Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 10, Episode 3
Friend of the Devils: Duke University, 4/78
Archival interviews:
- Charly Mann, by Jesse Jarnow, Heads, 2013.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (1:29-1:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For the sixth show of their spring 1978 tour, the Grateful Dead arrived at Duke University in North Carolina and turned in one of those performances that became an underground classic, released for the first time on Friend of the Devils. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: This is a show that holds up as, I think, one of the best shows they ever did. I really do. I think that [it’s] certainly one of the best of ‘77-’78, but I also think it's one of the most unique shows because of the energy they brought.
AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (3:52-4:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Duke was the one that I think [was] just head and shoulders above everything, a little bit.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (5:13-5:36) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Our friend Steve Silberman wrote liner notes for the new box set. A few weeks ago, just as the first episode of our season went up, Steve passed away suddenly at the age of 66, leaving an enormous hole in our collective heart. We spoke with Steve earlier in the summer about his love for this particular performance.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Years ago, I decided that the Duke set—which is not only in the box set, but has been broken out into its own standalone release—was one of the best shows that they ever played. It's such an extra bonus that there's good video of the show as well. That “Lazy Lightning”/“Supplication,” man. It is unbelievable.
AUDIO: “Supplication” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (3:26-3:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
STEVE SILBERMAN: Jerry is so happy. There are definitely points earlier in the tour where he sounds less engaged or slightly off or whatever. But by Duke, my god — he's like the happiest he ever [was] on stage.
JESSE: Eric Mlyn wasn’t at the Duke ‘78 show, though he did start seeing the band regularly in this era. Eric is now a professor at Duke University where he teaches a first-year seminar on the Grateful Dead and authored notes for the Duke 1978 release. Please welcome Eric Mlyn.
ERIC MLYN: The Dead played at Duke five times, and Jerry Garcia played once. We think that it's the most that they visited a campus outside of the West Coast. Not more shows, because they played multiple shows at some particular visits [to other campuses]. Duke had a really tight relationship with the band, and I think it's kind of an unlikely place that that would be the case. One of the things I task my class with is: why Duke? In fact, there's a wall at the library this semester that's up now, which is students trying to answer the question — why Duke? Why did they play here five times? Why did Garcia come once? And there's no answer, but there's lots of fun things to think about.
JESSE: One short answer is — there’s power in a student union. The longer answer takes up the remainder of our episode, more or less. The Grateful Dead first crossed the Mason Dixon Line in spring 1968, playing in Florida in April and Virginia in May. The band’s Southern strategy was halting to say the least, in part because the region didn’t evolve its own circuit of hippie ballrooms to match the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. Our friend Corry Arnold wrote a Lost Live Dead post several years ago titled, “The Grateful Dead In Virginia and North Carolina, Building A Bridge to the New South.”
AUDIO: “It Must Have Been the Roses” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (6:32-6:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Triangle Dead
JESSE: We spoke with Dr. Bob Wagner in the first episode of this season. In 1977, he’d simultaneously started medical school and began an illustrious career as a Grateful Dead taper.
BOB WAGNER: I was at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which is eight miles from the Duke campus. There was a band called [The] South Wing [Band]. They played a lot of Dead covers and Allmans covers. They played some jazz also.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [The South Wing Band, 1/17/12] (6:56-7:26) - [YouTube]
JESSE: That was a little bit of a jam on the way into “Truckin’” from a more recent show by the South Wing Band, who’ve remained active well into the 21st century.
BOB WAGNER: The lead guitarist was Ed Ibarguen, who is written up, I think, in the very first issue of Dead Relix.
JESSE: Grateful Ed Ibraguen was a vital center in a Dead Head scene that existed in the Triangle even before the Grateful Dead ever played there in 1971. Jim Enright was a younger Dead Head on campus.
JIM ENRIGHT: Grateful Ed Ibraguen was the guy that really got things going. He had a lot of tapes, and he had all these great Port Chester tapes, Capitol Theater tapes and that. He had a band called South Wing, played a lot of Grateful Dead. [They] always would open up with “Good Morning Little School Girl.”
JESSE: In fact, in the fall of 1970, Grateful Ed taught a Grateful Dead class at the Invisible University, an alternative student organization at UNC.
JIM ENRIGHT: There was a guy called Nyle Frank — King Nyle Frank. Nile started the Invisible University of North Carolina. He had this big coronation on the rooftop: big cape, crown, trumpeters and all this. Then Ed did a bunch of stuff. I think he did some appreciation classes. It was just a loose association of people that would get together to listen to tapes or copy, back when cassettes were the thing.
JESSE: He was surely stoked when the Dead arrived in the spring of 1971 to make their Duke debut, playing at Wallace Wade Stadium, the day before the band began their final stand at the Fillmore East.
JIM ENRIGHT: Duke was really good, Duke University, as far as their concert series. They started out with the Dead at Joe College [Weekend], April 24th, 1971 — a significant date for me, as it was my first Dead show. Pigpen was there in prime form.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [4/24/71] (6:06-6:36)
JESSE: Peter Coyle entered Duke in the early 1970s and got involved with the Student Union, becoming an advisor after his graduation, and was involved in all five of the Dead’s shows at Duke, plus the 1976 Jerry Garcia Band show.
PETER COYLE: I was one of the officers of one of the programming committees of the Student Union — not the Concert Committee, but of one of the other ones which programmed art galleries, art exhibits. But as a member of the organization's programming council, I, in general, was a bit involved with anything the union was doing. For big events, like the first I mentioned—the ‘71 concert, which was in the football stadium—pretty much everybody got involved.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [4/24/71] (1:58-2:08)
PETER COYLE: The first one, which was like an 11-hour concert, was the Beach Boys, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Mountain. Then the Dead, obviously. And then, for an emcee, a professional comedian named Uncle Dirty, who apparently had some kind of a career as a standup comic.
AUDIO: “Mescaline” [Uncle Dirty, The Uncle Dirty Primer] (26:56-27:17)
UNCLE DIRTY [1971]: The pill’s this big. It looked like a placebo from a children’s kit, you know? There was no Sandoz or Owsley in those days, right? Okay, it’s interesting, the pill’s that big. I figure I’d better get insurance, because what happens if he’s putting me on? But it seems that Prudential and Mutual weren’t interested in handling the transaction. So I got the local insurer, Rocky…
JESSE: That was from Uncle Dirty’s 1971 Elektra Records debut, The Uncle Dirty Primer.
PETER COYLE: So I was working that concert, which was fun. I was up in the press box of the football stadium, sort of coordinating the usher captains out on the field and in the bleachers, controlling the areas. Frankly, one of the things we were doing was tracking where the undercover cops were, warning the usher captains in the different areas when there were narcs moving into their area. People were quickly stashing their pot or whatever it was that they were recreating with.
JESSE: The Duke ‘71 show got Jim Enright permanently on the Bus, a very serious Pigpen fan.
JIM ENRIGHT: I saw them right after that in Atlanta, but Pigpen wasn't there, because he was sick at that point. But the New Riders had a far better show than the Dead did.
