This mix curates improvisational material from the Dead’s first shows of 1981, at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago. The band and the mix are crackling.
I’ve edited large swaths of the music into instrumental versions. One reason is Garcia’s exceptionally weird, small voice. The other is that I like to make instrumental edits for every era/year.
Instrumental edits eliminate the distractions of song-tightness and vocal quality altogether, leaving only the pure playing. As an improv-head, listening to vocal-free Dead has made me an advocate of nearly every year in the band’s history.
The band certainly played a lot of exciting and surprising minutes of music at the Uptown Theatre in February 1981. I’d never heard these performances, but Jesse Jarnow’s @bourgwick show-by-blow account persuaded me to baste in them on their 40th anniversaries and to pay particular attention to the material on this mix.
The first set includes unedited vocal performances, plus one big, stand-alone jam. The second set is all-instrumental, except for “Not Fade Away” and “The Other One.”
2h20m mp3 mix zipped up here (dates included in song title tags)
Set One (65 minutes):
- China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
- Bird Song
- Truckin’
- Jam
- Let It Grow >
- Deal
Set Two (75 minutes):
- Scarlet Begonias (instr. edit) >
- Fire on the Mountain (instr. edit) >
- Estimated Prophet Intro & Jam >
- Eyes of the World (instr. edit)
- Drums > Space >
- Quiet Improvisation >
- Not Fade Away >
- Wharf Rat (instr. edit)
- Terrapin Station (instr. edit) >
- Jam
- Quiet Improvisation >
- The Other One
Cover artist: unknown