Recommend me some of the proggiest Grateful Dead shows you can think of

[arturs]

I've always liked the Dead, never loved 'em... But I've been listening since we had that Yes/Dead thread a few months ago. And I want to explore some more.

I like the Dead most when they sound prog (examples are Blues for Allah, Terrapin Station, but some older stuff too like Dark Star or the Other One) and when they're tight and well rehearsed. I also find I like them live a lot more than in the studio (true for most people I guess!)

So if I wanted to get 4-5 of the proggiest Dead Shows that are readily available in some fashion, preferably officially on CD, what would they be? they don't need to necessarily include the tunes I have listed above, as long as you feel they would resonate with prog fanatics... I know we have some real Dead experts on this board so I would love some informed opinions.

[Dave (in MA)]

Inrared Roses
Grayfolded

They're not "shows" but they're live.

[moecurlythanu]

I think you'd find much to like on these:

Terrapin Station Landover 3CD
Without A Net 2CD

(Couldn't get the phone to paste links. )

[arturs]

Thanks, guys... Without a Net is on its way. I listened to a video version of Landover on YT and the sound was very good. The video was a poor aud boot but who cares. But Landover will cost me $40 so I'll hold off for a while. The GD live stuff is very expensive BTW. I am surprised they charge $30-$50 per show. But hey if they can get it why not I guess...

I also checked out Grayfolded. Interesting concept, a big mash up of Dark Stars. Not sure this would be a keeper but some great parts for sure.

Any shows from the 1970s that would be recommended for their proginess? I can check some out on YT but there are just so many!

[Servo]

You can browse 1000s of shows here:

https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead

It will sound cliche to some hard core Deadheads, but, check out 5/8/77 Cornell, I recommend the Steve Maizner matrix soundboard:

https://archive.org/details/gd77-05-...982.sbeok.shnf

As far as official CD's, I recommend this one:


http://www.amazon.com/One-From-Vault.../dp/B000002VK3

[Servo]

just listening to that Cornell show link I posted above, it's been awhile, so great...that Morning Dew solo....and esp. the Loser solo..

[arturs]

Thanks! That archive site is an amazing resource. There are over 2500 recordings of Dead Shows up there--and given that the Dead always encouraged taping I can listen without a shred of guilt. And the Cornell show sounds great. It is a particularly fun show to hear b/c I live in Ithaca very close to where the show took place...

[Servo]

thats Awesome, enjoy!

[GuitarGeek]

I'm not sure what you mean by "proggiest' Dead shows. The Dead had some vaguely proggy music, but most of it wasn't, except for some of the extended improvisations. Having said that, a few you might look into:

2/14/68: This was released on one of the Road Trips releases. They play all the material from Anthem Of The Sun, including the entire side one suite. Maybe more "psychedelic" than "prog rock", but New Potato Caboose was a pretty intricate composition that they only played for a couple years, while Born Cross Eyed starts on the 2 instead of the 1 (and was only played for a few months before being dropped). They also do China Cat Sunflower and The Eleven. The only downside about this show is that the Dark Star was a very early one, and the piece hadn't yet evolved into the improv vehicle it would be later. This was also the big opening night of the Carousel Ballroom, which was run jointly by the Dead, the Airplane, and Quicksilver for a few months before they realized they were better off being ripped off by Bill Graham than trying to run a venue themselves. Graham later turned the Carousel into the Fillmore West. This is also the show Jerry talks about in the Grateful Dead Movie, when he talks about the show where he shoved Phil down a small flight stairs.

1/24/69: The Dead played three nights at the Avalon Ballroom in late January 69, and this was the first one. You get another That's It For The Other One/New Potato Caboose suite (by this time, Born Cross Eyed had been dropped from the setlist and wouldn't return until 2003!). By this time, Dark Star was starting to become the improv showcase that it's now remembered as, and this is a good version here.

