Save Your Face

This third volume of highlights from The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour completes the brief West Coast leg of the tour. All three Shoreline Amphitheatre shows circulate as soundboard tapes.

You can find additional Summer ’94 highlight reels here.

4-hour mp3 file zipped up here (performance dates in title tags)

Disc 1:

• Cold Rain and Snow
• Black Throated Wind
• Samba in the Rain
• Stagger Lee
• Don’t Ease Me In
• Tennessee Jed
• The Promised Land
• If the Shoe Fits
• Good Lovin’

Disc 2:

• Here Comes Sunshine
• All Over Now
• Althea
• Sugar Magnolia
• Playin’ Jam
• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2

Disc 3:

• Improv: A Hot, Dry Summer
• The Music Never Stopped > Sugaree > The Music Never Stopped
• Help on the Way > Slipknot! >
• Franklin’s Tower
• Desolation Row
• Eternity

Disc 4:

• Bird Song
• Stella Blue
• Eyes of the World >
• Fire on the Mountain
• Corrina
• Smokestack Lightning
• One More Saturday Night
• Improv: Please Find the Nearest Exit

Notes:

Althea: I've only come across a few immaculate performances of this song from the final years. This is one of them.

Here Comes Sunshine: This is a startlingly vocal-correct, musically-punchy version. Of course it’s not perfect, because it never was, but certainly a notable, late-period contender. 

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This is the second of six highlight mixes drawn from 48 hours of soundboard recordings of The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour. Only one song from this tour and one show from this year have been officially released. “That's how it stands today - you decide if he was wise.”

Word to the wise: Don’t miss this “Terrapin Station > Jam.”

The first leg of the summer tour kept the band in an orbit around California, with the only out-of-state dates being Seattle/Eugene (Vol. 1 of this series) and this Las Vegas stop. Two of the three Vegas shows circulate as soundboards (25th and 26th), and this mix is drawn from them.

3-hour zipped-up mp3 mix here (tracks dates in files)

Disc 1:

• Improv: Powering Up
• Corrina
• Improv: Dilapidated Funk 1
• Liberty
• Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
• When I Paint My Masterpiece
• Peggy-O
• New Minglewood Blues
• Hell in a Bucket

Disc 2:

• Mississippi Half-Step
• Cassidy
• The Music Never Stopped
• Improv: Dilapidated Funk 2
• Improv: Featured Cellist
• Stella Blue
• Terrapin Station > Jam 

Disc 3:

• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2
• Improv: A Sad & Complicated Tale
• Victim or the Crime >
• Eyes of the World
• All Along the Watchtower >
• Morning Dew

Notes:

“Improv: Powering Up”: Drums>Space style Dead would have been a great way to open shows. Build a monolith of hypnotic sound, and then launch into a groove, like… 

“Corrina”: This song would have been a fine opening jam, setting the same dance-party tone as “Shakedown” or “Stranger.” And this is a really crackling version. 

Terrapin Station: The Vegas “Terrapin” is one of the year’s very best, while also being notably different from most. 

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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.”

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This mix presents some of the oddest Grateful Dead music I’ve heard. In January and February of 1983, the band spent several days recording at Stone House, in Marin County, near Fairfax. 

They mostly didn’t pursue songs, but instead worked extensively on several patterns. The tapes we have might be reels of the more together passages, pulled aside. There are also indications that additional parts were recorded on some tracks that have been wiped from the edits we have.

Stone House is not a studio but rather a large, historic building in the country. Mickey Hart, Dan Healy, Betty Cantor, and Rex Jackson worked in Stone House in 1974, recording Zakir Hussain’s album “Venu” in the building's large, central room. Check out this reminiscence of what that space was like, and the ambience it created.   

In 1983, perhaps Hart encouraged the band to shake things up by experimenting at Stone House. Perhaps everyone was supposed to bring in one idea. What was the actual intent of the sessions? What do the circulating tapes represent? I have no idea – but there’s very cool music to be heard. It's definitely not what you'd expect from 1983 Dead, nor what the Dead recording in an old building in the countryside might imply about the character of the music. 