JESSE: That was the disastrous Atlanta ‘71 show we discussed last episode.
PHIL LESH [11/11/71]: Okay, there ain’t gonna be no music as long as there’s cops on this stage.
JIM ENRIGHT: I saw them, I think it was in Pittsburgh. And then I saw them with the Allman Brothers at RFK. We all loaded up into the back of Joe Bell's pickup truck and boogied up and boogied back.
JESSE: By 1973, the local Dead scene started to flower even more and Jim Enright was ready to take his next step as a Dead freak. The Dead returned to Duke, making their debut at Cameron Indoor Stadium, home of the Blue Devils, the University’s adored basketball team.
AUDIO: “Weather Report Suite” [12/8/73] (8:11-8:25)
JESSE: It was just after the Cameron ‘73 show that Carrboro became home to the first-ever Grateful Dead fanzine. Dead in Words predated Relix by a little less than a year, but it was a little complicated. I poked around some when I was writing my book Heads, and interviewed Charly Mann back then.
CHARLY MANN [2013]: I was doing some newsletters. I did one on the Beatles called Paperback Writer. I did one on Bob Dylan called My Back Pages. Jim Enright was actually a guy who—very interesting fella—came to work for me. I sort of mentored him, and he became a protege. He had a great deal of interest in the Grateful Dead, whereas my interest in the Dead was not particularly strong. And I suggested he do one called Dead in Words.
JIM ENRIGHT: He had those newsletters, and I said, “Well, maybe I'll start a Grateful Dead one.” And so I started Dead in Words.
JESSE: The newsletters published by Charly Mann and Jim Enright were, in part, what we now call fanzines. But they were also something else — they were essentially mail-order catalogs for what were then euphemistically called “underground records,” but what we now call bootleg LPs.
JIM ENRIGHT: It was all undergrounds and stuff, with the Amazing Kornyfone label, the Wizardo label, Trademark of Quality, all those really classic underground labels.
CHARLY MANN [2013]: You certainly weren't going to get rich making Grateful Dead bootlegs.
JIM ENRIGHT: I think it lasted about three issues, maybe four, but not much longer than that. Just because it was a lot of work. I was mailing them out. That was back when everything here was Scotch-taped on, typed, cut and pasted.
JESSE: I’ve only seen a few issues of Dead in Words, and none that I have reference copies of, but it quickly morphed into something more like you’d imagine a Grateful Dead zine.
JIM ENRIGHT: Folks would send in articles. There's Jeff Chell, who was a Raleigh person that was really, really good. He had a great Garcia story in ‘73 when he gave him a ride from Raleigh to Cameron [Indoor] Stadium. He wrote about that in there, how surprised he was and how friendly Garcia was and that. But he also talked about how, on the way over, Garcia was getting ready to smoke a joint or something. He said: “He had this thing I'd never seen before. It was some type of little box.” And he said, “He did all these different things. It was like a puzzle box, and finally, out came a joint.”
JESSE: Hopefully, those old issues of Dead in Words will get digitized sooner than later. Watch an internet near you. They served as an important conduit though. Somehow, in Hawaii, future Dead archivist Dick Latvala came across a few issues in early 1975, borrowed $30 from his boss, and ordered some LPs from Jim Enright.
JIM ENRIGHT: One of the issues over here, I've got some people who were saying, “Hey, want to trade tapes?” And Dick Latvala is in there. There's three people, and one of them is Dick. And I thought that was so, so neat, to see his name here. From ‘73! That was just really neat. I don't know how many subscribers [there were] at this stage. There's probably a few hundred. I think a subscription was like $5 a year or something like that.
JESSE: Copies of the magazine made it up to the Dead Relics Tape Exchange in New York.
JIM ENRIGHT: Les Kippel and I talked. Somehow, we connected, and I went up to Brooklyn and stayed with him for one weekend or so. We had a good time. He kept looking at this: “Volume 2, No. 3? Where’s Volume 1 in the issues” And I just said, “You know, there aren't any.” For some reason back then—I don't know what it was—I thought, Oh, nobody wants to read anything that’s just started.
JESSE: Sounds a little like the Church of the SubGenius’s Stark Fist of Removal, which we talked about in our In & Out of the Garden episodes. By 1975, they’d connected with the Dead Relics crew in New York.
JIM ENRIGHT: I had this idea: ‘Oh, man, let's have a Grateful Dead convention.’ So I think my first newsletter said “First annual Grateful Dead convention coming soon.” Les and I were talking about doing it in New York or something. It was a great idea that just never happened. Too much to coordinate.
JESSE: Unfortunately, it never materialized. Dead in Words faded soon thereafter. In some accounts, there was tension between them selling underground LPs and Relix’s dedication to the cause of free tape trading. Mentions of the scrapped Grateful Dead convention are in the first issue of Relix, coming out just before Bob Wagner arrived at UNC. When Bob arrived, he looked for other tapers and found the scene somewhat lacking.
BOB WAGNER: I put an ad in the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper that came out every day, to trade Dead tapes, and exactly two people responded to my ad. So there wasn't very much of a Grateful Dead scene. There was, moreso, at Duke, because there were a lot of people from the Northeast who were students at Duke. For example, for that 9/23/76 show, I got there the night before to wait out and get good seats, to get good tickets — there were a lot of Dead Heads there, playing music from their car stereos, et cetera. That didn't really exist at North Carolina, where I was in school.
JESSE: Over at Duke, Joe DiMona was also a transplanted New Yorker in the South.
JOE DIMONA: When I got to Durham, having come from New York City, it was a tiny, small Southern town. There was nothing in Durham like there is today. There were no restaurants, there was no healthcare industry, there was no Research Triangle Park. It was just a tobacco town. The frat scene for parties was like disco music and keg beer and grain alcohol.
JESSE: For Dead Heads coming from the Northeast, where the Dead had played constantly, it was like entering a Grateful Dead desert.
JOE DIMONA: I was a huge Grateful Dead fan in high school, having discovered them in the early ‘70s. I grew up on the east side of Manhattan. So I saw them for the first time in 1976 in the summer at Roosevelt Stadium. Then I saw them on my 18th birthday in May of ‘77 at the Palladium theater on 14th Street. I think those were my first two shows.
AUDIO: “The Music Never Stopped” [Dave’s Picks 50, 5/3/77] (5:40-6:03)
JESSE: That was from Dave’s Picks 50, May 3rd, 1977 at the Palladium. By then, it was obvious to the newest generation of heads that the Dead had an accumulated history.
JOE DIMONA: We were hugely into tapes. I have friends who had literally hundreds of shows on tape. We would listen to the 2/13/70 Fillmore East show on cassette, under 10 layers of generations of hiss. It was like opening up the Egyptian tombs, and unearthing something that was a relic. Even in ‘77, looking back at 1970 was like a whole century before.
JESSE: At Duke, by 1975, there were enough Dead Heads to host a radio show, even. We used a bit of Bob Wagner’s story in an earlier episode, but we’ll repeat it here for more local color.
