Friend Of the Devils: Duke University, 4/78

Summary

GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST: Episode Summary Episode: Friend Of the Devils: Duke University, 4/78
Release Date: September 26, 2024
Hosts: Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarno

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, hosts Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarno delve into one of the most electrifying performances in Grateful Dead history—the April 12, 1978 concert at Duke University’s Cameron Indoor Stadium. This concert is a standout feature in the limited edition Friend of the Devils box set, which showcases eight previously unreleased Grateful Dead shows from their spring 1978 tour.

Background: The Grateful Dead and Duke University

The Grateful Dead maintained a special relationship with Duke University, performing there five times during the 1970s. This connection is explored through the experiences of key figures like Eric Milne, now a Duke University professor, and Fred Goldring, a concert committee chair. The podcast highlights the emergence of a dedicated Deadhead community in the Raleigh-Durham area, influenced by local enthusiasts such as Jim Enright and Bob Wagner.

Notable Quote:

Bob Wagner [04:06]: "Oh my. For the sixth show of their spring 1978 tour, the Grateful Dead arrived at Duke University in North Carolina and turned in one of those performances that became an underground classic."

The 1978 Duke Concert: Preparation and Arrival

The episode recounts the anticipation leading up to the Duke 1978 show. Jesse Jarno shares his experience of securing front-row seats and orchestrating a gathering of Deadheads from across the country. The hosts describe the vibrant atmosphere outside Cameron Indoor Stadium, with fans camping out 48 hours before ticket sales and creating a festive, communal vibe reminiscent of the early Dead shows.

Notable Quote:

Jesse Jarno [31:24]: "I brought a folding chair in front of the kiosk 48 hours before the applicable time... After two days we had about 350 people lined up overnight and we had the funnest times."

The Concert Experience: Performances and Highlights

Inside the stadium, the Grateful Dead delivered a high-energy performance that left a lasting impression on attendees. Key moments include Jerry Garcia’s animated guitar work during "Friend of the Devil," the extended drum sessions with Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and the encore rendition of "Good Lovin'," where Garcia famously performed windmill guitar moves.

Notable Quotes:

Eric Milne [49:06]: "Jerry is so happy... By Duke, my God, he's like the happiest he was ever on stage."
Steve Silberman [57:09]: "This is one of the best shows they ever did... the energy they brought."

Production and Recording

Unlike typical concert recordings, the Duke 1978 show featured a special mix by Betty Cantor-Jackson, capturing the essence of the live performance. Additionally, students from Duke’s Cable 13 documented the event, providing rare video footage that has since been included in the standalone Duke 78 release. The podcast touches on the challenges and significance of preserving such performances through tape trading and archival efforts.

Notable Quote:

David Lemieux [51:29]: "One thing you might notice on the recordings is that Jerry Garcia's voice seems to be very quiet during the first few songs..."

Aftermath and Legacy

The Duke 1978 concert had significant ramifications for future Grateful Dead performances at the university. Issues with crowd management and merchandise selling led to tensions with campus authorities, resulting in a temporary ban on future Dead performances. However, the legacy of the Duke shows endured, fostering academic interest and community gatherings that celebrate the Grateful Dead’s enduring influence.

Notable Quote:

Fred Goldring [79:07]: "Fred Goldring... For the 45th anniversary of this show, we had a gathering on campus. We had like, I think we had 150. It was the room was full and it was the community."

Conclusion and Reflections

The episode concludes with reflections from attendees and hosts on the profound impact of the Duke 1978 concert. Jesse Jarno reminisces about the magical atmosphere and the sense of camaraderie among Deadheads, while Eric Milne discusses the concert’s role in shaping his career and the ongoing dedication to preserving the Grateful Dead’s legacy. The hosts emphasize the significance of the Duke show as a pivotal moment in the band’s history and its lasting influence on the Dead community.

Notable Quote:

Jesse Jarno [73:16]: "I just remember walking out into the night on the quad and it looked like one of the greatest nights of my life... It was really, it was really special."

Key Takeaways

• Historic Significance: The Duke University 1978 concert is celebrated as one of the Grateful Dead’s most dynamic and memorable performances.
• Community Impact: The event solidified a strong Deadhead presence in the Raleigh-Durham area, contributing to the growth of the band’s enduring legacy.
• Archival Preservation: Efforts by individuals like Jim Enright and David Lemieux have ensured the preservation and accessibility of the Duke 1978 concert through the Friend of the Devils box set and related releases.
• Cultural Legacy: The concert’s influence extends beyond music, impacting academic studies and community gatherings that continue to honor the Grateful Dead’s contributions to music and culture.

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Notable Contributors:

• Guest Speakers: Eric Milne, Fred Goldring, Jim Enright, Bob Wagner, Joe Demona, Steve Silberman, and more.
• Special Thanks: David Ganz for audio contributions, Mark Pincus for executive production, and all involved in producing the episode.

For more insights and detailed accounts, listeners are encouraged to explore additional episodes and resources available at dead.net/deadcast.

Transcript

[Rich Mahan]

The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 10 of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we continue our journey through the new Grateful Dead box set Friend of the Devils. This time around we dive into the famed Duke University show from April 12, 1978. This new limited edition Friend of the Devil's box set is selling quick and with good reason. The band was playing great in spring 78 and as the name suggests, this 19 CD box set presents eight unreleased concerts that feature the rise of drums and face as second set traditions. Friend of the Devil's April 1978 includes eight complete shows including the Curtis Hickson Convention hall in Tampa, Florida on April 6, the Sportatorium in Pembroke Pines, Florida on April 7, Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Jacksonville on the eighth two shows at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia on the 10th and 11th Cameron Indoor Stadium, the famed Duke University show we're talking about Today on the 12th, Castle Coliseum in Virginia at the Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg on the 14th and the Huntington Civic center in Huntington, West Virginia on the 16th. The concert at Duke is the breakout show from this box will also be released separately and it'll be available as a 3 CD set for LP set and digitally of course. Both Duke 78 and the limited edition Friend of the Devils are out now. More info and orders are happening now [e-mail] head on over to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through nine and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help the good old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing Share an episode with your friends on social media. Hit that like button and leave us a review. Thank you very much. It helps so much. Were any of you heads at any of the shows in spring 78 up and down the East Coast? Well, we want to hear from you. We need your stories to illustrate just how wonderful these shows were. Record your tour [e-mail] and you just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead Cast. Sure, you're listening to your favorite podcast about our favorite band in the world right now, but you like to read about them too, right? Well, you're in Luck. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Duke University this famous show is special in that it was filmed by Duke and we've all been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to view it thanks to the Internet and witness the high energy spectacle that it is. Jerry doing Pete Townsend Windmills well, if you haven't watched it yet, you're just gonna have to see it for yourself and get ready for a behind the scenes look at this one of a kind Grateful Dead concert. Have your tickets out and ready. Here comes Jesse Jarno.

[Jesse Jarno]

Summer.

[David Lemieux]

Oh my. For the sixth show of their spring 1978 tour, the Grateful Dead arrived at Duke University in North Carolina and turned in one of those performances that became an underground classic. Released for the first time on Friend of the Devils, Grateful that archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

[Steve Silberman]

This is a show that it holds up as, I think one of the best shows they ever did. I really do. I think that certainly one of the best of 77, 78, but I also think it's one of the most unique shows because of the energy they brought. Duke was the one that I think just, you know, head and shoulders above everything a little bit.

[David Lemieux]

Our friend Steve Silberman wrote liner notes for the new box set a few weeks ago, just as the first episode of our season went up. Steve passed away suddenly at the age of 66, leaving an enormous hole in our collective heart. We've posted some links to [e-mail] deadcast we spoke with Steve earlier in the summer about his love for this particular performance.