90-minute mp3 mix here

• Stone House Disco Mix (16:00)
• Stone House Dub Mix (24:34)
• Victory (Long Edit) (15:38)
• Knot Jazz ’83 (Composite Edit) (7:42)
• Molly D (2:56)
• Stone House (Straight Edit) (23:03)

TRACK & EDITING NOTES:

Stone House Disco Mix

Stone House Dub Mix

Stone House (Straight Edit)

The band spent a day working on a pattern built around a programmed drumbeat, which isn’t titled on the tapes. I pulled all the most together pieces, removed stumbles from them, and edited them into a 23-minute version (straight). 

There is no repetition within the edit; it’s all different bits of real-time playing. You’ll hear one or more members exhorting the others, vocally or with handclaps, at several points. You’ll hear Garcia’s guitar at the beginning and end; otherwise he’s absent.

The three versions presented here are the exact same edit, straight and reprocessed two different ways. I think the band was playing this too slow AND too fast, so I’ve taken the liberty of @#$&ing around with tempo, pitch, and reverb.

Victory (Long Edit)

It’s called “Victory” on the tapes. Here, too, I’ve edited together many pieces without repeating any. It’s a gorgeous, narcotic groove, somewhere between VU’s “Ocean” and something far more contemporary. There’s plenty of richness within the super-low-key musical texture, and I’ve done my best to provide good dramatic turns in the places where I stitched bits together – or to hide the stitches entirely. (Listen at 9:18 for four seconds of a Garcia guitar lead – a trace of a track that wasn’t included in the mixdown/transfer we have.)

Knot Jazz ’83 (Composite Edit)

This is an edit made from three “takes” of everyone but Garcia moving back and forth through a structured pattern that has multiple references to the jams of old. 

Molly D

Grateful Dead ska, more or less! This is presumably an instrumental version of this Hunter/Hart composition, but I don’t have a vocal version for comparison’s sake. There are five versions of this on the tapes, and they seem to represent a process of recording to a drum track and then creating an edited track without the drums. I’m not sure who all is playing. 

Thank you Jesse Jarnow (@bourgwick) for tipping me off to these recordings and for providing the background sources.

Here’s another one of those unique and miraculous – but also shaggy – Grateful Dead events, boiled down to something more like an album fit for everyday listening. 

Rehearsing ahead of Brent Mydland’s first live performance with the band, the Dead jammed and jammed and jammed in their Club Front studio. The results are an exciting sequel to the “Blues for Allah” rehearsal tapes. I’ve always said that I’d have been cool with the Dead staying on the jazz-fusion path out of 1975; this music could be from that path. 

My mix presents 78-minutes of the best bits, sliced and diced and blended into a nearly continuous 60-minute jam, plus a 17-minute Space/Drums/Feedback freak-out, made up of several other bits. All told, it includes about half the minutes of the circulating tape, which is dated April 16, 1979. 

78-minute mp3 mix here (Cover: John Hilgart, cassette insert art, c. 1989)

• Herbie Prelude >
• Herbie 1 >
• Herbie 2 >
• Another Fire on a Different Mountain >
• Scarlet Begonias Jam >
• Fire on the Mountain
• Harbor Traffic >
• We Could be Genesis
• Not Fade Away Jam
• Dancing Between Thunder
• Summer of ‘73
• We’re Here All Week, Folks >
• Closing Time
• Booji Boy’s Bad Trip (space, drums, and feedback)

You can listen to the full 2h45m tape here: https://archive.org/details/gd79-04-16.studio.clugston.3121.sbeok.shnf 

Compared to my own excitement about this material, the 15 years of comments on the archive.org post, above, are surprisingly ambivalent. Methinks they haven’t seen the trees for the forest. I hope that my tightening and track differentiation will make it easier for some to enjoy these unique Dead performances. Imagine if this had been a second set in front of a live audience, in 1979 or any year. People would have lost their minds.

Editing notes:

• Two of the links indicated by “>” are real: “Herbie 1 > Herbie 2,” and “Scarlet > Fire.” I’ve created simple connective tissue anywhere else I could. There were few real stopping points in the music, but the drummers and odd noises provided some good opportunities for fake connections. The fade-ins on “Harbor Traffic” and “Summer of ‘73” come from the source tape. 
• The only vocals are on “Fire on the Mountain.”
• “Herbie Prelude” is a combination of two small Brent noodles, the second of which gave birth to (what I have called) the Herbie theme. 
• I removed many minutes from the “Herbie 2” jam, joining approximately the first five, Mydland-centric, minutes to the final minute-and-a-half, which brought it to a Garcia-led close. 
• “We Could Be Genesis” begins with some tightened up elements that preceded the full-fledged execution of the theme/idea, so it would be even more Genesis-like.
• “Not Fade Away Jam” removes two sections of reference-recording-level singing. There was a tempo change across the first vocal section, so you’ll feel that shift, but both the fast intro and slower jam are worthy.
• “Summer of ‘73” is an abbreviated version of the full jam, faded out when it disintegrated beyond a certain point.  
• “Booji Boy’s Bad Trip” combines three separate episodes of noisy fun and trims out some extraneous stuff within one or two of those episodes. 
• Every effort was made to hide the fact that these were stop-start rehearsals and to fake an album out of them. 

