Dead On This Date MIT 5/6/70, Steve Winwood Tribute
Time
Artist
Song
Album [Format]
Misc
Misc –
REQ:Request
LIVE:Live version
BiT:Band in town or area this week
S-REQ:Substitute request same artist
B'day:Artist birthday tribute
NEW:New Release
( ):Label, Year Rec/Rel
On this date 38 years ago, May 6, 1970, it was a national day of protest at colleges across the country, including the M.I.T. campus. Students were protesting the escalation of the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, and especially, the tragic killing of four anti-war protesters by U.S. National Guard troops just two days earlier, May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio.
Comment:
The Grateful Dead were scheduled to play a paid concert in M.I.T.'s Dupont Gym the following night. However, they were already in the area the day before, and they set up outdoors on M.I.T.'s Kresge Plaza in front of the Stratton Student Center to play a free afternoon concert for the crowd at the anti-war protest rally.
Comment:
This M.I.T. campus radio station, then known as WTBS (now WMBR), was patched into the soundboard and recorded a mono reel tape of the concert which has been in the station library archives since then. In 2000, I lent the tape to David Gans, producer and host of the official nationally syndicated Grateful Dead Hour, who digitally remastered it and featured it on his program that summer. For the 38th anniversary of the concert today, I played three tracks from the remastered version.
In honor of Steve Winwood being awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College in Boston this weekend, I did a brief retrospective of his musical career. Steve Winwood performs on all of the following tracks:
