"this one may be arguable, but it seems evident to me after seeing video and audio, and some interviews, that the Stephen opener is not cut on the recordings, but was actually played that way - they just abandoned it early on."
Pardon the delayed response. I also think they just bailed, as on the tape. Though deadlists says there's an edit at 1:25, it's not apparent - there are some mix changes, as usual for the first song in a set. But strangely, the second verse is skipped - and with two singers, that would be difficult to do. The video is also useful - unfortunately, I can't find a video that shows the actual segue, but this is the Stephen: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drBPBUFnQAk> And Mama Tried, from the same camera: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eYnn6TufdU> (Notice that Bob & Phil are in exactly the same spot when Mama Tried starts as when Stephen ends, suggesting it is continuous.) I don't see an edit in the Stephen video either - BUT, there is a discrepancy. Compare the little guitar break between the two verses. It's different on the tape vs. the video. So it seems like there has to be an edit (perhaps the second verse was snipped) - though the video looks like an unbroken shot. One of the 8/16/69 files on the Archive notes, "there seem to be disguised splices in St. Stephen... It seems possible that power was cutting out at times causing this problem." So, if the second verse got neatly spliced out, perhaps the second half of the song did too.... But my feeling is that the Stephen>Mama Tried segue went down the way we hear it. The videos certainly look that way. The band was quite confused at the show, and I think they realized after a couple minutes that Stephen was going to be a mess, and decided to switch to something simpler. The Stephen>Mama Tried segue is unique to this show. It does seem fishy, but heck, it adds to the Woodstock mystique: "the show so bad they couldn't even finish St Stephen!" On the other hand, if we speculate that some tricky edit took out the second half of Stephen, we have to ask - how did the song end? Stephen never just ended, it always segued. In 1969, it nearly always went into the Eleven. (A couple times it went into Lovelight.) There's no way that happened at Woodstock. If they didn't segue into Mama Tried, the song likely collapsed into a complete trainwreck (or perhaps the power went out altogether), which may be why that part would be edited out. Take your pick!
