Save Your Face

This is the penultimate SYF mix derived from the Grateful Dead’s 2026 “Complete Circulating Ace’s Sessions,” recorded in 1975. It is a sequel to the previous “Grooves Regrooved” mix.

The story so far is here, so I will lean on previous posts as prologue to this one:

• Sandcastles (four one-hour mixes)
• Grooves Regrooved Vol. 1 (40 minutes)

This Regrooved 2 mix continues the principles of the first one, but its relationship to source material is a little different. Volume 1 exclusively focused on condensing long takes into more emphatic short edits. This new one does some of that, but it focuses more on creating edits from multiple short takes on the same theme on the same day, creating more coherent “tracks” from fragmentary, developmental material.

To reemphasize: Save Your Face has always leaned hard into creating listening experiences from Dead material that I personally think stands up to a lot of re-listens - keepers, as they say. Cut the fat. Concentrate the positive. Make fake albums from seas of material. Etc.

The 24 hours of Complete Circulating 1975 Ace’s Sessions (2026) is documentary Dead heaven, but it’s not a series of albums you want to keep handy alongside “Blues for Allah” or your favorite 1974 shows. 

The Save Your Face 1975 curations are simply one listener’s preferred reduction of a sea of material into something I’m interested in hearing a lot.

60-minute mp3 mix here, edited from FLAC sources.

• Low Down Payment Instr. 1  Composite Edit (4/17/75)
• Low Down Payment Dev. 5, Jam Only Edit (3/17/75)
• EAC Composite Edit (2/28/75)
• Lazy Lightning Composite Edit (3/6/75)
• Blue Noodle Soup Condensed Edit (4/2/75)
• Spoonful Jam Condensed Edit (6/4/75)
• Low Down Payment Instr. 2 Composite Edit (4/17/75)
• Lazy Lightning Composite Edit (4/2/75)
• EAC Blues (4/17/75)
• EAC Blues Composite Edit (3/6/75)
• Proto 18 Proper Mono Remix (3/26/75)

Additional notes:

• All the “composite” edits combine portions of multiple short recordings from the sessions, simulating longer performances.
• “Low Down Payment” (a Crosby song) went through three permutations on the circulating sessions. I’ve included all three here.
• This “Proto 18 Proper” is the most complete/correct performance we have on the circulating tapes, but its original stereo mix is bizarre - Jerry quiet and one channel all-Keith. This mono mix blends Keith into the whole, makes Jerry somewhat more present, and gets closer to a listening experience that takes in the whole band’s performance.

This mix presents heavily edited versions of five long, exploratory, thematic grooves from the Grateful Dead’s 1975 Blues for Allah sessions at Bob Weir’s studio (Ace’s):

• Groove #1
• Groove #2
• Distorto
• Proto 18 Proper
• Blue Noodle Soup

(This is the second installment of Save Your Face mixtapes based on “The Complete Circulating 1975 Ace’s Sessions (2026).” You’ll find the first one here.)

In the edits presented on this mix, I have condensed the full recordings by removing the less interesting parts throughout each track. The original combined length was about 60 minutes, while these edits total about 40 minutes.

The objective was to tighten these often exciting but loose performances into thrilling, streamlined “jams” with no slack. In pursuit of that, I have removed many passages of music, ranging from nine seconds to more than a minute.

I cut the places where Jerry was between guitar solo ideas. I shortened passages where the band settled into a pattern for longer than made sense for a composition or a listener. I removed places where the band returned to the theme’s base for a while, before taking the next leap into its elaboration. These grooves adhere to fixed patterns, so removing pieces doesn’t break the flow. It just enables an editor to create gentle corners and a forward velocity that the full-length recordings lack. 

Comprised of only the most interesting passages, these edits create the illusion of performances that sound more like… well… performances. Baggy explorations now come across more like tracks for a rock/funk/fusion LP. I’ve known these recordings for many years, and even I was shocked and delighted by the transformations. 

41 minute mp3 mix zipped up here. All tracks sourced/edited from the lossless “Complete Circulating 1975 Ace’s Sessions (2026).”

