  Eddie Kramer recorded the Woodstock Festival for both the album and the movie.
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NEW YORK -- Even before any musician knew that Woodstock was going to be pop culture history, the now-legendary music festival was not just about the music.
So says Mike Carabello, percussionist for Santana, which played Woodstock on Aug. 16, 1969. Still an active ensemble under co-founder Carlos Santana, the group was one of several acts which burst out of the Woodstock weekend.
The music, Carabello says now on the 40th anniversary, was not even always great. "You could see that there were a lot of people who were just too tired, who had been up too long," Carabello says of members of his group and others he watched from the sidelines. Even "minus the drugs," the conditions were just too chaotic, he says.
"But it was not so much about the music," Carabello says. "It was about what happened. What's that saying? Often imitated, never duplicated. There it is! You can't copy something that just happened. It's never been duplicated again. It'll never happen again, not like that. It wasn't about the music. It was about a vibe that was going on."
The music, however, does still resonate. The man responsible is a living legend, audio engineer and producer Eddie Kramer. Sitting inside a claustrophobic trailer which served as his recording studio, Kramer recorded 99% of the music played that fateful weekend 40 years ago.
Kramer, born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1941, had earned the right. In his 20s, in London, he was recording Sammy Davis Jr., Petula Clark and The Kinks. Later he engineered albums for Traffic, Small Faces, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Moving to New York in 1968, he continued to work with Hendrix, as well as Vanilla Fudge, Joe Cocker and Led Zeppelin. The Hendrix connection led to Woodstock.
"That's how I got to do the recording of all of this," Kramer says, "because Hendrix was going to close the show and I had done a lot of his recordings. 'Get Kramer: We'll send his ass up there for the weekend!'"
Many Woodstock acts were inexperienced, Kramer remembers, citing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Santana and Sha Na Na. "It made them!"
There were problems, sometimes with musicians, sometimes with the conditions they were forced to play in, Kramer says. But quality still emerged. "On a scale of 10, I'd say 7 for the amount of artists who were able to deliver great performances. There were some shaky performances on some of the other ones."
Tom Constanten of Grateful Dead admits his group was an offender. "We didn't think we played particularly well," Constanten says, adding that Jerry Garcia was especially upset. But the Dead still loved the overall experience, Constanten adds. "This one time there was lightning in the bottle. Things were lined up. The moon was in the seventh house."
Kramer, calling Woodstock "a battlefield" and "three days of drugs and hell," says his own work was a challenge. "It was pretty rough out there." Yet he remains pleased. "I was surprised we were able to get as many good performances, under the circumstances."
Not all have been heard since. "There are 40 years of history here," Kramer says, "so there are legal wranglings between members of bands who are still alive. Then you have legal wranglings between their lawyers and the record companies and the film company. It's best that that stuff gets put off to one side. You have to deal with it but you try not to let it get in the way."
The goal, Kramer says, is to continue to put the pressure on to get more songs released to the public. Even 40 years later, Woodstock is not over.
