Volume 4 of this Grateful Dead 1994 Summer Tour series jumps three stops into the tour’s eastern U.S. leg. They started with a lumpy show in Vermont (bad soundboard), followed by two shows at R.F.K. Stadium in Washington, D.C. (no soundboards). All three of the Noblesville, IN shows at Deer Creek Music Center circulate as soundboards – curated below.
2.5 hour mp3 mix zipped up here (performance dates included in title tags)
Disc 1:
- Shakedown Street (edit)
- Easy Answers
- Tennessee Jed
- Jack-a-Roe (small edit)
- Maggie’s Farm
- Looks Like Rain
- Childhood’s End (debut)
- If the Shoe Fits
- Ramble on Rose
- Greatest Story Ever Told
Disc 2:
- Playin’ in the Band > Chaos Jam
- Improv: Ghost Factory
- Improv: A Narrow Escape
Disc 3:
- Help on the Way > Slipknot! >
- Franklin’s Tower
- Matilda (debut)
- Uncle John’s Band >
- I Need a Miracle
- Wharf Rat
- Johnny B. Goode
Notes:
You'll find all the posted Summer '94 mixes here
Sorry about the odd disc divide, which creates a 25-minute disc 2. I just couldn’t find a way to sequence these tunes onto two discs that worked as well as this sequence. (Not that I imagine many people are burning discs, but I try to be physical-format friendly.)
Shakedown Street: I’ve tried to avoid editing tracks for this series, except to remove some easy-to-remove, brief blemishes. One big exception is this Shakedown, which had a messy first verse, but which is otherwise very nice.
Easy Answers: I put this after Shakedown to make the point that the two songs’ grooves are closely related, and you can sing “well, well, well, you can never tell” on top of Easy Answers quite easily. You tell me this town ain’t got no heart? Easy answer. If they’d turned Easy Answers’ one-minute instrumental break into a six-minute jam, that would have been great.
Childhood’s End & If the Shoe Fits: Lesh wrote two of the band’s last three new songs (the other being the Hunter/Welnick Samba in the Rain). This debut of “Childhood’s End” is stiff, but it also has the merits of a recently learned/rehearsed song. I’d say it’s one of the best versions. They were already wearing “If the Shoe Fits” comfortably at this point.
Playin’ > Chaos Jam: By the 6.5-minute mark, this Playin’ is already descending into 10 minutes of full-band, non-MIDI screwing around, which is a reasonably rare event in this period.
Help > Slip > Franklin’s: This second and final performance of this sequence on the tour is much longer than the earlier Shoreline version (on Vol. 3) – with almost four minutes added to both songs.
Matilda: This song was only played a few times and was barely ever more than a sketch. The best expression I’ve heard is from March, 1995, when Hornsby sat in on grand piano, and the second set turned into a big party.
Johnny B. Goode: Begins with a band member shouting, “Rock and roll!” with great enthusiasm.
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.