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Showing posts with label 1980. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1980. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

1980 September 6 - Lewiston, ME

GRATEFUL DEAD
Saturday, September 6, 1980
State Fairgrounds - Lewiston, ME
Audience Recording

Strip away time. Erase the day of the week, the month, the year. Tumble into a kaleidoscope of color. Pass through the membrane. Be the membrane. There never was a membrane. You're back at a Grateful Dead show.

When they did it well, it was all about the evaporation of everything that grounded you to the here and now, yet allowed you to slip all the way into the here and now just the same. The Dead's musical muse simply was. It didn't evolve so much as slowly turn, ever-present in the light. A telltale sign that the band was coaxing the muse out came with the strong impression that you were no longer hearing music being played right now. More often, the muse simply sounded like the Grateful Dead, echoing backward and forward, un-tethered to "today."

Here's a show with the opportunity to echo as far forward as it could backward. Played in 1980, it stands at the center of the Dead's 30 year career.  This is too coincidental a reason, I know, but the show is indeed packed with muse-infused moments. On 9/6/80 the music played the band.


Set One: Alabama Getaway > Greatest Story Ever Told, Sugaree, Me & My Uncle > Mexicali Blues, Tennessee Jed, Stranger, Fried of the Devil, Far From Me > Little Red Rooster, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider > Promised Land
Set Two: Shakedown Street > Lost Sailor > Saint of Circumstance, Althea, Playin' in the Band > Uncle John's Band > Drums > Space > Not Fade Away > The Wheel > Uncle John's Band > Playin' in the Band > Sugar Magnolia E: One More Saturday Night> Brokedown Palace


The entire show is worth all of your ear's time. Yet, there are several highlights that bear mentioning – so many, that I'm quite sure I will overlook a few.

Sugaree plays on and on, Garcia speeding and swirling effortlessly. The band is locked in with him, everyone adding fuel to the fire. It's a healthy, long version, typical of the time period. Feel Like A Stranger is sublime. The jam is tossed into a heavy syncopation after Bobby missteps a "silky silky silky crazy night" line. It's impossible to tell who in the band slips with him, and who stays in the prescribed beat count of the song. But the result is an extremely extended jam that fires flares off in roller coaster streaming arcs for what feels like an eternity. The phrasing is filled with the standard Stranger themes, but it is peppered with so much more. When they somehow manage to pull together for the final refrain, it's like be shaken from an epic dream.

China>Rider had a wonderful tendency to catch fire in the early 80's. After just sort of reappearing in rotation at the start of 1979 (after a 4 year hiatus), the song duo had taken on a more upbeat tempo, and by 1980 it was a pure carnival of light and sound. The China>Rider here on 9/6/80 is flat out perfection. A wonderfully glowing solo section cascades into an I Know You Rider which finds Jerry's tone crisp and clean. He rounds corners and rolls over hills, spraying notes to the horizon. The last solo catches the light of the sun and soars like a bird. We slam into a Promised Land that punctuates the end of the first set with the same elevated energy that has permeated the entire show so far. It will blow your hair back and leave you breathless. And set two is still to come…

Leading off with a rousing Shakedown>Saint of Circumstance>Lost Sailor, the second set gets off to a fine start. But it's the huge meat of the show where the Grateful Dead's muse fills every pore. In case you overlooked it above, this is a very long ride: Playin'>Uncle John's>Drums>Space>Not Fade Away>Wheel>Uncle John's>Playin'>Sugar Magnolia. Within this roughly 60 minutes stretch of music, we find the Dead dipping deeply into the well of creative juices they've been tapping throughout this entire early September run.

Playin' quickly transports the band to no-time. Jerry's rapid staccato lead lines slowly swirling in and out of view are the only hint that it is still 1980. The jam flies down rails of light, banking around hillsides and tunneling through showers of rich watercolor rain. Footing is easily lost as perception is swept up into the buoyancy of music. When Garcia eventually directs the band into Uncle John's it rings with the message that we have arrived. There is a vast opening of hands and hearts here. You can feel it everywhere. The Dead have brought a crowd of thousands to trusted and familiar place. Here, the musical loping is timeless. As the song's joyful bounce tips over into the 7/8 time signature jam, the band is alive with light. Everything dazzles, and the music pulls into great tracks of ascending smoke. Before Drums, form dissolves into pulsing fragments and regressions.

