Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970

EMERGING PICTURES AND LEGACY RECORDINGS
PRESENT DEBUT THEATRICAL SCREENINGS OF
LEONARD COHEN LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970

Emerging Pictures and Legacy Recordings have joined forces to present the U.S. theatrical premiere of a never-before-seen concert film from legendary singer/songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen. Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Murray Lerner, and with a running time of just over 60 minutes, Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 presents for the first time Cohen’s early morning performance in front of 600,000 people at this fabled UK concert. Interwoven with the live footage are brand-new interviews with fellow festival performers Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bob Johnston and Kris Kristofferson.

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 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 offstage in awe as the Canadian folksinger-songwriter-poet-novelist quietly tamed the crowd. Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner was able to capture Cohen’s performance.

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 novel¬ist 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.

Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 captures 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. The film’s director, Murray Lerner, is 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.

This release of Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 coincides with the next leg of Cohen’s first full-scale U.S. tour in 15 years, a concert event certain to top “Best of 2009” lists.