I have now posted mixes pulled from all the currently circulating soundboard recordings of The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Spring Tour – February 25 to April 8. If you include the year’s first three shows in Oakland, the band played 23 shows that Spring, 5.75 of which do not appear to circulate as soundboards. 

From those that do, I have pulled 111 tracks, totaling 14.5 hours. Aside from two tracks that appear on two mixes, there is no duplication across the mixes. For the record, the only official release from this tour is the "Liberty" I have included, and the only official 1994 concert release is a single show from October, on the "30 Trips" boxed set. It's a shame that this period of Grateful Dead is so ignored. I'm glad that my efforts have made people who used to think like me sit up and say WTF - WOW!

I have made and posted these mixes over a year’s time, so it may not be clear how they map onto the tour or relate to each other. You can find all the original posts, with detailed notes and links to mp3 downloads, under the tag “GD 1994 Spring Tour.” 

This post is simply an overarching guide to the combined mixes. It provides a complete track list, so you can more easily see how the mixes cover the tour and what songs are represented. I’ve appended my Deadbase annotations, so you can literally see when and where the songs I’ve chosen happened during the tour and shows.

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Almost every song here stands out as a vocal performance. The crowd cheers Garcia’s singing and the band’s harmonies all over the place, and the mix lets the singers stand out. The “Stella Blue” is extraordinary. Playing throughout is excellent. Each composition gets its due. 

You’ll find the great improvisational performances from these same shows here and here. This mix is the rest of the highlight reel for Chicago and Richfield, OH. I always enjoy being able to pull songs like “Stella Blue” and “Wharf Rat” into this kind of song-centric context, free of late second set connective tissue. 

Aside from emphasizing that these are great performances featuring a lot of excellent Garcia singing, I’ll add that this “Around and Around” is delightful. It never explodes, and instead meanders into what sounds something like a drunken New Orleans funeral march. 

All three of the Chicago shows circulate as soundboards, but just one of the two Richfield shows. Hence my decision to combine them.  

100-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Don’t Ease Me In (3/16/94)
• Beat It on Down the Line (3/16/94)
• Bertha (3/21/94)
• Ramble on Rose (3/19/94)
• Stella Blue (3/21/94)
• Queen Jane Approximately (3/21/94)
• Looks Like Rain (3/16/94)
• High Time (3/16/94)
• Peggy-O (3/21/94)
• Wharf Rat (3/18/94)
• Around and Around (3/18/94)
• Deal (3/18/94)
• Standing on the Moon (3/16/94)
• The Wheel > (3/17/94)
• All Along the Watchtower (3/17/94)

This post concludes my survey of the ’94 Spring Tour. Every circulating soundboard has been curated and posted here, with representation of every stop on the tour.

Here are 50 more minutes of A+ Grateful Dead jamming from the Spring ’94 tour – all unreleased, like everything from this tour. Garcia’s leads never let up. He’s full of ideas and always knows where he wants to go next.

The reason I’m presenting this as a companion to my earlier “Dark Star Flashes” mix is that this contains all the other great jamming from the shows that contributed four of six songs on that mix. “Dark Star Flashes” was a popular post – a gateway to late Dead for me and some people who follow this blog. So, I didn’t see a reason to repeat that material in a show-specific context. It seemed like a better choice to double down and extend the original mix. 

With one exception, all of this comes from the three shows at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, March 16-18. That run would make an excellent official release as a compressed “Road Trip.” 