Space is brief, yet bottomless. Phil hurls massive planets, churning with purple lava, over and into the body of the crowd. They take away the space to breathe, as the air is filled with magma over and over again. Suffocating, taffy-like moans expand to fill the fairgrounds.

Not Fade Away appears and ignites the crowd's energy. And while it arrives off of a Garcia hip check into the boards, The Wheel which follows swoons with that unmistakable Grateful Dead vibe. A timelessness is returning, and when they deftly transition back into Uncle John's Band, the segue jamming is sensational. The ever-present underpinning of joy and welcoming arms envelope the audience and it becomes easy to lose oneself in the long spiraling cycles of the music's structure. Another nice transition unfolds back into Playin' to bring things home. The music swirls between the 7/8 and 10/4 time signatures. Themes merge and the Dead's music elevates the senses. The song ends with a few extra refrains during which Jerry delivers some unexpected soloing sparkle just when you'd otherwise expect the song to be over.

Sugar Magnolia closes the set, and things end with a Brokedown Palace encore that further solidifies this show's ability to strike the chord of the timeless Grateful Dead muse. Jerry's short solo floats like starlight through a softly swaying summer breeze. It is enough. We are bathed in the band's pure lore of folk-psychedelic Americana music. It is everything Grateful Dead. Fare thee well.

09/06/80 AUD etree source info
09/06/80 AUD Download

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

1980 May 10 - Hartford, CT

Grateful Dead 8/27/80 Pine Knob

GRATEFUL DEAD
Saturday, May 10, 1980
Hartford Civic Center – Hartford, CT
Audience Recording


As has often been pointed out here on the Grateful Dead Listening Guide, there is something extra special about discovering a wonderful show that may have hitherto evaded your radar. In fact, for many, entire years might fit this description, and 1980 is typically one of those years.

So here for your pleasure is one such show. Things are so good on 05/10/80 that when it's all said and done you might very well find yourself saying, "Where has this show been all my life?"

Set 1: New Minglewood Blues, Peggy-O, Mexicali Blues > El Paso, Althea, Passenger, Far From Me, Lost Sailor > Saint Of Circumstance > Deal
Set 2: China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider, Feel Like A Stranger > Comes A Time > Estimated Prophet > He's Gone > Uncle John's Band > Drums > Space > Not Fade Away > Sugar Magnolia E: Alabama Getaway > One More Saturday Night

This show has the sense of bursting energy about it. The band seems intent on pushing itself beyond the norm, and nowhere is this more evident than in the meat of the second set. Given the uniqueness of song pairings on this night, it's almost a crime to know the set list before you listen to this show as it kills the surprises. But this seems somewhat unavoidable here thirty years later.

After a China>Rider that finds Garcia absolutely peaking through one blistering run after another with giant spinning and spiraling wheels of starlight, the stage is set for what is already hinting at being a special evening. What follows not only contains some amazing music, but also presents us with several song transitions that never happened before, nor ever would after.

A snaky Stranger finds its exit jam turned on its head by Jerry as he slowly brings us over to Comes A Time. The transition seems to extend forever as Phil continues to return to Stranger while the rest of the band follows Garcia's migration. It's been over a year (and over 70 shows) since the last Comes A Time was played. That, coupled with coming out of Feel Like A Stranger for the first and only time, serves to thrill the audience completely.

This first post-Keith and Donna era Comes A Time floats its way out on delicate wings that allow the spaces between the music to swell with emotion. We've found a secret garden hidden behind hills where we can become one with a tender tranquility. And out of this garden we enter Estimated Prophet (never before or after to be found coming out of Comes A Time).

This Estimated succeeds in transgressing the laws of time and space as it defies any ability to be called solely a product of 1980. The jam is awash with great swells and syncopated rhythms that coil like rising smoke in still air. The slippery edges of slow motion water over river rocks eventually recede leaving us in He's Gone.

