| The Globe and Mail / CanadaBefore there was ever Live Aid or Band Aid or Farm Aid, even before George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, there was the concert that launched Greenpeace.The Amchitka concert CDs are an aural time capsule. To listen in is to eavesdrop on a special moment 39 years in the past when Phil and James and Joni were impassioned by a cause (and, in the latter pair’s case, by love).On headphones, it sounds as if you’re sitting just offstage. You can even hear audience cries…Continue reading… |
| Rolling Stone MagazineWilliam HermesThis two-CD set documents a 1970 Vancouver fundraiser that sent a boatload of protesters off to halt nuclear-bomb tests on Alaska’s Amchitka Island — the first example of Greenpeace-style activism. The concert was sweet and stirring: Phil Ochs is in fine voice despite tape noise; ditto a 22-year-old James Taylor, showcasing his brand-new Sweet Baby James. But the night belonged to a giggly, incandescent Joni Mitchell, previewing songs from her future classic Blue. Choice moment: “Big…Continue reading… |
| No Depression / USAMichael BerickI have been listening recently to the Amchitka concert CD (www.amchitka-concert.com) that got its long overdue release late last year. This live double disc documents the historic October 16 1970 show that launched Greenpeace. Money raised from this Vancouver, British Columbia benefit concert was used to buy a boat (later named the Greenpeace) that served to successfully protest U.S. nuclear bomb tests by…Continue reading… |
| Uncut/UKAdam SweetingThree artists: one causeOn October 16, 1970, Greenpeace was launched into the world at a concert at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, with the specific intention of funding a Greenpeace boat to said to Amchitka (in the Aleutians) to stop the H-bomb tests. Phil Ochs, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell rallied to the flag, Ochs a stalwart of the Greenwich Village folk scene, delivers a batch a batch of earnest protest strumalongs including Rhythms of the…Continue reading… |
| Sonicboomers.com Steve HochmanIf the spirit of the ‘60s came to a thudding end on Dec. 6, 1969 at Altamont — as the conventional wisdom goes — it may have been reborn in new form on Oct. 16, 1970 at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum. That’s where what we now know as the environmental organization Greenpeace was launched to public attention. That benefit event was headlined by Canada’s own Joni Mitchell, right as she crossed the cusp from folkie naïf to being a genre unto herself, a second voice-of-the-new-generation…Continue reading… |