1/26/69: The third of the Avalon shows from January 69. This one I'm mentioning because it has one of the few performances of a song called Clementine which was another one of the Dead's psychedelic songs, which was only played a handful of times and never released officially (well not several decades later, anyway). Most fans didn't even know the song existed until the mid 90's, which was when tapes first started to circulate that had the song. This is also the show where The Eleven and Turn On Your Lovelight from Live/Dead came from.

2/27/69: First of four nights at the Fillmore West, the version of Dark Star/St. Stephen from Live/Dead is from this show. The first minute or so of Dark Star on the album is actually the tail end of a jam that, on the night, segued out of Mountains Of The Moon. One of the regular maneuvers the band pulled in this era was playing a semi-acoustic Mountains Of The Moon (with Jerry and probably Weir on acoustic guitars and TC on organ) which would then segue, via a jam, into a fully electric Dark Star.
3/1/69: third of the four night run at the Fillmore West.

3/1/69: I'm mentioning this one was because of the great first set, which moves from That's It For The Other One through New Potato Caboose, then Doin' That Rag and finally Cosmic Charlie. The second set has another one of those acoustic Mountains Of The Moon/jam/Dark Star sequences.

4/22/69: The Dead played three nights at The Ark in Boston, this being the second night. Another great Mountains Of The Moon/Dark Star/St Stephen/The Eleven sequence.

4/26/69: First of two nights at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago, this features an extended jam, sometimes identified as an encore, but there's no real evidence the band actually left the stage then came back before playing a fantastic 38 minute Viola Lee Blues/Feedback jam, with apparently whoever was manning the soundboard (Owsley) slipping in a tape of What's Become Of The Baby during Feedback.

4/8/72: Second show of the legendary Europe '72 tour, including a fantastic Dark Star/Sugar Magnolia/Caution suite to wrap up the second set. Though this show took place at the Empire Pool in London, somehow a big chunk of the Dark Star managed to find it's way onto the Glastonbury Faire album that came out some months later (note: the Dead didn't even play at Glastonbury!).

4/26/72: Frankfurt finds the Dead playing a great Truckin'/The Other One/Comes A Time suite. The Other One by itself is 36 minutes long! This was released on the official double CD Hundred Year Hall (and has subsequent been included on the massive Europe '72 boxset that came out a few years ago).

5/11/72: This show at the Rotterdam Civic Hall features the longest ever Dark Star, which clocks in at around 46 minutes, before segueing into Sugar Magnolia, followed by Caution, Who Do You Love?, and Truckin'.

5/26/72: The last night of the Europe '72 tour, and the last night of the four night stand at the Lyceum Ballroom in London. If you're familiar with Europe '72, the Truckin' and Morning Dew that appeared on sides 5 and 6 of that album are from this show. The full jam runs something like Truckin'/The Other One/Morning Dew/The Other One/Sing Me Back Home

9/17/72: Baltimore Civic Center, released on Dick's Picks Vol. 23, and featuring a great He's Gone/The Other One/Sing Me Back Home. The Other One is around 39 minutes.

9/21/72: Philadelphia Spectrum, this show was issued on Dick's Picks Vol. 35, and features a 37 minute Dark Star that segues into a 10 minute Morning Dew.

2/15/73: The second show of the year takes place in Madison, Wisconsin, of all places. The Dark Star/Eyes Of The World/China Doll sequence is awesome. This is the second ever time the latter two songs were played, and the segue between Dark Star and Eyes Of The World features a great bass solo from Phil, then Jerry comes in and the two of them jam for a couple minutes before the drop into Eyes. There's also a decent Box Of Rain during the first set.

3/28/73: Springfield, Massachusetts has a great jam that kicks off with the Weather Report Suite Prelude, which then segues into Dark Star, followed by Eyes Of The World and Playin' In The Band. Every version of the soundboard tape I've ever heard has this weird hum on it. Fortunately, there's also an excellent quality audience tape of this show, so I'd go for that over the soundboard tape.

