Here Comes Sunshine: RFK Stadium, 6/73

Summary

GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST
Episode: Here Comes Sunshine: RFK Stadium, 6/73
Released: June 1, 2023

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast is the season seven finale and dives deep into two legendary Grateful Dead concerts at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., held on June 9 and 10, 1973. These shows, featuring the Allman Brothers Band as co-headliners, marked the culmination of the band’s transformative spring 1973 tour and are now part of the “Here Comes Sunshine” box set. With firsthand accounts, archival interviews, fan stories, and expert insights, the episode explores the music and legacy of these unique megagigs, the technical innovations behind their sound, and the confluence of two titans of American rock.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The "Here Comes Sunshine" Box Set & RFK Stadium Shows

[04:34]

• Scope of the Release: Includes five previously unreleased concerts from Spring 1973, with the two RFK shows as the grand finale.
• Significance of RFK: First time the Dead played a major East Coast stadium, co-headlining with the Allmans in a setting that required an unprecedented sound system.

“We’ve got May 13 through June 10. We’ve got four weeks of Grateful Dead spread over five weekends with some of the best and most inspired Grateful Dead I’ve ever heard.” – David Lemieux [04:48]

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The Dead & Allmans: Parallel Histories and Collaborations

[07:03, 08:06, 09:39]

• Historical Intertwining: Both bands valued the live performance as their core experience, not just album sales or singles. Approaches were marked by improvisation, shared jams, and mutual admiration.
• Missed Opportunities: Multiple planned co-headlining gigs between the Dead and Allman Brothers, with more thwarted by tragedy and logistical issues than realized. The RFK concerts represented the fulfillment of years of plans.

“They were just sort of doing it as they went… They really did still view live performance as their bread and butter.” – Alan Paul [08:06]

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The Scene: Stadium Innovation, "Mega Gigs," and the Wall of Sound

[05:35, 28:29, 30:19]

• Technical Evolution: Owsley “Bear” Stanley’s work on the sound system was revolutionary, with the RFK shows being a prototype for what would soon become the famed Wall of Sound.
• Growing Pains: The Dead faced logistical and existential challenges as their scale increased – immense PA systems, ballooning crews, financial stress, as well as the trade-off between intimacy and mass experience.

“We got into sort of a spiral scene where we have a lot of employees and a huge overhead… To pay for it all, we had to play bigger places… In order to play bigger places and get decent sound, we had to buy a bigger PA.” – Bob Weir [30:19]

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Vivid Memories: Fans and Firsthand Experiences

[41:48, 45:22, 47:14, 51:53, 54:51, 88:48, 92:54]

• Fans share stories of traveling to RFK by train or car (including with nitrous tanks!), camping in parking lots, and enduring intense heat and emotional highs and lows.
• Saturday, June 9: Kicked off with Doug Sahm, then three hours of the Dead, highlighted by “Promised Land”, “Deal”, “Looks Like Rain”, and a unique second set jam.
• Sunday, June 10: Known as one of the longest Dead shows ever (4 hours 40 minutes). Features “Morning Dew” as a show opener—rare and emotionally resonant.

“It felt like I was walking into a Roman amphitheater about to be slaughtered on the floor… with my heart and mind torn apart. I was holding steady, rough steady and calm as I could be, already seasoned and ready to withstand whatever fate delivered to me.” – Dano O’Hanklin [46:39]

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The Music: Highlights and Setlist Analysis

Saturday, June 9

• Set 1: “Promised Land”, “Deal”, “Looks Like Rain”, “Loose Lucy” (last early version), “Big River”.
• Set 2: Tight, energetic jams including “Eyes of the World” (peaking “sonic sculpture” version) and “China Doll”.
• Crowd & Chaos: Fans attempting to scale the stage, Christmas lights ripped down, communal but chaotic energy.