[Eric Milne]

Years ago I decided that the Duke.

[David Lemieux]

Set, which is not only in the.

[Eric Milne]

Box set, but has been broken out.

[David Lemieux]

Into its own standalone release, was one of the best shows that they ever played. It's such a an extra bonus that.

[Eric Milne]

There'S good video of the show as well.

[Rich Mahan]

That lazy lightning supplication, man, it is unbelievable. To the end the world for the.

[David Lemieux]

Way that you're making me feel now you got the hell the girl.

[Eric Milne]

Jerry is so happy like there.

[Rich Mahan]

There are definitely points earlier in the.

[David Lemieux]

Tour where he sounds less engaged or.

[Eric Milne]

Slightly off or whatever, but by Duke, my God, he's like the happiest he.

[David Lemieux]

Was ever on stage. Eric Milne wasn't at the Duke 78 show, though he did start seeing the band regularly in this era. Eric is now a professor at Duke University, where he teaches a first year seminar on the Grateful Dead and authored notes for the Duke 1978 release. Please welcome Eric Milne.

[Fred Goldring]

The Dead played at Duke five times, and Jerry Garcia played once. And we think that it's the most they visited a campus outside of the west coast, not more shows, because they played multiple shows at some particular visits. Duke has a really tight relationship with the band, and I think it's kind of an unlikely place that that would be the case. And one of the things I task my class with is why Duke? In fact, there's a wall at the library which is students trying to answer the question, why Duke? Why'd they play here five times? Why did Garcia come once? And, you know, there's no answer. But there's lots of fun things to think about.

[David Lemieux]

One short answer is there's power in a student union. The longer answer takes up the rest of this episode, more or less. The Grateful Ed first crossed the Mason Dixon line in spring 1968, playing in Florida in April and Virginia in May. The band's Southern strategy was halting, to say the least, in part because the region didn't evolve its own circuit of hippie ballrooms to match the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. Our friend Cory Arnold wrote a lost live Deadpost several years ago titled the Grateful Dead in Virginia and North Carolina, Building a Bridge to the New south, which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast All I know I could not leave her there. We spoke with Dr. Bob Wagner in the first episode of this season. In 1977, he'd simultaneously started medical school and began an illustrious career as a Grateful lead taper.

[Bob Wagner]

I was at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which is eight miles from the Duke campus. There was a band called South Wing. They played a lot of Dead covers. South Wing, they played Dead and Allman's covers and played some jazz also.

[David Lemieux]

That was a little bit of a jam on the way into Truckin from a more recent show by the South Wing Band, who've remained active well into the 21st century. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast and the.

[Bob Wagner]

Lead guitarist was Ed Ybarguin, who is written up, I think, in the very first issue of Dead Relics.

[David Lemieux]

Grateful Dead Iberguin was a vital center in a Deadhead scene that existed in the Triangle even before the Grateful Dead ever played there. In 1971, Jim Enright was a younger Deadhead on campus.

[Jim Enright]

Grateful Ed Abarguan was the guy that really got things going. He had a lot of tapes, and he had all these great Porchester tapes and Capitol Theater tapes and that. And he had a Band called Southwing, which played a lot of Grateful Dead, always would open up. Good morning, little school girl.

[David Lemieux]

In fact, in the fall of 1970, Grateful Ed taught a Grateful Dead class at the Invisible University, an alternative student organization at unc.

[Jim Enright]

Then there was a guy called Nile, Frank King, Niall. Frank and Niall started the Invisible University of North Carolina. And he had this big coronation on the rooftop, big cape, crown trumpeters and all this. And then Eddie did a bunch of stuff. I think he did some appreciation classes. It was just like a. Just a loose association of people that would get together to listen to tapes or copy back in the. You know, when cassettes were the thing.

[David Lemieux]

He was surely stoked when the Dead arrived in the spring of 1971 to make their Duke debut, playing at Wallace Wade Stadium the day before the band began their final stand at the Fillmore East.

[Jim Enright]

Duke was really good. Duke University as far as their concert series. And they started out with the Dead at Joe College, April 24, 1971. A significant date for me, as it was my first Dead show. Pigpen was there in prime form.

[David Lemieux]

Peter Coyle entered Duke in the early 1970s and got involved with the student union, becoming an advisor after his graduation, and was involved in all five of the Dead shows at Duke, plus the 1976 Jerry Garcia Band show.

[Peter Coyle]

I was one of the officers of one of the programming committees of the student union. Not the concert committee, but one of the other ones which programmed art galleries, art exhibits. As a member of the organization's programming council, I, in general was a bit involved with anything the union was doing. And for big events like my 1971 concert, which was in the football stadium, pretty much everybody got involved. The first one, which was like an 11 hour concert, was the Beach Boys, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Mountain, and then the Dead, obviously. And then for an emcee, a professional comedian named Uncle Dirty, but apparently had some kind of a career as a. As a stand up comic.

[David Lemieux]

Like, the pillow was this big, looked like a placebo from a children's kit. You know, there was no Sandoz or Osley in those days. Right.

[Eric Milne]

Okay, so.

[David Lemieux]

And like, it was interesting, the bill's up big and like, I figure I better get insurance because what happens if he's putting me on? But it seems that Prudential and Mutual.

[Peter Coyle]

Weren'T interested in handling the transaction.

[Jesse Jarno]

So I got the local insurer, Rocky.

[David Lemieux]

That was from Uncle Dirty's 1971 Elektra Records debut, the Uncle Dirty Primer.

[Peter Coyle]

So I was working that concert, which Was fun. I was up in the press box of the football stadium, sort of coordinating the usher captains out on the field and in the bleachers who were controlling the areas. And frankly, one of the things we were doing was tracking where the undercover cops were and warning the usher captains in the different areas. When there were narcs moving into their area, people were quickly stashing their pot or whatever it was that they were recreating with.

[David Lemieux]

The Duke 71 show got Jim Enright permanently on the bus, A very serious Pigpen fan.

[Jim Enright]

I saw him right after that in Atlanta, but Pigpen wasn't there because he was sick at that point. But the new writers had a far better show than the Dead did.

[David Lemieux]

That was the disastrous Atlanta 71 show we discussed last episode. Okay, there ain't gonna be no music as long as there's cops on this stage.

[Jim Enright]

I saw him, I think it was in Pittsburgh. And then I saw him with the Allman Brothers at rfk. We all loaded up into a back of Joe Bell's pickup truck and boogied up and boogied back.

[David Lemieux]

By 1973, the local dead scene started to flower even more, and Jim Enright was ready to take his next step as a Dead freak. The Dead returned to Duke, making their debut at Cameron Indoor Stadium, home of the Blue Devils, the university's adored basketball team. Listen to the thunder shout I am I am I am I am it was just after the Cameron 73 show that Carrboro became home to the first ever Grateful Dead fanzine. Dead in Words predated Relics by a little less than a year, but it was a little complicated. I poked around some when I was writing my book Heads and interviewed Charlie mann. Back in 2013, I was doing some newsletters.

[Joe Demona]

I did one on the Beatles called Paperback Rider. I did one on the Bob Dylan called My Back Pages. Jim Enright was actually a guy who came. Very interesting fella who came to work for me, and I sort of mentored him and he became a protege. And he had a great deal of interest in the Grateful Dead, where my interest in the Dead was not particularly strong. And I suggested he do one called Dead in Words.

[Jim Enright]

He had those newsletters, and I said, well, maybe I'll start a Grateful Dead one. And so I started Dead in Words.

[David Lemieux]

The newsletters published by Charlie Mann and Jim Enright were in part what we call fanzines, but they were also something else. They were essentially mail order catalogs for what were then euphemistically called underground records, but what we now call bootleg LPs.

