We have a tremendous variety of music for you this week, spanning almost 20 years of the Grateful Dead’s recorded history, and we hope you’ll find this week’s journey as enjoyable as we did while preparing it for you.

As we mentioned last week, we have a bit more music from the Family Dog in San Francisco, specifically the encore from 9/6/69, a nice Pigpen-led Midnight Hour, with plenty of good jamming in the background.

Our next chronological stop on this week’s trip is 9/9/72 at the Palladium in Hollywood (venue of the performance of one of the best-ever versions of Hard To Handle, in 1971). From this show in 1972, we have the second set jam of He’s Gone>Truckin’>The Other One, which features a reel flip that is just a fact of life in these 7” reel-to-reel tapes, which run at 7.5 ips, meaning the tape is changed every 47 or so minutes. It’s always fortunate when the cuts are located in acceptable places, like this, rather than the brutal cuts that often destroy the listening experience. This one really isn’t too bad.

At this point we jump forward a year to 9/7/73 at Nassau Coliseum, with a song that mightn’t be what people think of first when they think of 1973: Looks Like Rain. This is a really great rendition, and just sounds so darn good, we thought you’d enjoy it. And, for a dose of quintessential 1973 music, we have the first set closing song from the same show: Playing In The Band. I really can’t get enough of these 1973 Playing In The Bands, and this one certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Going forward to 1985, to 9/3/85 in Kansas City, we have the pre-Drums sequence featuring That’s It For The Other One>Eyes of the World>I Don’t Need Love. The “Cryptical” part of the sequence in 1985 never quite matched the energy or perfection of the 1969 versions, but the “Other One” portion of the song is very good, as is the Eyes and the rare Don’t Need Love. This is drawn from the Beta PCM digital masters.

Lastly this week, we have a couple of songs from London on 4/7/72, specifically Pigpen’s Chinatown Shuffle and a powerhouse Me and My Uncle.

As sometimes happens, we have no idea what we’ll have for you next week, but looking at what we have to select from, it’s bound be to be a nice selection of some excellent music. Let us know what you think by writing with questions, comments, suggestions or requests.

David Lemieux
vault [at] dead.net