“The concert, as per usual, or per often, was a tapestry of darker and lighter themes... reminding me that hey, [shit] happens, man. But there’s a good side too.” – Dano O’Hanklin [52:25]

Sunday, June 10
[88:48, 89:58, 92:54, 94:18, 101:16]

• Set 1: “Morning Dew” opener, rare and powerful; “Wave That Flag” (last version before morphing into “U.S. Blues”); “Bird Song”, “Playing in the Band”.
• Set 2: Begins with “Eyes of the World”, features extended, jazzy “Jam in 7”, haunting “Stella Blue”, and monumental “Dark Star” loaded with “Philo stomp” from Phil Lesh.
• Super Jam / Set 3: Grateful Dead join by Dickey Betts (Allmans), Chuck Leavell, Butch Trucks, possibly Merle Saunders and others for “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” “That’s All Right, Mama,” “Not Fade Away,” “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad,” “Drums,” etc.

“I feel that this second set, third set, Super Jam, is some of the most inspired Grateful Dead music I’ve ever heard.” – David Lemieux [114:05]

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Allman Brothers Band Perspective

[62:23-64:18]

• Their post-Duane lineup, featuring Dickey Betts and Chuck Leavell, won over Deadheads with tight playing and a distinct sound.
• Played nearly identical setlists each night, but delivered spirited performances.
• Legendary Onstage Moment: Rumors of “Eat a Peach” scented incense, and discussion of the collaborative encore jam, even if lineups are still debated to this day.

“Oh, I remember them being really tight. Greg Allman’s just incredible. And I didn’t know quite what to expect without Duane Allman, but I was not disappointed at all.” – Jay Curley [63:08]

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Behind the Scenes: Tapers, Crews, and Rock’n’Roll Chaos

[79:53, 83:23, 85:56, 86:23]

• Early tapers describe DIY efforts to document the shows, hiding microphones, smuggling in poles, and even holding tape machines while disguised as pregnant.
• Crew logistics, food and drink antics (a promoter gets pasta dumped on him for failing to provide steak/beer), and near disasters (a shade cloth fire extinguished by spraying beer bottles) illustrate the wild and woolly nature of staging a 1973 Dead show.
• Crew politics flare up: a Capricorn Records promoter is beaten by Allmans roadies during a stage access dispute.

“The worst thing that can happen to a concert is the eggs are cold in the morning… and that’s basically what happened at RFK.” – Bunky Odom [73:25]

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Cultural & Personal Impact

[119:04 – 120:03]

• Content Warning: The podcast does not shy away from the dark realities and dangers at the periphery of large festivals, sharing a harrowing account of sexual assault outside the stadium.
• Tales of sleeping outside, missing wallets, and lost tapes, juxtaposed with the lasting power of the music and Dead-community glow.

“Headphones and music help, you’re on the train. But secretly you’re saying, I just saw the Grateful Dead and you didn’t… that glow lasts for a while.” – Ihors Labicki [125:12]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On stadium scale & the Wall of Sound:
  “You can look at photos of RFK and you can see the prototype of the wall of sound.” – David Lemieux [28:29]

• On the 'mega gig' experience:
  “The experience… got to be one that was totally controlled… airplanes to motel, motel to gig, backstage, heavy security, nobody near the stage, you know.” – Jerry Garcia [32:39]

• On the spirit of collaboration:
  “I think the Dead and the Allmans had a kinship, and they played music in a very similar way… they let the music guide them.” – David Lemieux [114:05]

• Fan experience:
  “We had this giant [nitrous] tank, and we said, oh great, we’ll take the tank with us. Of course you’re going to see the dead, you got to take the tank.” – Ihors Labicki [42:49]

• On Morning Dew opener (June 10):
  “That show, all of a sudden, the show opened up with Morning Dew—it was mind blowing to most of us… we sort of should have known that it was going to be extra special.” – Brian Schiff [90:19]

