Save Your Face

74 minutes (10 tracks) of vocal-free improvisation in lossy 192kbps mixtape glory.

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The aspect of The Grateful Dead’s record release strategy since Garcia’s death that I’d particularly fault is the failure to secure the band’s legacy as one of the outstanding jazz-fusion explorers of the early 1970s. Ten years ago, I became fed up with poor 1972-1974 vocals, and was tired of most of The Dead’s songs, after 20 years of listening to them a lot. So, I made 10 volumes of nothing but vocal-free improvisational material from 1972 to 1974, and listened to nothing but that for a while. As this blog’s mixtapes indicate, I eventually came back around to the songs themselves, but the improv tapes remain a concentrated thrill. 

This is the first volume I made, probably the one most focused on spontaneous musical compositions that have no relation to any particular song. Some of this material was subsequently released officially, but whatever the provenance of the sources I used at the time, it’s all crispy. The 11/11/73 material may be sourced from a cassette that Dick Latvala sent me in the early 1990s, when I was sending him tapes of Pigpen outbursts, mostly directed at the sound mixer, that Dick couldn’t find in the archive. We’d argued, first, about whether “Dark Star” or “The Other One” was the ultimate Dead barometer (he insisted on “The Other One” and may have been correct), and then about the merits of the dreamy, drifty 11/11/73 “Dark Star” (the jam following it is on this mix). I loved that "Dark Star"; Dick was meh. I eventually conceded that maybe I was partly in love with the particular vibe of my mid-generation cassette, which I'd clutched tightly to my breast for years. Dick responded by sending me a dub of his reference copy of the whole show; he was a very nice guy. The "Dark Star" was still the song I knew and loved, but so much cleaner, so I guess I accidentally tricked Dick – but he was satisfied to receive in return a tape of Pigpen threatening to cut off the sound mixer’s head and shit in it. 

This mix is comprised of 21 musical segments drawn from all the “Dark Stars” performed during the Europe ’72 tour. They are arranged into two 64-minute sequences, each of which begins with the song’s intro, and each of which contains a verse. It’s all “forward moving” improvisation, whether on the “Dark Star” theme or farther afield. There’s no “space,” though the segments wind up and wind down from spacey zones, such that The Dead’s development of each musical angle here is respected, and the result feels more or less like a single performance, with ebbs and flows. If you’ve ever imagined a one-hour or two-hour “Dark Star” that never completely spaces out and keeps finding new melodic avenues, this is for you.

192kbps mp3s sourced from the official Europe '72 box (and reloaded to fix a defect)

This is a radical edit to highlight an extraordinary stretch of playing in this show. 

• Truckin’ (intro and jam) > (8:52)
• The Other One > Space > Big River Tease > The Other One > (24:18)
• Eyes of the World (instrumental) > (7:46)
• The Other One. (4:23)

The purpose of this “radical edit” was to keep this whole sequence intact, but to eliminate the actual songs, “Truckin’,” “Big River,” and “Eyes of the World,” none of which are outstanding in performance or soundboard mix.

Five pieces were sliced out, and the breaches healed, so that it sounds approximately like The Dead played it this way:

• “Truckin’” and “Big River”: One cut each, eliminating everything from the first sung word to the last sung word. 
• “Eyes of the World”: All three verse/chorus segments removed, but the instrumental passages between them preserved and segued together into a single big instrumental “Eyes.”

It sounds crazy, but the result is a quite wonderful 45 minutes of high-end Grateful Dead instrumental, improvisational adventure through the riffs and changes of several songs, without singing any of them except "The Other One." 

This mix features a giant slice of the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter songbook, played and sung superbly by the late-1972 through 1974 live band. 

The intent, when I compiled and posted it three years ago was to find officially-released performances of these songs that stood up in every respect – singing, playing, and sound mix. I wanted versions you could use to prove that the songs were great, and that the live Dead were great. 1972-1974 is my favorite version of the band, despite the fact that the vocals were often a mess, in performance or in the mix. 

I limited my scope to approximately a dozen releases that I could rip straight from an official disc. I couldn’t find every song that belongs here. For instance, there wasn’t a properly-sung and powerfully-played “Uncle John’s Band” in the stack of shows I used. 

320kbps zipped mp3 download (dates and source releases are included in song tags)

SET 1 (73 minutes)

• Bertha
• Loser
• Friend of the Devil
• To Lay Me Down
• Here Comes Sunshine
• Deal
• Sugaree
• Tennessee Jed
• He’s Gone
• Don’t Ease Me In

SET 2 (62 minutes)

• U.S. Blues
• They Love Each Other
• Loose Lucy
• Scarlet Begonias
• Row Jimmy
• Eyes of the World
• Mississippi Half-Step > We Bid You Goodnight

SET 3 (74 minutes)

• Comes a Time
• Stella Blue
• Black Peter
• Morning Dew
• China Doll
• Bird Song
• Wharf Rat
• Ship of Fools
• Brokedown Palace

If you enjoy this experiment with an all-Garcia setlist, you might also enjoy this one.

Revised notes, September 2019