BOB WAGNER: The Duke University radio station at the time, WDBS, sometime during the vacation period had what they called a Grateful Dead Orgy. They played all the tapes for a whole weekend. I didn't even own a cassette player, but a friend of mine in the dormitory did. He recorded a few cassettes, and those were my first tapes.
JESSE: But there were definitely Dead Heads at UNC, too. In early 1978, just before the Dead came back to Duke, a kerfuffle broke out in the Daily Tar Heel about an alleged “no-play” list on WXYC, the campus radio station, which supposedly included the Dead. But one of the station managers clarified it wasn’t a “no-play” list, but a way to limit DJs from playing too much Dead. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the Dead were super popular at Duke also — they were one of the most popular bands of the decade. What is surprising is how often they actually came and played, which owes to the Student Union and a number of other factors. The chair of the Concert Committee during the 1977-1978 school year would go onto a career as an eminent entertainment lawyer and these days runs Flat Iron Recordings and plays occasionally in his own band, Fred and Company. Please welcome, Fred Goldring.
FRED GOLDRING: For me, it was the front row seat to the music business, and, in 1978, I worked my way up to getting elected as the chair. That was the year we had some just amazing shows, including the Dead. We had this great deal with these promoters. It was Cellar Door Productions in DC and Jack Boyle in Florida. They would route all these concerts from DC to Florida, and they needed to pick up a date when they were routing from DC down to Atlanta. Normally, they would go to Greensboro Coliseum, because that was the big 15,000-plus seat arena there. It was closed for renovations, and then UNC had some moratorium on concerts at their big arena. So we managed to be the one that was left over in our 8,000-seat gym, or whatever it was. We were getting concerts regularly that we had no business getting, because they just needed to put a stop in and make it the routing work. It was great for the school, but not financially; I think we got like $1,000 and some piece of it above some break-even [point], which never happened. But we got these great shows. Every three or four weeks, we'd have the Allman Brothers; Santana; Zappa; Loggins and Messina. Of course, the Grateful Dead came every year. Earth, Wind and Fire, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen — we had everybody! It was unbelievable.
JESSE: It was a good time to be at Duke.
FRED GOLDRING: We just happened to be at the right moment in time, in the right place, with all these other things happening, like Greensboro and UNC. We were still a great basketball team; in 1978, we got to the finals in the NCAA and lost. But still, that was out of nowhere. We hadn't had that dynasty that started yet with Mike Krzyzewski. So, Cameron was just a gym.
JESSE: At Duke, the Dead’s four visits in the ‘70s, plus the Jerry Garcia Band in ‘76, made it feel like an annual appearance, which is how many people remember it. For many of the bands that came through, it’s what’s called in the industry an underplay.
FRED GOLDRING: They had these arena shows that were really meant for the 15,000-seat arenas. We had a small gym, so they couldn't put the… Earth, Wind and Fire had these pyramids they came out of at the beginning of the set, and they weren't sure it was going to clear the ceiling.
JESSE: It was always a big deal when the Dead came to Duke.
FRED GOLDRING: My buddy, Andy Jacobson, who at that point was the ticket guy on our committee, reminded me that we printed up the tickets. He had to keep them under his bed and locked in his room, because he didn’t want them to get stolen and they wouldn't keep them in the office. That was the fun part of being on the Concert [Committee]. For one thing, you got to sit dead center on the aisle, front row. And then you got X amount of tickets to sell to your friends.
JESSE: By 1978, it could be argued that, by virtue of the Dead playing so often for the teenage heads of New York in the early ‘70s, Raleigh-Durham had become Dead territory by the end of the decade. Eric Mlyn.
ERIC MLYN: Duke is an interesting place, right? It's in the South, but a lot of the students are from the Northeast. I think New York is the second-largest source of undergraduates after North Carolina, Florida, New Jersey. So, home turf for the Grateful Dead. In a lot of ways, there were probably lots of New Yorkers going to these shows at Duke.
More Or Less In Line
JESSE: Joe DiMona was a testament to this, bringing big New York Dead freak energy to the sleepy South.
JOE DIMONA: My dormitory was literally right across the street from on West Campus. And I found out that the tickets were going to go on sale on a certain date in March. 48 hours before they were going to open the little kiosk… imagine the stadium with a little brick kiosk built for one man at the window that they would sell tickets for the games through. Back then, for everything, you had to go buy a ticket. I brought a folding chair in front of the kiosk 48 hours before the applicable time, and I sat there. I resolved: ‘I'm not going to move.’ I wanted to buy the first tickets on sale for the show. I think this is kind of an important part of the story: Cameron is a very special place. The arena itself is considered one of the top 10 sporting arenas to ever see a show at, or a game at. And the environment, especially the Duke fans — the Crazies, they call them, the Cameron Crazies. But it’s just a special place. It's large, but it's also intimate.
JESSE: We’re going to pause from Joe waiting on line for a moment to tell you a tiny bit about Cameron Indoor Stadium. At the time, it held 8,800 basketball fans, and a few hundred more concertgoers. Peter Coyle.
PETER COYLE: Perry Como—if you're old enough to remember Perry Como—had a radio and then a television variety show that was sponsored by Chesterfield Cigarettes. You know the Chesterfield building downtown? Liggett & Myers, [the tobacco company] that made Chesterfields, was headquartered here. So, periodically, he would do his show from the basketball stadium. The network paid the costs to make the acoustics in that building good enough for them to get a broadcast-quality show out of the building.
AUDIO: “Chesterfield Supper Club” [12/19/52] (0:22-0:49)
ANNOUNCER [12/19/52]: Chesterfield brings you the Perry Como Show. All the top tunes on TV!
VOCALISTS [12/19/52]: Chesterfield’s the best for you, so here’s the thing for you to do, buy your smokes the modern way: regular, king size, start today.
PERRY COMO [12/19/52]: Sound off
VOCALISTS [12/19/52]: For Chesterfield
PERRY COMO [12/19/52]: Sound off
VOCALISTS [12/19/52]: For Chesterfield
PERRY COMO [12/19/52]: Try a pack of Chesterfields, and do it today. Regular pack or king size.
JESSE: Uh, hard pass on that, Perry. It was a regular stop for ‘70s arena acts. The Dead had played there in ‘73 and ‘76. The 1977-1978 school year had already seen a double bill of Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie, a show by Jimmy Buffet, and—in February—the Atlanta Rhythm Section with Chuck Leavell’s band, Sea Level. Joe DiMona attended one and there’s a cool picture of him and his friends in the front row, sometimes mislabeled as being from the Dead show, but you can get a sense of the venue’s vibe. Now back to Joe, camped outside the box office.
JOE DIMONA: And I sat there, and lo and behold, over the next day, people heard about it, and a long line of people started coming and lining up with me. I got a pen and a paper, and I started creating a list of names. We kept a list of the names of who was in line. We had rules about who could leave to go to a class and come back. You had to have someone to hold your place. And after two days, we had about 350 people lined up overnight. We had the funnest time.