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Important Segments & Timestamps

| Time | Segment | |---------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:34 | Overview of the RFK shows and Here Comes Sunshine box set | | 07:03 | Introduction to Allman Brothers Band’s relation with the Dead | | 28:29 | Discussion of stadium scale and the Wall of Sound | | 41:48 | Firsthand fan accounts—arriving at the stadium, road stories | | 54:51 | Saturday setlist breakdown (Deal, Looks Like Rain, Loose Lucy, etc.) | | 88:48 | Sunday show—heat, exhaustion, apples as the “breakfast of champions” | | 91:00 | The rare “Morning Dew” opener—emotional impact | | 101:16 | “Stella Blue”, stadium echo, and audience tape specialness | | 104:08 | "Dark Star" and its significance in the set | | 110:09 | The Super Jam: Dead + Allmans + others | | 119:04 | Difficult events on the festival periphery (content warning) |

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Final Reflections

The two nights at RFK Stadium in June 1973 capture the Grateful Dead at an exhilarating and transitional moment: both technically (laying groundwork for the Wall of Sound), musically (fluid setlists, rare song arrangements, inter-band jamming), and culturally (fan immersion, chaos, and communal highs and lows). The collaboration with the Allman Brothers brought together parallel countercultural forces in a setting that was both innovative and fraught with the perils and joys of the era’s festival culture.

For Deadheads, scholars, and the merely curious, this episode encapsulates not just two great gigs but the arc of American rock’s evolution in the early 1970s.

“We’d like to thank our guests in this episode Bunky Odom, Buddy Thornton, Ron Wickersham, Alan Trist, Ben Haller, Peter Rowan… and all the Dead family, past and present.” [128:44]

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Links to further reading, rare tapes, and the full Here Comes Sunshine release are available at dead.net/deadcast.

Transcript

[Jesse Jarno]

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[Rich Mahan]

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[Jesse Jarno]

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[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.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to.

[Rich Mahan]

Season seven of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. Well this week we wrap up Season seven with a Here Comes Sunshine box.

[Jesse Jarno]

Set finale covering the June 9th and.

[Rich Mahan]

10Th, 1973 shows at RFK Stadium.

[Jesse Jarno]

It is grand indeed, loaded with all.

[Rich Mahan]

Kinds of great music and stories, including a dive into the Allman Brothers Band, who were also on the bill for both shows.

[Jesse Jarno]

Speaking of Here Comes Sunshine Here Comes.

[Rich Mahan]

Here Comes Sunshine 1973 this new release is a 17 CD limited edition set.

[Jesse Jarno]

Available exclusively from Dead.net that features five previously unreleased concerts recorded during the band's transformative spring 1973 tour. The shows included in this set are.

[Rich Mahan]

Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, Iowa 51373 Campus Stadium at UCSB in Santa Barbara, California on 52073 Keys our stadium, San.

[Jesse Jarno]

Francisco 52673 and today's subject, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, Washington, D.C. on June.

[Rich Mahan]

9 and June 10, 1973. The 61073 show, the second of the two RFK shows, will also be available.

[Jesse Jarno]

As a standalone release in two configurations.

[Rich Mahan]

A 4 CD set and an 8 LP set. The 17 CD big box and the 4 CD set will be released on June 30th. They'll also be available digitally and the 8 LP set comes on July 28th.

[Jesse Jarno]

You can pre order all of the.

[Rich Mahan]

Here comes sunshine 73 releases now over.

[Jesse Jarno]

At dead.net head on over to dead.net.

[Rich Mahan]

Deadcast there's lots to look at.

[Jesse Jarno]

Check out all of our past episodes while you're there, including the complete seasons one through six.

[Rich Mahan]

You you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can.

[Jesse Jarno]

Listen when, where and how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing hitting.

[Rich Mahan]

That like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review and if you think about it, post an.

[Jesse Jarno]

Episode on your social media. It really helps us out and spreads the word.

[Rich Mahan]

Very kind of you. Thank you very much. Did you know we have transcripts for many of your favorite Dead cast episodes available for you?

[Jesse Jarno]

Reading pleasure.

[Rich Mahan]

Well, we recently uploaded season one, so.

[Jesse Jarno]

Bop on over to dead.net deadcast index and check them out.