[Jim Enright]

It was all like, undergrounds and stuff, with the amazing Cornyphone label, the Wizardo label, Trademark Equality, all those really classic underground labels.

[Joe Demona]

You certainly weren't going to get rich making Grateful Dead bootlegs.

[Jim Enright]

I think it lasted about three issues, maybe four, but not much longer than that. Just because it was a lot of work. I was mailing them out. You know, that was back when everything here is like scotch taped on and, you know, typed, cut and pasted.

[David Lemieux]

I've only seen a few issues of Dead in Words and none that I have reference copies of. But it quickly morphed into something more like you'd imagine a Grateful Dead scene.

[Jim Enright]

Folks would send in articles like, there's Jeff Chell, who was a Raleigh person that was really, really good. He had a great Garcia story in 73 when he gave him a ride from Raleigh to Cameron State. He wrote about that in there, how surprised he was and how friendly Garcia was and that. But he also talked about how on the way over, Garcia was getting ready to smoke a joint or something. But he said he had this thing I'd never seen before. It was some type of little box. And he said, I opened. You know, he did all these different things. It was like a puzzle box. And finally out came a joint.

[David Lemieux]

Hopefully those old issues of Dead End Words will get digitized sooner than later. Watch an Internet near you. They served as an important conduit, though, somehow. In Hawaii, Future Dead archivist Dick Lotvalla came across a few issues in early 1975. Borrowed $30 from his boss and ordered some LPs from Jim Enright.

[Jim Enright]

And one of the issues over here, I've got, you know, some people are saying, hey, they want to trade tapes, and Dick Lot valo's in there. There's three people, and one of them is Dick. And I thought that was so, so neat to see his name here. I mean, from 73. That was just really neat. I don't know how many subscribers at this stage. There's probably a few hundred. I think a subscription was like $5 a year or something like that.

[David Lemieux]

Copies of the magazine made it up to the Dead Relics tape exchange in New York.

[Jim Enright]

Les Kipple and I talked. Somehow we connected. And I went up to Brooklyn and stayed with him for one weekend or so. We had a good time. And he kept looking at this. Volume two, number three. Where's volume one in the issues? And I just said, you know, there aren't any. For some reason back then, I don't know what it was. I thought oh, nobody wants to read anything. It's just started.

[David Lemieux]

It's a little like the Church of the Subgenius's stark fist of removal, which we talked about in our in and out of the garden episodes. By 1975, Dead in Words connected with the Dead Relics crew in New York.

[Jim Enright]

I had this idea that, oh, man, let's have a Grateful Dead convention. So I think my first newsletter said, first annual Grateful Dead Convention coming soon. Les and I were talking about doing it in New York or something, so. So it was a great. It was a great idea that just never happened. Too much to coordinate.

[David Lemieux]

Unfortunately, it never materialized. Dead in Words faded soon thereafter. In some accounts, there was tension between them Selling underground LPs and relics Dedication to the cause of free tape trading. Mentions of the scrapped Grateful Dead convention are in the first issue of Relics coming out just before Bob Wagner arrived at unc. When Bob arrived, he looked for other tapers and found the scene somewhat lacking.

[Bob Wagner]

I put an ad in the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper that came out every day to trade Dead tapes, and exactly two people responded to my ad. So there wasn't very much a Grateful Dead scene. There was more so at Duke because there were a lot of people from the Northeast who were students at Duke. Like, for example, I went for that 92376 show. I got there the night before to wait out, to get good seats, to get good tickets. And there were a lot of Deadheads there playing music from their car stereos, et cetera. That didn't really exist at North Carolina, where I was in school.

[David Lemieux]

Over at Duke, Joe Demona was also a transplanted New Yorker in the South.

[Joe Demona]

When I got to Durham, having come from New York City, it was a tiny, small Southern town. There was nothing in Durham like there is today. There were no restaurants, there was no healthcare industry. There was no Research Triangle Park. It was just a tobacco town. The frat scene for parties was like disco music and keg beer and grain alcohol.

[David Lemieux]

For Deadheads coming from the Northeast, where the Dead had played constantly, it was like entering a Grateful Dead desert.

[Joe Demona]

I was a huge Grateful Dead fan in high school, having discovered them the early 70s. I grew up on the east side of Manhattan, so I saw them for the first time in 1976 in the summer at Roosevelt Stadium. Then I saw them on my 18th birthday in May of 77 at the Palladium Theater on 14th Street. I think those are my first two shows.

[David Lemieux]

That was from Dave's Picks 50, May 3, 1977, at the Palladium by Then it was obvious to the newest generation of heads that the Dead had an accumulated history.

[Joe Demona]

We were hugely into tapes. I have friends who had literally hundreds of shows on tape. And we would listen to the two 1370 fill Maurice show on cassette. You know, like under 10 layers of generations of his. It was like opening up the Egyptian tombs and unearthing something that was a RELIC. Even in 77, you know, looking back at like 1970 was like a whole century before, you know what I mean?

[David Lemieux]

At Duke, by 1975, there were enough Deadheads to host a radio show even. We used a bit of Bob Wagner's story in an earlier episode, but we'll repeat it here for more local color.

[Bob Wagner]

The Duke University radio station at the time, WDBs and sometime during the vacation period had what they called a Grateful Dead orgy. And they played tapes like for a whole weekend. And I didn't even own a cassette player, but a friend of mine in the dormitory did and he recorded a few cassettes and those were my first tapes.

[David Lemieux]

But there were definitely Deadheads at UNC too. In early 1978, just before the Dead came back to Duke, a kerfuffle broke out in the Daily Tar Heel about an alleged no play list on wxyc, the campus radio station which supposedly included the Dead. But one of the station managers clarified that it wasn't a no playlist, but a way to limit DJs from playing too much Dead. It shouldn't be too surprising that the Dead were super popular at Duke. Also. They were one of the most popular bands of the decade. What is surprising is how often they actually came and played, which owes to the student union and a number of other factors. The chair of the concert committee during the 1977 and 1978 school year would go on to a career as an eminent entertainment lawyer and these days runs flatiron Recordings and plays occasionally in his own band, Fred and Company. Please welcome Fred Goldring.

[Eric Milne]

For me, it was a front row seats of the music business. And in 1978 I worked my way up to getting elected as the chair. And that was the year we had some just amazing shows, including the Dead. We had this great deal with these promoters, it was solid or Productions in D.C. and Jack Boyle in Florida. And they would route all these concerts from like D.C. to Florida. And they needed to pick up a date when they were routing from D.C. down to Atlanta. And normally they would go to Greensboro Coliseum because that was the big 15,000 plus seat arena there and it was close renovations. And then UNC had some moratorium on concerts at their big arena. So we managed to like be the one that was left over in our 8,000 seat gym or whatever it was. And we were getting concerts regularly that we had no business getting because they just needed to put a stop in and make it the routing work. It was great for the school, but not financially. But I think we got like a thousand dollars and some piece of it above some break even thing which never happened. But we got these great shows. So every three or four weeks we'd have Allman Brothers, Santana, Zappa, Loggins, the Messina. Of course the Grateful Dead came every year. Earth, Wind and Fire, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen. I mean we had everybody and it was unbelievable.

[David Lemieux]

It was a good time to be at Duke.

[Eric Milne]

It just happened to be the right moment in time at the right place with all these other things happening like Greensboro and UNC. And so we were still in great basketball in 1978. We got to the finals of the NCAA as a loss, but. But still it wasn't like that was out of nowhere, right? So we hadn't had that dynasty that started yet with Mike Krzyzewski. So Cameron was just a gem at duke.

[David Lemieux]

The Dead's four visits in the 70s, plus the Jerry Garcia Band in 76 made it feel like an annual appearance, which is how many people remember it for many of the bands that came through. It's what's called in the industry an underplay.