JESSE: Joe even filed a newspaper story about it. “Many students returned from spring break last to join in a Grateful Dead revival,” he wrote. “The Grateful Dead concert isn’t until April but the revival was held almost a month in advance, and stretching many light years into the future.” Whoa… [trail of reverb] “What I am speaking of, gentlemen, is the line that assembled outside Wallace Wade Stadium beginning at one o’clock Monday afternoon, waiting for Grateful Dead tickets to go on sale Wednesday morning at nine o’clock. I owe this article to the many friends I made and kept and found during the course of my two-day vigil: first there was Nick Morgan, Master Mixer and supplier of all those old Dead tapes that we hope you were groovin’ to.” We’ll interrupt Joe’s article to welcome Nick Morgan to the Deadcast.
NICK MORGAN: I got to Duke University in January of ‘78. It was one of those mid-year admissions — they barely let me in, but thank goodness they did. I got there from New York, New York with my friend Joe DiMona. I got to my first show in ‘76 and got to see Jerry and John Kahn in Boston before that, in ‘75. So I was primed, and ready for a lot, lot more.
JESSE: “Then there was Marvelous Mellifluous Monet, and the sparkling incandescent oils of the east. There were Morrison and Keyes, the Keepers of the Gate, and there was the rat-ta-tat-splutter of Chris Brown’s moped doing invisible circles around the stadium.”
NICK MORGAN: I'm only three months into my Duke career. By then, we'd managed to have some good times tossin’ discs on East Campus. I was living at Gilbert Adams for my freshman spring semester. We would haul some speakers out onto the lawn and play some Grateful Dead. My friends Bridget Bards and some other great people would toss disc with me. We’d get some good long fuckin’ jam on from Europe ‘72 on through the speakers, and that would attract the other Dead Heads who liked playing Frisbee. So immediately I met some people like Bridget that were going to be lifelong friends.
JESSE: “There were the tenacious tent people who seemed to inch closer with each passing dawn; there were the guitar pickers and the harp players and the foosball fumblers, and of course the frisbees hung in the light air with or without the permission of the sun. Two kegs were shared by all as the line grew to as many as three hundred by Wednesday.”
NICK MORGAN: There were definitely Dead Heads, but it was more than that. Being in the South away from New York at that time, and feeling the music and cultural transformation happening in the Triangle area — there was the Ninth Street Bakery, there were cooperatives starting, there were hippies. It wasn't just the Grateful Dead scene; it was alternative culture rising.
JESSE: “There were the van people and the car people and the barefoot and the bootfoot. We even had a little rain (mini-Woodstock). What remains is thanks to the campus policeman who, although we squatted almost on his territory, bothered us not.”
JOE DIMONA: The Duke basketball with Coach K is famous for people tenting out for tickets before the games. But I don't know if our little lining up for the Dead show was the first-ever example of people camping out in front of Cameron for anything. It might’ve been!
JESSE: Fred Goldring.
FRED GOLDRING: The Carolina basketball game was always like the beginning of the year. But I don't even remember people camping out for that. I kind of vaguely remember the Dead thing, because, unlike a lot of other artists… Springsteen really hadn't gelled yet, it was early days for him. I can't think of another band around that point where you would have generated that kind of community. So I'm not surprised about that, but you're right. It was really the precursor to K-Ville, which is actually a thing now.
JESSE: At least according to ESPN, K-Ville, the regular tent city established by the Cameron Crazies, didn’t become a feature of Duke basketball until 1986.
JOE DIMONA: And I got the first four tickets sold, and I invited some of my super high-power partying friends to come from the Midwest and from Massachusetts. They all drove down from all over the country for this show, which was crazy. And they all showed up. Whether there was a Dead Head scene at Duke, I don't think there was, but there sure was that weekend.
JESSE: Nick Morgan.
NICK MORGAN: We had front row seats: A1, 2, 3 and 4. We scored the jackpot. We knew we were in nirvana. So as soon as we got our tickets, after whatever shenanigans were involved, we hit the phone lines and put the word out and reached out to Johnny Dwork up in Hampshire College and Andre Carothers up at Amherst. Hit the phone lines to the New York posse, made the call and invited as many friends as we could to come on down. I think our four tickets turned into, like, 20 friends. Certainly there weren't going to be enough tickets for everybody, but that didn't matter, right? It’s the Dead scene: everyone was going to be taken care of by everyone else.
JESSE: It was impressive work. Even still, the show was in no danger of selling out for the Duke students. Peter Coyle.
PETER COYLE: The thing about Duke back then, I don't know offhand at the top of my head, but I think the entire undergraduate student body was around the 5,000 range. And not every student is going to go to every concert. Cameron Stadium, for a concert, I think it holds about eight [thousand]. So if every student was in the building, there’d still be 3,000 empty seats. So basically, the way the ticket sales worked was there usually were a couple days when the tickets were only available to Duke undergraduate and graduate students. And then after that, it was open anywhere. We had ticket sales locations in the record bars in Chapel Hill, I think sometimes in Raleigh. So tickets were generally available, or people could just phone the university box office with a credit card and buy them over the phone. So it wasn't just a student audience; probably the majority of the audience wasn't students. A lot of it was UNC and other universities, a lot of high school kids. And then a lot of people who just liked their music.
Cable 13
JESSE: In the age before the internet, I think there were probably more pockets of Dead Heads around Raleigh-Durham than Joe DiMona or Bob Wagner suspected. When the Jerry Garcia Band came through in early 1976, they’d even shown it on the campus television station, and during finals week no less. Please welcome back, Peter Coyle.
PETER COYLE: The official name of it was Duke Union Community Television, but it was on Channel 13 on the dormitory television sets. It was one of the pieces, the Programming and Media Committees that were part of the Union. I actually had a hand in starting it. I was president of the Union the following year after the first concert. From ‘72-’73, I was the union's president. And, at that point, they had just sort of come out with video recorders that weren't the size of buses.
JESSE: At the Duke University archives, there’s also video of the Jerry Garcia Band in 1976, but we especially have Peter and Cable 13 to thank for the video of the Duke ‘78 show that we’re talking about today. Thanks, Peter. Also, it’s a fascinating story.
PETER COYLE: We had a student filmmaking organization that still exists called Freewater Productions. So we set up the video production unit within that group, and with the discretionary funds that I had as the president of the Union, I bought the first video recorder and monitors and cameras to make and to show. We also found all kinds of video cameras on the campus that professors had gotten as part of research grants and never used. We were able to collect a few of them from them and sort of put together a TV studio in the basement of one of the academic buildings. We got assigned a channel on the university's master antenna so that we could broadcast only into the common rooms’ televisions, because it was only by cable. So they started operating as an on-cable station, producing a lot of shows, producing campus news affiliated with. Some national news and stuff. And then covering things like the concerts and other events that were happening on the campus.
JESSE: Something to note as well is that the Duke video was not a live broadcast, but edited together by students and aired on Cable 13 sometime thereafter.
PETER COYLE: It might [have] be[en ready by] the next week. It [depended] on how quickly they edit, their editing and whatever, in terms of when they put it on the air. I don't know that there were a lot of live telecasts.
JESSE: Still, that sounds like a pretty excellent cable station, though—only showing up on dorm lounge TVs—not even every Duke student knew about it at the time. Joe DiMona.