The entirety of He's Gone feels born out of the same secret spaces discovered in Comes A Time. As we pass into the end portion of the song we are again treated to a dose of music that has a tactile presence to its silences. Everything visible and invisible combines to take us further out of ourselves. This slowly grows in intensity as cosmic winds and jet streams rise around us. Then the music settles, and given our location in the show we can't help but expect to head directly into Drums from here. This is not to be.

The transition into Uncle John's Band captures the quintessential perfection that was Grateful Dead improvisation. Again never seen before or after, heading from He's Gone into UJB is like icing on some magical musical cake. There is no escaping the energy that pours from the band to the crowd and directly off the tape. We are firmly in our sacred space with the band. There is no desire to be anywhere else. "Where does the time go," indeed. The music begins to eclipse itself as the jamming unfolds. Decidedly proving that there is no reason what-so-ever to discount years or decades that came after the Dead's "golden era," this jam is riveting. The song itself eventually falls away and the band continues to coax magic from thin air prolonging the approach of the moment when the drummers finally take over.

The post Drums/Space portion of the show is intensely rockin' right to the final notes of the two song encore. The band certainly was in no mood to hold back. When it was all done, the music played for nearly 3 full hours.

05/10/80 AUD etree source info
05/10/80 AUD Download

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

1980 June 21 - Anchorage, AK

Jerry Garcia 10-25-80
GRATEFUL DEAD
Saturday, June 21, 1980
West High Auditorium – Anchorage, AK
Audience Recording


1980 is a year, like 1979 to some degree, that seems somewhat lost between eras. Not even shunned like 1976 as paling to a nearby year thought to be better, 1980 often doesn’t even draw enough attention to offer up a negative dismissal. It is generally simply forgotten. When Deadheads talk about the early 80’s, the years that come to mind are 1981-1984. Poor 1980 seems always the bridesmaid and never the bride. This is a real shame, because 1980 is filled with many breathtaking moments and some pretty standout historic events, such as the return of Acoustic Dead at the Warfield and Radio City Music Hall. Without even focusing on that highlight (we will in the future), you needn’t look far to find an ample supply of great music from this transitional year. It sounds a lot like the late 70’s and a lot like the early 80’s, and generally it will always surprise you and make you wonder why no one gives it much attention.

Alaska. I know a fair amount of Grateful Dead lore, but I can’t recall exactly how the Dead managed to arrange a trip so far north, and to sell a three night run on top of it at this 2,000 seat high school auditorium. What amazes me further is that we were lucky enough to have seen someone up there taping these shows, and taping them well. In fact, there was more than one taper doing it; in Alaska, no less. It warms this AUD lover’s heart to be able to serve up such a wonderful audience recording here now. This run is regarded as containing some of the best music of the year, and the closing night, 06/21/80, shines the most brightly in my opinion.

Jerry Garcia June 1980 AlaskaWhile it’s well known that the first sets of the early 80’s often could contain a blistering amount of energy and musical excitement which could rival second sets, and any first set output from the previous decade, it is not altogether clear precisely when this first set transformation took place. It seems to have its seeds with the addition of Brent to the band in May 1979, but didn’t really see its groundswell until sometime later. It would be a worthy investigation to try pinning down the first post Keith & Donna show that contained a surprisingly blistering first set. We can at least be sure that by June 1980, the propensity for first set fireworks was well on its way to being a hallmark of the decade.

A fun fact to bear in mind about this show – consider the date and location. The sun never set in the sky while the band played this “night.” People walked out of the concert into daylight.

Right out of the gate, we are treated to a great Sugaree, a song that fully matured during the prior year with the band, as well as in Jerry’s solo band work in 1980. This provides a great start to the show, complete with Garcia reaching some shredding highpoints late in the solo. It is only a precursor for things to come.

