Do you have some favorite '69 Airplane to recommend? I have Bless Its Pointed Little Head, recorded in late '68, and I've heard Sweeping Up the Spotlight from November '69. IMO, neither can touch the Dead at their best in those years. The Airplane at the Matrix on 2/1/68 is respectable, but compared to the Dead that month? No. But maybe there are even better Airplane live recordings than those?
One of the funniest movies of all time. “You are young and you got your health, what you want with a job?”
I would recommend the Golden Gate Park show from May 7, 1969 as well as the October Winterland shows (25 and 26 I think) with our favorite rock band the GD. All of them are nice soundboard and feature IMO great performances. Edit: These are not official releases.
We saw a mesmerizing all-Bach recital by Hilary Hahn earlier this summer at Tanglewood. She was getting tones and nuance out of a violin that I’d never heard before. Fantastic musical experience! (I know, I ought to post this in “classical corner,” but hey, I like chatting with Deadheads more!)
Listening to some of Road Trips 3.3 after it was mentioned. Some good stuff, unique Dark Star, great acoustic Friend of the Devil. Of course some of the acoustic stuff is sloppy and halfway incompetent, as usual, often seconds away from brilliant passages. The woman with the shrillest voice in history introduces them for the early electric set. Now I need to get back to Dicks Picks 18 which is what I was listening to earlier....
I think it's instructive to listen, as I did today/last night, to China Cat Sunflower from 1968, 1970, and 1974...it is illustrative of the band's evolution, anyway, as they are all profoundly different from one another. The first goes into The Eleven, the next two IKYR...the transition of the first I think Jerry leads, the second Weir, the third Weir then Jerry. The 1970 edition is not quite the modern version in attack, both vocally and instrumentally, but musically all the key elements are in place, whereas the earliest of the three is in many ways like a different song...doesn't even have the signature riff really, although sometimes in the early ones the (Jerry) riff sounds more like it does later and sometimes less so, it seems like. Weir's part is way more dominant and aggressive in the intro, though. Garcia's singing in 1968 is like a completely different vocalist, and the vocals are still quite different from the more familiar later style in 1970 but again, they're like halfway in between...
You just made it a functional word. I'm pretty sure that was the very first show I burned off the Archive back in 05 or so. I have it on 5 CDs, early and late show as well as NRPS. I remember my friend calling me 'what are you doing, want to come down?' 'Hey I'm just listening to this GD show, remember that tape I made you from the Fillmore East? I got the full show of it.' 'OK, so come down when it's done.' 'Well, there's about 4 hours and 45 minutes left of it...'
5/15/70 That unofficial version sounds really good too. Like at least 90% of the sound quality of the Road Trips version.
Dick 18 PiTB>Wheel>PiTB currently. PiTB starts out a little meandery but coalesces into some interesting jamming...
78 weenies (I am not one) proceed directly to 6/4/78. One of, if not the, barn burner of the front half of the year.
Cow Palace 76. I feel like this release fell through the cracks a bit, but it’s a good one. Phil and Jerry are having nice little chat in the PITB.
