Every once in a while, live Grateful Dead spontaneously produced what seems like a perfect, finished composition. This one is arguably the greatest example of what I've started calling Dead "chamber music". Suddenly the band is a string trio, it sounds like they are bowing their instruments, and the piece they are playing is moody and gorgeous. It's 1972's sophisticated update of the gentle drones that concluded "Feedback" in 1969. Why wasn’t there more of this?
Cover image by Saul Steinberg
Cover illustration by Luigi Serafini, from "Storie Naturali"
The Dead played this show on my birthday, an easy drive from where I lived at the time. Unfortunately, I was turning eight years old and wasn’t paying attention. But that’s okay, because the gift waited patiently for me to finally unwrap it.
Although this show has escaped The Dead’s generous approach to releasing Fall 1973 recordings, it has as much superb material in it as nearly any of them.
My curation is built around two uninterrupted pieces of the second set. My arrangement of other songs around those pieces follows The Dead’s lead, when they decided to play a couple of first set songs in the middle of a fantastic second set “Playin’” jam.
Parts of this show only circulate as audience recordings. The soundboard of everything else captures a rather wonderful mix, but for some reason the frequency spread of the circulating soundboard is all out of whack. It comes across as brittle, shrill, sterile, stabby, insubstantial, etc. I don’t know if this is a feature of the master tape or of a transferring snafu somewhere down the line.
But fear not! I obtained a FLAC file and gave it enough of a re-EQ to turn down the stabby and to bring up the warmth and depth, until it became a fully immersive Fall 1973 experience. Happy birthday.
90-minute 320kbps mp3 mix here
Here are 70 minutes of highlights from an unreleased show, captured in a well-balanced SBD mix. Detailed comments under the track list.
This is the next-to-last show of the March tour of the Northeast, which began mid-month in Uniondale, NY. The March 24 show in Philadelphia was released as "Dave's Picks #32," and final show of the tour – April 2, Boston - was released as “Dave’s Picks” #21.
There are some obvious flaws in the material I’ve judged best from this show but it’s not for lack of The Dead trying and generally succeeding wonderfully. The sound of the mix/tape is great for instruments and not too hard on group vocals.
70-minute mp3 mix here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/khddft26pjbfem7/GD%20shortlist%2073-03-31.zip?dl=0
Points of interest:
This is the only instance of “I Know You Rider” NOT following “China Cat Sunflower” between late 1971 and late 1985. The performance of the song itself isn’t fantastic, but the three minutes between the end of “Space” and the first word of “Rider” are noteworthy. They begin a free-form jam (which an audience member recognizes and gets vocally excited about) that morphs into the “Feelin’ Groovy” jam, leading to “Rider.”
The band was clearly into messing around with the “China > Rider” continuum in early ’73. On 2/24, they jammed into the transitional “Feelin’ Groovy” jam out of a bass solo, then brought it down to quiet before launching “Sugar Magnolia.” On 2/17, they jammed out of “Here Comes Sunshine” into “China Cat Sunflower.” There may be other mutations in March that I’ve never heard.
“The Other One” is strong out of the gate, flags for a couple of minutes, then builds wonderfully through the second half, including a dance with “The Spanish Jam” that has some great moments.
This is the sixteenth performance of “They Love Each Other,” and it’s clicking well.
“Mississippi Half-Step”: Sooner or later, I will make an instrumental edit of every Dead song, just to hear what it sounds like and to see how long it turns out to be.
Most “Casey Jones” are too thumpy and stabby for me, but I really like this crisp, swinging performance.
Cover art: Detail from Max Weber, “New York at Night”
For their first tour of 1973, The Dead were in the Midwest from the middle to the end of February. After two weeks off, they toured the Northeast from the middle of March through April 2.
The tour started with three shows at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York on the 15th, 16th, and 19th, excerpts from which are combined here. These shows remain unreleased.
This run, and the 16th in particular, has numerous excellent “smaller songs,” but the mix posted here is a continuation of the jammy mashups I posted of the February shows.
Aside from the edits that are obvious from the track list, the only things I’ve cut out that interrupt continuous Dead performances are two noodly-to-shrieky spaces that offered nothing special and broke the momentum.
A pretty “Dark Star” that’s not sure how solid it wants to get nonetheless comes to a swelling climax, then gives way to an autonomous six-minute jam, which then slides back into a perfectly executed “Dark Star” verse. Several minutes of unorthodox, wandering around jamming ensues, leading into “Truckin.”
