[plain talk]

Drugging people against their will is not cool. Ask Jerry Garcia. Well you can’t because he’s dead. :-)

Garcia and Weir suffered from bad anxiety attacks before gigs. Jerry said in an interview he did not like being stoned at gigs because at a gig you are not free to do whatever you want in the moment. This is what he said long after the Acid Test concerts which were a different animal as they could play or not play.

Anyway Garcia ate some cake icing before Woodstock laced with LSD. He didn’t like having to perform in that condition not of his choosing. He later did not want the recordings released because they sounded so bad (and they did sound bad).

I know this seems counterintuitive based on what we know of the Dead and drugs but that’s what he said in interviews.

[dayglored]

The Dead's set at Woodstock was plagued by numerous serious issues, including a broken gear platform, heavy rain, bad grounding giving the band members serious electrical shocks, and reports of fireball lightning landing on-stage. That last item might have been a hallucination, but the others were all too real.

The set sucked. I say that as a member of a respected GD tribute band for 30 years. You can't play that music when all that other sh!t is going wrong.

[bigbob]

just look at how things worked out for Casey Jones