mayall sings California over a haunting bass line. The improvisation turns melancholy, particularly when the roaring cries of the saxophone start to resonate. In the middle of the night, Beefheart launches into the blues in front of a huge mud puddle that separates him from the audience. Amongst them, an impressionable teenage Joe Strummer is changed forever. Neil Young sings with the desperation of a man ready to kill his girlfriend with a bullet in the head. Leonard Cohen plays, as the Isle of Wight Festival draws towards a gloomy failure, still unaware he would become the messiah in the imminent fall of the hippie movement. The imminence of this end is obvious in the baroque and tormented curses of Tim Buckley who, while already drowned in drugs and alcohol, will eventually lose his life to a drug overdose.

Bad trip

Jim Morrison shouts the words of a nightmare weaved in red hair and magical snakes. Hendrix pays tribute to the oppressed American Indians with “I Don’t Live Today”. His guitar screams, cries, convulses, seethes, agonizes. High on acid, Iggy Pop shouts out, climbs on spectators, spreads peanut butter on his chest, in front of the TV cameras. The Mothers Of Invention generate a deeply violent drone, by way of an end.

Epilog

With Suicide, a ’60s garage standard (“96 Tears”) comes across like an industrial shock punctuated by chilling imprecations. Nico resurrects the apocalypse of the Doors to make it an electronic and terrifying mass that shook the Tokyo public in 1986. The Velvet's muse died two years later coming off a bike, after a long fall through heroine.

The ’80s were the final completion of the hippie agony.

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