I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now: the southeastern portion of the May ‘77 tour is the strongest, even better than Cornell and the shows surrounding it.
Wrapping up 12-31-84. Like most NYE shows, it started out strong and kind of petered out, though Baby Blue is a nice way to end a calendar year. Now it's on to 8-13-87 at Red Rocks. Good 87 show, excellent version of Loser in set 1, and a good pre-drums segment of Uncle John's>Estimated>He's Gone.
Park City which should be coming up soon for you is one of my favorite ‘87 shows. Phil’s Whole Lotta Love bass line at the beginning of China Cat helps make for a memorable version.
Yes, and having finished 84 and 71 I'm concentrating on 87 now, so that one should be just a few days away, if not sooner. Lots of neat stuff coming up - the return of Schoolgirl, debuts of La Bamba, Hey Pocky Way, Good Golly/Blue Dress. It looks like late 87 is going to be good, 87 to date has been better than I would've anticipated - a lot of fun, good sounding tapes, if thinner on the jams than years like 83 or 91 (or even 94.) I just heard the first ever 'Tons of Steel' at the end of 84, looks like the final performance comes at the end of 87 (and yet Far From Me was in the repertoire until 1990....)
Because I'm bored, I just did a look - the phish thread had been open for 2 years and was 95 pages long when the wolfman showed up this past july - it's now over 200 pages in not even 6 months. I tried to do a survey of warewolf's effect on this thread, but the search maxes out at 600 posts results, which doesn't even go back to January.
I don't think Jerry ever played a late '60s SG Special or late '60s Les Paul reissue (the ones with P90s) on stage. He played an early '50s Les Paul with P90s in early '68, two Les Paul Customs with P90s in the bridge and a staple pickup in the neck during '67 and at least once in '68 (the widely seen photos from the Newport Festival in early August) and a late(r) '60s SG in '68 and '69. I agree though - it's a very distinctive sound that P90s have.
He was in rehab when he passed from heart failure. Garcia thought he could manage his habits of hard dope and music and did for years but he he always knew that eventually one had to go and what he chose was cleaning up. Lesh was overly harsh. There are many stories of musicians who stop gigging to chase the dragon. Jerry was far from that.
A great read-up on how McCoy Tyner influenced members of the Grateful Dead in their early days of being a group. Grateful Dead Guide: The Dead Quote Coltrane
I remember seeing tyner in the late 80's with a trio. he came out for the encore to do a solo piece. someone called out for my favorite things. the crowd laughed but tyner said he'd bring out the others and give it a try. it was really good.
My mistake, I was unclear. I wasn't referring to the year of the guitars, but the year of the recordings. It should've been " '68/'69 shows where he played a Les Paul/SG with p90s" for less ambiguity.
‘87 doesn’t have the big jams, but is consistently strong otherwise. The MSG run is strong. 9/18/87 is almost everyone’s (including me) pick for best of the year, but the first half of the second set of 9/19 (the other show I attended) has one of the most exploratory segments of the year.
Not to embarrass him any more than I need to, which is not at all, but he's the Larry Bird of the thread--he makes all of the other posters, including me, better. Parish, who was Jerry's equipment guy, and then road manager for JGB, said that, every day, Jerry had two priorities: (1) get f'd up, and (2) play music. I'd like to think that at the point he was losing feeling in his left hand/arm he would want to get clean for good, but who knows. I've read in one of the many books that had Jerry stayed at Betty Ford, which has a medical staff, he might still be around. Serenity Knolls had no such thing.
But Jerry wasn't a mainline junkie. Im sure he had other issues with synapses not firing as effectively as necessary.
You could probably put together a playlist of the extended GD Family covering the album. Anyone care to take a stab? I know Merl Saunders covered "Meet Me in the Morning". And which BOTT tracks did the Dead play or rehease with Dylan?
If Garcia wasn't keeping his guitar chops up towards the end as Hornsby has said, one could surmise that the necessary exercises to keep his carpal tunnel mitigated had fallen by the wayside as well. Poor dude was exhausted. Heroin is far from an energizing substance, but advancing heart disease and long ignored chronic health issues becoming more acute are also incredibly debilitating and taxing to the human condition. Perhaps if there was a CPAP machine at Serenity Knolls Garcia completes his detox without issue. But even a clear headed Garcia would be weighed and slowed down by cardiovascular disease that was worsening to the point of necessary intervention. One the one hand, big Gar never really stuck with the 'new lifestyle, new exercises, new diet' necessary to combat chronic illness. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of people finding their second wind after a quadruple bypass or whatever. A bypass operation and the following rehab is more of a commitment than carpal tunnel exercises, so who knows. Captain Trips is no longer exhausted. Long live Captain Trips!
