Last week, I found a listing of a video of the 5/3/70 show in the Wesleyan library media collection. I doubted that it was for real. Fortunately, a local correspondent went to see the video, and brought back a surprising report:
It's a black & white film, about 65 minutes long, documenting many of the events of the day on Foss Hill. It was filmed by a handheld camera; the sound is often muffled or unclear; the picture quality is poor, with many edits or stoppages, lines, wobbles & breakups; many songs are skipped, and it was distant from the stage, making the band a bit hard to see. The first 15-20 minutes of the film shows the crowd growing on Foss Hill. It was a chilly day, sometimes raining. There's a brief shot of an opening band, Swamp Gas, as an equipment crew sets up the stage. Then there's an open-mic period with announcements and speeches about the protests, and a kazoo band playing Silent Night. Over 25 minutes into the film, sometime in the afternoon, Garcia & Weir appear to do an acoustic set, minus the rest of the band. Weir announces, "Phil and Mickey are still on their way from upstate New York." We see two songs, Deep Elem Blues and Silver Threads & Golden Needles. An unknown harmonica player plays with them. They're playing on the top of a flatbed truck, to the quiet crowd seated on blankets. Then we cut to the NRPS set, sometime later in the evening after dark. Garcia's on pedal steel, and we get three songs Workingman's Blues, Last Lonely Eagle & Truck Drivin' Man. The sound, while bad, is still better than our audio tape. Then, about 50 minutes in, we cut to the start of the Dead's set Hard to Handle, China Cat (cut after 30 seconds), I Know You Rider. The sound's pretty bad, and also the camerawork, as the crowd stands up & cries out. Makeshift stage lights were set up, which leave the band mostly in shadow. Garcia is quite animated in the Hard to Handle solo, moving around with pelvic thrusts. Weir starts an audience clap-along at the end of Rider. Then the video cuts abruptly to a short experimental film and about a minute of an indoor poetry reading. Some of you may already have suspected, but we actually have a partial SBD tape of the acoustic set! It's the one misdated 5/9/70 - <http://archive.org/details/gd70-05-09.sbd.cotsman.9770.sbeok.shnf> You can hear Weir's announcement at the start, and the harmonica player throughout; two songs are the same as on the video; and there's an announcement at the end about the free food running out at the first aid station (also mentioned on the video & audience tape). It's unquestionably the same show. Unfortunately, it cuts there after only 4 songs: Deep Elem, Friend of the Devil, Silver Threads, Black Peter. There's no telling how this tape originated, or came into circulation, or got mislabeled. If only more of it existed! The poor audience tape we have was made by students for a sociology class project. It starts during the NRPS set, but misses the first few songs of the Dead's set, picking up again at Me & My Uncle (around 9:30 at night). The taper helpfully says that Good Lovini' is the seventh song, so we know four were played before Me & My Uncle, and the video captures two of those. Needless to say, the deadlists entries for these two shows should be updated at some point. (The free Wesleyan show, by the way, was played outdoors on Foss Hill, not in the Fieldhouse.)
