Grateful Dead

Once again this week, we’ll be covering more than 20 years of the Grateful Dead’s recorded history in the Tapers Section, from 1969 through to 1991, plus a taste of 1967.

We’ll get started this week with a great sequence from 6/8/69 at the Fillmore West, the final night of a four night run at that magnificent venue (they sure did like to play four night stands there…). This jam of He Was A Friend of Mine>China Cat Sunflower>New Potato Caboose includes not only exquisite performances, but also the final version of New Potato Caboose. While not quite 8/24/68’s New Potato (what is?), it is pretty darn good.

Moving up a year to another four night run at the Fillmore West, we have some great material from June of 1970. Our first track is this beautiful acoustic Candyman from 6/4/70. From 6/6/70 we have two jams: Dancing In The Street and the meaty Good Lovin’>Drums>New Orleans>Good Lovin’, a cool piece due to the rare presence of New Orleans. Finally, from 6/7/70, we have a couple of acoustic/electric song, Me and My Uncle, New Speedway Boogie, with the latter always being such a nice addition to the 1970 setlists.

One of the most famous Grateful Dead shows, both due to performance quality and the long-standing availability of excellent soundboards recordings circulating, is 6/10/73 from RFK Stadium in Washington. From this great show, we have this exploratory Bird Song and the quintessential 1973 combination of Eyes of the World>Stella Blue.

We’ll next jump up five years to 6/4/78 in Santa Barbara, with the second encore of Sugar Magnolia, played that night for none other than Uncle Bobo.

June of 1991 found the band on a terrific tour, with Bruce Hornsby along for the ride on piano, vocals and occasionally accordion. From 6/7/91 at Deer Creek in Indiana, here is the second-set opening jam of Scarlet Begonias>Fire On The Mountain, Truckin’>New Speedway Boogie. We hope you don’t mind two New Speedways in the same week, although this is remarkably different than the 6/7/70 version played above.

Finally this week we have a couple of pieces of music that aren’t necessarily date-appropriate, but just need to be heard. Something we didn’t have time to play a couple of months ago is this rollicking China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider from 4/16/72 in Denmark (NB: in April, we mentioned that the Grateful Dead played only two shows in Denmark in their career, when in fact they played four concert in that country). Another out-of-place song this week is this Morning Dew from 10/22/67 at Winterland. As we’ve previously discussed, there is remarkably little 1967 material in the vault, but due to very popular requests, we wanted to get something out there for you to hear from 1967.

Check back in next week when we’ll play some music spanning another 20 years or more in the band’s recorded history, including selections from 1970, 1976, 1991 and a few other gems. Feel free to write with questions or comments, suggestions or recommendations.

David Lemieux
vault [at] dead.net