Welcome back to our first full week of 2009 here at the Tapers' Section, where we hope your year is starting as well as ours.

We're going to step outside of our featured week a little bit, primarily owing to the fact that the vault doesn't have too much music from this week in the Grateful Dead's history. Our first selection is one of the all-time great sequences of bonus tracks from any Grateful Dead release, the jam of Estimated Prophet>Eyes of the World>St. Stephen>Sugar Magnolia,, from 12/30/77 at Winterland. This music was included at the end of CD #3 of the majestic Dick's Pick Volume 10, which featured the 12/29/77 show, the triumphant return of China>Rider.

Next we'll jump back in time almost a decade to 10/12/68 for the excellent Anthem of the Sun styled jam of That's It For The Other One>New Potato Caboose>Jam>Feedback. There isn't a lot of 1968 Grateful Dead music in the vault, but what's there is mostly excellent. In fact, it's so good, we figured we'd give you a double dose today, with the next jam, from 10/20/68, being the other common jam from 1968, Dark Star>St. Stephen>The Eleven>Caution. This is certainly one era from which I wish there were more tapes in the vault.

Finally this week, from Winterland on 1/2/72, we have the very cool, very unique jam of Good Lovin'>China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider>Good Lovin'. There aren't a lot of split Good Lovin's like this, so it's always a pleasure to bring you the one-time-only jams.

Check in next week for a whole lot of good music from 1968, 1969, 1970 and 1972.

David Lemieux
vault@dead.net