Just fired up 10.30.73 this morning. Looking forward to the set II Dark Star > MLBJam > Dark Star >Stella > Eyes > WRS > Let It Grow. Its been several years since I last listened...
Ha! Yeah, pretty much matches my experience with them. But if you want a bit of an adventure, and have a flexible schedule, it can be a fun way to travel.
NP one of the first known two set shows... “The Avalon was an old swing ballroom once called the Puckett Academy of Dance, with good acoustics, a wonderful sprung wooden dance floor, mirrors, columns, red flocked wallpaper, and lots of gilt. The Dead's first show there was to raise money for the Straight Theater, a dance hall on Haight Street that some local young people were trying to open.” Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip Grateful Dead Live at Avalon Ballroom on 1966-05-19 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive
I've been considering pairing down my physical GD collection, with the goal of holding onto enough cd's to fill one 30Trips box with the best of the best official releases. If you had to choose 30 shows (roughly 90 discs) of officially released shows, which discs would you choose? Shrine Auditorium 11-10-67 (2) Carousel Ballroom 02-14-68 (3) Fillmore West 03-01-69 (3) Binghamton 05-02-70 (3) Fillmore East 05-15-70 (4) Columbus 10-31-71 (1) Fort Worth 11-14-15-71 (3) New York 03-72 (Academy of Music bonus) (1) Frankfurt 04-26-72 (3) Rotterdam 05-11-72 (4) London 05-26-72 (4) Veneta 08-27-72 (3) Philadelphia 09-21-72 (4) Waterbury 09-24-72 (3) Wichita 11-14-72 (3) Boston 04-02-73 (3) Vancouver 06-22-73 (4) San Francisco 11-11-73 (3) Los Angeles 11-17-73 (3) Cleveland 12-8-73 (1) Tampa 12-19-73 (2) Portland 05-19-74 (3) Seattle 05-21-74 (3) Des Moines/Louisville 06-16-18-74 (3) Boston/Providence 06-26-28-74 (3) Landover 07-29-74 (1) Philly/Jersey City 08-4-6-74 (4) San Francisco 08-13-75 (2) Buffalo 05-09-77 (3) 90 Hamilton 11-02-04-77 (3) Eugene 01-22-78 (3) Cape Cod 10-27-79 (3) East Rutherford 10-16-89 (3) 92 Discs..... that was hard...
My impression is that Amtrak is much more reliable outside of the Northeast corridor. There are some great train trips I still want to take. Some more legs of the Chicago to Emeryville CA (Bay Area) California Zephyr, like from Denver to Glenwood Springs. Or the Coast Starlight, from LA to Seattle. Sometimes parts of Amtrak routes switch off with buses, which is not great. But the buses are comfortable.
I've certainly been pleased with Amtrak since my return to the Midwest. KCMO to St. Louis is a lovely five-hour trip -- I just did it yesterday, in fact, and we even arrived ~5 minutes earlier than scheduled. It was comfortable, the wifi was impressive, and it's so much quieter than flying -- my iPod volume display didn't go nearly as high as I have to push it on a plane. I sampled some JGB and started Download Series 4 (6-18-1976, the night after the new Dave's). Gotta love a Crazy Fingers when we get one, and I just realized I've got a new-to-me Wheel to look forward to later in the show.
I'm not sure that's true. I did Chicago to Detroit a few times when I lived in the Windy City and it was pretty bad. I had a buddy do the CA to Chicago trip. He's a bit of an odd duck and has a high tolerance for that sort of thing. Swore he'd never do it again. YMMV. FW69 Bonus Disc queued up after this Justin Townes Earle album finishes....
This Dark Star has taken me aback... I did not remember Bob's little repeated descending syncopated line starting at about 6min 20sec. It is pretty awesome and goes on for a while.... does that appear in other Dark Stars or was this unique? I really don't remember hearing this other places...
Catch the 'Detroit Lightning' out of Santa Fe, The 'Great Northern' out of Cheyenne, From sea to shining sea...
Horrible advice. If you ever want to sell, you are essentially destroying the value of these releases
I remember reading a High Times interview with Joe 'King' Carrasco, a Tex-Mex lunatic who first earned some national repute in the 1980s, talking about meeting up with other musicians and getting into jam sessions while taking the train in Mexico. I think the train was heading to Cuernavaca, magic mushie land, or back from there, or both. It sounded like the greatest thing ever. Like pulling off the most fun parts of the Festival Express trip, on the down-low. (Now with vaping!) This is one reason I'm sticking with the guitar. I want to be able to get good enough to do something like that.
That's the same gig where a young woman took some LSD in the lot outside of the show, made the terribly irresponsible decision to drive, and ended up committing vehicular manslaughter. Police Say 'Deadhead' on LSD Caused Fatal Crash A Tragic Trip : Routine Errand Ends in Death as Woman, Youth on Drugs Collide Driver Who Was Under the Influence of LSD Gets 7 Years in Death of Pregnant Woman An an example of abusing the power of LSD, it doesn't get much worse. The LA Times article refers to her as a 'Deadhead' in the headline, but also mentions that she didn't go inside to attend the show. She may have only shown up in the lot to score. No matter. What she decided to do was wrong, wrong, wrong. A life-changing experience, in all the worst ways. That may have had a negative synchronistic impact on the band's performance, if one is inclined to credit such knock-on effects. It doesn't gratify me to post about such tragedies. But the rest of us can learn from them, and prevent the liability of their repetition.
I watched the Dave's Picks 2019 video on youtube (starring a pelican), and then the next video YouTube played automatically was Dave's Vol. 13, CD 1, so there I went.
You know all the rules by now, and the fire from the ice... There was always darkness around the scene, in polarity with all the Light. It's a design feature of the Earth plane. Every silver lining's got a touch of gray...
I believe I read that Jerry liked that dichotomy around his life too – good and evil, things like that, hence the Hells Angels around the scene and things like that.
Today I did not try out anything adventurous, just yet another trip down Dark Star>Sugar Mag>Caution lane*, from 4/8/72, and then the Truckin'>Not Fade Away>GDTRFB from 1974-05-19. I really love that Truckin' sequence, there are so many like it and I'm not sure why that one stands out to the extent it does, but I'm clearly not alone in this assessment. In some ways it seems like garden variety Dead, something rather common done very well, and for whatever reason it's immensely satisfying. After a decent amount of pre-72 and a good handful of Europe 72 Truckin's lately, the band sounds very mellow here (in that unique way of the Dead where it's also really rocking). I was thinking about all the bus-jumpers at various points of their career, post-1970 or 1971 is too mellow for some of the old heads, I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone say they jumped between 72 and 73 but there's clearly a change there too, and for the mellower (again in that unique etc. etc.), and then from early to late 73 also. I have decided that it's all Grateful Dead and it all has good stuff about it, I am even going to try revisiting some 94-95 at some point (but not soon). But every time they changed they lost something, it's just that they usually gained something too...I haven't listened to much 80s this year but I remember last summer watching the video of 1989-07-04, and if you can't dig that you have a screw loose. And it's all well and good to say "it's not as good as 1972," but it's not like it's 1972 Dead minus something, there are pleasures there you cannot get from 1972. I have said all that a zillion times here, I know. Sometimes you have to say what's on your mind even if you are an idiot... *that's a really dumb way to say it but it's that kind of day
And subsequently today I listened about 6 times to Dark Star>Comes a Time, 1972-07-26. I don't trust myself fully about it yet because I am just enthralled by the sound of the band today, but this seems like a really good one, and one I hadn't paid attention to before.