[Eric Milne]

They had these arena shows that were really meant for the 15,000 seat arenas. We had a small gym so like they couldn't put the, you know, Earth, Wind and Fire, these pyramids they came out of at the beginning of the stage and they weren't sure it was going to clear the ceiling.

[David Lemieux]

It was always a big deal when the Dead came to Duke.

[Eric Milne]

My buddy Andy Jacobson, who at that point was the ticket guy on our committee, reminded me that he, we printed up the tickets, he had to keep them under his bed and locked in his room because, you know, he was afraid they would get stolen and they wouldn't keep him in the office. That was the fun part of being the concert chair. You know, one you got to sit dead center on the aisle, front row and then, you know, you got X amount of tickets to sort of sell to your friends.

[David Lemieux]

By 1978, it could be argued that by virtue of the Dead Plains so often for the teenage heads of New York in the early 70s, Raleigh Durham had become Dead territory by the end of the decade.

[Fred Goldring]

Eric Milne Duke is an interesting place, right? It's in the south, but a lot of the students are from the Northeast. I think New York is the second largest source of undergraduates after North Carolina, Florida, New Jersey. So, you know, home turf for the Grateful Dead. So in a lot of ways there were probably lots of New Yorkers going to these shows at Duke.

[David Lemieux]

Joe Demona was a testament to this, bringing his big New York Dead Freak energy to the sleepy South.

[Joe Demona]

My dormitory was literally right across the street on West Campus. And I found out that the tickets were going to go on sale on a certain date in March, 48 hours before they were going to open the little kiosk. Imagine a stadium with a little brick kiosk built for one man and window that they would sell tickets to the games through. Because back then, everything you had to go buy a ticket. I brought a folding chair in front of the kiosk 48 hours before the applicable time. And I stayed that there and I resolved, I'm not going to move. I wanted to buy the first tickets on sale for the show. I think this is kind of an important part of the story because Cameron is a very special place. The arena itself is considered one of the top 10 sporting arenas to ever see a show at or a game at. And the environment, especially the Duke fans, the crazies they call them. So the Cameron craziest. But it's just a special place. It's large, but it's also intimate.

[David Lemieux]

We're going to pause from Joe waiting online for a moment to tell you a tiny bit about Cameron Indoor Stadium. At the time it held 8,000 basketball fans and a few hundred more concertgoers.

[Peter Coyle]

Peter Coyle, Perry Como, if you're old enough to remember, Perry Como had a radio and then a television variety show that was sponsored by Chesterfield Cigarettes, which, you know, the Chesterfield building downtown, I mean Liggett Myers that made Chesterfield's was headquartered here. So periodically he would do his show from the basketball stadium. So the network paid the costs to make the acoustics in that building good enough for them to get a broadcast quality show out of the building. Chesterfield brings you the Perry Como Show.

[David Lemieux]

All the top tunes on tv.

[Jesse Jarno]

Chesterfield's the best for you.

[David Lemieux]

So here's the thing for you to do. Buy your smokes the modern way. Regular inside. Start your day.

[Bob Wagner]

Sound off for Chesterfield.

[Jim Enright]

Sound off.

[Joe Demona]

Chesterfield Riot.

[Peter Coyle]

Back to Chesterfields and do it today.

[Joe Demona]

Either way, regular or king size.

[David Lemieux]

A hard pass on that Perry. It was a regular stop for 70s arena acts. The Dead had played there in 73 and 76. The 19771978 school year had already seen a double bill of Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie, a show by Jimmy Buffett, and in February the Atlanta Rhythm Section with Chuck Lovell's band Sea Level. Joe Nimona attended one, and there's a cool picture of him and his friends in the front row, sometimes mislabeled as Bean from the Dead show, but you can get a sense of the venue's vibe. We've Posted [e-mail] deadcast now back to Joe Camped outside the box office and.

[Joe Demona]

I sat there and lo and behold over the next day people heard about it and a long line of people started coming and lining up with me. I got a pen and a paper and I started creating a list of names. We kept a list of the names who was in line and we had rules about who could leave to go to a class and come back. Did you have to have someone to hold your place? And after two days we had about 350 people lined up overnight and we had the funnest times.

[David Lemieux]

Joe even filed the newspaper story about it. Many students returned from spring break last week to join in a Grateful Dead revival. He wrote. The Grateful Dead concert isn't until April, but the revival was held almost a month in advance and stretching many light years into the future. Whoa. What I am speaking of, gentlemen, is the line that assembled outside Wallace Wade stadium beginning at 1 o'clock Monday afternoon waiting for Grateful Dead tickets to go on sale Wednesday morning at 9:00. I owe this article to the many friends I made and kept and found during the course of my two day vigil. First there was Nick Morgan, master mixer and supplier of all those old Dead tapes that we hope you were grooving to. We'll interrupt Joe's article to welcome Nick Morgan to the Deadcast.

[Jesse Jarno]

I got to Duke University in January of 78 was one of those mid year mission that barely let me in. But thank goodness they did. So got there from New York, New York with my friend Joe Demona. Got to my first show in 76 and got to see Jerry and John Khan in Boston before that in 75. So I was primed and ready for a lot more.

[David Lemieux]

Then there was the marvelous mellifluous Monet and the sparkling incandescent oils of the East. There were Morrison and Keys, the keepers of the gate. And there was the Rat, a tat splutter of Chris Brown's moped doing invisible circles around the stadium.

[Jesse Jarno]

I'm only three months into my Duke career. By then we'd managed to have Some good times tossing discs on East Campus. I was living at Gilbert Adams for my freshman spring semester. We would haul some speakers out onto the lawn and play some Griffith. My friends Bridget Bower and some other great people would toss discs with me and we'd get some good long trucking jams from Europe 72 on through the speakers. And that would attract the other Deadheads who like playing Frisbee. So immediately I met some people, like Reggie, that were going to be lifelong friends.

[David Lemieux]

There were the tenacious tent people who seemed to inch closer with each passing dawn. There were the guitar pickers and the harp players and the foosball fumblers. And of course, the Frisbees hung in the light air with or without the permission of the sun. Two kegs were shared by all as the line grew to as many as 300 by Wednesday.

[Jesse Jarno]

So there was definitely Deadheads. But it was more than that. Being in the south, away from New York at that time, and feeling the music and cultural transformation happening in the Triangle area. There was the 9th Street Bakery. There was cooperative starting. There was hippies. It was more like it wasn't just the Grateful Dead scene, It was alternative culture rising.

[David Lemieux]

There were the van people and the car people and the barefoot and the boot foot. We even had a little rain. Minnie, Woodstock. What remains is thanks to the campus policemen who, although we squatted almost on his territory, bothered us not.

[Joe Demona]

The Duke basketball with Coach K is famous for people tenting out, you know, for tickets before the games. But I don't know if our little Lining up for the Dead show was the first ever example of people camping out in front of the camera for anything.

[David Lemieux]

It might have been Fred Goldring.

[Eric Milne]

Carolina basketball game was always like the big game of the year, but I don't even remember people camping out for that. I kind of vaguely remember the Dead thing because unlike a lot of other artists, Springsteen really hadn't gelled yet. It was early days for him. I can't think of another band around that point where he would have generated that kind of community. And so I'm not surprised about that. But it was really the precursor to which is actually a thing now, at.

[David Lemieux]

Least according to espn. Cavill, the regular tent city established by the Cameron Crazies, didn't become a regular feature of duke basketball until 1986.

[Joe Demona]

I got the first four tickets sold and I invited some of my super high power partying friends to come from the Midwest and from Massachusetts, and they all drove down from all over the country for this show, which was crazy. And they all showed up. Whether there was a dead end scene at Duke, I don't think there was, but there sure was that weekend.

