Remembering Woodstock: Bob Weir : Rolling Stone

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Bob Weir

It was raining toads when we played. The rain was part of our nightmare. The other part was our sound man, who decided that the ground situation on the stage was all wrong. It took him about two hours to change it, which held up the show. He finally got it set the way he wanted it, 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 great big blue spark about the size of a baseball, and I got lifted off my feet and sent back eight or ten feet to my amplifier.

The people were just glad to be entertained, to get their minds off the rain and mud, no matter what was happening. Had we played a good set, we probably would have transported them to another reality entirely. Some people made their careers at Woodstock, but we've spent about twenty years making up for it [Laughs]. It was probably the worst set we've ever performed. And to have performed it in front of a crowd that size as not an altogether fulfilling, experience.

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