This is one of the earliest performances of “Truckin’” transitioning into the “Nobody’s Fault” jam.
This 3/15 “Eyes” jam was the sonic rescue mission of this mix. It is easily one of the most involving and successful (and yet unique) of the early performances, but the soundboard of it has many dramatic volume fluctuations. I’ve fixed those pretty well and want to advise you that the performance overwhelms the sonic gremlins that remain.
The other two 3/15 songs are likewise exceptional. “China Doll” has many exquisite details. “The Other One” is aggressively adventurous and almost becomes a separate jam. The 3/15 soundboard has the drums mixed way too loud, but on “The Other One” and the “Eyes” jam, this is a plus, and it doesn’t impact “China Doll.”
This post completes my jam-centric reduction of February 1973 Dead shows. Boy, they were playing great.
I posted highlights of Palo Alto (2/9) here.
I posted a mashup of Madison, St. Paul, and Chicago (2/15, 2/17, 2/19) here.
This third installment presents material from Champaign-Urbana, IL (2/21 & 2/22) and Iowa City (2/24).
The next two shows, the last of the February tour, are documented on Dick’s Picks #28 (Lincoln, NB & Salt Lake City on the 26th and 28th).
86-minute mp3 mix zipped up here
This mix combines performances from The Dead’s 2nd, 3rd, and 4th shows of 1973, in Madison, WI, St. Paul, MN, and Chicago. If I do say so myself, the result is mighty. "Bertha" starts smoldering around :38 and ignites at 1:20. It doesn't let up after that for more than 100 minutes.
After five weeks off, The Dead started 1973 with a stand-alone show in Palo Alto, CA on February 9th. On the 15th, they began an eight-show tour with concerts in the wintery, upper Midwest. Nothing from this tour earlier than the 26th, in Lincoln, Nebraska, seems to have been released.
From a historical documentary POV, these early ’73 shows look exciting because they unleash a bunch of new Hunter/Garcia songs and a fun cover sung by Donna. From an aesthetic POV, not many performances of those new songs are worth hearing repeatedly. The really amazing parts of these shows are elsewhere. If you look in the right places, the band was extremely hot out of the gate in '73.
107-minute mix here (source dates included in mp3 tags).
This is a narrow slice of the available “Gaucho” outtakes designed for daily listening purposes. It includes only the songs that did not make the album, and in four cases I have edited out lengthy stretches of the rhythm section treading water in places where solos/elaborations were supposed to go, but never did. This makes these songs flow much more like songs, rather than sounding like what they were/are – unfinished recordings.
If you’re a Steely Dan fan and these titles are unfamiliar to you, your mind will be blown that they exist and are solid, real songs. If you do know these recordings, you probably understand why editing some of them down makes sense. Anyway, 29 minutes of seven, unfinished Steely Dan recordings certainly could have turned into 40-45 minutes of finished songs and turned "Gaucho" into a two-LP set, if Becker and Fagan hadn't been grinding to a halt at this point. This is as close as I can get to a credible expansion of the released album.
29-minute “Gaucho” outtakes mp3 companion here
I can’t let the 45th anniversary of this show pass without paying tribute to the wonderful jamming it included.
It’s the first show of 1973, and it’s famous because it featured debuts of seven new songs. But it’s mostly a messy, rusty show, the new songs not rehearsed enough, old songs not rehearsed at all. There were also a lot of technical difficulties with a new sound system.
Nonetheless, the band was clearly very excited to be doing this again, after five weeks off. The “Playin’” jam is wonderfully involved and never breaks stride, and the two new songs that were truly ready for prime time are superb. I think this is the best of the first three, exploratory “Eyes” jams,” and the execution of the song itself is exceptional.
Illustration by Victor Moscoso. Typography by Tom Ford.
A while back, Jesse Jarnow (@bourgwick & jessejarnow.com) suggested to me that there might be a single mega-suite hiding in the fragmentary, unreleased live recordings from The Dead’s tour at the beginning of 1968. On the 50th anniversary of the end of that tour (February 4, 1968), we present our ideal set, based on the extant, unreleased recordings.
