Summer Tour ’94 Vol. 2: Las Vegas (June 24, 25, 26)

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. 

In this period, the band typically kept the traditional, thunderous, outro riff very brief, quickly making a hard shift into the latter-day “Jam Out of Terrapin” – which often had very little trace of “Terrapin” in it.  I have absolutely no problem with this approach, since nearly every “Jam Out of Terrapin” is excellent, and they come in different flavors. 

However… this Vegas rendition violates the period’s norms. The band hangs with the traditional “Terrapin” outro riff for a long time, and then gently spreads out into the song’s melodic elements to sustain a true, exploratory “Terrapin Jam” up to about the 17:30 mark. So, this might be one of the longest, I dare say “complete,” “Terrapins” there is. And then it leads into another jam altogether!

“Stella Blue”: This version comes to a big, swelling climax, that almost moves the Dead into the zone of slick 70s-80s arena rock bombast. It’s great. 

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.