I’d second the recommendation on Blair Jackson’s bio on Garcia (Garcia: An American Life). It’s realy good and provides a different perspective than McNally.
It isn’t. It’s PITB>Ship>PITB/Jam>Drums>Space>The Wheel>PITB>Wharf from looking online. With the filler being just the pre-drums segment.
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I second David Browne’s So Many Roads. I enjoyed it more than A Long Strange Trip. He does something different where each chapter starts with a specific anecdote and that story weaves in and out of the chapter on a certain time period. Speaking of Dark Star, one of the anecdotes breaks down the Fillmore 1969 version while discussing that time period. It is super cool.
Most GD books I find tend to skew towards the early years. So Many Roads by Browne (that @pbuzby mentioned) and Phil's book I recall that being the case, it's like 10 chapters on the first 15 years of the band, and then 3 chapters on their last 15 years. The first Garcia book I read was Rock Scully's which is well-written, but maybe, shall we say 'embellished' a bit (still dying to know what he learned from G. Gordon Liddy.) Most of them are relatively painless reads, at least the 4 or 5 I've read. Garcia: a signpost to New Space is from 72 I believe, so it will put you right into the thick of what the GD were doing then (though the 2nd half of the book is not about much at all and kind of a slog.) There's also the rabbit hole of the Grateful Dead Sources blog (deadsources.blogspot.com), companion to the excellent Grateful Dead Guide (deadessays.blogspot.com)
Rock’s was my first as well and I loved it. It was very salacious and he clearly has an axe to grind. He really delves into Jerry’s drug use but he has some great stories even if they tend to twist reality some.
I felt the same way about LST documentary. 3/4 episodes set in the first 10 years and 2 episodes for the last 20. Not to say i didn’t enjoy it or anything. I was just surprised to not see the same attention paid to the later part of the career. I’ve tried to start the Long Strange Trip book probably 4 or 5 times and i just can’t get a roll going on it. I love the attention to detail but sometimes i feel like i am reading an encyclopedia of the band then the story of them if that makes sense.
First set 6/9/76, Road Trips 4.5. Holy cow, even though I typically name this release as the best official '76 so far, the Scarlet Begonias did not register properly with me before. Starts off well but when they hit the solo midway through, Keith switches to the Rhodes and suddenly we have liftoff, you may now get up and move around the zone. Standalone Scarlets have always been my preference and I'd usually point to '74, but this one is now on the shortlist for personal favorites. Sure is fun every now and then to stumble onto a great chunk that for whatever reason you just missed before.
Bob Weir had this to say in a 1978 interview: Q: Why did the band seem to disappear in 1974? WEIR: We just took some time off. We needed it. Badly. We were starting to get, not so much stale, as musically inbred. We were starting to play music that nobody understood. We didn't even understand it when we listened back to the tapes sometimes. It was real at the time and we kind of got a feeling for what it was, but we had been playing so much and we knew each other so well, we were getting inbred and it was time to just cut out and get into some other stuff and bring some new influences to our music. He repeated the point talking to David Gans in 1981: "There have been nights -- not so much recently as right before we knocked off in '74 -- we got so musically inbred that we were playing some fairly amazing stuff, but almost nobody could hear it or relate to it except for us. That's one of the reasons why we knocked off and went out and did solo projects. We were speaking a language known only to us, using a musical vocabulary that was really pretty damned esoteric at some points. Q: You don't think the crowd was picking up on it? A lot of them didn't -- I know they didn't... There were the close-in core of fans, like yourself probably, who could follow it. But your average kid who came to the show because it was the only thing happening on Friday night in town...we lost them with pretty fair regularity. Since then, we've gotten more succinct. The space music, though it happens, generally doesn't go on for as long, and if it does go on for a while we generally get to the heart of what we're getting to a lot quicker." Jerry or Phil might have felt differently about this... Weir had the more "pop" sensibility and was often in favor of keeping things brisk, keeping the show moving along so nobody in the audience got bored, making the jams more succinct...as he told Gans, "I'm the Mr. Show-Biz in the group... By the time I start getting bored with a given number, it's a fair guess that a certain portion of the audience is getting bored." I don't recall the other guys ever worrying about a bored audience!
Yes, especially when you combine official release numbers with tequila after (not during, mind you) hosting a drop-off party for 25 seven-year-olds.
