Save Your Face

This sixth and final volume of SBD highlights of Summer '94 Grateful Dead is a lively conclusion to the series – approximately the length of a single show, 1970s-centric, and book-ended by some great deep cuts. 

The 1994 tour ended at Giant’s Stadium, in New Jersey – but the circulating soundboards end one stop earlier, in Auburn Hills, MI. The band played two shows at The Palace, and this mix is drawn from soundboards of both second sets and one first set.

3-hour mp3 mix zipped up here (performance dates includes in song tags)

Disc 1: 60 minutes

• Satisfaction
• Way to Go Home (released on “So Many Roads”)
• Greatest Story Ever Told
• Row Jimmy
• Me and My Uncle >
• Mexicali Fakeout > Big River
• Lazy River Road
• Spoonful
• Black Peter

Disc 2: 50 minutes

• Estimated Prophet > Jam
• Spanish Jam
• New Speedway Boogie (edit) >
• Truckin’ > Other One tease >
• He’s Gone

Disc 3: 60 minutes

• Victim or the Crime
• Scarlet Begonias Jam > Fire on the Mountain
• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2
• Improv: The Creature Wakes Up
• Improv: The Creature Checks Its Texts >
• Improv: The Creature Attacks the Watchtower >
• All Along the Watchtower
• In the Midnight Hour

Notes:

• This is the first “Satisfaction” since June 1992, and the last one the band ever played. It’s currently my favorite version, but I’m no expert on all the versions.
• This is the first “Midnight Hour” since April 1993, and the third from last. (The other, final two were played during the Fall ’94 tour.)
• This is the first “Spanish Jam” since March 1993, the fifth from last, and quite cool. The next one, in September 1994, is nowhere close. 

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This volume of the Summer ’94 highlights series covers a stretch of the tour for which there are few circulating soundboards. 

Only 1.5 of the 5 shows played in Chicago, Maryland Heights, MO, and Hebron, OH (July 23 – July 29, 1994) currently circulate as soundboards (a full Chicago/Soldiers Field show and a Maryland Heights/Riverport Amphitheatre second set). No shortage of great stuff, though.

2-hour mp3 mix zipped up here (dates included in song tags)

• Samba in the Rain
• China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
• New Minglewood Blues
• Cassidy
• One More Saturday Night
• Playin’ in the Band
• Jam Out of Terrapin
• Improv: Beat
• Improv: Between Stations
• Improv: Tone Poems
• The Other One
• Estimated Prophet
• The Wheel >
• Attics of My Life >
• Sugar Magnolia

Notes:

• Jam Out of Terrapin: Great, as usual. This one slides in behind the same show’s Playin’ jam very comfortably.
• Estimated: 20 minutes long with jazzy sidetrips.
• The Wheel > Attics > Sugar Magnolia: 22 minutes of as-played pleasure.
• Improv: Between Stations: This is one of the coolest ambient-mode drums/space segments I’ve found. A locomotive that drifts in and out of signal range.
• Yeah, I opened the mix with “Samba in the Rain.” I’ve included two performances of it in this Summer ’94 series, the first one a nice, precise execution, and this one, which really cooks.
• Notable flaw: Second verse of China Cat Sunflower.

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.

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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. 

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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. 

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This is the first of six highlight albums from The Grateful Dead’s 1994 Summer Tour, which began exactly three months after the end of the Spring Tour and ended a month-and-a-half before the start of the Fall Tour: June 8 to August 4. They played 29 shows.

Roughly half the tour’s minutes circulate as soundboard recordings, which amounts to almost 48 hours of music. My mixes reduce that to about 19 hours, or 40% of the music played on the soundboards. I passed over some other good music to avoid repeating too many songs, so the very-good-to-great level of the tour is probably more like 50%. Not a bad hit rate. Nonetheless, only one song from this tour has been officially released. 

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.  

After tour-opening shows in Sacramento, CA (no soundboards), The Grateful Dead’s first Summer Tour road trip was a five-show visit to the Pacific Northwest: Two shows in Seattle, WA and three in Eugene, OR, June 13-19. Circulating soundboards cover 3.3 of the 5 shows. In truth, this is mostly a Eugene mix; the Seattle soundboards did not include as high a percentage of exciting material.

3h7m mp3 mix here (source dates included in mp3 tags)

Disc 1 (54 minutes):

• Beer Barrel Polka
• China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
• It’s All Over Now
• Sugaree
• When I Paint My Masterpiece
• Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
• Good Lovin’
• One More Saturday Night

Disc 2 (73 minutes):

• Improv: Daybreak
• Bird Song
• Improv: Woozy
• Eternity
• Improv: Beat 1
• Improv: Beat 2
• Improv: Espionage
• Improv: Jam >
• The Other One
• Improv: Lonely
• Improv: Ominous
• Improv: The Long Hello

Disc 3 (60 minutes):

• Samson & Delilah
• Scarlet Begonias Jam > Fire on the Mountain
• Jam Out of Terrapin
• Victim or the Crime Jam
• Standing on the Moon
• Sugar Magnolia

Additional Notes:

• The band inflected the latter-day “Jam out of Terrapin” several different ways. Sometimes it retained more “Terrapin” elements/echoes for longer. Sometimes it seemed like a “Playin’ jam” reprise. And in the case of the one on this mix, the sproinginess makes it feel possibly related to “Scarlet > Fire,” which did indeed appear earlier in the same set. This jam ought to have a better name than “Jam Out of Terrapin,” which is what the version on “So Many Roads” was titled. Maybe “Gamera Jam.”

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