The first set continues to deliver the goods, peaking a few different times. Supplication is first to crack open the door to some mind bending psychedelia. Loping along in its 7/8 time signature, Jerry’s fingers fly as the music opens up into great spinning orbits causing everything to cycle through loosely knotted patterns that seem to follow the path of an infinity symbol. A short jam, but fully satisfying. They cool things way down, only to let it all mount up again on electric fingers of fire. Then the set closes with an altogether gooey Feel Like A Stranger. Like huge handfuls of warm, multicolor taffy, the music oozes with complete disregard to anything resembling right angles. Floor, walls, hands, and faces all congeal in a great lava lamp of interwoven wax. Stranger wouldn’t close sets all too often, but here it works oh so well to prime the crowd for what the rest of the night may bring. The jam begins with its fantastic funk/disco high step, only to quickly tip head over heels into a cauldron of stewing colors. Jerry and Brent lose all sense of each other’s beginning and end points as the music follows fractal footprints deep into your mind. You know it’s gonna get stranger.

Grateful Dead 1980As things get started in Terrapin Station, the music sheds all connection to the year in which it is being played. Sounding far more like a slice of 1977, this Terrapin calls to mind that strong sense of being gathered around a campfire as the band tells a story – something generally associated with other songs than this one. Nonetheless, the band is casting its hypnotic spell over everything. Gentle hands with flamed fingers caress our face and beckon us in. The door is shut behind us. We are safe and alone, as a grand journey begins with the solo section marking a point of no return. The music rises and falls on the trails of some great juggler’s balls. They change size and color as they translucently pass each other in the air. It’s a ballet of butterfly music in a dream that defies our ability to concretely retell the story after waking. The song reaches its zenith and crashes thunderously as the melody chases its own tail over and over. It gives nary room for a breath before materializing into the next song, Playin' In The Band.

The Playin’ jam wastes no time stroking the fibers of the Grateful Dead’s adoring musical muse. Its power is awakened like a room instantly filling with a heady incense that reminds our ancient soul receptors of the essence of the eternal. Broken up into a handful of section, the jam begins immediately to unbind the tightly wrapped petals of the musical flower that held the formal part of the song together. It’s like a flower slowly waking to starlight. While the tempo of the song churns along, there is a widening space between the beats, into which cosmic oceans gently lap to the shore. Garcia goes right for his auto-filter wha pedal and calls up a nearly invisible web of energy that drifts and turns in unseen air currents. Everything takes on a distinctly three dimensional aspect on the audience recording, all of the instrumentation finding its natural place in the landscape around us.

After a short while Garcia’s pace quickens, and he’s running staccato lines in a musically choreographed dance of twirls, swoops, and back bending joy. The energy of the band tightens around Jerry, and everything takes on the sense of wild horses galloping across moonlit countryside, not unlike the energy we hear in Playin’s from 1972. We flow endlessly over hills which quietly rise and fall at random intervals like the deepest ocean shedding a storm’s energy reserves. What seems like hours later, the band emerges into a more subtle pasture where sounds begin to crackle and shimmer like the air around us is condensing into sporadic forms just out of reach. Slowly these sounds, which could have previously tricked our mind as not possibly coming from the musicians, fill all of our aural space, and we’ve somehow been cast a million miles away from whatever concert we thought we were attending. Great suns are rising and setting. Clouds form into mountains, then into lightning, then into thousands of turning flowers. And on and on it goes.

Jerry Garcia 09/25/80A molten lava-like creature is stirring. It’s skin ripples with glass sharp scales as it transforms to fill our entire field of senses. Blaring a white hot cacophony of wicked colors which gush out like an uncapped torrent, the band drives deeply into a completely frenzied expression of Space, and leaves us powerless to defend anything as we slip into Drums.

The Space which then returns after Drums is breathtaking. It’s as if we have walked right back into the pre-Drum chaos. Nothing sounds done out of routine, whatsoever. By no means is the band just playing some weirdness because this is where it fits in the show. The music is doing things which defy all the laws of physics completely. Steal your face right off your head, indeed. There’s little sense in trying to describe things more accurately. This Space leaves you completely transformed. As it fades off, Phil can be heard hinting at Dark Star (no WAY!). Instead, the band turns on a dime into Truckin’ and the entire concert has returned around you. As if from a wormhole in another dimension, we are dropped back into something far more familiar to our human experience. There are people clapping along, hooting and hollering. The music dances. The band is playing back on a steady 4/4 beat. My God, where were we?

