As the historic festival marks its 40-year anniversary, Rhino presents WOODSTOCK-40 YEARS ON: BACK TO YASGUR'S FARM, a 77-song, six-CD boxed set that features the most comprehensive collection ever available of artists that performed at the original festival, sequenced in chronological order of performance, featuring 38 previously unreleased recordings, including the Grateful Dead, The Who, Tim Hardin, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & The Fish, and others.
To assemble the most comprehensive document of the myth-steeped weekend, the boxed set's co-producer Andy Zax pored over every inch of multitrack tape in search of the strongest parts of each of the 33 sets. ‘The way we approached all of the material was as if it was a cinema verite documentary-the raw record of the event,’ Zax says. In addition to the music, the set offers considerable amount of ancillary material sprinkled throughout the discs-stage announcements, lysergic babble, the sounds of rain, a cameo appearance by Abbie Hoffman, and the graciousness of Max Yasgur's address to the crowd, heard for the first time in its entirety.