A bunch of us piled into my friend's van the night before and drove down. You should have seen the looks we got at a local very touristy breakfast spot. I thought it was a good show.
Thanks for posting this. Boy, I wish Maron would just shut up and let his guests talk sometime, though.
Listening to Steppin' Out with the Grateful Dead for the first time in awhile. Love how they stitch the songs together from various shows in a seamless fashion so it sounds like one long marathon show. Great sound.
Real Gone did a lousy job on the last vinyl DP they did, #34. I’m going to wait for the reviews to come in before I decide to purchase.
It's one of those crazy dynamic recordings of the wall. It sounds fantastic when played loud on the big rig at home
I agree that fall 1989 was a lot of fun. I saw the Hampton and Charlotte shows. I'm really confused about the date of 9-9-1989 for a show at the Spectrum, though. I could've sworn the tour started in Hampton on October 8.
I was able to record a little more than 40 shows with a wide range of results. Mostly because of my microphones, outdoor venues turned out better than basketball or hockey arenas. Generally speaking, Compared to a board recording there is considerably less detail from the instruments and vocals and more from the room or space. Sometimes that's a very good thing and other times it can sound boomy, distant and washed out. Microphones are a lot like speakers, personal preference and placement makes all the difference. No two audience tapes are the same and often times very, very different from the same show. Ultimately it was all about the content, being able to relive the show in the parking lot was a great deal of fun. Establishing a network of friends that you could trade tapes with and meet up with at shows across the country was also a big part of it.
Lol yes 10 Funny thing is I went back and added the month after thinking that just 18-20 didn’t read well enough but must’ve had 9 on the mind Number 9 number 9
Well, the space-time continuum shifted enough at Dead shows to make something as mundane as MM/DD/YY irrelevant anyway.
Hey mine is the best aud out there for the gig I taped! Of course it’s the only aud out there...... http://db.etree.org/shn/109177
This is SO true. He's terrible about interviewing musicians. There's nothing like cutting off a great story mid tell with, "oh, yeah? What did your old man do?" - I swear it's every episode. He gets great guests so I keep it in my podcast feed, but I probably only listen to 10/15 a year because of Marc. Also, skipping the first 15 minutes of self promotion is a must. Just to keep on track - is Real Gone ever going to announce the next Road Trips collection? The next one should be the 11-15-71 show in Austin...
I kind of skipped to where they were talking about Altamont, he didn't seem to really kill the GD, just said something like 'maybe if they'd played they could have defused it, etc.' Was there anything else or was that it? The story goes the Stones waited to go on because the film crew wanted them playing when the sun went down. I also heard they had to wait because Wyman was shopping back in SF and had to wait for the chopper to come back, which raises the question of 'was the day of a big festival show a good time to take a run for smokes?' He also backed up Scully's contention that Jagger and Cutler wanted the Angels because they'd used cosplay Angels in London, and people who knew the real Angels were kind of like 'uh, is that really a good idea?' Scully also talks about how the GD were high as hell and freaking out, and Russell talks about how there was a lot of speed, I wonder if there was still a lot of STP around in December 69, supposedly that had a lot more freakout potential than typical LSD.
I thought it was interesting that the much talked about “short stage” was the same one they used for the other 29 shows on that tour. It also sounded like the thing that really freaked out the dead was the singer that got punched out by and angel. So it was more about them tripping and got spooked about their own safety more than anything else. Which is completely understandable, I think we’ve all heard Jerry say he didn’t trip and play shows because it wasn’t optionally to leave.
From looking at the photos of the 1969 Oakland show, that's probably true. But all that means is that the preparation for the show didn't even account for the massive difference in scale between an arena concert for an audience of 15,000 and a show for an outdoor audience of >150,000. You know, the stage wasn't four feet high at Woodstock. Also, note the presence of the barricade, a wooden fence. The photographers in the photo are evidently on a raised scaffold built along the front of the stage. It wasn't four feet off high at the Hyde Park concert, either- the other big Stones show of 1969- either. Also, note the presence of the stage barricade, a metal fence shown in the photo below a the left center, perhaps to provide an extra level of access for VIPs and the press, or maybe just to keep an aisle clear and lessen the crowd density. I can't say for sure- the fence goes off a long way, and there are a lot of people in the crowd in front of it. It does look like the folks in the section immediately in front of the stage had a lot more room than the crowd on the other side of the fence- enough to maintain a clear path, complete with carpeting laid down. As can be seen at the bottom of the photo, just right of the center.
In the Rolling Stone interview later published for the book Garcia: A Signpost to New Space, Garcia says explicitly that he and Phil had both dropped STP before arriving at the concert site. Sensory overload on sensory overload. They both had been at Woodstock, of course. But they noticed a pronounced difference in the atmosphere at Altamont, in their hypersensitive state. A brief clip of Phil and Jerry can be seen in the film Gimme Shelter, featuring Phil saying something along the lines of "...Hell's Angels, beating on people? That doesn't sound right..." Well, no, it doesn't. That's inarguable. As for the Rolling Stones, it's been reported by more than one source that there was a very long break before they appeared because Jagger wanted to wait until the sun was down so the stage would be properly spotlit for his performance. A reasonable decision from an aesthetic standpoint, particularly given the the concert was being filmed. But it apparently entailed a long, long wait for the crowd, (iirc) especially since the Dead were supposed to be filling the late afternoon slot with their performance. (Not certain on that detail, but I seriously doubt that the Dead were scheduled as the closing act.) Which they bailed on, undeniably. So, not particularly laudable decisions by anyone. But everyone was put in a corner by the sudden change of access from Sears Point to Altamont. I had noted in an earlier post that the concert site was moved "less than 72 hours" before showtime. A lot less- like 24 hours. More details on that logistical nightmare here: Barber: Infamous Altamont concert was nearly held in Sonoma County. Here's the inside story
My impression is that some members of the band (Jerry, Phil, Billy, Mickey) were dosing onstage for quite a few of their performances throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Not all that heavily in terms of the amount, but fairly frequently. When Jerry and Robert Hunter were busted while driving the New Jersey turnpike in the early 1970s- 1973, I think that was- LSD was one of the substances found in the stash. This probably isn't the place to get into a lot of speculation on that, but I think it's important to note as far as historical accuracy. I'd venture that it was easier to accomplish that most easily and successfully in the era when most of their show consisted of extended improvisational suites, along with a few cover tunes- some of which were also amenable to drawn-out jams over one or two chords- and only a handful of original songs and ballads in the more standard verse-bridge-chorus form. By the time the band was playing 25 or more songs a night, most of them originals, it got to be more important to emphasize structural organization- the chord changes for all the melodies, all (or at least most) of the words, and so forth.
Oh, I don’t doubt that it happened just saying jerry has brought that up several times. Being able to split when he wanted seems to be something he thought about. Just speculation this may have been an occasion that happened. In one of his last interviews he talked About still taking psychedelics. Said he doesn’t plan on it, it just happens. Or something like that.
