Grateful Dead
10/06/77
Activity Center
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ
Set 1:
01 – Promised Land
02 – Tennessee Jed
03 – Jack Straw
04 – Dire Wolf
05 – Looks Like Rain
06 – They Love Each Other
07 – New Minglewood Blues
08 – Loser
09 – The Music Never Stopped
Set 2:
10 – Tuning
11 – Bertha >
12 – Good Lovin’
13 – Friend Of The Devil
14 – Estimated Prophet >
15 – Eyes Of The World >
16 – Drums >
17 – Not Fade Away >
18 – Black Peter >
19 – Not Fade Away >
20 – Around And Around
Encore:
21 – Uncle John’s Band
Sounds like a plan – now if i could just find some disk space somewhere – sounds like i’m gonna need it!
Indeed. I’ve been moving shows from my regular external hard drive to a back up all afternoon. Soon I’m gonna have to buy another 2 TB external. It never ends.
Oh boy, external HDD to external is just the pits of despair! time for a long walk or a sleep! I’m sure USB 3 would help but its the speed through the PC bus that really kills it. ‘synctoy’ from microsoft d/l is the best i’ve found and much faster than a basic copy/paste. If you can go offline and disable antivirus it also makes a big difference
It isn’t too terribly bad here. I do things kind of weird which helps out.
Whenever I download a file it goes directly to my normal hard drive. Once its done (and I’ve decided that I’ve seeded it long enough) it gets moved to my main external drive. I put it in a folder of shows that have not yet been uploaded and posted here.
Once they get posted they get moved to another folder on the same hard drive that denotes they’ve been blogged but need to be organized. At some point I then move those shows to another external drive and as I’m doing so I add them to db.etree and note their final location.
It is kind of a ridiculous process but it works for me. I did a bunch of that final moving today so I’d move a show then put in on db.etree and by the time I was done it was usually completely moved and I could move on.
Oh boy! Before I got DSL, I D/Led lots o’ Dead in mp3 from LMA. Better sound than my old tape sources, but not the same quality as lossless sources. Right after I got DSL, D/Ling sdbd shows from LMA was stopped. Been trying to re-get all those shows in lossless elsewhere ever since. Hope your upcoming 68/69 posts include 6/14/68, 6/19/68, 9/2/68, 10/12/68, 10/13/68, 5/3/69, 7/11/69, 7/12/69, 8/29/69, 10/25/69, 11/2/69, and 12/19/69. Anything else will be great too!
And then into the 70s, 80s, and 90s! You’re awesome!
(complete 5/15/70?)
OK so I am one of those who has never really caught onto The Dead unlike so many including you Mat. What is your favorite period of Dead? Rather, what would you name as your Top 5 periods of Dead shows?
Grant:
I can say that if you like hard-edged space rock, shows like the 3/2/69 posted above should float your boat!, as will most 68/69 shows. For that and a taste of Americana-music, try 70-71 shows. ’72 is all of that, plus ventures into jazzier realms. 73-74 is loaded down with sleepy-but-soulful ballads and cuts way back on the rockin’, but takes the jazzyness pretty seriously. 76-78 bring back the rock edge, but with a 70’s L.A. polish that is friendly but often balls-less. 79-81 gradually reduces the jazzyness but brings in a slew of new keyboard sounds and a new vocal blend, courtesy of new guy Brent Mydland. After that comes the 80s/90s shows- I love plenty of shows from that period, but start with the 60s/70s!
If 3/2/69 doesn’t have you comin’ back for more, you probably can say you’re not going to “catch on” to The Dead!
Seth did a good job of summing things up. Although I usually don’t recommend folks start with the late 60s stuff. It is pretty far out there and unless you know you want some big psychedelic jamming then I’d go for something form the 70s.
I’ll disagree a little with the 76-78 not having any balls too. Sure is is a little more polished and doesn’t have the ferociousness of some of their earlier stuff, but the jams are still killer and they’ve got a number of new terrific songs to play with as well.
The 80s aren’t really my thing either as they really started playing around with the MIDI technology and their sound made a dramatic change with it. There is some great stuff in there, but I’m with Seth in not starting with those show.
By the late 80s and into the 90s the band became a behemoth. They started regularly playing stadiums and the intimacy suffered for it. Plus Jerry’s health problems became a bigger and bigger deal and by the end he was hardly playing at all. That being said the run with Bruce Hornsby in the early 90 has some pretty stellar moments.
All of that being said I’d grab something I posted from the May 1977 run as a tester. If you dig the spacier stuff there then you can give the 69 stuff a try.
As for studio albums I’d grab American Beauty, Workingman’s Dead (both have some of their best songs on it and really show of their folk roots) and then Wake of the Flood & Blues For Allah are a good representation of their jazzier side from a studio perspective.
Live is where its at but I think its good to hear some of the studio work so that you can actually hear the songs before they are sent into outerspace in a live setting.