You may have figured this out since I’ve made so many changes over the last year, but I’ve been feeling a bit burned out running this blog of late. I want to state right up front that I have no intentions of closing the blog, but that I’m trying to find ways to continue to share the music and keep it interesting for myself whilst fostering this community and lessening the work load on me.
One of the ways I’ve been doing this is to try and collect all the shows/sources from certain eras, or venues or any other thing I can think of. I did this with Bob Dylan in 1978 and Jerry Garcia in the Fall of 1981. Today I’ve got shows from The Grateful Dead in 1981. Truth be told this was a bigger project than I had intended. It includes 16 shows and an enormous amount of sources. Too many for any reasonable person if I’m being honest.
I had intended to collect them all before I shared them, but that is taking too long. It has been about a month since I shared the Jerry tour and I’ve still got over 40 sources I need to collect. So for today, I share what I’ve got and as I collect the rest I’ll share them here.
This does bring up an interesting question. Are any of you hard-core completists? Do you have to have every source of every show or are you just looking for the best quality recordings? I’m a bit of a completist myself, but I recognize not everyone is. I also realize that collecting every show takes up a lot of space. Just this one month has added close to 100 gigs to my drives.
I chose March of 1981 almost at random. I follow a number of Deadheads on Twitter and several weeks ago some of them were chattering about how good these shows were. I’ve always been a 1970s Head but I’ve been trying to listen more to shows from the 1980s. The more I listen the more I realize how much great music they made in that decade.
March of 1981 is an interesting period for the Dead. Keyboardist Brent Mydland was fully integrated into the band by then. He’s a terrific keyboard player and his use of various synthesizes added some interesting textures and sounds to the band. He’s a good singer too and he added some nice vocal harmonies into the mix. Garcia was in good health and throughout this period his playing is excellent.
In March they did a short tour of the East Coast before heading to Europe for four nights in London and one gig in Essen, Germany. It seems very strange to me that they’d do just five shows in Europe before heading home. Even stranger is the fact that they went back to Europe in October. I believe that’s the only time they traveled across the ocean twice in one year.
Whatever the reasons the music is excellent across the board.
Click here to dig in.
Thanks again, for everything, Mat. I have over 400 gigs of mostly Bob Dylan shows. I guess I’m a completist, but I really would just like the best bootleg of each show. Christ, I doubt I’ll be able to listen to all the shows I’ve collected in my lifetime.
I feel that. I tend to lean towards absolute completists levels, but it is a gargantuan task. That’s where I was with this set of shows form the Dead. I started collecting everything, but there are just so many different sources. Or versions of sources. Its the same with Dylan. There are well over 10.000 LB numbers and so many of them are essentially the same, but with the slightest variations.
My trouble is figuring out which source is the best.
I long ago gave up on the idea of being able to listen to everything I collect. I guess its the goal, and I never download something I don’t at least have an interest in listening to, but yea, at some point the collection gets so big that there aren’t enough hours in a lifetime to listen to it all.
Mat, I started out as a completist, but that compulsion faded when I realistically looked at the enormity of the task–just for Dylan, I opted for finding the best quality I could. I agree with poboy, I don’t think I will ever be able to listen to everything I have, so why not concentrate on just the best?
Mat, Truly appreciate all you are doing, offering so many sources for so many shows. I lean towards getting the best source myself, but am a completest as far as tours etc. So having the option to hear all the different sources to choose from that you post is a huge treat! So the “completest” angle on your end also pays off for those of us who are not! Thank you!!
As I noted above I have trouble figuring out which source is the best. I’ve got some hearing issues so I always hesitate to make a declaration of which source sounds better than the others. Which is partially why I tend to collect and share everything. That just takes up a lot of space and as I get closer to hitting my 5TB limit on the Amazon Drive I have to wonder yet again how much is too much?
At some point I may start taking polls as to which source people think is the best and then remove everything but that one.
All of this really comes out as I was trying to collect all those Dead sources. A lot of them are on the Archive already and those 24 bit ones were a beast to download!
Hi Mat. I am with you, regarding keeping the best possible source. But one source may be crystal clear and be missing one track…which is on a slightly inferior recording! A very daunting task indeed. And, like you say, Archive has 1000s of Dead items (but not all downloadable).
I’m with you there. If a great source doesn’t have all the songs, I want to also collect the worse sounding source to get the entire show.
Yea, the Dead is weird in terms of this blog since all the audience recording are available to download on the blog and there are numerous other places to grab the soundboards. But I love the Dead and they were the first band I ever collected so I like sharing them here.
Mat from what I’ve gleaned from you you’ve got a family and a life outside of this blog. That is the most important thing. If you never posted anything again you would still go down in the music sharers hall of fame first ballot. Personally I don’t require a post everyday or even weekly. I am not a completest as my music addiction already takes up a lot of my time. The best sounding version is what I seek. I’ve got a hundred or so shows that i need to go through along with all the fantasic music being released these days, Elvis’s 10 cd set in Vegas and Dylan’s latest bootleg series for example. If you just posted occasionally 10 to 20 times a year I think most of us would be cool with that. Main thing is that this work be fun for you and not a burden.
