This is the first of six highlight albums from The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour, which began exactly three months after the end of the Spring Tour and ended a month-and-a-half before the start of the Fall Tour: June 8 to August 4. They played 29 shows.
Roughly half the tour’s minutes circulate as soundboard recordings, which amounts to almost 48 hours of music. My mixes reduce that to about 19 hours, or 40% of the music played on the soundboards. I passed over some other good music to avoid repeating too many songs, so the very-good-to-great level of the tour is probably more like 50%. Not a bad hit rate. Nonetheless, only one song from this tour has been officially released.
Cover art for this series combines typographic elements from a 19th Century patent medicine almanac with scans of my own cassette tape-case art from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
After tour-opening shows in Sacramento, CA (no soundboards), The Grateful Dead’s first Summer Tour road trip was a five-show visit to the Pacific Northwest: Two shows in Seattle, WA and three in Eugene, OR, June 13-19. Circulating soundboards cover 3.3 of the 5 shows. In truth, this is mostly a Eugene mix; the Seattle soundboards did not include as high a percentage of exciting material.
3h7m mp3 mix here (source dates included in mp3 tags)
Disc 1 (54 minutes):
- Beer Barrel Polka
- China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
- It’s All Over Now
- Sugaree
- When I Paint My Masterpiece
- Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
- Good Lovin’
- One More Saturday Night
Disc 2 (73 minutes):
- Improv: Daybreak
- Bird Song
- Improv: Woozy
- Eternity
- Improv: Beat 1
- Improv: Beat 2
- Improv: Espionage
- Improv: Jam >
- The Other One
- Improv: Lonely
- Improv: Ominous
- Improv: The Long Hello
Disc 3 (60 minutes):
- Samson & Delilah
- Scarlet Begonias Jam > Fire on the Mountain
- Jam Out of Terrapin
- Victim or the Crime Jam
- Standing on the Moon
- Sugar Magnolia
Additional Notes:
- The band inflected the latter-day “Jam out of Terrapin” several different ways. Sometimes it retained more “Terrapin” elements/echoes for longer. Sometimes it seemed like a “Playin’ jam” reprise. And in the case of the one on this mix, the sproinginess makes it feel possibly related to “Scarlet > Fire,” which did indeed appear earlier in the same set. This jam ought to have a better name than “Jam Out of Terrapin,” which is what the version on “So Many Roads” was titled. Maybe “Gamera Jam.”
- The space-jam that leads into this “The Other One” is based on a Weir lick that came back around as a big, full-fledged jam in Philadelphia in March, 1995. I didn’t notice a version during the Spring Tour, but I never listened the audience-only shows. I’ll keep an ear open for more iterations.
- For these Summer mixes, I’ve tried to mainstream the drums/space highlights into the flow of regular songs. This PNW volume is the most elaborate result of that, with the second disc made up of three jam songs and a bunch of drums/space bits. I always like putting “Bird Song” in the “Dark Star” slot, and I’ve juxtaposed “Bird Song” and “Eternity” twice on these mixes.