Grateful Dead: December ‘94

Here are two hours of soundboard highlights from The Grateful Dead’s last tour of 1994 – 11/29 to 12/19. The sequence turns set list logic on its head, hopefully to good effect.

After their September-October ’94 Fall tour, the Dead took nearly a month-and-a-half off before playing 11 shows in Denver, Oakland, and Los Angeles. Only 3.5 of those shows circulate as soundboards. 

2h15m mp3 mix zipped up here (dates included in files)

Jerry Disc:

  • Brokedown Palace
  • That Would Be Something
  • New Speedway Boogie > (edit)
  • Nobody’s Fault But Mine
  • He’s Gone (w/Branford Marsalis)
  • Eyes of the World (w/Branford Marsalis)

Bobby/Jams Disc:

  • Sugar Magnolia
  • Slipknot!
  • Feel Like a Stranger
  • Estimated Prophet Jam (w/Branford Marsalis)
  • Jam >
  • Space
  • Jam
  • I Need a Miracle
  • Black Throated Wind
  • When I Paint My Masterpiece
  • All Along the Watchtower
  • Picasso Moon 

Notes:

  • Disc 1: A gentle, escalating tribute to Garcia, at the end of 1994. He wrings everything he can out of the vocals on several of these tracks - ragged but all-in. This was the last sung Nobody’s Fault and only the 7th since 1974. I love the way he starts dropping out the ends of the lines.
  • Sugar Magnolia > Slipknot! > Feel Like a Stranger: This sequence is a pretty good illusion. Slipknot drops into the Sunshine Daydream slot, and includes the opening of Help on the Way to get it rolling. The synchronized closing riff of Slipknot stumbled, so I omitted that, and Stranger’s big first beat hits just as the free-form jam is readying itself for that leap. 
  • The Marsalis Estimated jam is tremendous. The song part is fine, but this improv was worth separating. Space and Samba from this show made it onto my “Dead is Jazz” mix, but I chose a David Murray Estimated for that one.
  • This mix corresponds to my September ’94 and October ’94 mixes to the extent that it excludes new songs and only touches a bit on drums/space. 
  • Picasso Moon is a really good take. Unfortunately, the first 40 seconds are an audience patch, so I relegated it to the “encore” position of the Weir-centric disc.