[Rich Mahan]

Thanks to everyone who has left their.

[Jesse Jarno]

[e-mail] we're asking you to share your.

[Rich Mahan]

Stories now about going to shows in 73. Anything that you've got we want to hear the Dead Were on Fire.

[Jesse Jarno]

We want to hear your firsthand account.

[Rich Mahan]

Share those stories [e-mail] and you just may hear yourself on the Dead Cast. In this final episode of season seven of the Dead Cast, we head to Washington, D.C. to cover two shows at.

[Jesse Jarno]

RFK Stadium held on June 9 and June 10, 1973.

[Rich Mahan]

The Allman Brothers Band were also on the bill for these two mega shows.

[Jesse Jarno]

And they were hot.

[Rich Mahan]

Literally and figuratively, as you'll soon find out. Take it away, Jesse.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Grateful Dead finished the spring of 1973 on the East coast playing two giant shows with the Allman Brothers Band at RFK stadium in Washington, D.C. that now conclude the Here Comes Sunshine box set. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David.

[Rich Mahan]

Lemieux the RFK is on many occasions have very nearly become their own box set, but we're very glad that they ended up all being together. So we've got May 13 through June 10. We've got four weeks of Grateful Dead spread over five weekends with some of the best and most inspired Grateful Dead I've ever heard. And that goes for everything from Des moines right through June 10th. The final set with all those guys.

[Jesse Jarno]

The box set captures mellow Midwest sunshine from Des Moines on May 13, breezy Pacific Ocean sunshine from Santa Barbara on May 20, and dreamy golden Gate park sunshine from Kezar Stadium on May 26. But the two shows at RFK were a different variety. Blazing hot east coast sunshine, musical and otherwise.

[Rich Mahan]

Thank you all for giving us a chance to get a wonderful suntan. RFK was really the first time the Dead had played a big east coast stadium. They'd done Roosevelt, but this was a big stadium. This is an NFL stadium. Bear was much more involved in that. The construction of the sound system had to be much bigger than anything they'd used up until then.

[Jesse Jarno]

Working on the sound system and capturing sonic journals of that work was Owsley Stanley, 11 months post prison.

[Rich Mahan]

So Bear was at those shows and recorded and for those, we also had, I believe, kids recordings from that and we ended up opting to go with bears. Kids are incredible as well, but bears, they have a certain bear quality to them in a very good way.

[Jesse Jarno]

Thanks as always, Bear. I know we mentioned the length of the Des Moines show a few weeks back, but the second night at RFK truly might be the longest ever Dead show, counting the jam set at the end. 4 hours, 40 minutes, 47 seconds of stage time, according to the official track listing on the new box. So for these stadium shows we have a stadium sized episode. Don't forget your sunscreen.

[Rich Mahan]

Sunshine.

[Jesse Jarno]

Co Headlining the weekend at RFK were the Allman Brothers Band. That year, the Allmans released their biggest ever song, making it to number two with a bullet.

[Rich Mahan]

Lord, I want born Rambling man Trying to make a living and doing the best I can when it's time for leaving I hope you understand that I was born a Ramblin man.

[Jesse Jarno]

But Ramblin man and its associated album, Brothers and Sisters, wouldn't be released until August 1973, only after the Allman Brothers had spent the summer playing mega shows with the Dead and without. To help guide us through Allman's history as it merges with our own, we're so genuinely happy to welcome Alan Paul, author of a great forthcoming book titled Brothers and Sisters, out later this summer via St. Martin's Press. We've linked to it at dead.net deadcast.

[Rich Mahan]

None of this stuff makes sense if you look at it through the lens of the more contemporary music business or even like what developed in the 80s 90s that we got used to, where somebody puts out a single, then they put out an album, then they tour behind it. They were just sort of doing it as they went. And there's a lot of differences between the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers, but one similarity is that they really did still view a live performance as their bread and butter.