D'oh, I've listened to a bunch of shows I haven't mentioned, I was writing up a shortened recap that still was really long, and I put it into my clipboard to write that two sentence reply about GD books, and my computer locked up, I had to restart, and my clipboard contents are gone. So here's the short short version: Any 1983 concert between April 20 in Providence and May 14 at BCT is worth checking out. All have their psychedelic moments, including a couple of viciously cruel Dark Star teases out of space (they played Throwing Stones both times) on 4-20 and 5-13, and some really good takes on Help on the Way>etc., Scarlet>Fire, Estimated, etc. The Let it Grow on 5-14 is a real burner, and the Other One on 4-23 is a throwback, 13 minutes without even counting the parts that were played during Space. There are a couple of clunkers in there, usually in the first sets, but good stuff on balance even if a couple seem to circulate exclusively on AUDs. Quite a few times, on various tunes, they get into this deep groove that's just quintessential Grateful Dead. Also I think I hear Phil singing some backup on some of these shows. Between 5-15-70 and 6-24 there is not really anything as good as what they played in the first week + of May. I think if SBD tapes of the Fillmore West run from early June were out there in full, its reputation would be similar to 5-15-70. There's a unique jam each night (none built around Dark Star,) more in the vein of turning up various rocking themes rather than deep space exploration, kind of the halfway point between 69 and 71 (though that's too much of an oversimplification.) Man's World really hits its stride here, they get into a rhythm that reminds me of clementine, with all three guitars moving around in the groove. After that come a couple more heinous primitive AUDs. Whereas you get a sense from 5-3 and 5-8 there's something really intense happening there, I didn't get that from the 6-13 and 6-21 AUDs, which to be fair are plagued by some pretty bad cuts. Then there's 78, which everyone reading this thread must know is pretty good (so far.) They only played New Hampshire once, ever, 5-5-78 at Dartmouth, then swung west to Burlington, in their only tour of Northwestern New England, such as it was. I listened to those two shows plus 5-7 at RPI outside Albany, all of which were fine examples of 78. I've been especially digging the post-drums segments of these sets. 5-7 had what might be the first 70s Iko I 'got,' a nice version indeed. Finally in 91 - we talked about 3-30-91, one of the best post-70s shows I've heard, and the next night was very good as well, a good Jack Straw and Peggy-o combo to open the first set, and a massive Bird Song to end it. If I'd been at that show, the last thing I would have expected in set 2 was Dark Star (this ain't 72, after all, and they covered a lot of the ground of a 91 DS in that Bird Song) but there it was, Dark Star>Playin' reprise>Black Peter. I'll have to listen to a few more to get a grip on how it's different from the earlier versions - but the pre-verse jam is basically just diatonic stuff, the Dark Star theme, and after the verse Garcia is the one who plays the anchor while the other voices start introducing minor chords, playing in different keys, space feedback etc. At one point they try to bring DS back in, but I'd swear Hornsby is playing the 'tiger...' The next show, 4-3-91 in Atlanta I felt just did not click. Foolish Heart was good, but the Victim that preceded it (usually one of my favorites,) was just off. And I pretty much always like it when they play Masterpiece, but I was not feeling this show. Maybe an off night from them, or maybe it was me. Either way, I haven't been too enthused for 91 since. But the setlist for the following night looks good, I'll get around to it eventually.
82-08-03 Kansas City, MO. From a new AUD tape that CM helped circulate. Really good show. A fine Shakedown Street opens up set 2. Killer To lay me down.
Indeed. I like Bobby's sound on this show. More of a clean sound than a lot of other shows from this era.
And then they complained the audience got too big and hard to handle. And it's one in ten thousand that comes for the show...
Honestly, while it’s not specifically ABOUT the Dead, I would read Heads by Jesse Jarnow. It gives such a great history of psychedelic users in the US and manages to weave a history of the band all throughout. And congrats on the Dead finally “finding” you. Enjoy the trip!
In WV right now. Played 3 28 91. Let It Grow onwards this show is exceptional. The Terrapin-Victim (With deep space meltdowb) and Foolish Heart all blew my mind.
Been all over the place the last few days with variable results which can be me, my mood, the performances or both. As I’m *still* an official release listener due to numerous reasons - one of which is that I prefer many repeated listens over a period of years to improvised music so if I let the floodgates open to hundreds of possible shows, I’ll never listen to something like the 12/28/79 RT release show or the RT Fall 79 discs more than once or twice... 79 with Brent is sometimes exciting but often resorts to the uber insect notes from Jerry and the ensemble playing has become messy compared to 78 & especially 77. I enjoy the late 79 music is somewhat small doses. I think the above 2 releases plus Dick’s 5 is pretty much enough for me from this timeframe to last a while. Been also deep into more repeated listens to E72 - love LOVE the 4/17 show with the great Dark Star>SM>Caution But maybe 4/16 is the sweetest of the sweet. Keith is heard to my ears better than he is on most of these recordings/mixes and his playing on Cumberland & China Cat in his margins is so sublime. I’ll be giving the mind bending end of second set on disc 3 a listen later on with that Archtop endorsed jam out of Truckin’