Life is a delicate balance between good and bad, something Kris Kristofferson was keenly aware of as he played his first U.K. gig (and one of his first gigs ever) to an angry crowd of around half a million people on August 26, 1970. Unwelcoming audience members aside, the experience was one small part of Kristofferson’s meteoric rise to fame around the turn of the decade.
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Still, not letting a crowd like that disaffect you is no small task, even for a rough-and-tumble ex-Army Ranger.
Kris Kristofferson Called His First U.K. Gig “Insane”
The Isle of Wight Festival, a hedonistic, historical, chaotic counterculture hub located on Afton Down on the western side of England’s Isle of Wight, began on Wednesday, August 26, 1970. Festival organizers sought to make an event that defined the new decade, much like Woodstock had defined the final years of the 1960s the previous August. Big-name acts like The Who, The Doors, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, and Jimi Hendrix played. Kris Kristofferson, an up-and-coming songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee, opened the festival, too.
For Kristofferson, who had never performed in the U.K. before and had only played a handful of clubs before the massive festival, the Isle of Wight was both his biggest and most unnerving crowd thus far in his career. “It was a total disaster,” Kristofferson put it bluntly in a Q&A with Classic Rock. “We paid our own way to come over, stayed in a crummy hotel on the island. They just hated us; they hated everything. They booed us, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Sly Stone; they threw s*** at Jimi Hendrix. At the end of the night, they were tearing down the outer walls, setting fire to the concessions, burning their tents, shouting obscenities. Peace and love it was not.”
Joni Mitchell had a similar experience on stage during her set on Saturday, August 29. Hecklers began booing Mitchell and telling her to smile with such veracity that she abruptly stopped her set and addressed the crowd. “Maybe I’m kinda weird, but when I’m sitting up here playing, and I hear all those people growling out there, it really puts me up tight. I forget the words, and then I get nervous, and it’s really a drag. Just give me a little help, will you?”
The Songwriter Said Only One Artist Fared Well
Between the technical problems on stage and the increasingly irate audience, artists struggled to get through their Isle of Wight Festival sets with their egos intact. Kris Kristofferson and Joni Mitchell weren’t the only ones. Political protests stunted the final songs of Sly and the Family Stone’s set. Jimi Hendrix was dealing with equipment malfunctions. According to Kristofferson (who, for whatever it’s worth, had a much warmer welcome when he returned with his full band for a second set), the only artist who didn’t get chewed up and spit up by the crowd was, surprisingly, Leonard Cohen.
“It was strange,” Kristofferson recalled in a 2004 interview. “I love Leonard. But I thought they were going to kill him because they had been so s**** to Jimi. He never did get ‘em going. By the time they got to Leonard, it was like four in the morning on the last day. They were burning down the concession stands and tearing the walls down, and they all wanted a free concert, which was unreasonable, because they had a lot of people there that they were paying. Not me, but a lot of people.”
“My guitarist, Zal Yanovsky, and I stayed up to hear Leonard. He came out of his dressing room in his pajamas with a raincoat on, and he took 20 minutes on stage just tuning up. I thought, ‘They’re going to kill him.’ And he charmed the beast. He, for whatever reason, you know, they listened to him. They loved him.”
Photo by Al Clayton/Getty Images
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