[Jesse Jarno]

Nick Morgan we had front row seats a 1, 2, 3 and 4. We scored the jackpot. We knew we were in Nevada. So as soon as we got our tickets, after whatever shenanigans were involved, we hit the phone lines and put the word out and reached out to Johnny Dwork up in Hampshire College and Andre Carruthers up at Amherst and hit the phone to the New York posse and made the call and invited as many friends as we could to come on down. So I think our four tickets turned into like 20 friends, which was, you know, as it would be. So certainly there weren't going to be enough tickets for everybody, but that didn't matter, right? It's the dead seat where everyone was going to be taken care of by everyone else.

[David Lemieux]

It was impressive work even still, the show is in no danger of selling out for the Duke students. Peter Coyle the thing about Duke back.

[Peter Coyle]

Then, I don't know offhand the top of my head, but I think the entire undergraduate student body was in around the 5000 wing. And not every student is going to go to every concert. Cameron Stadium holds about for a concert. I think it holds about 8. So if every student was in the building, there'd still be 3000 NTC. So basically the way the ticket sales worked was there were usually a couple days when the tickets were only available to Duke undergraduate and graduate students. And then after that it was open anywhere and we had ticket sales locations with the record bars in Chapel Hill, I think sometimes in Raleigh. So tickets were generally available or people could just phone the university box office with a credit card and buy them over the phone. Yeah. So it wasn't just a student audience. Probably the majority of the audience wasn't students. A lot of it was UNC and other universities, a lot of high school kids and then a lot of people who just liked their music.

[David Lemieux]

In the age before the Internet, I think there were probably more pockets of deadheads around Raleigh Durham than Joe Demona or Bob Wagner suspected. When the Jerry Garcia ban came through in early 1976, they'd even shown it on the campus television station. And during finals week, no less. Please welcome back Peter Coyle.

[Peter Coyle]

The official name of it was Duke Union Community Television, but it was on channel 13 on the dormitory television sets. It was one of the pieces, the programming and media committees that were part of the union. I actually had a hand in starting it. I was president of the union the following year, after the first concert from 72 73, I was the union's president. And at that point they had just sort of come out with video recorders that weren't the size of buses.

[David Lemieux]

At the Duke University archives, there's also video of the Jerry garcia band in 1976. But we especially have Peter and Cable 13 to thank for the video of the Duke 78 show that we're talking about today. Thanks, Peter. Also, it's a fascinating story.

[Peter Coyle]

We had a student filmmaking organization that still exists called Freewater Productions. So we set up the video production unit within that group. And with the discretionary funds that I had as the president of the union, I bought the first video recorder and monitors and cameras to make end to show. We also found all kinds of video cameras on the campus that professors had gotten as part of research grants and never used. And we were able to collect a few of them from them and sort of put together a TV studio in the basement of one of the academic buildings. We got assigned the channel on the university's master antenna so that we could broadcast only into the commons rooms televisions because it was only by cable. So they started operating as an on cable station and producing a lot of shows, producing campus news, affiliated with for some national news and stuff, and then covering things like the concerts and other events that were happening on the campus.

[David Lemieux]

Something to note as well is that the Duke video is not a live broadcast, but edited together by students and aired on Cable 13 sometime thereafter.

[Peter Coyle]

It might be the next week. It depends on how quickly they edited their editing and whatever in terms of when they put it on the air. I don't know that there were a lot of live telecasts.

[David Lemieux]

Still, that sounds like a pretty excellent cable station, though, only showing up on dorm lounge TVs. Not even every Duke student knew about it at the time. Joe Demona.

[Joe Demona]

We didn't have a tv. I didn't know they were even doing.

[David Lemieux]

That at the time. Joe is a cub reporter for the Duke Chronicle.

[Joe Demona]

I worked for the Duke Chronicle. I was a freshman reporter, I guess you could say editorial assistant. And I decided that I was gonna go interview the band for the paper. I would go with my pad and paper and interview them the day of the show. Like I said, my dorm room was across the street. I go in front of Cameron in the afternoon of the show and I am waiting there with the idea that I would explain to them that I was the Chronicle reporter assigned to interview them and try to ask them a couple of questions. And I wait I wait finally, like these two big black limousines pull up and out comes the band. As they walked past me, I completely lost all of my composure and I started screaming at the top of my lungs. I really like just the idea that Jerry Garcia was walking right past. I just totally, I totally lost it. I completely lost it. I think my journalism career went down the tubes at that moment. And after they went in, I was like, all right, pull yourself together, Joe. And I went in, I said, I tried to get myself into the auditorium and there was this very gruff motorcycle biker security guy, he said, you're not getting in here, kid. So I just. So I just, I just gave up.

[David Lemieux]

Next time.

[Jesse Jarno]

Nick Morgan, April 12, which was just like a midweek, you know, regular day for probably most students. By mid afternoon, my friends from New York had arrived. Josh Hyman and Joe and all our mutual friends were starting to pull into town. And at least in our dorm room and Gilbert Adams, the scene was swelling. Clearly Deadheads were descending on campus and this was not gonna be an average afternoon of classes and study halls and whatnot. It was time to get serious about. Grateful Dead are coming to Cameron Indoor Stadium. So we must have taken the bus over from east campus to west. And by that point, as we get towards the gym complex, there was a scene, it was a full on scene of Deadhead swirling about. This was not just a football game on a Saturday with a bunch of football fans. This was grateful bedtime on campus. And it was beautiful. A lot of Guatemalan fabrics and tie dyes and probably not much tie dyes, black and white T shirts and bunch of Guatemalan fabrics and blue jeans and hippies. That was us, man.

[David Lemieux]

Peter Coyle was working for the April 12, 1978 show.

[Peter Coyle]

I was working in another department at the university, but I was a member of one of the non students on the university union governing board because I was friends with the staff and with most of the students involved with it. I was basically a background stage volunteer for that one as well. I was working with, I think that was Jan Gibson, the primary staff, and then Jake Phelps, who was the director above her, who was primarily out dealing with audience issues, including I think at that concert was the one where he took a gun away from somebody.

[David Lemieux]

It was the Dead's fourth visit to campus. But something critical had changed since their appearance in September 1976.

[Peter Coyle]

That was a concert that had a lot of problems around it, outside the followers, if you will. The people selling all the T shirts out of their vans and stuff became a real problem. At that concert. So there was a lot of dealing with that issue, which really pissed off the campus police. And that was what led to the police wanting a ban on bringing the Grateful Dead back. Not because of anything about the band, but because of the people that followed them, who had all these people in these vans and cars and whatever and filling the parking lot, and none of them wanted to pay to buy tickets. They were trying to, you know, to the extent they didn't want to get in, they were trying to find freeways into the building. And also, though there was no restrooms immediately available, shall we say, for those people who were out there for, you know, all pretty much in that parking lot. And basically the bushes and other areas became the restrooms for that crowd. And that really annoyed the athletic department as well as the police.

[David Lemieux]

The campus was pretty overrun.

[Peter Coyle]

One of the band members, and out of respect for him, I won't mention which one it was, he had decided he wanted to wear a Duke T shirt for the concert. We had just opened a new student center, which had a new store in it. So the store wasn't in the location it had been in the previous times that that had been there. So I offered to walk with them, show them where they had to get to that building and how to get to that store and buy the T shirt. As we're walking down the quad, down through the parking lot in the direction of that building, one of the. I'll call them the camp followers came up to us to try to sell us merchandise. This guy just looked at him and said, I wouldn't ever pay money for anything by the Grateful Dead. But the guy followed us all the way to the building, screaming at him about what a loser he was, that he didn't like the Grateful Dead because they were the greatest band in the world. And this is one of the original members of the band.

