Woodstock
At Woodstock, in addition to playing the main festival stage on Saturday, Quill spent the week preceding the festival living at the setup crew's camp at a nearby motel, providing entertainment for the collection of stage crew, hog farmers, and festival workers. Quill was also hired by festival promoters to play a series of goodwill concerts at nearby state prisons, mental institutions, and halfway houses as a gesture aimed at countering community concerns about the upcoming festival. (Note: In the history of Quill, this rated as one of the strangest tours. Though enjoyed by the band, there were moments of unpredictability as many members of the very animated audiences were either certifiably insane or 'doin' time', depending on the venue.)
In the run up to Woodstock, seeing the market potential of the buzz that the band had already created with press, pundits and fans, and it's coming appearance at the Festival with the potential for film exposure, Ahmet Ertegün President of Atlantic Records agreed to sign Quill in the summer of 1969 to their Cotillion label.
At the festival, after relentless, and torrential rain all Friday and through the night, the skies miraculously cleared just before the band was to play. On a still soaking stage, under a now beaming sun, the band played a 40 minute set of 4 songs ("That's How I Eat", "They Live the Life", "Waiting For You", and "Driftin'"), and was received enthusiastically by the mud-caked, but drying 500,000 person throng. As a result of its position as first on stage that day and the remaining disarray due to all of the rain, Quill missed a key opportunity to appear in the Woodstock film, although that was the original intent of Paret and the band. The band was filmed, but a glitch in the film/audio system made it such that the audio and film were not synchronized properly. This rendered the footage unusable for the now famous film that made so many acts household names. The problem was fixed in time for Santana the next band up and their appearance in the film sealed the band's later success.
Shortly after the festival, Quill self-produced and then released its first Cotillion album, which made some impact, but did not gain national attention. The fact that the Quill footage could not be used for the Woodstock movie seriously disappointed Ertegün and the band's record was never actively promoted, even though over the years it has attained some cult status.
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