Intrigued by a New York Times article about the Grateful Dead, I went online and streamed a concert from May 8, 1977, which is supposedly The Best Dead Show Ever. You’d think it’d be hard to quantify something like that. I mean, what if someone who really, really loved the Grateful Dead didn’t consider it a Great Dead Show unless the band played “Dark Star,” “New Speedway Boogie,” and “Box of Rain,” or at least two out of of those three, or maybe “Uncle John’s Band” or “Bertha” or “Sugar Magnolia”? What if you think that Bob Weir should never try to sing “El
Paso”? What if you think the Dead went downhill after Pigpen died? See what I mean? No matter how well the band played that night at Cornell, you’d walk away thinking, hmmm, that was ok, but maybe the eighth best Dead Show you’ve ever seen.
My Dead Years were 1969-1972, but hey, I’m an open-minded kind of guy, and I haven’t listened to them much lately, so the article gave me the excuse to go to archive.org and see what all the excitement is about
What can I say? It’s a Dead Show all right. But I’d forgotten how Weir should not only not sing “El Paso,” but how he always used to botch “Mama Tried,” and how no matter how much Deadheads like it when the band plays “Dancing In The Streets,” Motown is another musical area the Dead should stay well clear of, and absolutely not explore for longer than 16 minutes, as they did that night. It’s almost like a disco-jam-band version. There’s a song called “Lazy Lightning” that is completely disposable. You know how the Dead would go off for a few minutes and talk amongst themselves, like infielders gathered on the pitcher’s mound when it’s second-and-third with one out? From the sound of this recording, there was a lot of that.
There’s a nice “Scarlet Begonias”/”Fire On The Mountain”/”Estimated Prophet” run in the middle of the set, and I like the songs from Garcia’s first solo album (“Loser” and “Deal”). And the set does gain momentum as it goes, reaching one of those acidy peaks in a “St. Stephen”>”Not Fade Away”>”Morning Dew” pre-encore trilogy. I suppose this is a representative 1977 gig, with Garcia hitting some high heights, but I’m not hearing why it should rank so supremely in the hearts of the faithful. Is it heresy to suggest that no show with the Godchauxs could possibly be considered The Best Anything? Donna’s vocals never add much, and sometimes she just floats around trying to find a place to sneak in.
I’d chalk it up to that you-had-to-be-there syndrome, but most of the people testifying weren’t. They’re listening to the same soundboard mix that I am. I was there at the equally-storied Fillmore East concerts in February 1970, and I guess if I were forced to pick (by whom, exactly, but you know what I mean…), those are the ones I’d put in the Dead time capsule.
2 Responses to one more sunday night (1977)
I too had a fondness for The Dead, running roughly from the first album to Workingman’s Dead, and even then they were never consistent.
One of the most tedious concerts I ever attended was The Dead at The Rainbow, London, sometime in the mid-70s. Me and my mate Mike Gardener went out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee to a nearby cafe as they started Johnny B. Goode. When we came back they were still playing it. We felt like we’d missed nothing.
I’m a huge fan of the Dead… from ’68 to ’73. Everything they did before was juvenilia, and everything after pretty much utter crap. Me, I blame the change in choice of drugs; by ’73 cocaine had kicked in big time, and then Garcia became a hopeless, fat junkie. Take the brown acid, not the brown powder.
I was lucky enough to see them at the Lyceum in ’72, but Alexandra Palace in ’74 was excruciating. None of this stopped me becoming an avid collector of their live stuff, and the 10-CD box of every note they played at the Fillmore West in Feb/March ’69, some of which became Live/Dead, is astonishingly good (except for awful readings of R&B tunes and a simply tragic attempt at Hey Jude).