8/16/69. Max Yasgur's dairy farm, Bethel, NY.

The Grateful Dead at Woodstock. So many tales. By pretty much all accounts, their performance was an absolute disaster, as the band was plagued by equipment problems, drugs, intrusions from onlookers, and understandable nerves.

A mixdown from the multitrack master surfaced in 2004 on the Archive via a Bill Koucky transfer. It quickly became the gold standard of this show to circulate, and rightly so—it’s a near perfect professional recording and in stereo to boot. The new mix features 14 minutes of mint stage chaos before and after the music, led by Chip Monck and Ken Babbs, tag teaming on the stage mic.

A tape cut takes us to the start of the Dead’s set—sandwiched between Mountain and Credence Clearwater Revival. Everyone is on stage now; Weir can be heard commenting that it’s “kind of zappy up here,” the result of Owsley changing the wiring for the stage prior to the ​band’s set, yet somehow managing to improperly ground the stage equipment in the process. The music begins with St. Stephen, which is quickly abandoned before the “Lady finger” bridge, as Jerry leads the band into an upbeat Mama Tried.

Garcia: “You want it louder?” “Can’t hear your voices!” someone shouts. “Yeah,” answers Jerry, “presumably somebody’s working on it.”

Weir: “It’s a sinister plot!”

The show stops dead as Owsley gets to work figuring out the problem. In the meantime, we get ten minutes of chatter while the issues with the sound system are worked out. Jerry dolefully asks, “Can you throw some of those lights out there, man, wherever you are? There’s nothing out here but this enormous void with little fires.” Babbs takes over and regales the crowd with a lengthy psychedelic monologue, somehow holding things together pretty well.

Country Joe MacDonald marshals the microphone and gives an update about the brown acid: “Now, if you’ve taken it already, don’t worry because you’re not poisoned and you won’t die. But if you haven’t taken it, I would recommend that you don’t take it – just listen to the music and wait ‘til you can get some stuff that you know is good, if that’s your inclination. That’s called common sense!” “Country common sense,” adds Babbs, “from us folks out in the Bay City!” The crowd applauds.

Sound issues resolved, the Dead go with Dark Star. It only clocks in at 19 minutes, but gels nicely halfway through, before sliding into a gorgeous post-verse jam with a bright Garcia/Lesh/Kreutzmann peak—clearly the highlight of the performance. Jerry skips the second verse and moves into High Time again. It’s an ambitiously quiet song under these circumstances; the band doesn’t even seem distracted when Phil’s amp picks up some helicopter-radio chatter in the middle of the song, before Garcia sings “nothing’s for certain, it can always go wrong…” The song ends to a small smattering of applause.

The boys conclude their Woodstock set with Turn on Your Lovelight which, at over 38 minutes, is one of the longest ever. On the whole, it’s not an inspired version. The music rambles for the majority of it, with minor Pigpen raps and not a lot of full-band jamming. Jerry seems to be in a good way however and manages to pull off some nice licks here and there.

And there you have it. Many have and continue to describe this performance as the worst Grateful Dead show ever, but this is an over-exaggeration. I revisit it every year, at least for a run through the Dark Star, which is pretty goddamn good.

Bear tape: archive.org/details/gd1…