[David Lemieux]

Fred Goldring, worked backstage the day of the show.

[Eric Milne]

Of all of the acts, ironically, they were sort of the friendliest. We got all this done by. Through the promoter. So we really didn't have that much to do with booking them. I was standing outside, like, what is a green room or whatever? It's a tiny little. And there was a. A table where they're all sitting around. And Garcia sees me. I was just sort of standing outside the door, and I had my little clipboard and my legal pad and looking official or whatever. And he, like, turns around and he sees me. He goes, hey, man, what are you doing? I'm like, hey. He says, come on in. And Join us. You know, he puts a seat aside and. And says, you're part of the family tonight. I said, okay, cool. You know, so I sat down and. Well, I can't go into where the rest of it happened there, but. But let's suffice to say it was an interesting evening. And just as they're about to get on stage, you know, I was telling him as a guitar player and blah, blah, blah. He like. He says, oh, man, we gotta. This is like, this is the big night. We gotta commemorate this. And he grabs my clipboard and he writes in all caps, to Fred, Pete Pickens. Stay high. Jerry goes, see? And he draws a plant and a music note. He goes, that's supposed to be a pot plant. I go, okay, close enough, you know, And I have it on my wall still.

[David Lemieux]

The Dead were ready to tear the roof off Cameron Indoor Stadium. Nick Morgan.

[Jesse Jarno]

All I remember is the ginormous amount of people trying to get into Cameron. But it all happened. We got in and the place was already filled with energy. It was a pretty full house. Before anything gets started.

[David Lemieux]

We can share the women, we can share the wine we can share what we gotta use.

[Jesse Jarno]

From that first note of Jack Straw, everything felt electric. It just. Clearly, the band was so happy to be there and happy to be playing, and it did not. Nothing felt wrote about that performance.

[David Lemieux]

Fred Goldring was out in the crowd.

[Eric Milne]

In all fairness, I wasn't a Deadhead. I mean, I like the Grateful Dead. I maybe knew five songs and, you know, I played maybe one or two of them, you know, Friend of the Devil, whatever, when I was playing in bands. But I wasn't like a fanatical Deadhead. I remember it being a very good show and a very long show. They played, you know, a long time. And I guess that was the lore about the, you know, both. I guess at that point it was like, you know, Springsteen and the Grateful Dead would play for three hours, right? And they both did.

[Jesse Jarno]

Besides our seats that Joe Devono and I scored for the front row, which was magnificent. My job was to be the usher for the people in the first, like, 10 or 20 rows. Unfortunately, the idea of being ushered versus the responsibility didn't quite line up. So my. My idea of having a great time at a show sort of like took over. And I wasn't able to actually be the usher I was supposed to be. So I think I was mostly enjoying the show, but started demonstrating how to enjoy Front Few Rose. And hopefully I was a good bridge between everyone who's supposed to be in Certain seat. And what's the thing where I got to but be dead? I figured everyone could figure that out pretty well and sure seemed like everybody was happy with their arrangement.

[Eric Milne]

I remember the night of the show, there was like an area between the front rows and the stage which was fairly high up. And the bouncers, so to speak, the guys that were sort of protecting the stage were all like football players. They had their hands full that night because everybody was like tripped out. And probably a lot of locals too that weren't even school bought tickets. And they're dancing and these guys like, excuse me, you gotta move. And they're like, but it's the dead man. And they're like, we don't give a shit who it is. Go sit down.

[Jesse Jarno]

I think I was exactly one of the problem children. Like I was supposed to be helping those guys. And I wasn't really sure if you're supposed to get out of the aisle or be in the aisle or what the best place to be is because everyone really seemed like they were exactly where they needed to be.

[Bob Wagner]

Bob Wagner it was a very high energy show and it was really fun for me being back home. I got a few of my local friends to go and a lot of the traveling entourage stayed in my little tiny abode that I rented back then. So I think we had like 10 or 12 people sleeping on my floor after the show.

[David Lemieux]

One thing you might notice on the recordings is that Jerry Garcia's voice seems to be very quiet during the first few songs, but the crowd at Cameron indoors could hear him just fine. This is because the recordings on Friend of the Devils aren't sound word recordings. They're special mixes that Betty Cantor Jackson made with outputs from the soundboard run through her mixer and sent into her reel to reel. The first few songs were often spent getting the levels on her recording Correct. On Dr. Bob's audience tape, Garcia can be heard loud and clear.

[Rich Mahan]

The wolves are running round but we.

[David Lemieux]

Love one so hard and cold rusted feet. Betty had Garcia's voice dialed into her tape mix in time for Peggy O. Very thankfully. I love how Phil Lesh's bass sounds in the mix here too. Our captain fell in love with a lady like a dove and he called her by name. Pretty pad heads love the wee little details. And there are a few extremely minute ones to note from Duke 78. There is, for example, what's called the Day of the Month effect on Beat It on down the Line, with the number of beats in the song's intro matching the [e-mail] deadcast we've linked Robert K. Tudkushian's paper on that topic. There's one of the more articulated version of the Dead Plain funiculi funicula, a 19th century Italian folk pop novelty song celebrating the opening of a railway to the top of Mount Vesuvius that is to go peer to the edge of a hopefully dormant volcano. I suspect many Deadheads may prefer their volcanoes live. It's not exactly a performance nor a jam, yet more than tuning full enough that it's credited with its own track on this release. You people in the administration or the management of this building don't think that you're slipping our notice. We still haven't seen you turn off those lights up there yet. Neither band nor crowd were too pleased by the situation. The lighting was addressed in a Post show staff memo in which Dean William Griffith admitted that it took the staff by surprise. Apparently since the previous concert there the basketball program had installed a new set of lights. It wasn't Bill Griffith stressed in his memo because they were trying to bust pot smokers. They remedied it by the Grover Washington concert in June. No, we don't mean the spotlights that are focused upon the stage here to illuminate ourselves. We mean the house lights, dummy. Turn down the house lights. One place where the later 70s transformed their earlier work was Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's Loser. Like Jack Straw and other Western numbers, it got bigger. Garcia took more choruses and the dynamics got widescreen, especially by the post solo chorus.

[Jesse Jarno]

Nick Morgan after that electric Beat it on down the Line, things slowed down a little bit with Piggyho, but it picks right up again with Matron Mixicality. Nothing really felt slow, but by the time you got to the end of the first set, that Lazy Lightning supplication was literally fire. It was just. It was spectacular. I hope the band had as much fun playing it as we had fun experiencing it, but that's how that song was meant to be played.

[David Lemieux]

The late Steve Silberman was a fan of this one. As we mentioned, in that intense middle fugue section, it really blows the roof.

[Rich Mahan]

Off because it establishes this tension that.

[Eric Milne]

Just keeps getting more and more and.

[David Lemieux]

More tense until it's all blown out.

[Eric Milne]

In these cascades of really sexy chords.

[David Lemieux]

So yeah, I love that. To my ears, Lazy Lightning supplication channels some of the same energy as the China Cat Sunflower. I know you Rider Transition, but set in a different time signature and decades. Steve Mazner was in attendance, though Bob Wagner was Handling the taping.

[Bob Wagner]

It was a high powered show. Duke. Duke was pretty cool. I went into college basketball and stuff like that. So going to Cameron probably now would be a bigger deal than then, but still it was ACC basketball and the arena circled around the back of the stage. And I think during the break I just needed rest. You know, you're on the road for a little bit. Guy kind of just rested behind the stage area. And I kept noticing this guy. I get he must have been inebriated. And I don't know if he was having conversations with the roadies, but you could see he wanted to drop down from the balcony onto the stage. And eventually he did.