JOE DIMONA: We didn't have a TV. I didn't know they were even doing that.
JESSE: At the time, Joe was a cub reporter for the Duke Chronicle.
JOE DIMONA: I worked for the Duke Chronicle. I was a freshman reporter, I guess you could say. Editorial assistant. I decided that I was going to go interview the band for the paper. I’d go with my pad of paper and interview them — day of the show, literally. Like I said, my dorm room was across the street. I go in front of Cameron on the afternoon of the show, and I am waiting there, with the idea that I would explain to them that I was the Chronicle reporter assigned to interview them, and I’d try to ask a couple of questions. I wait, I wait, and finally — these two big black limousines pull up, and out comes the band. As they walked past me, I completely lost all of my composure, and I started screaming at the top of my lungs. [laughs] Just the idea that Jerry Garcia was walking right past… I just totally, totally lost it. I completely lost it. I think my journalism career went down the tubes at that moment. After they went in, I was like: Alright, alright, pull yourself together, Joe. I tried to get myself into the auditorium, and it was this very gruff, motorcycle biker security guy. He said, “You're not getting in here, kid.” So, I just gave up.
April 12th - Durham
JESSE: Next time. Nick Morgan.
NICK MORGAN: April 12, which was just like a mid-week, regular day for probably most students — by mid-afternoon, my friends from New York had arrived, Josh Hyman and Joe and I are all our mutual friends were starting to pull into town. At least in our dorm room, in Gilbert Adams, the scene was swelling. Clearly Dead Heads were descending on campus. This was not going to be an average afternoon of classes and study halls and whatnot. It was time to get serious about — Grateful Dead are coming to Cameron Indoor Stadium. So we must have taken the bus over from East Campus to West. By that point, as we get towards the gym complex, it was a scene. It was a full on scene of Dead Heads swirlin’ about. This was not just a football game on a Saturday with a bunch of football fans; this was Grateful Dead time on campus, and it was beautiful. A lot of Guatemalan fabrics and tie-dyes… [actually] probably not much tie-dye, but with black and white t-shirts and a bunch of Guatemalan fabrics and blue jeans and hippies. That was us, man.
JESSE: Peter Coyle was working for the April 12th, 1978 show.
PETER COYLE: I was working in another department at the university, but I was a member of, one of the non-students on the University Union governing board. I was friends with the staff and with most of the students involved. I was basically a backstage volunteer for that one as well. I was working with… I think that was Jan Gibson, the primary staff. And then Jake Phelps, who was the director above her, who was primarily out dealing with audience issues. I think at that concert was the one where we took a gun away from somebody.
JESSE: It was the Dead’s fourth visit to campus, but something critical had changed since their appearance in September 1976.
PETER COYLE: That was a concert that had a lot of problems around it outside. The followers, if you will, the people selling all the t-shirts out of their vans and stuff, became a real problem at that concert. There was a lot of dealing with that issue, which really pissed off the campus police, and that was what led to the police wanting a ban on bringing the Grateful Dead back — not because of anything about the band, but because of the people that followed them. You had all these people in these vans and cars and whatever, filling the parking lot. None of them wanted to pay to buy tickets. To the extent they didn't want to get in, they were trying to find free ways into the building. And also, there were no restrooms immediately available, shall we say, for those people who were out there—all day pretty much—in their parking lot. And basically, the bushes and other areas became the restrooms for that show for that crowd. That really annoyed the athletic department as well as the police.
JESSE: The campus was pretty overrun.
PETER COYLE: One of the band members—and out of respect for him, I won't mention which one it was—he had decided he wanted to wear a Duke t-shirt for the concert. We had just opened a new student center, which had a new store in it, so the store wasn't in the location it had been in the previous times that they had been there. I offered to walk with him, show him where they had to get to that building, had to get to that store and buy the t-shirt. And as we're walking down the quad, down through the parking lot, towards that building, the direction of that building, one of the—I'll call them the camp followers—came up to us to try to sell us that merchandise. This guy just looked at him and said, “I wouldn't ever pay money for anything by the Grateful Dead.” But the guy followed us all the way to the building, screaming at him about what a loser he was, that he didn't like the Grateful Dead, because they were the greatest band in the world. This is one of the original members.
JESSE: Fred Goldring worked backstage the day of the show.
FRED GOLDRING: Of all of the acts, ironically, they were sort of the friendliest. We got all this done through the promoters, so we really didn't have that much to do with booking them. I was standing outside what was a green room or whatever. It's a tiny little… there was a table where they're all sitting around, and Garcia sees me. I was sort of standing outside the door; I had my little clipboard and my legal pad, looking official or whatever. He turns around and sees me, he goes, “Hey, man, what are you doing?” I'm like, “Hey.” He says, “Come on in and join us.” He puts the seeds aside, and says: “You’re part of the family today!” So I said, “Okay, cool.” So, I sat down. I can’t go into the rest of what happened there, but, suffice to say, it was an interesting evening. Just as they’re about to go on stage—I was telling him I was a guitar player, blah blah blah—he goes, “Oh man, this is a big night! We’ve got to commemorate this.” He grabs my clipboard and he writes, in all caps: “TO FRED: KEEP PICKIN’, STAY HIGH – JERRY GARCIA.” He draws a plant and a music note. He goes, “That’s supposed to be a pot plant.” I go, “Okay, close enough.” And I have it on my wall, still.
JESSE: The Dead were ready to tear the roof off Cameron Indoor Stadium. Nick Morgan.
NICK MORGAN: All I remember is the ginormous amount of people trying to get into Cameron. But it all happened. We got in, and the place was already filled with energy. It was a pretty full house before anything got started.
AUDIO: “Jack Straw” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:12-0:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICK MORGAN: From that first note of “Jack Straw,” everything felt electric. It just… clearly, the band was so happy to be there and happy to be playing. Nothing felt rote about that performance.
JESSE: Fred Goldring was out in the crowd.
FRED GOLDRING: In all fairness, I wasn't a Dead Head. I liked the Grateful Dead; I maybe knew five songs, I played maybe one or two of ‘em, “Friend of the Devil” or whatever, when I was playing in bands. But I wasn't like a fanatical Dead Head. I remember it being a very good show, and a very long show. They played for a long time. And I guess that was the lore about the… I guess, at that point, it was Springsteen and the Grateful Dead who’d play for three hours. And they both did.
NICK MORGAN: Besides our seats that Joe DiMona and I scored for the front row, which was magnificent, my job was to be the usher for the people in the first 10 or 20 rows. Unfortunately, the idea of being an usher vs. the responsibility didn't quite line up. So, my idea of having a great time in the show sort of took over, and I wasn't able to actually be the usher I was supposed to be. I think I was mostly enjoying the show, but sort of demonstrating how to enjoy for the front few rows. Hopefully I was a good bridge between everyone who was supposed to be in certain seats and what seat they really got to. But, being Dead Heads, I figured everyone could figure that out pretty well. It sure seemed like everybody was happy with their arrangement.
