Andy Zax, Music Reissue Producer on Woodstock '69 Festival interviewed by Brendan Toller

WPKN Music, Arts, and Culture Podcast

Andy Zax is an American music historian and a producer of music reissues.

As a producer of boxed sets and archival music reissues, Zax has been responsible for restoring and remastering the catalogues of Talking Heads, Rod Stewart, Echo & The Bunnymen, Television, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, The Sisters Of Mercy, David Axelrod and Lee Hazlewood, among others. His reissues of once-obscure cult favorites such as Television's Marquee Moon, John Cale's Paris 1919, Judee Sill and Heart Food by Judee Sill have successfully brought those albums to larger audiences that had eluded them upon their initial release, while his exploration of record company tape vaults has yielded discoveries such as the lost masters of Johnny Mathis's 1981 Chic-produced I Love My Lady.

In late 2005, Zax visited a Warner Brothers tape storage space in Los Angeles and encountered dozens of boxes of one-inch eight-track recordings from the Woodstock Festival. "From the moment I saw those tapes", he said, "I was like, 'Oh my God, there's so much more than I'd ever thought'", he said. "It was clear to me that no one was exploring this stuff and dealing with it in totality. Here was this vast trove of material not treated correctly."

In 2009, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, Zax produced the boxed set Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm, for which he was nominated for a Grammy for Best Historical Album.