Truckin’ over delivers in most every way imaginable. When they hit the big power chord after the long triplet ramp up section, a shock wave erupts over the crowd. Just before this note there is a fraction of silence, which is common to all Truckin’s at this moment of the song. But it is somehow more this time. Perfectly executed, the entire band absolutely stops together, and hits that chord in perfect unison – a classic moment where we can hear more in the space between the music, than in the music itself.

The show closes with a Brokedown Palace which brings a spiritual serenity to the entire evening’s experience. In taking you to this quiet spot of personal grace, it actually succeeds in returning us all to a harmonious union; one to which we often don’t pay enough attention…

"Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul..."

06/21/80 etree source info
06/21/80 AUD Download

Friday, July 25, 2008

1980 June 8 - Folsom Field

Jerry Garcia detail Feb 22, 1980

GRATEFUL DEAD
Sunday, June 8, 1980
Folsom Field, University of Colorado - Boulder, CO
Audience Recording


This is another Joani Walker recording, and you should be getting pretty used to the fact by now that this is a harbinger of quality goods. Joani was the wo-MAN! There’s no question about it. Heap whatever pristine AUD accolades you’d like here, they all apply. Again, one of her tapes captures not only the music, but the entire feel of an early 80’s outdoor show. Recorded eight rows behind the soundboard, you really couldn’t ask for anything better.

Opening up with a hauntingly accurate prophetic introduction, this 15th Anniversary show gets started with a totally unprecedented Uncle John’s Band > Playin’ In The Band > Uncle John’s Band. Clearly a nod to the proceedings (though understandably, as Bob Weir indicates in a post show interview, the band could hardly care about the recognition of the date), this “Uncle John’s sandwich” casts a guaranteed special sparkle to the event. You can be sure that news spread far and wide after this show about the unexpected opener.

The band pushes through some early sound system adjustments and reach the 7/8 time signature jam in full gear. Jerry is popping out notes like a string of pearls cast into the air. All the band members are coming through on tape beautifully, and while the jam is short, and perhaps only a 7 out of 10, it doesn’t matter. They’re opening with Uncle John’s Band! In the holographic memory machine of the future that allows us to be transported right back to this event, we will be exchanging glances at this point, shaking our heads in wonder and smiles that we could be getting an Uncle John’s in the opening slot. Lucky us!

Jerry Garcia Feb 28, 1980Playin’ segues in nicely, and with Jerry’s very first note of the solo section, everything elevates. His tone has swollen to fill the sky, and drips with an electric intensity that spawns a psychedelic kaleidoscope of visions. For the first 30 seconds or more , he rolls out a string of notes that are channeled from deeply within and beyond thinking. It’s as if he’s completely lost - the music entirely taking over to play the band. Each note drops in perfectly, as if this is the Playin' In The Band jam that wrote them all, similar to how I found the Bird Song from 08/01/73 to appear archetypical. It gives the music a sense of divinely delivered perfection. The rest of the band is quickly absorbed into this energy, and you can feel the satori moment blossom around you. The note selection and the instrumental accompaniment could not be improved upon. There are many things going on in this jam as it progresses. Little things like passing visions in a dream. The recording being so good, complete surrender to the music is near unavoidable. The wonderfully recorded balance of instruments places everything directly within your field of aural vision. It’s juicy and succulent. They don’t spend too long in this zone, and eventually weave back into Uncle John’s to wrap things up.

At this point the desired affect has been reached. The crowd is completely done-in by the special twist given to the start of the show. The band follows with some straight ahead cowboy Dead and you can absolutely feel the joy and comfort of the crowd come through on tape. In different ways than the opening jam, the following songs burst forth with equal passion and pleasure. You get the feeling of being in a perfect spot, needing nothing else. There may not be anything insanely over the top, but the rest of the set just feels like a wonderful Grateful Dead show.