[Jesse Jarno]

If you enjoy the kind of deep, obsessive territory we cover on the Dead cast, I can't recommend Alan's book highly enough. Just like the Dead and the Allmans had a lot of similarities and equivalents through their bands and organizations. Alan's become our unofficial Almonds correspondent and ambassador, plunging down a few rabbit holes in the course of putting this episode together. The Dead and the Allmans first got acquainted at the Fillmore east shows we touched on most recently in our Bear's Choice episode, you know, February 1970. That was the Valentine's Day 1970 Mountain Jam, available from the Owsley Stanley foundation after those shows, they played together whenever they could, which was never nearly enough. Besides a radio appearance with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, Duane Allman would only sit in with the Dead Once more in April 1971, again at the Fillmore east, before his tragic death in a motorcycle accident that October. The Allmans continued onward, and the bond between the bands grew even tighter, starting in the summer of 1972. Please welcome Deadhead Ehorse Labicki.

[Rich Mahan]

The Dead were playing in Hartford in the summer. And you see this organ get put on stage and it's got a big mushroom painted on it and you kind of know, oh man, something's gonna happen, happen here. That's not the Grateful Deads experience equipment. It's the Allman's.

[Jesse Jarno]

And sure enough, Greg Allman, Dickey Betts, Barry Oakley and Jaime O popped out to jam with the Dead in Hartford the next night. Garcia, Weir and Bill Kreutzman returned the favor, joining the Allman Brothers at Gaelic park in the Bronx for a dope mountain jam. The summer 1972 jams connected the rest of the band with the Dead, and most especially connected Dickey Betts and Jerry Garcia.

[Rich Mahan]

Maybe because Dickie was a little bit more of a shy guy. He wasn't so outgoing. He wasn't the one who jumped up on stage and was always doing sit ins. Dwayne would play with anyone, anywhere.

[Jesse Jarno]

With a pair of good jams under their belt, everybody was eager for more. The Grateful Dead had Sam Cutler in their corner. The Allman Brothers had Bunky Odom. Please welcome to the Dead cast Bunky Odom.

[Rich Mahan]

In March of 69, we all got to making at the same time. I was the vice president of Phil Walden and Associates. I was never an employee of Capricorn Records. Dwayne came to me and he said, you're our man in the office. I was in charge of the day to day.

[Jesse Jarno]

By the summer of 1972, Sam Cutler and Bunky Odom had become pals.

[Rich Mahan]

Sam and I got to talking about doing some dates together. You know, I think. I think I went to San Francisco four or five times and talked to him. Sam came to Macon. We became friends and we talk and we decided, let's try two dates. We put together a date in Houston with the Allmond Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead, and we put together a date at the University of Georgia in Athens.

[Jesse Jarno]

All in all, the Dead and the Allmans were supposed to play together seven times in the last two months of 1972. But it wasn't destined to be the.

[Rich Mahan]

Last show that Barry Oakley played and the only time that he and Chuck Lavelle played together was an abbreviated show because it was part of the Don Kirschner rock concert and they played Rambleman, so they debuted it.

[Jesse Jarno]

As it turns out, the Dead were originally scheduled to have appeared alongside the Allmans on the debut episode of Don Kirschner's rock concert recorded on Long island at Hofstra University on November 2. It would have been a good time to promote the brand new Europe 72 LLP. But according to a report by Robert Crisco on Newsday, the Dead canceled because the network wouldn't let them run their own sound. The band's proper shows together were scheduled to open two weeks later in Texas. But then tragedy struck and Barry Oakley died.

[Rich Mahan]

So the dates didn't get work. They included two hours of quote, open jam at the end of each night. So, you know, those two shows are something that really got away. And the Dead ended up playing in Houston alone.

[Jesse Jarno]

That was from the totally mega 26 minute plane in the band from the November 18th show in Houston released with the plane title 11 1872. Oakley had been one of the more serious debt freaks in the Allmans. And Phil Lesh would fly and eat a peach T shirt at a few of the shows in the spring of 73. I'm not sure where the University of Georgia show fit in, but the co headlining gigs would have continued out west.

