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.
Music Never Stopped > Sugaree > Music Never Stopped: A shocking show-opener. It was clearly a planned move, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so I kept the pieces together.
Help > Slip > Franklin’s: The band played this twice on the 1994 Summer Tour, both circulate on soundboards, both are strong, both are flawed, and both are included in this highlight series. This Shoreline performance is considerably shorter than the July 21, Indiana performance, but it’s the better “Help.”
Bird Song: This song was rarely less than very exciting in the 1990s, including 1994, moving confidently from sweet melody to jazzy disintegration and back again. This one isn't as fantastic as the Eugene, OR performance from earlier in the tour.
Eyes > Fire: This is the last Fire-without-Scarlet the band ever played, and the first one since mid-1993. It’s also the only time “Eyes” preceded “Fire.” Fortunately, the performance of both songs at Shoreline lived up to the statistical occasion. They even had the grace to end “Fire” without the “Scarlet” coda. (Garcia does mess up the third verse, but I left it alone.)