[David Lemieux]

Ask my family doctor about what I have now. Now I sit now doctor, doctor, listen in this. Dr. Oh, can you tell the doctor what's healing me? Imagine the next bit set in slow motion to Good Lovin.

[Bob Wagner]

And it took them a little while to catch up with him, recognize who this was and what he did. But unfortunately they're playing Good Lovin. And I'm watching them just beat the shit out of this guy during Good Love. And it was a little awkward. All you need is good love.

[Jesse Jarno]

And the poor guy took it out and.

[Bob Wagner]

And they removed him from the back of the arena and backstage.

[David Lemieux]

Love. Near the beginning of the second set, the band pull out what's almost inarguably the most Southern gothic piece in the songbook. It Must have been the Roses. I don't know, maybe it was the Roses. Check out our Tales of the Great Rumrunners episode for more on the connection between the Robert Hunter solo composition It Must have Been the Roses and William Faulkner's short story Arose for Emily. If you're the kind of fan that squints their ears when they hear band members discussing things just off microphone, there's an extended strategical pause before the set's jam sequence. He's telling the one about the traveling salesman. They've already heard it. They're just humoring him.

[Peter Coyle]

I don't think they're gonna get it.

[David Lemieux]

If you listen closely and it's too faint to even include here, you can hear the band plotting out what's to come, including a use of the phrase rhythm devils. But the onstage off mic conversation apparently spins off track as Billy Kreutzman, long standing arbiter of comm, calls for order. Shut up. We're doing the show. The jam sequence they settle on begins with Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow's estimated profit. California Preaching on the burning shore California I've been knocking on the golden door like an angel standing in a shepherd light Rising up the paradise I know I'm gonna sh. And in the beginning of the jam is another subtle grateful lead. First Estimated Profit has entered its Yelp era. You can now figure out how to annotate that on your tape. We talked about song's evolutions in the last episode about the Fox Theater gate, but the Dead didn't play Eyes of the World, a song which had morphed a bit in recent years. Jerry Garcia sets the tempo around 120bpm, 10 or so clicks faster than the early 70s. With Garcia barely stating the intro chords, it throws a spotlight on Bob Weir's second guitar part. The drummers sound pretty excitable. Probably that drummer was excited for what was to come. As we've discussed over the last few episodes, the dead spring 1978 tour was the beginning of what's now called Drums in Space. And it's thanks to the Cable 13 cameras that we have some pretty solid visual documentation of what was occurring on probably most nights of this tour.

[Bob Wagner]

Bob Wagner the Duke show, which was my hometown show, basically that had one of the longest drum sessions. I believe Garcia was out for a little while of it, not for a long portion.

[David Lemieux]

It's really a lot of fun to watch Garcia gleefully bashing on the open tune steel drums.

[Bob Wagner]

And there were lots of other people from the bands entourage there. I remember one of the people that cooked for the band was banging pots and pans for part of it.

[David Lemieux]

Bob's not being sarcastic. If you watch the video, you can see a percussionist up on stage literally bashing together pots and pans. Did some research there. And the mystery percussionist is the late Leonard Kossas, known as Psy, as in Cy Kosis, a tour chef who came to the Dead's organization via promoter John Cher and who would go on to work for many even bigger acts over the next decades.

[Bob Wagner]

It was a really high energy show. I felt at the time that like too much of the energy was going into the percussion. The Rhythm Devils. If I'm not mistaken, the Duke one is the longest version of the Rhythm Devils. It seemed to go on forever. And I caught some ribbing from some of my local friends from college that I got to go who weren't Deadheads. Well, gee Bob, you got me to come see a chef bang pots and pans on the stage.

[David Lemieux]

To my ears, it's an element that connects the drum segment back to the participatory fun of the acid tests and the early days of the band. A way to maintain that extra open form. Over the next decades, countless people will join Mickey Hart and Billy Kreutzman in their Rhythm Devil activities. Some of them only remembered because there's photo or video documentation with probably many other unaccounted for guest players over the years. Nick Morgan the drum thing was spectacular.

[Jesse Jarno]

And strange, given what I was experiencing that night. It was very cosmic. Took me into some other sort of deep ancient astral plane. I thought that was the gateway to the Rhythm Devils of early humanity. Sounds so what did I know? I didn't know that was a new business for the band, but I thought it was super cool.

[David Lemieux]

The show's finale features some really animated music.

[Joe Demona]

Joe demona the US Blues Encore is one that everybody seems to remember because one of the things about that show is the energy that Jerry put out like. Like he actually at some point jump up in air, windmilling his arm on the guitar. And this isn't something that you used to seeing from him.

[David Lemieux]

David Lemieux so I had the Duke.

[Steve Silberman]

Tape in probably 88, 87, 88 and then 89 or 90. I got the video of it. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I mean, it was the kind of thing where I watched Jerry do these windmills and then I'd rewind it and on the VHS and I'd watch it again and again and I'd have friends come over. I said, oh, you gotta watch this. And I'd put the VHS in and we'd watch this little piece and then we go to the next one that he'd do and the next. And just the way he was fist in the air and growling and Bob jumping around like a bonafide Bono esque rock star. We couldn't believe it. I do wonder that if there were more videos of more shows that these moments that we've heard a thousand times, peak moments where they blow the roof off the place, what did they look like at that moment?

[Bob Wagner]

Bob WAGNER I think it was a one time thing, but I don't remember having that as part of my memories. It's like, wow, that was the show where Jerry was doing the Pete thing. That wasn't part of my memories. It wasn't until the video came out that I really became aware of that. And of course that show achieved a lot of notoriety because of that. I was in general aware that it was a very high energy.

[David Lemieux]

Well, Garcia can be seen getting pretty animated in some early Dead footage, including the Grateful Dead movie. He could still show flashes in the later 70s. Steve Silberman was already a five year dead veteran by the time of 1978. Jerry was mostly pretty mellow like no, that's not true. Jerry was strikingly happy at the Duke show. The only time I ever saw him.

[Eric Milne]

That happy with my own eyes on.

[David Lemieux]

Stage was when he was playing with.

[Eric Milne]

Bonnie Raitt the Greek. He was thrilled.

[David Lemieux]

He was absolutely thrilled. Thank you and good night. Nick Morgan.

[Jesse Jarno]

I just remember walking out into the night on the quad and it looked like one of the greatest nights of my life. I just was so grateful. I was so utterly grateful. In love even more with the Grateful Dead. In love more with my friends and love where I was at on Duke University campus. Being at the epicenter of everything, it just seemed like one of the most magical nights of my life. And I knew it right then and felt the joy of all the friendship and camaraderie, love and magic that had happened. It was really, it was really special.

[David Lemieux]

Joe Demona.

[Joe Demona]

We were wired out on whatever psychedelics were around. And I remember we, we were up all night and I ended up on East Campus. I don't know if you know anything about the Duke campus, Jesse, but there's the west campus, the beautiful gothic quads and then the East Campus, sort of the Georgian brick beautiful campus separated from by about a mile from one another. I remember walking back from the east campus at about 5:30 in the morning, which is about a mile in the rain and just like totally trashed and like tuning in with the birds and the insects and the whole. In the rain, you know, the whole thing about it was just like whoa.

[David Lemieux]

But there wasn't much time for sleeping.

[Joe Demona]

Then we hopped and did a little tour to see a couple other shows at William and Mary and I forget where else.

[David Lemieux]

Slow down, that's next episode. Not every fan base was nearly as organized or as rabid as the Deadheads. Fans of other bands could try to find somebody like Charlie Mann.

[Joe Demona]

We actually had a taping business where there were a number of shows we would get that we think this isn't worth putting out on vinyl. And we would sell and make tapes for people that came in the like 76 or something like that.