I appreciate that. No one on this blog has ever complained about the number of times I post in a given week or how many shows are posted. I know that I could post once a week and people would be nothing but grateful. It’s just a weird quirk of my personality that makes me feel guilty if I don’t post something every day. I don’t know how to change that part of my brain.
2020 was a rough year for everybody and for me personally. It made me rethink some things and look at this blog in a different way. I still do enjoy sharing the music and hope to continue doing so for a long while. Sometimes because I get so busy trying to collect more shows and to put them on my blog every day I forget to sit and actually enjoy the music. That’s what I’m trying to do with these collections. Creating a specific set of shows to collect and to share is helping me to sit down with it and listen, and enjoy. That brings the joy.
I hate begging for comments, but they really do help. Knowing someone is enjoying the music I’m sharing helps to make me want to share more.
Mat, I feel your frustration. I think so many of us are just so pleased with what you share that we don’t worry about being a completist. For me it’s all about the quality. I have been collecting boots since about 1970, with a collection that started on reel to reel tape, eventually was supplemented by cassettes and now has been replaced in its entirety by digital downloads. I have always strived for finding the best quality versions of shows; ideally soundboards and even better, soundboards mastered by Charlie Miller. When I find a better quality version of something I have I compare the two carefully and then delete the inferior version. There’s just not enough time in life to listen to crappy quality shows just to say I have a complete collection.
I actually listen to what I collect, mostly when I’m skiing or hiking or when I’m in the car. When I pick out something with marginal quality it means the music itself must be something special. So from my perspective I would rather not have to wade through multiple crappy versions just to find the good one. In fact, when I search in your catalog and find multiple audience versions I often just move on. My goodness, my collection is up to about 100,000 songs and I just don’t need more volume, I want quality or unique performances with unusual setlists. But that’s me and may not apply to others. In any case, what you do for us is truly appreciated so thank you!
I totally understand that philosophy. It’s funny because for a very long time I was not particularly serious about collecting in the sense that I just grabbed whatever I thought looked interesting and then I would listen to it. If it was good it would wind up in my rotation, and if the sound quality wasn’t good or if the performance sucked then it would just gather dust.
This was in the tape trading days (that’s awesome you’ve been collecting for so long, I started in the mid-90s so it began with cassette tapes). I have very warm feelings of the days when we traded physical copies of things through the mail.
But now with digital downloads being so easy (and truth be told my inescapable need. to post more and more shows to this blog every day) I grab everything under the sun. It has only been recently that I got serious about systematically trying to collect everything. Part of it is because of this blog. I want to share everything so that I might please every person. Part of it is my weird collectors brain. I also have a bit library of books and Blu-rays. I like creating lists and organizing them. Part of the pleasure of collecting boots is to make my lists and then try to see what I’m missing.
But yea, when it comes to listening I like the good sound. I’ve learned to love good sounding audience recordings, but nothing beats a crispy SBD.
Hi Matt. I love your site! With regards to Jerry, have you ever thought about grouping together all of the JGB shows when Nicky Hopkins was a member? I believe his short stay was from Summer 1975 until year end. Nicky is such a legend and the shows I have heard are so unique with Nicky there.
That’s a very interesting idea. I may look into that, thanks.
I actually prefer shows that are NOT available in multiple versions. It’s too difficult which is the one I actually want.
Also, there are so many shows each week, even I can’t keep up, so I don’t know how you do it. Maybe one email and post per week with a couple of shows for various artists?
mat, just looking at this massive post must have been very time consuming. i’m sure we all appreciate your efforts but take some time to smell the roses. i pretty much like best sounding and complete (matrix),but i can understand the completist thing. i was that way collecting records for years,the hunt can be fun but can get in the way of enjoyment (least for me) but wow what a great post,would love to see a similar post of the fall europe tour,peace and thanks for all your time and kindness to us all,peace and stay safe
So I decided yesterday to dig into this treasure trove you’ve handed to us. March ’81 is not a month I’ve listened to before, and several shows get outstanding comments from reviewers on Archive and elsewhere. So I’ll be listening to the shows from MSG (3/9 gets especially strong reviews) and London (3/21 has quite the first set). But first I decided to do something different so I watched the entire video of 3/28/81 on You Tube. I strongly recommend that for anyone else who hasn’t seen that, which was broadcast from Rockpalast. The band plays really well throughout and Jerry is dynamite on Sugaree, Shakedown and Althea in the first set. That was a pretty amazing way to spend a Saturday night. So thank you for pointing me towards this month, which I had never focused on before. “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right!”.
You are very welcome. I had a similar experience as you. I’d not paid much attention to this period until a few folks on Twitter were going on about it. But once I dived in I realized how great they were playing in these shows. Glad I could shed a little light.