50-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Feel Like a Stranger > (3/18/94)
• Scarlet Begonias Jam > Fire on the Mountain (3/16/94)
• Eternity Jam (3/17/94)
• Playin’ in the Band > UJB Jam Conclusion (edit, 3/17/94)
• Eternity Jam (3/21/94)

Song Notes:

• “Eternity” isn’t a great song (lounge blues), but the jam the band built out of it was great (lounge jazz). If the band had survived longer, I’d want to hear where this kind of mood/playing went, further down the road. My favorite alternate universe Dead is the one that tacked jazzward out of “Blues for Allah,” so “Eternity” is a happy real-world event for me. 
• This “Playin’” is very fun, with lots of episodes. The jam-flow begins with traditional, feisty playing around the theme, leads into a great dissolving stretch that doesn’t lose the thread, and then leads into further, focused adventures in the post-UJB jam that I’ve edited on. 
• This is an exceptionally punchy, tight, direct, dense “Fire.” There is a fleeting vocal error by Garcia, but otherwise his singing is up-front and confident, and his leads drive the song straight through. (He just flies on the "Stranger" jam, too.)

Editing Notes:

• The internal edits are the removal of the “Eternity” song-parts and an extension of the “Playin’” jam with the end of the same show’s “Uncle John’s Band” jam – which was a return to “Playin’” territory. I’ve made some simple transitions to keep the whole thing moving along. If they’d played “Scarlet > Stranger > Scarlet,” my “Stranger/Scarlet Jam” jump-cut might be believable. 

Where this fits into my Spring ’94 mix series:

• The four shows represented here are the last four circulating soundboards from the Spring ’94 tour that I have not presented as single-show “shortlists” or single-venue “road trips” compilations. As such, I had to choose between those approaches (repeating a lot of tracks from the earlier “Dark Star Flashes” mix) or the approach I’ve taken here. It leaves some fine non-jam performances on the cutting room floor that I’ll get around to buttoning up eventually.
• In any case, I hope the density of goodness on this mix offsets any cumulative annoyance I have created with my many different approaches to presenting Spring ’94 highlights. 

This was one of the best Grateful Dead shows I saw live. The one hour edit posted here has the arc you’d want if whatever you’d smoked or ingested was beginning to come on strong just as the music started. 

The great thing about this show is that it had big melodic/exploratory versions of both “Bird Song” and “Dark Star.” At the time of the show, a “Dark Star” was due, and I wanted nothing more. After the “Bird Song,” I doubted the second set would include “Dark Star,” but I got my wish. 

The “Dark Star” was split into two pieces, with a lot of wild, noisy stuff in between. It’s cool noisy stuff (normal and MIDI), but not on the level or in the character of the melodic heights of this show. So, I’ve made the edit that I’ve wanted for nearly 30 years – the Greensboro ’91 “Dark Star” without interruption.

62-minute mp3 mix zipped up here

• Prelude: Ambient (5:21)
• Bird Song (16:14)
• Dark Star > Playin’ Coda > (17:24)
• Black Peter (9:30)
• Peggy-O (6:32)
• It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (6:49)

The Dead played five shows at Nassau Coliseum (Uniondale, NY) in March. Only 2.3 of them circulate as soundboards: All of 3/23, 3/27 without the heart of the second set, and only the second set from 3/28.  

This mix pulls excellent performances of 17 songs from those soundboards. There are lots of delights in here, including many of the "small" or seemingly mundane songs. Vince lights things up all over the place. The “Might as Well” is the only occurrence later than mid-1991. The "China Cat" jam might surprise you. "Truckin'," the song, has a fantastic chugging groove, and the jam falls beautifully into "The Other One" from another night. The closest thing to a major blemish is Garcia being uncertain on some “Jack Straw” vocals, but it’s a fiery version nonetheless. 

mp3 mix zipped up here

Part 1 (61 minutes):

• It’s All Over Now
• Jack Straw
• Jack-a-Roe
• Queen Jane Approximately
• Johnny B. Goode
• China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
• He’s Gone >
• Goin’ Down the Road, Feelin’ Bad
• Might as Well

Part 2 (70 minutes):

• Truckin’
• The Other One >
• Morning Dew
• All Along the Watchtower
• Samson & Delilah
• Standing on the Moon
• Victim or the Crime
• Rain

Note: Some post-“Built to Last” songs and Drums/Space segments from these shows appear on other “Save Your Face” mixes and aren’t repeated here. The gap in the 3/27 second set tape is apparently the result of a lengthy technical issue break, during which they turned off the recorder - then, didn't remember to turn it back on until the band had played "Iko," "Uncle John's Band," and "Playin'."