Here are five hours of wild West Coast Grateful Dead from the same month (8/2 through 9/7) as Woodstock. Jesse Jarnow has generously written liner notes for this mix, which was inspired by his show-by-show commentary @bourgwick and refined in conversation with him. His essay is below the tracklist.
Disc 1: A Swell Dance Party (76 minutes)
- PA: There’s going to be a party
- Hi-Heel Sneakers (with sax & violin)
- Minglewood Blues (with Gary Larkey on flute)
- China Cat Sunflower (with Gary Larkey on flute)
- Sittin’ on Top of the World
- High Time
- Mama Tried
- Big Boss Man (composite edit)
- Hard to Handle (three version combo, with violin)
- Not Fade Away > Easy Wind intro jam
- Easy Wind (instrumental edit)
Disc 2: A Swell Dance Party cont. (64 minutes)
- Big Boy Pete >
- Good Lovin’
- It’s All Over Now
- Beat it on Down the Line (w/violin)
- New Orleans >
- Searchin’
- I’m a King Bee
- Me and My Uncle
- Dire Wolf
- He Was a Frind of Mine
- Seasons >
- Slewfoot
- Casey Jones
Disc 3: The Dark Star Variations (58 minutes)
- Dark Star >
- Cosmic Charlie
- Dark Star (w/sax and violin)
- The Other One (w/sax and violin)
- Jam after Caution (w/sax and violin)
Disc 4: The Dark Star Variations, cont. (51 minutes)
- Dark Star (edit, Hartbeats w/Howard Wales on organ)
- Jam (Hartbeats w/Howard Wales on organ)
- Dark Star
Disc 5: Grateful Airplane (Garcia, Kreutzman, Hart, and Jefferson Airplane members) (47 minutes)
- Peggy Sue
- That’ll be the Day
- Johnny B. Goode
- Baby What you Want Me to Do?
- Wipe Out > Big Railroad Blues
- Volunteers Jam
5-hour mp3 mix zipped up here (track dates and personel noted in song tags)
Not the Wild East
Like everything it touched, Woodstock casts an oversized shadow over the music the Grateful Dead made in the late summer of 1969. A terrible set in front of several hundred thousand, Woodstock virtually erases a fertile month in the band’s musical history. Forgotten between the crystalline perfection of the Live/Dead recordings from the spring, and the first glimmerings of the band’s folk-country directions (and the birth of the New Riders of the Purple Sage) is the sound of the Grateful Dead exploding with vivid energy that confounds the usual narrative of the band’s progression from deep space to deep Americana.
The month began with a chain of events centered around what was set to be the biggest music festival of the summer, resulting in a sudden, unexpected platform for the band’s newest explorations. The festival wasn’t Woodstock, but an enormous multi-day affair set to be held in San Francisco: The Wild West. As Michael Kramer has wonderfully documented in Republic of Rock and elsewhere, expectations for Wild West were so big that some in the underground press referred to Woodstock as the “Wild East.”
But Wild West imploded before it could happen, the implosion manifesting in part as a strike by the Light Artists Guild held outside a Grateful Dead show on Jerry Garcia’s 27th birthday. The venue for the Dead show and the picket line was the Family Dog on the Great Highway, the collective’s new venue “at the edge of the Western World” across the street from the Pacific Ocean in the ballroom once known as Topsy’s Roost, inside the Playland-at-the-Beach amusement park. Garcia refused to cross the picket line, and the subsequent negotiations led to the brief life of the utopian Common, practically speaking an ongoing series of loose afternoon hangs at the Family Dog, sometimes including the Dead. One such affair, not circulating as of press time, involved an early-career gig by the New Riders of the Purple Sage and a late-career gig by the New Lost City Ramblers, the pioneering folk act that were a formative influence on Garcia. Alongside the band’s regular gigs at the Family Dog and a small docket of other festivals and appearances, the month yields a virtual box set of raw surprises.
