We’ve been having such a great time the past few weeks focusing one specific year in the Taper’s Section, we’ve decided to continue the trend this week by exploring some excellent music from 1976.

Our first stop this week is at the Boston Music Hall on 6/9/76, for the first East Coast Grateful Dead show since 8/6/74 at Roosevelt Stadium in New Jersey. The band, of course, started their comeback tour inauspiciously with two shows the previous week, June 3 and 4, 1976, at the Paramount Theatre in beautiful Portland, Oregon, before embarking on the big East Coast tour that would bring the band exclusively to small theatres (Boston Music Hall, Beacon Theatre in New York, Capital Theatre in Passaic, Tower Theatre in Philadelphia and the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, before the six nights at the Orpheum in San Francisco in July). From this first show of the East Coast tour, we have a quartet of first set songs, Big River, They Love Each Other, Looks Like Rain, Ship of Fools. It’s very cool to hear Ship of Fools in the first set, as it would become an exclusively second set song by 1978.

From the second set of 6/9/76, we have the opening trio of songs, St. Stephen>Eyes of the World>Let It Grow, with the Let It Grow featuring that neat little drum break that was unique to 1976 and 1977. The master reels of 6/9/76 are missing the first few bars of St. Stephen, but the quality of the rest of the jam certainly does make up for the missing few seconds.

From about a week later, on 6/17/76 in Passaic, NJ, we have the second set opening jam with an absolutely quintessential 1976 sequence, featuring Help On The Way>Slipknot!>Franklin’s Tower>Dancing In The Street>Samson and Delilah. Just a classic jam from that summer.

Lastly this week, we have one of my favourite jams from 1976, the first half of the second set from 10/9/76 in Oakland, California, the first night of the band’s double bill with The Who. This magnificent piece of music features St. Stephen>Not Fade Away>St. Stephen>Help On The Way>Slipknot!, a terrific piece of music from an excellent year overall. This was drawn from Dick’s Picks Vol. 33 with features the entirety of the two nights of Grateful Dead music over 4 CDs.

Be sure to check in next week for more great music. As always, feel free to write to the email address below with questions, comments, suggestions or requests. It really is always great to hear from you.

David Lemieux
vault [at] dead.net