6/16/74: One of the many great shows from the 72-74 era (I've never heard a bad show from this time period), this one took place in Des Moines. There's a great Eyes Of The World/Big River and a 28 minute Playin' In The Band, both of which has somebody playing synthesizer during the improv bits. Is it Ned Lagin or Keith Godchaux? Keith generally only played piano, but I've seen a handful of pictures where he also has a synth onstage, and I've never seen any confirmation that Lagin was at this show.

6/18/74: Louisville, Kentucky. Another great show, with a great Eyes Of The World/China Doll, and a fantastic Weather Report Suite/The Other One/Stella Blue. Our mystery synth player appears during The Other One here, as well.

6/28/74: Boston Gardens, and one of the first live Dead tapes I ever owned back in the early 90's. This one features a Weather Report Suite/improv/US Blues. The Sugar Magnolia/Scarlets Begonias that opens the second set is also pretty good. This is also, I believe, the first show where they did Sugar Mag and the Sunshine Daydream coda were separated from each other and played at opposite ends of the set.

8/4/74: First of two nights at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The big second jam on this one is Weather Report Suite/Improv/Wharf Rat/US Blues.

8/5/74: Second night at the Spectrum, and another of the first tapes I had when I first started trading. This one has a great He's Gone/Truckin'/improv/Stella Blue sequence. On my old cassette copy, Stella Blue was cut off during the second set, and it always broke my heart when I heard it, but the suite was released on Dick's Picks Vol. 32 (as was the second set suite from the previous night).

8/6/74: Some of the stuff from this show at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City also made it on DP 32, but it's worth hearing the circulating soundboard tape, because they left the big second set jam off the official release. Also noteworthy for Weir chastising audience members who are climbing up the security fence at the front of the stage just after Eyes Of The World. Also noteworthy for the first set closing Playin' In The Band/Scarlet Begonias/Playin' In The Band.

9/11/74: Though a Dick's Picks was released from the Dead's three nights at Alexandria Palace in London in September 74, they somehow managed to completely overlook the amazing second set from the third night of the run. The setlist is Seastones/Eyes Of The World/a whole of improvisation/Wharf Rat. This is one of the spaciest performances the Dead ever did.

10/16/74: First night of the five night run at the Winterland includes a 30 minutes Playin' In The Band (bits of which were used in the Grateful Dead Movie), and a great Seastones/Wharf Rat/improv/Eyes Of The World sequence. At the end of Eyes Of The World, the rest of the band drops out while Jerry does a short sort of a cadenza, which you're kinda expecting to segue into something, but it doesn't. But it still sounds pretty cool.

10/17/74: The He's Gone/Improv/The Other One/Stella Blue on this show is fantastic. Stella Blue and post He's Gone improv made it into the Grateful Dead Movie.

10/18/74: Second set was Seastones/Dark Star/Morning Dew. As mentioned above, this is the version of Morning Dew in the Grateful Dead Movie.

10/19/74: The Eyes Of The World in the Grateful Dead Movie is from this show. Another one that segued gracefully into China Doll. There's also a great Sugar Magnolia/He's Gone/Jam/Truckin'/Black Peter/Sunshine Daydream on this show, too.

3/23/75: The SNACK benefit at Kezar Stadium, the Dead plays one big weird instrumental which should appeal

12/29/77: Released on DP 10, this one has an awesome Playin' In The Band/China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider/China Doll/Space/Drums/Not Fade Away/Playin' In The Band suite.

[Grimjack]

Dick's Picks 32 from Aug 74. fusion-y and tight enough to please most prog fans.

[Gerhard]

I still go back to Dick's Picks vol 1 from Dec, 1973, especially for Here Comes Sunshine and the 21 min Playing in the Band, and Dick's Picks vol 3, from May, 1977, especially for the amazing Help-Slipknot!-Tower that closes out CD1. Neither are complete shows, but what's there is all good, imo.