[David Lemieux]

Rock Collectors LTD offered mail order tapes. A different branch of the bootleg network. But they also had goods that were hard to find among tape traders.

[Joe Demona]

Jim and I actually had the video of that show, I think, which is now available from Duke, that black and white video, because the student union film. And Jim actually got a hold of that.

[David Lemieux]

Jim Enright remembers it being the other way around. And Brought some videotapes to show and.

[Jim Enright]

Tell Charlie acquired through a contact of his at Duke copies of the tape of the show. If you look at these, these are Beta tapes.

[David Lemieux]

Interestingly, I've come across several other accounts of people claiming to have liberated the Duke 78 video in some manner. And I can only assume that they're all telling the truth. But if you ever watch the copy on YouTube, which was upscaled recently and streamed officially by the dead for the Duke 78 release, you have Jim Enright directly to thank.

[Jim Enright]

So I had them for a number of years. I was trying to think when I got them it'd have to be probably sometime in the early 80s. And then through tape trading I was in touch probably with Harvey Lubar, who you probably know.

[David Lemieux]

The late Harvey Lubar was the founder of New York's Hell's Honkies Tape Club. And he's a dead freak I genuinely miss and think about often. We've heard his voice on a few Dead casts. And he was, as we say, the definition of a tape trading mensch in a world where people could be overprotective of their recordings.

[Jim Enright]

And Harvey was always so generous with his tapes and with his music and with everything that he would send me the best stuff. And one time we were talking, I said, well I. I did have a video of the 78 Duke Show. He said what? Anyway, I sent it to Harvey on, converted it from Beta to vhs.

[David Lemieux]

The tape got around David Lemieux.

[Steve Silberman]

I heard this show before I saw the video. But I did see the video early on. Because I was also a videotape trader such that we were. But I had two hi fi VHS decks attached together. And I remember I traded with this guy in New Jersey, Lee, and he had hundreds of Dead videos. And that went for all of the pro shot stuff, which would be Duke. He had the Europe show on the 417 closing of Winterland 1128, 11 2478. So he had all that stuff. But then this was around 89 when I was getting into video trading. He was also part of the crew that would go in with video cameras, really good stuff, microphones plugged in and do one camera shoots of the Deads concerts. It was frowned upon. In fact it was. It was illegal, no videotaping, but these guys did it. Then I traded for them. So I had this huge collection of video tapes. So I got the Duke show and I always loved the energy. But when I saw the video and saw that the visuals I'd never seen. Jerry in particular, no Not Jerry. All of them this animated.

[David Lemieux]

It wasn't the last time that Ed played at Duke, but it came close.

[Fred Goldring]

Eric Milne after the 78 show, the university basically said, they're not coming back because the Hell's Angels had been here.

[David Lemieux]

For his liner note to the new box set, and probably just because he could. Eric dove into the Duke archive.

[Fred Goldring]

I've got memos, I've got budgets, I've got expenses. I have a number of documents for the 78 show. One of the most interesting is this memo that I cite by William Griffith, who was kind of the vice president, I think, for Student affairs, who was making an argument for why the dead should be allowed to come back.

[David Lemieux]

Essentially, it's an analysis of the Duke show from the facility's point of view, responding to the critique that dead fans had damaged Cameron Indoor Stadium with a virtual thread by thread inspection of the building, even comparing notes with their equivalents at William and Mary, where the dead played. A few days later, they concluded that the only lasting damages were cigarette burns in the carpet, some of which had probably been there already, and that their impact was little different from other acts. Griffith knew he was making an argument for the losing side. One might call him an advocate of the devil. There must be a better word for that. News that the dead wouldn't be returning didn't go over too well. Fred Goldring.

[Eric Milne]

I got, like, hate mail from every deadhead on campus who was saying that I didn't like the dead, and I was the one that made it so they weren't coming back, which was, of course, not true. And my roommate at the time, who was the middle linebacker of the football team, I remember he wrote a letter to the Duke Chronicle, which was the newspaper, inviting them to any of the dead who had a problem or thought that I had done this to come visit him.

[David Lemieux]

Eric Milne.

[Fred Goldring]

There were always debates about the dead coming back, right? And they changed their mind in 82 to let them back one more time.

[David Lemieux]

Duke has embraced the dead's legacy at the university in numerous ways. For starters, it's become a kind of teachable moment in Eric's classes about the dead.

[Fred Goldring]

I've taught it now for three years, has kind of revived interest in the dead at Duke and brought the dead heads out of the woodwork. One of the really amazing things about finding out about the dead at Duke is that the Duke archives have just a rich amount of information on the dead at Duke, and it's a great way to teach students about doing primary research. So my students are in the Archives.

[David Lemieux]

The show has also become a kind of community marker.

[Fred Goldring]

For the 45th anniversary of this show. We had a gathering on campus. We had like, I think we had 150. It was. The room was full and it was the community. Some students, but mostly people from the community. And people were talking about that they had been at the show, how amazing it was. There are folks around town who worked in Duke performances and student affairs who are eager to talk about what their experiences were like.

[David Lemieux]

One way to look at this is nostalgia to gather and talk about a great performance from a few decades ago. But there's also a sense of the Grateful Dead as a continuing community, a mobile community that manifests in different ways and different places. One that Joe Demona quite literally identified in his article about Waiting to Buy Dead tickets. The revival was held a month in advance and lasted many light years into the future. That future now includes that freshman course that Eric Milne teaches, where the Duke 78 show itself is an object of study.

[Fred Goldring]

One of the things I do in my class is each student gets a dead buddy. And a dead buddy is a Deadhead at Duke. And they've come out of the woodwork. The head of finance at the Duke Hospital, the head of our corporate risk management people I know, they're like. I'm like, you're into the Dead, really? And. And so now I think we've transitioned from it being a stigma to people wanting to be part of it. My course has uncovered that the 70s.

[David Lemieux]

Deadheads became 80s and 90s and 21st century Deadheads, of course, but they also became professionals. Nick Morgan became a civil and environmental engineer for the United States government, an activist, and eventually a board member at the Rex foundation, the charitable group started by the Dead in the early 1980s.

[Jesse Jarno]

I knew that being on the Dead bus gave me a sense of purpose to help others engage in the world in more meaningful ways, engage my work, my community, my friends. And so that was just part of the direction of my life, is being in service to various community projects. And I think it was a miracle that someone on the REX board saw me contributing to toxic waste cleanup, reap environmental activism, different projects out in the world. And they wanted someone who had grassroots experience in community activism to join the RECS board to help steer the Grants world into more community based projects.

[David Lemieux]

Things have changed, but there really was a stigma.

[Fred Goldring]

I was on the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill when they played in. Was it 92 or 93? I think it was 1993. And talk about being a Clark Kent Deadhead. I went in to teach my class the next morning. I taught at 8am Introduction International Relations class, and my students were like, did you see that freak show out there last night? And I just didn't have the guts to tell them that I was part of that freak show. And I didn't want my colleagues to know either. So I changed into my Burks and T shirt in the parking lot. That was a long time ago.

[David Lemieux]

In 2023, Duke University Press even launched its own Studies in the Grateful Dead series, edited by our own scholarly puba, Nicholas G. Merriweather. They've published two excellent titles so far, John Brackett's Live the Grateful Dead Live Recordings and the Ideology of Liveness, and Michael Kahler's Get Shown the Light, Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast the story of the Dead and Duke is ongoing as those many light years keep slipping into the future.

[Rich Mahan]

Thank you very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast, friends. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Peter Coyle, Fred Goldring, Nick Morgan, Joe Demona, Bob Wagner, Jim Enright, Steve Mazner, Charlie Mann, Eric Milne, David Lemieux and Steve Silberman. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his extensive interview archive. Thank you, David. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doron Tyson. All rights reserved.