Super Ball IX is not Watkins Glen’s first music festival. In 1973 the site hosted Summer Jam, a “one-day” concert with The Band, The Allman Brothers Band, and The Grateful Dead. As you can imagine, that lineup had some serious drawing power. The promoters sold 150,000 tickets to the event – itself an unimaginable crowd – but three times that number also got in for free. To put that in Phish terms, take the crowd at The Clifford Ball, put it next to The Great Went crowd, stir in some Lemon wheel, and then add in the heat addled Camp Oswego population, the tired Cypressians, and the muddy It and Coventry people and you’d still be an entire festival crowd population short. This was the entire population of Baltimore or Seattle put into a concert grounds. It’s an event on a scale different than anyone would ever consider now.

When four times as many people showed up for your event as you planned for, some things will have to give. Any semblance of a parking plan ended quickly as people moved to the ditch your car somewhere and walk plan. Water, food, and bathrooms were all in short supply. As if that weren’t enough, the weather decided to add to the excitement. Incredible heat led to thunderstorms – The Band’s set was delayed by them – which then turned into bitter cold; according to a review in The Deadhead Taping Compendium, someone actually burned the portable toilets for heat. Due to the size of the event, most of the crowd had no hope of seeing the bands. Stand in the very band of the concert area this weekend and you’ll be closer to the stage than 90% of the crowd was at Summer Jam and they didn’t have high definition video screens.

What they did have was repeater speakers and a sense of adventure. Woodstock was a recent memory, still non-corrupted by its sequels. Parking your car somewhere along the miles of back roads trying to find the concert, and ending up completely covered in mud was considered almost a badge of honor.

A lot of the music of Summer Jam is lost to history. Recordings of The Allman Brothers and Band sets exist but are muddy and hard to find. The Band released an album called Live at Watkins Glen but it’s largely studio tracks with crowd noise and thunder overdubbed. Fortunately you can count on the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead to have their live shows get circulated everywhere. Both of Dead’s shows can be streamed on archive.org.

Wait. Both? More than the traffic and the rain and the crowds, Watkins Glen is known for its soundcheck. When The Band came out to practice the night before they were stunned to discover that there was a crowd already. They played a few songs and then The Allmans played a few songs and then The Dead played a few sets. You couldn’t get The Dead off of the stage in the mid 70s. When presented with a chance to entertain thousands of people, they played for nearly two hours in a low pressure environment; Phil frequently reminded the crowd that, “This is only a test,” and at one point reminded the crowd that this, “means you’ll forgive us anything tonight.”

The loose nature of the night was best represented by the free flowing twenty minute jam dropped in the middle of the second set. Starting out of some Phil and Jerry noodling, but it quickly picks up into a stunning theme. This is a quintessential 1973 jam. Jerry is playing soaring leads, Phil keeps a melodic counterpart, the rhythm section is tight, and odds are high that there might be a keyboard player in the mix somewhere. It combined beauty and energy and does so effortlessly, as though they could keep playing like this for hours. There’s a reason why the Grateful Dead compilation So Many Roads included this jam. If the entire rest of the festival had been canceled, attendees would have had their $10 worth just from this creation.

Eventually tests end, even ones as long as this one. July 28 came around and the real concert began. The Grateful Dead opened the show with a three-hour two set performance. The highlight of the first set is an exploratory “Playin’ in the Band” that tries to pick up where the previous night’s jam left off. The feel of the jam is different; instead of the loose nature of the soundcheck, this stays closer to a typical Grateful Dead moment. It doesn’t soar quite as high but for about two minutes they manage to channel the spirit. After a peak where Jerry was playing so fast that the melody almost became a white noise, it dropped into a pretty, albeit mellow, section. A patient build into the reprise finally ended the jam and the set.

The second set started out with a high energy “Around and Around” before meandering a bit. “Truckin’” brought things back up with its fun “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” jam in it. Things had loosened up by then, leading to a delicate “China>Rider” and a long “Eyes of the World.” It’s hard to let yourself go when playing to a crowd that large, but eventually The Dead were able to do it.

The Band followed, drawing the booby prize time slot. It poured so hard in the middle of their set that they had to shut things down after “Endless Highway” (with some amusing teases of Eric Clapton’s “Let It Rain” in the intro), forcing keyboardist Garth Hudson to play a solo piece while the rest of the band stayed dry. Sure they played hits such as “The Weight,” “Stage Fright,” and, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but it was “Slippin’ and a Slidin’” that described the scene best as people stumbled around in the mud.

Much like The Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band focused a lot of their set around improvisation, but instead of free flowing loose jams, they kept things going with a high energy blues based themes. This technique worked better on the shorter songs – “Blue Sky” got an especially nice mid-song break to the obvious delight of the crowd. Their new song “Ramblin’ Man” also was able to take advantage of the contrast between the pop song roots and the energy of the jam to create a powerful performance.

The set closer was the 24-minute tour de force of “Whipping Post.” Perhaps the highlight of the entire festival, the jam builds and ebbs, going down to almost nothing around 12 minutes in until a stunning theme is discovered a few minutes later. They build on this, bringing it up to a peak built out of blues intensity before slamming back into the main “Whipping Post” theme. With no way to go further up, the song ends with soulful singing from Gregg reminding us one last time that sometimes he feels like he’s dying. Even with the mediocre sound quality, the show is worth tracking down for this.

After eight hours of music from the three bands, the encore had everyone come on stage for a trio of “Not Fade Away,” “Mountain Jam,” “Johnny B. Goode.” It’s hard to avoid sloppiness with that many musicians on stage, but this isn’t about precision, it’s about fun and celebrating that they managed to pull off a concert this massive and chaotic with very few mishaps; the unfortunate death of Willard Smith in a skydiving stunt mishap – he was carrying flares and one set his clothes on fire – was the one tragedy of the event.

Summer Jam is a difficult act to follow but there are lessons that it can pass on to Super Ball IX. There are virtues in musical patience. Chaos can lead to beauty. Sometimes at the end of the night it can be fun to just get onstage with some friends and see what happens. And most of all, if you’re going to play “Whipping Post” at Watkins Glen, you had best bring it.