In Defence Of Vinyl Giveaway: Win A Copy Of Leonard Cohen LP!
WWith the Holidays around the corner, Dotted Music continues making you delicious music presents. Today we are announcing In Defence Of Vinyl sweepstakes, giving you a chance to win a copy of Leonard Cohen Isle Of Wight 1970 LP, pressed on 180 gram audiophile vinyl. There are quite a few reasons to respect Coheen, who will receive lifetime achievement award at next year’s Grammys alongside with Michael Jackson, so give it a try even if his music is not your cup of tea.
I dubbed the giveaway “In Defence Of Vinyl” because of a strong personal passion for vinyl records. If you care about Technics axing its 1200 and 1210 turntables, or worry about low 12” sales – enter the giveaway as well, it’s so easy! And there is no better way to support vinyl than by adding more records to your vinyl collection.
What you need to get the prizek
The rules are similar to the STS9 giveaway.
Subscribe to Dotted Music blog using this RSS link, or subscribe via email (in the sidebar on the right side). On December 28th, I will publish a post with simple instructions on how to claim your giveaway entry. Only subscribers will see that post.
Remember, entering this sweepstakes gives you a pretty high chance to win, so subscribe now! I hope that you’ll enjoy the blog and find info from the feed informative enough to keep it landing into your RSS reader or email box even after the promotion ends.
Please note: this contest if for the US residents only.
The prize won’t be shipped until early January.
About the release
Leonard Cohen
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 sidestage 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 ostensibly there to record Miles Davis’ set, did a brilliant job of supervising Cohen’s live recording as well.
Leonard Cohen Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 is a fascinating and timely portrait of the artist as a young man, just three years into his recording career (though he was already a published poet and novelist for 15 years). As he mesmerizes the Isle Of Wight audience, Cohen intersperses a baker’s dozen songs with tales both real and apocryphal, as well as a handful of his poems. In pristine condition after nearly four decades in the archive, the video and audio programs will be available together as a deluxe two-disc DVD+CD package at all physical and digital retail outlets starting October 20th through Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. A double-LP vinyl set will be released on the same date.
Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 will also be available on Blu-ray, exclusively through Amazon.com.
The CD (and double-LP) of Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 represent the 77-minute concert set as performed by Cohen and his backup band: Bob Johnston (Cohen’s Nashville-based Columbia A&R staff producer), and Nashville musicians Charlie Daniels (electric bass, fiddle), Ron Cornelius (lead guitar), and Elkin ‘Bubba’ Fowler (bass, banjo). They were joined by backup singers Corlynn Hanney, Susan Musmanno, and Donna Washburn. During the course of their European tour – which Cohen only agreed to undertake if Johnston (producer of Cohen’s most recent LP, Songs From A Room) would manage him and organize the band – the group began to call themselves The Army, owing to the battles they were subjected to by audiences on the road.
The DVD (and Blu-ray) of Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 is a masterwork by Murray Lerner, known for his work on Festival!, his Oscar-nominated 1969 documentary of the Newport Folk Festivals. His work on that film spurred the Isle Of Wight promoters to bring him aboard and document their festival – whose violence turned it into the last of the three original Isle Of Wight festivals of 1968, 1969, and 1970. (Bob Dylan put the festival on the map when he performed there in 1968, his first public performance since recovering from his fabled motorcycle crash of 1966.)
Lerner’s Isle of Wight footage went unfunded for decades until 1995, when the multi-artist Message To Love (with its brief snippet of Cohen singing “Suzanne”) was finally issued on video. Since then, Lerner’s documentary-style Isle of Wight videos on the 1970 performances by Miles Davis, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix have inspired a new generation of music fans. In 1980, Lerner’s From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern In China won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 cover
Adding further historic provenance to Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 is a newly commissioned 2,000-word liner notes essay written by veteran British rock journalist and BBC commentator Sylvie Simmons. Author of well-received biographies on Neil Young (Reflections In Broken Glass, 2003), Serge Gainsbourg and others, Simmons previously wrote liner notes for the 2003 Sony International compilation MOJO Presents An Introduction To Leonard Cohen.
“Before he sang,” Simmons writes, “Cohen talked to the hundreds of thousands of people he couldn’t see. He told them – sedately – a story that sounded like a parable and a bedtime story, that worked like hypnotism and at the same time tested the temperature of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn’t much like circuses, but he enjoyed the part where a man would stand up and ask everyone to light a match so they could locate each other in the darkness. ‘Can I ask each of you to light a match,’ Leonard asked the audience, ‘so I can see where you all are?’”
UPDATE: The contest is now closed, and the winner is Hannah Turner. Congratulations!
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