Shortlist: September 11, 1973 – Williamsburg, VA

Ladies and gentlemen… Bob Weir and The Grateful Dead.

75-minute 192kbps mp3 download

  • Looks Like Rain
  • Message to Shouters
  • Weather Report Suite: Prelude > Part 1 >
  • Let It Grow (with horns)
  • Let Me Sing Your Blues Away (with horns)
  • Mississippi Half-Step
  • Jam > Dark Star
  • Jack Straw
  • The Race is On
  • Beat It On Down the Line
  • Playin’ in the Band

Between recording “Wake of the Flood” during the first half of August and the album’s release in mid-October, The Dead played eleven shows in September, all but the first two of them featuring the album’s horn players (Martin Fierro and Joe Ellis) on three songs. ("Eyes of the World" with horns debuted the night after this show.)

Williamsburg was the first horns show, featuring the 2nd ever performance of “WRS Prelude > Part 1” and the 3rd ever performance of “Let It Grow.” Probably because they’d just been rehearsing and recording these compositions, this is one of the tightest, by-the-book, performances of the whole suite that I have. Plus, it’s got exciting horns!

It’s just by chance that almost everything that stood out to me in this show is authored and/or sung by Bob Weir. This is one of the best performances of “Looks Like Rain” I have heard, so gentle and nuanced in all respects that I took the opportunity to start the shortlist sequence off in hushed beauty, rather than with the traditional bang of a Grateful Dead concert.

“Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” is a mess, but it’s such a rarity that I had to keep it, and I enjoy it too. 

Shortlist philosophy: Start with a good soundboard of an unreleased show, and keep only what you honestly want to hear again and again. Be song-agnostic; look for outstanding performances of anything and everything, and reject an average performance of any song, no matter how grand that song’s generic status as a big deal may be. Whatever’s left, edit out the tuning and other delays, and arrange everything into a pleasing sequence. Share the results in lossy mp3 format, in the spirit of the cassette tape trading of my youth, diligently not trying to compete with or annoy Grateful Dead Enterprises, whose property this music is.