Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm

Six CD box-set with an 80 page perfect bound book included!

Much has been written about the significance of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair as a cultural event. Ironically, what has been least examined up to now is the very thing that brought nearly half a million together in 1969: the music itself. 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 and The Fish, and others.

To assemble the most comprehensive document of the myth-steeped weekend, the boxed set's co-producer Andy Zaxpored 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.

Another significant byproduct of the Woodstock - 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur's Farm boxed set is that, by virtue of its size and rigorously chronological sequence, it gets closer to a sense of the performances as they occurred in real time than any previous compilation. For the first time, the complete and accurate set lists will be available in the boxed set's booklet. Some Woodstock aficionados will be taken aback by the actual order of the performances; it differs from both various written accounts and from Michael Wadleigh's film Woodstock, which takes certain liberties with chronology in order to maintain its narrative flow.