Jarnow:
In late 1967 and early 1968, the Grateful Dead began linking their newest songs into extended suites, resulting in the experimental "Anthem of the Sun" and the double LP "Live/Dead." By the time those albums made it to stores, though, the song suite had already evolved. During the early 1968 winter tour of the northwest, the band brought a multitrack, making recordings that would be used for Anthem, and one can hear them piecing together different combinations of their newest songs, their most psychedelic material yet and – not coincidentally – their earliest collaborations with lyricist Robert Hunter.
"To the Eagle Palace" (title borrowed from Hunter's 1968-'69 "Eagle Mall Suite") posits a seamless path through the band's early 1968 repertoire. Highlighting early drafts (such as "Dark Star" with a call/response Garcia/Lesh intro and a drumless arrangement featuring only hand percussion), forgotten songs (like the lovely Lesh/Hunter psych-jazz "Clementine"), and a few shifting audio fidelities, with edits and crossfades occurring inside song performances as well as within many of the transitions.
It is a fantasy set, perhaps played on a night tape wasn't rolling. As it happens, it would also fit onto two LPs with even side breaks. LATVALA!
86-minute composite suite here
To the Eagle Palace
Source dates included in mp3 tags.
Hilgart:
Thanks to @mr_completely for tipping us off that our preferred “Spanish Jam,” which is split between two different sources, required a channel-flip to make the merger of the two halves sound right. And thanks to Jesse for forcing me to cut and re-edit until the result was as just exactly perfect as we could manage. Beyond that, we’ll let our editorial process remain mysterious. Just enjoy this amazing, non-stop, 86-minute tour through the birth of the mature Dead.
If you think of the first half of my BOOTLEG1969 curation as the general release and of this sequel as the bonus material on “the deluxe edition,” you’ll have it about right.
In this three-part expansion pack, I’ve tried to capture everything else from the audience/bootleg tapes that I consider to be compelling listening. I count 18 hours of source tapes, which I’ve curated down to 6.75 hours with my two compilations.
As with the main compilation, here I’ve endeavored to stack up performances in ways that push them as far out of the bootleg morass and as close to the old “1969 Live” album experience as possible. Nevertheless, the average fidelity of this second set is lower than the first one.
You can download the following three mixes here: 3h15m, 31 tracks, 440MB
Just Like Sister Ray Set (120 minutes)
Aside from “The Complete Matrix Tape” performance, 11 “Sister Rays” from the Reed/Morrison/Tucker/Yule period appear to have made it onto tape. I judge 5.3 of them to be essential. Two appeared on my initial mix, and these are the other 3.3.
Do you need this much Sister Ray? Yes, of course. I wish there were 50 soundboard recordings.
This is a nearly all-vocal edit of the song that proceeds directly through the story of Duck and Sally, Rosie and Miss Rayon, Cecil and the sailor, the narrator and his ding-dong. It begins with Reed introducing the characters and their situation and concludes with a mutation into “The Murder Mystery,” in which “Sister Ray’s” murdered sailor gets moved from the carpet to the casket to the parapet, and so on. Two otherwise tedious/abrasive recordings of “Sister Ray” happened to contain the pieces to make this totally approachable version of the song – as a song.
Quiet Again (50 minutes)
In some cases, the audience recordings captured quieter songs quite beautifully, even though the same recordings might offer only terrible versions of loud songs.
My initial curation included one version each of these songs; here are the other pleasing versions. You might like some of them better than the ones I initially picked.
Reed’s vocals on the 7-11-69 “Candy Says” and “Pale Blue Eyes” are fantastic. Both recordings begin rough, but they straighten out.
Underground: Lo-Fi Jams (72 minutes)
The Velvet Underground rocking out is one of the best sounds ever, but it’s also what typically threw audience tape recorders into the red, particularly during verses and choruses. As the “Rock Set” on my initial compilation sadly demonstrated, finding even one really good, end-to-end recording of a loud song on the audience tapes is sometimes a challenge.
This collection includes all the additional minutes of fiercely-played material that I find exciting, even at low, or very low fidelity.
A few tracks include the vocals; all the others are instrumental edits. Because of this, you can pretend that this is a lost jam session tape.
I swear that this is the best remaining version of “Beginning to See the Light.” The song never (seems to have) had a jam, and there’s nothing in this performance that stands out, but somehow it seemed like the song/riff had to be on a low-fi jams mix.
And that’s it. Everything from this period’s audience tapes that I recommend you take seriously and keep handy, polished and arranged to the best of my ability.