FRED GOLDRING: I remember, the night of the show, there was an area between the front rows of the stage, which was fairly high up, and the bouncers, so to speak. The guys that were protecting the stage were all, like, football players. They had their hands full that night because everybody was tripped out. Probably a lot of the locals, too, that weren't even in school, who bought tickets. They're dancing and these guys like, “Excuse me, you gotta move.” And they're like, “But it's the Dead, man!” And they're like, “We don't give a shit who it is. Go sit down.”
NICK MORGAN: I think I was exactly one of the problem children… I was supposed to be helping those guys, and I wasn't really sure if you're supposed to get out of the aisle and be in the aisle, or what the best place to be is. Everyone really seemed like they were exactly where they needed to be.
JESSE: Bob Wagner.
BOB WAGNER: It was a very high-energy show. It was really fun for me being back home. I got a few of my local friends to go, and a lot of the traveling entourage stayed in my little tiny abode that I rented back then. I think we had like 10 or 12 people sleeping on my floor after the show.
JESSE: One thing you might notice on the recordings is that Jerry Garcia’s voice seems to be very quiet during the first few songs.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:02-0:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But the crowd at Cameron Indoor could hear him just fine. This is because the recordings on Friend of the Devils aren’t soundboard recordings. They’re special mixes that Betty Cantor-Jackson made with outputs from the soundboard, run through a mixer, and sent into her reel-to-reel. The first few songs were often spent getting the levels on her recording correct. On Dr. Bob’s audience tape though, Garcia can be heard loud and clear.
AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [4/12/78, Wagner audience tape] (0:07-0:35)
JESSE: Betty had Garcia’s voice dialed into her tape mix in time for “Peggy-O,” very thankfully. I love how Phil Lesh’s bass sounds in the mix here, too.
AUDIO: “Peggy-O” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:48-1:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Dead Heads love the wee little details, and there are a few extremely minute ones to note from Duke ‘78. There is, for example, what’s called the Day of the Month Effect on “Beat It On Down the Line,” with the number of beats in the song’s intro matching the date. We’ve linked to Robert K. Toutkoushian’s paper on that topic.
AUDIO: “Beat It On Down the Line” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:00-0:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There is one of the more articulated versions of the Dead playing “Funiculì, Funiculà,” a 19th century Italian folk-pop novelty song celebrating the opening of a railway to the top of Mount Vesuvius — that is, to go peer into the edge of a hopefully dormant volcano. I suspect most Dead Heads may prefer their volcanoes live.
AUDIO: “Funiculì, Funiculà” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:26-0:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It’s not exactly a performance nor a jam, yet more than tuning. Full enough that it’s credited with its own track on this release.
AUDIO: “Funiculì, Funiculà” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (1:00-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR [4/12/78]: You people in the administration or the management of this building, don’t think that you’re slipping unnoticed — we still haven’t seen you turn off those lights up there yet.
JESSE: Neither band nor crowd were too pleased by the situation. The lighting was addressed in a post-show staff memo in which Dean William Griffith admitted that it took the staff by surprise. Apparently since the previous concert there, the basketball program had installed a new set of lights. It wasn’t, Bill Griffith stressed in his memo, because they were trying to bust pot smokers. They remedied it by the Grover Washington concert in June.
PHIL LESH [4/12/78]: No, we don’t mean the spotlights that are focused upon the stage here to illuminate ourselves. We mean — the house lights, dummy!
BOB WEIR [4/12/78]: Turn down the house lights!
PHIL LESH [4/12/78]: Dummy!
JESSE: One place where the later ‘70s transformed their earlier work was Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s “Loser.” Like “Jack Straw” and other Western numbers, it got bigger.
AUDIO: “Loser” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (5:46-6:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Garcia took more choruses and the dynamics got widescreen, especially by the post-solo chorus.
AUDIO: “Loser” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (6:26-7:03) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Nick Morgan.
NICK MORGAN: After that electric “Beat It On Down the Line,” things slow down a little bit with “Peggy-O.” But it picks right up again with “Mama Tried”/“Mexicali [Blues].” Nothing really felt slow, but by the time you got to the end of the first set, that “Lazy Lightning”/“Supplication” was literally fire. It was just spectacular. I hope the band had as much fun playing it as we had fun experiencing it. That's how that song was meant to be played.
AUDIO: “Lazy Lightning” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (1:54-2:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The late Steve Silberman was a fan of this one, as we mentioned.
STEVE SILBERMAN: In that intense middle fugue section, it really blows the roof off because it establishes this tension that just keeps getting more and more and more tense — until it's all blown out in these cascades of really sexy chords. [laughs] So, I love that.
AUDIO: “Supplication” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:43-1:06) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: To my ears, “Lazy Lightning”/“Supplication” channels some of the same energy as the “China Cat Sunflower”/“I Know You Rider” transition, but set in a different time signature and decade.
AUDIO: “Supplication” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (3:18-3:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Steve Maizner was in attendance, though Bob Wagner was handling the taping.
STEVE MAIZNER: It was a high-powered show. Duke was pretty cool. I’m way into college basketball and stuff like that, so going to Cameron probably now would be a bigger deal than then. But still, it was ACC basketball, and the arena circled around the back of the stage. I think during the break, I just needed rest; you're on the road for a little bit, and I kind of just rested behind the stage area. And I kept noticing this guy — he must have been inebriated. I don't know if he was having conversations with the roadies, but you could see he wanted to drop down from the balcony onto the stage. And, eventually, he did.
AUDIO: “Good Lovin’” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:23-0:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Imagine the next bit set in slow motion to “Good Lovin’.”
STEVE MAIZNER: And it took them a little while to catch up with him, recognize who this was and what he did. But unfortunately, they're playing “Good Lovin’” and I'm watching them just beat the shit out of this guy during “Good Lovin’.” It was a little awkward. “All you need is… good love!” And the poor guy took it, and they removed him from the back of the arena and backstage area.
AUDIO: “Good Lovin’” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:57-1:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Near the beginning of the second set, the band pull out what’s almost inarguably the most Southern Gothic piece in the songbook, “It Must Have Been The Roses.”
AUDIO: “It Must Have Been the Roses” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (1:14-1:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Check out our Tales of the Great Rum Runners episode for more on the connection between the Robert Hunter solo composition “It Must Have Been the Roses” and William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose For Emily.” If you’re the kind of fan that squints their ears when they hear band members discussing things just off-microphone, there’s an extended strategical pause before the set’s jam sequence.
BOB WEIR [4/12/78]: He’s telling him the one about the traveling salesman. They’ve already heard it; they’re just humoring him. I don’t think they’re gonna get it.
JESSE: If you listen closely, and it’s too faint to even include here, you can hear the band plotting out what’s to come, including a use of the phrase Rhythm Devils. But the onstage off-mic conversation apparently spins off-track, as Billy Kreutzmann, long-standing arbiter of calm, calls for order.
BILL KREUTZMANN [4/12/78]: Shut up! We’re doin’ a show!
JESSE: The jam sequence they settle on begins with Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow’s “Estimated Prophet.”
AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (1:22-1:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And in the beginning of the jam is another subtle Grateful Dead first.
AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (6:35-6:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Estimated Prophet” has entered its yelp era. You can now figure out how to annotate that on your tape. We talked about songs’ evolutions in the last episode about the Fox Theatre gigs, but the Dead didn’t play “Eyes of the World,” a song which had morphed a bit in recent years. Jerry Garcia sets the tempo, around 120 bpm, 10 or so clicks faster than the early ‘70s.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (0:07-0:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: With Garcia barely stating the intro chords, it throws a spotlight on Bob Weir’s second guitar part.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (1:07-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The drummers sound pretty excitable.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (3:56-4:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Probably that drummer was excited for what was to come.
AUDIO: “Rhythm Devils” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (11:15-11:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As we’ve discussed over the past few episodes, the Dead’s spring 1978 tour was the beginning of what’s now called “Drums” and “Space.” And it’s thanks to the Channel 13 cameras that we’re about to have some pretty solid visual documentation of what was occurring on probably most nights of this tour. Bob Wagner.
BOB WAGNER: The Duke show, which was my hometown show, basically, that had one of the longest “Drums” sessions. I believe Garcia was out for a little while, not for a long portion.
JESSE: It’s really a lot of fun to watch Garcia gleefully bashing on the open-tuned steel drums.
AUDIO: “Rhythm Devils” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (13:00-13:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WAGNER: And there were lots of other people from the band's entourage there. I remember one of the people that cooked for the band was with banging pots and pans for part of it.
AUDIO: “Rhythm Devils” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (15:32-15:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Bob’s not being sarcastic. If you watch the video, you can see a percussionist up on stage literally bashing together pots and pans. Did some research there, and the mystery percussionist is the late Leonard Koucis, known as Cy, as in, Cy Koucis, a tour chef who came to the Dead’s organization via promoter John Scher and would go on to work for many even bigger acts over the next decades.
AUDIO: “Rhythm Devils” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (15:53-16:08) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WAGNER: It was a really high-energy show. I felt at the time that too much of the energy was going into the percussion, the Rhythm Devils. If I'm not mistaken, the Duke one is the longest version of the Rhythm Devils. It seemed to go on forever, and I caught some ribbing from some of my local friends from college that I got to go who weren't Dead Heads. “Well, gee, Bob, you got me to come see a chef bang pots and pans on the stage.”
JESSE: To my ears, it’s an element that connects the “Drums” segments back to the participatory fun of the Acid Tests and early days of the band, a way to maintain that extra-open form. Over the next decades, countless people would join Mickey Hart and Billy Kreutzmann in their Rhythm Devil activities, some of them only remembered because there’s photo or video documentation, with probably many other unaccounted for guest players over the years. Nick Morgan.
NICK MORGAN: The drum thing was spectacular and strange. Given what I was experiencing that night, it was very cosmic, took me into some other sort of deep, ancient astral plane. I thought that it was a gateway to the Rhythm Devils of early humanity sounds. So, what did I know? I didn't know that was a new business for the band, but I thought it was super cool.
AUDIO: “Rhythm Devils” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (24:13-24:28) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The show’s finale features some really animated music.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (1:30-1:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Joe DiMona.
JOE DIMONA: The “U.S. Blues” encore is one that everybody seems to remember. One of the things about that show is the energy that Jerry put out. Like, he actually, at some point, jumped up in air, windmilling his arm on the guitar. This isn't something that you’re used to seeing from him.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (3:12-3:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I had the Duke tape in probably ‘87-’88. And then, ‘89 or ‘90, I got the video of it. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was the kind of thing where I watched Jerry do these windmills, and then I'd rewind it on the VHS, and I’d watch it again and again. And I’d have friends come over and say, “Oh you’ve got to watch this!” And I'd put the VHS in and we'd watch this little piece, and then we go to the next one that he’d do, and the next. Just the way that he was… fist in the air, growling and jumping around, like a bonafide Bono-esque rock star. Ah, we couldn't believe it.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [Duke ‘78, 4/12/78] (5:02-5:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: I do wonder, if there were more videos of more shows, these moments that we've heard 1,000 times, peak moments where they blow the roof off the place — what did they look like at that moment?
JESSE: Bob Wagner.
BOB WAGNER: I think it was a one-time thing. I don't remember having that as part of my memories. It's like, Wow, that was the show where Jerry was doing the Pete Townshend thing. That wasn't part of my memories. It wasn't until the video came out that I really became aware of that. Of course, that show achieved a lot of notoriety because of that. I was, in general, aware that it was very high-energy.
JESSE: While Garcia can be seen being pretty animated in some early Dead footage, including The Grateful Dead Movie, he could still show flashes in the later ’70s. Steve Silberman was already a five-year Dead veteran by the time of 1978.
STEVE SILBERMAN: ‘Jerry was mostly pretty mellow’ — no, that's not true. Jerry was strikingly happy at the Duke show. The only time I ever saw that happy with my own eyes on stage was when he was playing with Bonnie Raitt at the Greek. He was thrilled, he was absolutely thrilled.
AUDIO: “U.S. Blues” [4/12/78] (5:45-5:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [4/12/78]: Thank you — and good night!
JESSE: Nick Morgan.
NICK MORGAN: I just remember walking out into the night on the quad and feeling like it was one of the greatest nights of my life. I was just so grateful. I was so utterly grateful, and in love even more with the Grateful Dead, in love more of my friends, in love where I was at — on Duke University campus, being at the epicenter of everything. It just seemed like one of the most magical nights of my life, and I knew it right then, felt the joy of all the friendship and camaraderie of love and magic that had happened. It was really special.
JESSE: Joe DiMona.
JOE DIMONA: We were wired out on whatever psychedelics were around. And I remember we were up all night, and I ended up on East Campus. I don't know if you know anything about the Duke campus, but there's the West Campus, the beautiful, old Gothic quads, and then the East Campus. So the Georgian brick beautiful campus, separated by about a mile from one another. I remember walking back from the East Campus at about 5:30 in the morning, which is about a mile in the rain, just totally trashed. Tuning in with the birds and the insects and the whole… in the rain. The whole thing about it was just like, whoa.
JESSE: But there wasn’t much time for sleeping.
JOE DIMONA: Then we hopped and did a little tour to see a couple other shows, At William and Mary and I forget where else.
The Video
JESSE: Slow down, that’s next episode. Not every fanbase was nearly as organized or as rabid as the Dead Heads. Fans of other bands could try to find somebody like Charly Mann.
CHARLY MANN [2013]: We actually had a taping business where there were a number of shows you would get [and say] ‘This isn't worth putting out on a vinyl.’ And we would sell and make tapes for people. That came in like ‘76 or something.
JESSE: Rock Collector’s Ltd. offered mail-order tapes, a different branch of the tape trading network. But they also had goods that were hard to find among tape traders.
CHARLY MANN [2013]: Jim and I actually had the video of that show, I think which is now available from Duke, that black-and-white video, because of the Student Union film thing. Jim actually got a hold of that thing.
JESSE: Jim Enright remembers it being the other way around and brought some video tapes to show and tell.
JIM ENRIGHT: Charly acquired, through a contact of his at Duke, copies of the tape of the show. And if you look at these, these are Beta tapes.
