On Monday, Dead & Company performed in Bethel Woods, New York at the site of the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. Their performance 52 years ago was infamously plagued by a confluence of problems that Bobby Weir once said was "was probably the worst set we've ever performed." Of course Weir was exaggerating, but it wasn't a high point in the band's storied career either. So Monday, Dead & Company had a re-do of the same song sequence and the results were wonderful. Setlist below after the music. Here's Bobby Weir on what happened at Woodstock, from a 1989 interview quoted today in Rolling Stone:
"It was raining toads when we played," Weir told Rolling Stone in 1989. "The rain was part of our nightmare. The other part was our sound man, who decided that the ground situation on stage was all wrong. It took him about two hours to change it, which held up the show."
"He finally got it the way he wanted it," he continued, "but every time I touched my instrument, I got a shock. The stage was wet, and the electricity was coming through me. I was conducting! Touching my guitar and the microphone was nearly fatal. There was a big blue spark about the size of a baseball, and I got lifted off my feet and sent back eight to 10 feet to my amplifier."
front page thumbnail: crop of "Dead & Company at Madison Square Garden on November 1, 2015" by Brianga (CC BY-SA 4.0)