• Groove #2 Condensed (2/28/75, 5:17) - originally 10:07
• Proto 18 Proper Condensed (2/28/75, 7:18) - originally 11:36
• Blue Noodle Soup Development Condensed (4/2/75, 2:36) - originally 5:06
• Blue Noodle Soup Condensed (3/11/75, 9:58) - originally 16:46
• Groove #1 Condensed (2/28/75, 10:11) - originally 14:14
• Distorto Condensed (2/28/75, 6:13) - originally 8:07

Some additional notes:

• Distorto gradually developed into Crazy Fingers. Both Blue Noodle Soup and Proto 18 Proper received more organized treatments elsewhere in the sessions. However, those takes don’t have the fire of exploration.
• The remarkably prolific 2/28/75 session also included the long/earliest performances of a protean King Solomon’s Marbles and the EAC Jam changes (which developed into The Music Never Stopped). Neither of those contained enough meat to be worth carving into a shorter event.
• The file set you’ll download carries the album title “Sand Castles: 1975 Ace's Selections 5 - Grooves Regrooved (SYF mix).” This ties it to the previous SYF Ace’s curations and disambiguates it from other presentations of this material.

Cover image: John Hilgart, based on his photograph of an ice cream cone melting down a sidewalk in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

This mix curates four hours of music from the 24-hour “Complete Circulating 1975 Ace’s Recordings (2026).”

It is not a summary of the sessions. It is not chronological. It is not archivally-minded. It is emphatically a Save Your Face joint: Isolate something specific in Grateful Dead music, and sequence it into a cool listening trip.

(Save Your Face has shared links to the complete sessions and a great, summary compilation that guides you through all aspects of the sessions - Angels in Flame. I helped with those, but they were not Save Your Face mixtapes.)

In the case of this mix, I sought 1975 Ace’s passages that are more like live performances than rehearsals. They capture the band playing in earnest, rather than just running through changes, or settling into a groove without shape or development. 

The result is a fierce and wonderful version of “live” Dead and the final chapter of “jazz Dead.” It is all instrumental, except for Franklin’s Tower. 

Unsurprisingly, Slipknot and King Solomon’s Marbles loom large, as they appeared early in the sessions and went through many changes. The Blues for Allah suite (BFA > Sand Castles & Glass Camels > Strange Occurrences in the Desert) also featured many nice variations of its three elements. 

Beyond that core, the mix features two more album songs (Help on the Way and Franklin’s Tower) and everything that includes improvisational jamming: The Nines/Orpheus, No Name, A Lost Soul, the Proto-Fire jam, and a big, 1974-like jam in the middle of a Blues for Allah sequence. 

I have edited start points to manage creaky beginnings (of performance or tape source) and to keep every second compelling. I have also re-equalized quite a few tracks that were stabby or murky.

To avoid repetition of very similar takes of the same song from the album sessions proper, I have omitted some solid performances and included some takes of Slipknot without the preceding Help on the Way.

The selections are organized into four albums/playlists, each an hour long, and each intended to be a unique musical/listening arc through the themes and variations. 

The four sequences are tagged as different albums in the metadata, but all tracks are numbered consecutively, 1-36, across the set. So, if you want to re-tag it as one big “album,” rather than four small ones, that’s easy to do.

Download mp3s here. All tracks derived from the lossless Complete set (2026).

* Indicates two tracks where there’s an edit within the track. For the short Blues for Allah, I chose the first, most basic cycle through the pattern from a longer track and terminated it with the drums from the end of that track. For the edited King Solomon’s Marbles/Stronger Than Dirt, I started the track at the eruption of the Stronger Than Dirt riff and kept going until the reintroduction of the King Solomon’s Marbles riff, which I then terminated with the very end of the song. This track provides a handy needle-drop and way to compare the two riffs, with very nice playing in between. Otherwise, no razor blades were applied between the beginning and end of tracks on this mix.

Cover image: Adapted from a photograph of the band at Ace’s in 1975 by Stephen Barncard (also the producer/engineer of American Beauty).