Grateful Dead

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Week of October 17, 1994

I'm posting this show at the request of Jaime Gomez, a resident of Chile who lived in Iowa for several years and saw the Grateful Dead in the summer of 1994.

This is an all-music show (hooray!). For a while during the course of my weird business relationship with the Dead organization, I wasn't allowed to play complete sets on the Grateful Dead Hour. So in this program I swapped in the Europe 72 version of "Ramble on Rose". Bureaucrats, mumble-mumble...

A highlight of this set is "Eternity," written by Bob Weir in collaboration with blues great Willie Dixon. I found Bob Weir's account of the collaboration on the Grateful Dead Family Discography site:

I had this chord progression and melody that I wanted to run by Willie to see if he liked it .... he did, so he started dashing off words. He wanted me to run a certain section by him again and stuff like that, and we started working on a bridge. Then he dashes off this sheet of lyrics and hands it to me. Now I'm really stoked to be working with the legendary Willie Dixon and I'm prepared for just about anything.

He hands these lyrics to me and I'm reading through them. And they seem, you know, awfully simplistic. Like there wasn't a whole lot to them....

....Now he wants me to read through it and sing the melody I have and see if they fit. And so I started singing through these simplistic lyrics, and that simplicity takes on a whole other direction.

By the time I had sung through them, it's like my head is suddenly eons wide. I can hear what's happening just sort of echoing around in there and I'm astounded by the simple grace of what he has just presented to me. I'm sitting there with my mouth open literally, and Willie's laughing. He's just sitting there laughing, saying, 'Now you see it. Now you see it. That's the wisdom of the blues.'

Grateful Dead 9/17/94 Shoreline, Mtn View CA
JACK STRAW
FENNARIO
THE SAME THING
WEST LA FADEAWAY
QUEEN JANE, APPROXIMATELY

Grateful Dead, Europe 72
RAMBLE ON ROSE

Grateful Dead 9/17/94 Shoreline, Mtn View CA
ETERNITY->
DON'T EASE ME IN

You can browse and/or search the Grateful Dead Hour program logs on the GD Hour web site. Let me know if there's a particular program you'd like to hear, and feel free to post requests and comments here or by email to gdhour@dead.net

Thanks for listening!
David Gans
gdhour@dead.net

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