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Set 1:
Smokestack Lightning
Cryptical Envelopment
Drums
The Other One
Cryptical Envelopment
Turn On Your Love Light

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Comments:

This was a really big show:

1. Santana
2. Jefferson Airplane
3. Grateful Dead
4. Elvin Bishop Group
5. Creedence Clearwater Revival
6. Bangor Flying Circus
7. Aum
-Anonymous (10/29/2021)

From Rolling Stone Magazine, August 1969:

The Dead didn’t get it going Wednesday night at Winterland, and that was too bad. The gig was a bail fund benefit for the People’s Park in Berkeley, and the giant ice-skating cavern was packed with heads. The whole park hassle – the benefit was for the 450 busted a few days before – had been a Berkeley political trip all the way down, but the issue was a good-timey park, so the crowd, though older and more radical than most San Francisco rock crowds, was a fine one in a good dancing mood, watery mouths waiting for the groove to come. The Airplane were on the bill too, so were Santana, the Act of Cups, Aum, and a righteous range of others; a San Francisco all-star night, the bands making home-grown music for home-grown folks gathered for a home-grown cause.

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But the Dead stumbled that night. They led off with a warm-up tune that they did neatly enough, and the crowd, swarmed in luminescent darkness, sent up “good old Grateful Dead, we’re so glad you’re here,” vibrations. The band didn’t catch them. Maybe they were a bit tired of being taken for granted as surefire deliverers of good vibes – drained by constant expectations. Or they might have been cynical – a benefit for those Berkeley dudes who finally learned what a park is but are still hung up on confrontation and cops and bricks and spokesmen giving TV interviews and all that bullshit. The Dead were glad to do it, but it was one more benefit to bail out the politicos.

Maybe they were too stoned on one of the Bear’s custom-brewed elixirs, or the long meeting that afternoon with the usual fights about salaries and debt priorities and travel plans for the upcoming tour that they’d be making without a road manager, and all the work of being, in the end, a rock and roll band, may have left them pissed off. After abortive stabs at “Doing That Rag” and “St. Stephen,” they fell into “Lovelight” as a last resort, putting Pigpen out in front to lay on his special brand of oily rag pig-ism while they funked around behind. It usually works, but not that night. Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman, the drummers, couldn’t find anything to settle on, and the others kept trying ways out of the mess, only to create new tangles of bumpy rhythms and dislocated melodies. For the briefest of seconds a nice phrase would pop out, and the crowd would cheer, thinking maybe this was it, but before the cheer died, the moment had also perished. After about twenty minutes they decided to call it quits, ended with a long building crescendo, topping that with a belching cannon blast (which fell right on the beat, the only luck they found that night), and split the stage.
-Doin' That Rag (12/13/2021)

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