Plenty of good music on the docket this week here at the Tapers Section, ranging from 1969 through to 1980, with plenty of good stuff in between.

Our first stop is to beautiful Santa Rosa, California, located in the heart of Sonoma County. If you ever find yourself passing through Santa Rosa, be sure to pack your ice skates and stop in to the Charles M. Schulz skating rink (and Snoopy museum!) in downtown Santa Rosa. The Grateful Dead performed two very good shows there in June 1969, and from the second night, on 6/28/69, we have the quintet of songs that ended the show, Doin' That Rag, High Time, King Bee, Sitting On Top of the World, Lovelight. All of it is played really well, so we figured we'd fill your ears with a nice chunk of the show.

Next up, because we recently got a request for a New Speedway Boogie, is this great version from 7/3/70 in Calgary, from the famous Festival Express tour across Canada. It's too bad they put this song away in 1970, but fortunately they brought it back in 1991.

From 1973, in Portland, Oregon, we have the meaty second set jam featuring Dark Star>Eyes of the World>China Doll from 6/24/73. This was part of a little tour of the west coast in 1973, with shows in Vancouver, Portland, Seattle and Universal City. It's a nice, long, exploratory Dark Star, with a great combination of the newer songs Eyes and China Doll following it.

We'll now move forward to the fall tour of 1976, when many great concerts were played. An interesting, unique second-set sequence was played at virtually every show on this tour, and this show from 9/30/76 in Columbus, Ohio is certainly no exception. From that show, we have St. Stephen>NFA>Wharf Rat>NFA>St. Stephen>Around and Around. There's lots of great jamming throughout this sequence.

Lastly this week, from the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco during the Grateful Dead's three week residency during which they performed three sets per show, we have the opening of the second set featuring Feel Like A Stranger>Franklin's Tower, Samson and Delilah. This was drawn from the cassette master, for although there were multi-track recordings made of all of these shows, unfortunately, many have since been erased. Fortunately, the entire run is documented on cassette masters for those shows for which multi-tracks don't exist.

Thanks for stopping by. We'll see you next week with more great music from the vault. As always, we welcome you to write the email address below with questions, comments, suggestions or requests.

David Lemieux
vault@dead.net