[arturs]

Thanks for some more suggestions, in particular to GuitarGeek for your detailed descriptions. I've got my listening cut out for me. I hope I'll be able to check out most of these shows on archive.org before choosing some to buy. By which point they'll probably be OOP and going for big bucks LOL!

[Obscured]

relisten.net

[notallwhowander]

Why not try The Grateful Dead Movie soundtrack? Sure it's pieced together from different shows, but the result is of a real high quality. I'm not familiar with the shows it combined, and I could not hear any edit points. I understand that those familiar with original show recordings hear it differently. But being none the wiser, it's a great listening experience from a great epoch of the band's live career (pre-Terrapin, but building towards it.)

It's five discs, so it will set you up for a while.

[GuitarGeek]

Why not try The Grateful Dead Movie soundtrack? Sure it's pieced together from different shows, but the result is of a real high quality. I'm not familiar with the shows it combined, and I could not hear any edit points

One mark against the Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack is they edited the 10/19/74 Eyes Of The World way down. On the night, it was something like 19 minutes long, but for whatever reason (maybe for space reasons), it's only about 12 minutes on the official release.

Also, they left out all the Seastones performances (which has been generally the case with the official releases they've put out from the summer/autumn 74). They join the pre Dark Star jam from 10/18/74 "already in progress" (the unofficial version that's circulated since at least the mid 90's has the full unedited set). And they leave out the second set jam from 10/16/74 altogether.

But, they did two things right: they include the full Playin' In The Band from 10/16/74 (at least on the bootleg version I have, there's a short cut in the middle) and the full He's Gone/The Other One/He's Gone suite from 10/17/74 and uninterrupted (the version I have on the bootleg has the sequence split across two discs).

Most of the 10/19/74 suite is intact, though to reflect what was chosen for the movie, the Sunshine Daydream finale comes from a different night. I imagine that's probably inconsequential to most "prog" fans, since they're typically not interested in that part of the Dead's music, but for the purposes of hearing the music how it happened, on the night, I feel it's worth noting.

Having said that, the Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack is worth having, if one doesn't wish to wade through all five nights of the October 74 Winterland run, and can live without the missing stretches of music. Personally, I don't wish to hear every single version of El Paso, Big River, and The Race Is On, but the improvisations do interest me, and I think some of the stuff that didn't make it onto the official release is very worthy.

And I still find it mind boggling that The Grateful Dead Movie (and it's soundtrack) was drawn from the same five nights as Steal Your Face. The movie/soundtrack is brilliant, perfectly encapsulating what was brilliant about 1974 era Grateful Dead (regardless of Owsley thought of the whole project), whereas Steal Your Face is pretty much the definition of "WTF were they thinking" (or more accurately, "WTF was Phil thinking" since Phil Lesh was the main guy behind Steal Your Face). To this day, I have no idea how the music that was on Steal Your Face got chosen over some of the much better music that was also played that week.

[JKL2000]

The other day on Sirius XM's Grateful Dead channel's Today in Grateful Dead History they played the one GD show I went to: 4/8/82 Syracuse University.

Probably not the proggiest, but I was .

[JKL2000]

<<Also, they left out all the Seastones performances (which has been generally the case with the official releases they've put out from the summer/autumn 74). >>

I can perhaps understand doing this for the movie, but why would they do it for other official releases (on CD I assume)?

[Dan Marsh]

Great job guitargeek......i agree completely with your list!

I have all 36 Dick's Picks, fwiw.

[jkelman]

Great job guitargeek......i agree completely with your list!

I have all 36 Dick's Picks, fwiw.

Damn you!!

[arturs]

Why not try The Grateful Dead Movie soundtrack? Sure it's pieced together from different shows, but the result is of a real high quality. I'm not familiar with the shows it combined, and I could not hear any edit points. I understand that those familiar with original show recordings hear it differently. But being none the wiser, it's a great listening experience from a great epoch of the band's live career (pre-Terrapin, but building towards it.)

