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 of 600,000 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.

As Cohen followed Hendrix's set, onlookers and (fellow festival headliners) Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins and others stood sidestage in awe as the Canadian folksinger-songwriter-poet-novelist quietly tamed the crowd. Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner (From Mao To Mozart, Festival, Message To Love) perfectly captured Cohen's perfor­mance. Likewise, Columbia Records staff A&R producer Teo Macero did a brilliant job of supervising the live audio recording.

This DVD/CD package contains the new film documentary by Lerner featuring interviews with fellow festival performers, as well as Cohen's full performance on CD. All tracks are previously unreleased (sans bits of “Suzanne” which were featured in the documentary Message to Love, also by Lerner). Included are live versions of classic songs from the first two Leonard Cohen LPs: “So Long, Marianne,” “The Stranger Song,” “Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye,” “Suzanne,” “Bird On The Wire,” “You Know Who I Am,” and “The Partisan” as well as spoken word and poetry.

Tracklist

1. Introduction
2. Bird On A Wire
3. Intro to So Long, Marianne
4. So Long, Marianne
5. Intro: “Let's renew ourselves now…”
6. You Know Who I Am
7. Intro to Poems
8. Lady Midnight
9. They Locked Up A Man (poem)/A Person Who Eats Meat/Intro
10. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong
11. The Stranger Song
12. Tonight Will Be Fine
13. Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye
14. Diamonds In The Mine
15. Suzanne
16. Sing Another Song, Boys
17. The Partisan
18. Famous Blue Raincoat
19. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy

CD:

1. Diamonds In The Mine
2. Famous Blue Raincoat
3. It's A Large Nation
4. Bird On A Wire
5. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong
6. The Stranger Song
7. Tonight Will Be Fine
8. They've Surrounded The Island
9. Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye
10. Sing Another Song, Boys
11. Judy Collins Introduces SUZANNE
12. Suzanne
13. Joan Baez on The Isle of Wight
14. The Partisan
15. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy
16. CREDITS: So Long, Marianne