JESSE: Interestingly, I’ve come across several other accounts of people claiming to have liberated the Duke ‘78 video in some manner, and I can only assume that they’re all telling the truth. But if you ever watched the copy on YouTube, which was upscaled recently and streamed officially by the Dead for the Duke ‘78 release, you have Jim Enright directly to thank.
JIM ENRIGHT: I had them for a number of years. I was trying to think when I got them; it’d have to be probably sometime in the early ‘80s. And then through tape trading, I was in touch probably with Harvey Lubar, who you probably know.
JESSE: The late Harvey Lubar was the founder of New York’s Hells Honkies tape club and he’s a Dead freak I genuinely miss and think about often. We’ve heard his voice on a few Deadcasts, and he was—as we say—the definition of a tape trading mensch, in a world where people could be overprotective of their recordings.
JIM ENRIGHT: Harvey was always so generous with his tapes and with his music and with everything. He would send me the best stuff. One time we were talking, I said, “Well, I do have a video of the ‘78 Duke show.” He said, “What?!” Anyway, I sent it to Harvey, converted it from Beta to VHS.
JESSE: The tape got around. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I heard the show before I saw the video, but I did see the video early on, because I was also a videotape trader, such that we were. I had two hi-fi VHS decks attached together. I remember I traded with this guy in New Jersey, Lee, and he had hundreds of Dead videos. That went for all of the pro-shot stuff, which would be Duke; he had the Europe show, the 4/17[/72]; the closing of Winterland [12/31/78], [as well as] 11/24/78. So he had all that stuff. But this was around ‘89, when I was getting into video trading; he was also part of the crew that would go in with video cameras—really good stuff, with recording microphones plugged in—and do one-camera shoots of the Dead’s concerts. It was frowned upon. In fact, it was illegal. No videotaping — but these guys did it, and I traded for them. So I had this huge collection of video tapes. So I got the Duke show. And I always loved the energy. But when I saw the video and saw the visuals… I'd never seen Jerry, in particular—no, not Jerry, all of them—this animated.
Legacy
JESSE: It wasn’t the last time the Dead played at Duke, but it came close. Eric Mlyn.
ERIC MLYN: After the ‘78 show, the university basically said they're not coming back, because the Hells Angels had been here.
JESSE: For his liner notes for the new box, and probably just because he could, Eric dove into the Duke archive.
ERIC MLYN: I've got memos, I've got budgets. I've got expenses. I have a number of documents for the ‘78 show. One of the most interesting is this memo that I cite by William Griffith, who was kind of the Vice President, I think, for Student Affairs, who was making an argument for why the Dead should be allowed to come back.
JESSE: Essentially, it’s an analysis of the Duke show from the facility’s point of view, responding to the critique that Dead fans had damaged Cameron Indoor Stadium with a virtual thread-by-thread inspection of the building, even comparing notes with their equivalents at William and Mary, where the Dead played a few days later. They concluded that the only lasting damages were cigarette burns in the carpet, some of which had been there already, and that their impact was little different from other acts. Griffith knew he was making an argument for the losing side; one might call him an… advocate of the devil. There must be a better word for that. News that the Dead wouldn’t be returning didn’t go over too well. Fred Goldring.
FRED GOLDRING: I got hate mail from every Dead Head on campus, who [were] saying that I didn't like the Dead and I was the one that made it so they weren't coming back. Which was, of course, not true. And my roommate at the time, who was the middle linebacker on the football team, I remember he wrote a letter to the Duke Chronicle, which was the newspaper, inviting any of the Dead Heads who had a problem or thought that I had done this to come visit him.
JESSE: Eric Mlyn.
ERIC MLYN: There were always debates about the Dead coming back, right? And they changed their mind in ‘82, to let them back one more time.
JESSE: Duke has embraced the Dead’s legacy at the university in numerous ways. For starters, it’s become a kind of teachable moment in Eric’s classes about the Dead.
ERIC MLYN: I've taught it now for three years. It has kind of revived interest in the Dead at Duke and brought the Dead Heads out of the woodwork. One of the really amazing things about finding out about the Dead at Duke is that the Duke archives have just a rich amount of information on the Dead at Duke. It's a great way to teach students about doing primary research. So, my students are in the archives.
JESSE: The show has also become a kind of community marker.
ERIC MLYN: For the 45th anniversary of this show, we had a gathering on campus. We had, like, I think we had 150 people. The room was full, and it was the community — some students, but mostly people from the community. People were talking about that they had been at the show, how amazing it was. There are folks around town who worked in Duke Performances and Student Affairs who are eager to talk about what their experiences were like.
JESSE: One way to look at this is nostalgia, to gather and talk about a great performance from a few decades ago. But there’s also a sense of the Grateful Dead as a continuing community, a mobile community that manifests in different ways in different places, one that Joe DiMona quite literally identified in his article about waiting to buy Dead tickets — “the revival was held a month in advance and lasted many light years into the future.” That future now includes that freshman course that Eric Mlyn teaches, where the Duke ‘78 show itself is an object of study.
ERIC MLYN: One of the things I do in my class is each student gets a Dead buddy, and a Dead buddy is a Dead Head at Duke. And they've come out of the woodwork: the Head of Finance at the Duke Hospital, the head of our corporate risk management. People I know! I’m like: ‘You’re into the Dead? Really?’ And so now I think we’ve transitioned from it being a stigma to people wanting to be part of it. And my course has uncovered that.
JESSE: The ‘70s Dead Heads became ‘80s and ‘90s and 21st century Dead Heads, of course, but they also became professionals. Nick Morgan became a civil and environmental engineer for the United States government, an activist, and eventually a board member at the Rex Foundation, the charitable group started by the Dead in the early 1980s.
NICK MORGAN: I know that being on the Dead Bus gave me a sense of purpose to help others engage in the world in more meaningful ways; engage in my work, my community, my friends. And so that was just part of the direction of my life, being in service to various community projects. And I think it was a miracle that someone on the Rex board saw me contributing to toxic waste cleanup, Greenpeace environmental activism, different projects out in the world, and they wanted someone who had grassroots experience in community activism to join the Rex board to help steer the grants world into more community-based projects.
JESSE: Things have changed, but there really was a stigma.
ERIC MLYN: I was on the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill when they played in, was it ‘92 or ‘93? I think it was 1993. And talk about being a Clark Kent Dead Head: I went in to teach my class the next morning—I taught an 8:00 AM Introduction to International Relations class—and my students were like, “Did you see that freak show out there last night?” And I just didn't have the guts to tell them that I was part of that freak show. I didn't want my colleagues to know either. So I changed into my Birks and t-shirt in the parking lot. That was a long time ago.
JESSE: In 2023, Duke University Press even launched its own Studies in the Grateful Dead series, edited by our scholarly poobah, Nicholas G. Meriwether. They’ve published two excellent titles so far — John Brackett’s Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness, and Michael Kaler’s Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead. The story of the Dead and Duke is ongoing, as those many light years keep slipping into the future.
AUDIO: “Supplication” [4/12/78] (4:55-5:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]