It's five discs, so it will set you up for a while.

Well I went a little overboard taking your advice. After looking up the GD movie, I saw that it was a part of the 14 DVD box set, so I bought that instead! Expensive but still $100 is a great price for so much stuff.

I ended up watching the Closing of Winterland 1978 first. Some truly sublime moments. Scarlet Begonias/Fire on the Mountain and the Dark Star/Other One/Wharf Rat suite. Great stuff and exactly what I was looking for. Of course there are also a lot of tedious covers, unavoidable I guess at a Dead show. That's what the FF button is for, for the next listen!

[GuitarGeek]

Well I went a little overboard taking your advice. After looking up the GD movie, I saw that it was a part of the 14 DVD box set, so I bought that instead! Expensive but still $100 is a great price for so much stuff.

I ended up watching the Closing of Winterland 1978 first. Some truly sublime moments. Scarlet Begonias/Fire on the Mountain and the Dark Star/Other One/Wharf Rat suite. Great stuff and exactly what I was looking for. Of course there are also a lot of tedious covers, unavoidable I guess at a Dead show. That's what the FF button is for, for the next listen!

Closing Of The Winterland is a pretty good show, lots of good songs on that one. I actually had a crummy bootleg VHS tape of the second and third sets from that show for years before the DVD came out, and it's almost scary how different the picture quality between the two are. Yeah, the VHS is probably a n-th generation copy, but given the fact that it was almost certainly with a primitive consumer VCR off the PBS broadcast of the concert, I'm sure even the master tape probably looked a bit worn out by the mid 90's (which was when I got my copy). For what it's worth, that was actually the first Dark Star in 4 years on that show (the last one being 10/18/74, one of the shows I noted in my previous post).

The Grateful Dead Movie I think is just about one of the best "rock n roll" movies ever. It captures the band at the peak of it's powers, mixes in some good documentary footage of the Winterland and heads hanging out, etc, a great animated sequence, and to me it's just the best rock n roll cinematic presentations ever. And I don't give a frell what Owsley thought, the band kicked ass during those shows, and the film is beautifully shot and edited, not like today's "Gotta cut to a new shot every 2 seconds" editing. Most of Stella Blue consists of a largely unbroken shot of Jerry, which is just breathtaking. And there's no out of synch shots in the film, either (well, apparently there is one, but it goes by so fast you don't even notice it).

So what else did you get in the box?

[Servo]

Sunshine Daydream is s pretty cool DVD too.

Lots of naked people in the crowd

Just watch out for the naked guy behind the stage swinging his junk around

Unless you're into that sort of thing...

...not that theres anything wrong with it.

[GuitarGeek]

Sunshine Daydream is s pretty cool DVD too.

That's antoher one I've got on a bootleg VHS from the 90's. Sunshine Daydream was actually made back in 1972, with the intention, I think, o fit being shown theatrically. But the band 86ed the original release (after the film had already been put together and was pretty much ready for release) because they decided they played badly that day. Great animation during Dark Star. Somehow, one of my favorite bits is at the beginning of Jack Straw, where the dog pulls the cookie (or ice cream sandwich, or whatever it is) out of the toddler's hands and eats it. There's something really endearing about that moment, for some reason. THey also used a lot of what was already at the time archival footage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. If I'm not mistaken, the guy with the hat that keeps getting blown off his head and he catches the hat and puts it back on his head and it gets blown off again, is Neal Casady, who was a big part of the early Grateful Dead mythology (he's the "Cowboy Neal" who was "at the wheel of a bus to Never Never Land" in The Other One).

[Dan Marsh]

They made him put on pants later in the day!

[arturs]

So what else did you get in the box?

This is the review that made me buy it. Very nice and detailed description. Mostly late 80s shows through 1991. Plus Winterland and the GD movie. Should be a fun ride. I'll probably be finished watching it all by November!

http://www.goldminemag.com/reviews/d...-years-combine