Grateful Dead
06/14/87
Ventura County Fairgrounds
Ventura, CA
OTS; Superscope EC-7 Cardioid Condensers (Near Coincident) >Sony TC-153SD (HX-S 90, XLIIS 90)
Cass Masters Transferred: Denon DR-M12HR Cassette Deck >Tascam DR100mkII (24bit/48kHz) (August 2024) WAV >Audacity (Amplify By 4.7db, Index Tracks, Down Sample To 16bit/44.1kHz, Minor Edits [Tape Flips], & Fades) Fix SBEs >FLAC (Level 8) + Tags Via xACT 2.53
[Recorded, Transferred, FLAC, Tags, & Front Cover Artwork By OldNeumanntapr]
TDK HX-S 90 – 1st Set
Maxell XLIIS – 2nd Set
Set I
Disc I:
- Tuning
- Hell In A Bucket >
- Sugaree
- Tons Of Steel
- Ramble On Rose
- Me & My Uncle >
- Mexicali Blues (tape flip)
- Althea
- Feel Like A Stranger
- Might As Well
Set II
Disc II:
- Scarlet Begonias >
- Fire On The Mountain (tape flip)
- Playing In The Band >
- Terrapin Station >
- Drums >
- Space > (tape flip)
Disc III:
- Truckin’ >
- Wharf Rat >
- Throwing Stones >
- Not Fade Away
Encore:
- The Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)
Jerry Garcia – Guitar
Bob Weir – Guitar
Brent Mydland – Keyboards
Phil Lesh – Bass
Bill Kreutzmann – Drums
Mickey Hart – Drums
OldNeumanntapr Notes:
I haven’t listened to these recordings in many years and I just recently realized that they had never been digitally transferred. I was able to transfer my Saturday Ventura master with my Sony D5, but when I tried to transfer the Sunday show I heard what sounded like WOW distortion. This turned out to actually be a problem with my D5 and was not the tape at all. I had to borrow a Denon home cassette deck from a friend for these transfers. The first thing I noticed was that I had forgotten that I used to pause the tape between songs, mostly in the first set. I don’t know why I did this but I had only been recording live shows for about a year. I don’t know when I wised up and just let the tape roll. I think my rationale was that I was trying to cut out the dead air between songs but I ended up clipping the beginning of some songs. I would also, in the early days, start the second set at the end of side two of the first set. I didn’t realize that this would give me one extra tape flip.
This was the weekend that I met my friend Gene, who patched into my Sony 153 with a borrowed Marantz 420. Gene would eventually buy a gray-market Sony D10 DAT recorder that we would ship back and forth from coast to coast to record Dead shows with.
My intentions were to use the TDK chromium tapes for one day and the Maxell XLIIS tapes on another, to see which ones I liked better. (I would eventually use only XLIIS to master shows with.) For some unknown reason, most likely cannabis induced, I ended up taking one tape of each manufacturer in with me for the Saturday show, so I had no choice but to repeat that for the Sunday show.
I liked the Ventura Fairgrounds a lot. My ex wife and I camped for the weekend in the parking lots in my ’67 VW camper bus and we were quite comfortable, compared to our neighbors in the lot who were spending the night in a Honda CRX. Talk about cramped! Brian and I became friends, not sure that his girlfriend enjoyed the weekend’s accommodations, and Nikki and I stayed with him once in San Francisco not long after the big Loma Prieta Quake where he showed me the big cracks inside the Victorian that he was renting. I remember that he said that during the quake he got into a doorway but forgot that there was a pocket door that slammed against him repeatedly!
All in all this was a million times better experience than the previous year’s Ventura Fairgrounds excursion when Jerry had his diabetic coma, the shows were cancelled, and I almost burned up my VW bus! (Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?)
Do NOT Convert To MP3.
Enjoy! Share freely, don’t sell, play nice, don’t run with scissors, etc. 😉