The second set opens with a nice Feel Like A Stranger. There are occasional and slight mis-queues here and there, and it seems to make Jerry want to make up for things through the solo section. A wonderful passage follows with the entire band playing off of one another, and Jerry’s tone takes on burning intensity which channels directly off the tape into your head. He takes acrobatic twists and turns everywhere, elevating the song above the norm. The beat pushes, punctuates, and slightly syncopates beautifully throughout.

Ship Of Fools is a very sweet with Jerry lending some extra expressive energy to his vocals which translate into a wonderful solo. The song always carried the sense of being a classic throughout the 80’s. It also provides a pleasant breather before the meat of set two.

Bob Weir 1980In Estimated Prophet, Jerry spends only a short time in the jam noodling around before diving all the way into a rapidly picked string of arpeggios which swirl and unswirl into liquid color eddies. Eventually one of his eddies breaks us out of the song and begins to stretch out to infinity. That luxurious loss of footing takes over and we seem poised to be happily lost forever. But it really serves to inform the band that Eyes Of The World is on the way. A truncated Estimated jam slips sweetly into Eyes.

This Eyes Of The World is a firecracker. It blasts along at a stiff tempo reaching the solo section after verse one in under two minutes. The solo is full of razor sharp edges, like a fire formed of metal - crackling and glowing. The next solo section finds the same fire bathed in a somewhat ethereal energy. The flames seem to be smiling and relaxing, despite the fury of energy that sends them into the sky. The third and final solo section casts the fire out to the horizons. Jerry calls back the infinity stretching repetitions of notes again and again, and this is mimicked beautifully by the drummers. Slowly then, a vastly wide open space appears, and within it, ocean-sized pinwheels begin to slowly turn under foot. It’s a gooey jam, not too unlike some passages from 1976. The dissolve into Drums is slow coming, with Brent and Phil taking some time to stir the fire lazily along.

A little over half way through Drums, Mickey and Billy call up wonderful African/Egyptian rhythms, caught perfectly in the glorious recording quality that Joani is getting on tape. The Space that forms out of Drums is very nice, though short. Its goal is to bridge the way into Saint Of Circumstance, which exude from Space early on before hitting the song itself. The highlights for the duration of the set are more of the quiet nature. Black Peter, and the Brokedown Palace second encore give off more of that delicious energy of just being in the presence of the band on a good night.

You can add this one to your list of sensational recordings and often deeply rich and soul provoking evenings with the Grateful Dead.

Friday, February 15, 2008

1980 August 16 - Mississippi River Festival

Jerry Garcia 1980 GRATEFUL DEAD
Saturday, August 16, 1980
Mississippi River Festival - Southern Ill. University, Edwardsville, IL
Audience Recording

Outdoor audience recordings from the early 80's are something very special. They give off a certain vibe that can't be found in the decade before, and seems to slip away as the 80's move along and the band's popularity grows. This is a time where first sets can sometimes exceed second sets, and the overall energy of the band is rocketing beyond its more mellow mood of the 70's.

Joani Walker's recording of this daytime, outdoor show at SIU in Edwardsville, IL is pure gold. Despite the rain, and at times it was A LOT of rain, Joani captured this show all the way through. Even when the rain was pouring down in the second set during Ship Of Fools, and you can hear it clatter over the plastic cups covering the mics, she sticks it out and manages to preserve this fantastic show and classic vibe of being at an outdoor show in 1980. This "vibe" is something unique to the time period, and speaks a language of the Grateful Dead that resonates unlike other periods. It's as truly Grateful Dead-like as the late 60's or mid 70's - an important part of any Dead tape collection.

The band is firing on all cylinders right out of the gate. Jerry is in fine form and seems to be giving everything an extra something special. This is made all the more enjoyable by the excellent sound quality of the tape. It's a wonderful document of band's evolution - Brent now a firm fixture, and many new tunes finding their solid footing. Older tunes are starting to really feel like "classics" now. Everything in set two sizzles with psychedelic energy in all the right places, from the white-hot China>Rider to the deep and stirring Estimated Prophet and Other One. Then, the Black Peter in particular is perfectly delivered. It moves through you like a warm breeze, and cradles you like a baby. There's nowhere else you want to be.

08/16/80 etree source info
08/16/80 AUD download

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