[Rich Mahan]

David Lemieux the December 72 Winterland shows were supposed to be with the Allmans. And I mean it's great to hear in the RFK setting, but to have heard it in the Winterland setting. These two bands at the height of their excellence playing a five or six thousand seat arena indoors three nights. And thankfully the Dead continued on and played those shows and I think the Sons of Champlin opened one of them. So we had to get the Oliver Rust Band back together and I don't know how many months it was. And they got Chuck in the band and Lamar's in the band. Sam and I started talking again. What can we do? You know, let's do something big. And we knew we couldn't do it in the South. We knew we had to do it somewhere north of Washington because those two bands were huge up there.

[Jesse Jarno]

Like the Dead, the Allman Brothers were road warriors.

[Rich Mahan]

Alan Paul they were continuing to grow and get bigger and more popular in these sort of strange, murky ways that are sort of hard to define. It's like they just somehow were capturing the moment and they had this zeitgeist that they didn't exactly create. Although the success of Brothers and Sisters then did create it, if that makes any sense. I mean, but they were already riding this sort of wave.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Dead rubbed off on the Allman Brothers in lots of ways, large and small. Earlier this season, we mentioned Susila Kreutzman stores, Kumquat Mei and Rainbow Arbor. She'd made some of the earliest Dead shirts. And she assisted making some of the earliest Allman Brothers shirts, too.

[Rich Mahan]

She was making some Allman Brothers shirts. I'm gonna guess it was around the RFK show. But she was doing that with Roselane Lavelle, who was Chuck's wife, who has a real sense of fashion and, you know, in later years actually owned a boutique clothing boutique for years in Macon. So it wasn't like a stress at all for her to be involved in that. And they worked on it a bit together. And she told Roselyne and some of the other Allman Brothers wives and girlfriends, look, this is cool. You ought to do this. And so they did. They actually started making their own merch. 100% inspired by Suzella, the Allman Brothers.

[Jesse Jarno]

Family discovered the same thing the Dead family did.

[Rich Mahan]

So they did start a merch company. But they realized really quickly, like, gee, this sucks. You know, there was. There was, as I. As she did, I believe, there was no real infrastructure. There was no support for it. They were fighting these sort of sexist guys within the band. And without the band, you know, they had to go deal with venues by themselves. Can we sell these shirts? And it just became too much of a headache. And so they started a company. Guy named Ira Sokolow, in collaboration with Willie Perkins and some of the other Allman Brothers guys, started a merch company called Great Southern.

[Jesse Jarno]

For the two bands first big east coast outing together, they chose a site at the edges of the band's respective territories, 200 miles just south of the Mason Dixon Line. Robert F. Kennedy stadium in Washington, D.C.

[Rich Mahan]

And we decided to do it. Said, let's do two nights in RFK for Larry Maggot with Electric Factory concerts out of Philadelphia. Let's see if we can get that together.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Dead had been working with electric factories since 1968, and the Philadelphia company had helped the band grow. Our friend Cory Arnold wrote a great piece about the band's relationship with the promoters, which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast. The dead had only played inside the Beltway a few times. The shows at RFK were designed to be regional gigs attracting fans from the north, south and beyond.

[Rich Mahan]

The Dead were actually big, larger than the Allman Brothers Band in the Northeast. And I'm not saying that that All Brothers Band didn't have a fathering up man, but the Dead were like God up there. And they still are.

[Jesse Jarno]

Tickets went on sale in early May, a week before the Dead began their spring shows that are on the Here Comes Sunshine box and only a few weeks before the Watkins Glen Summer Jam was announced near the end of the month. Another piece in here is one that we touched on last time, which is that the Dead and the Allmans also had a show book together with Waylon Jennings at the Ontario Motor Speedway in Southern California on May 27, a Bill Graham joint the day after the Dead's gig at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. It would have been Watkins Glen west, estimated to draw around 150,000 people through a speedway to dig the Dead, the Almonds and another big Roots act. Citing a noise curfew, Graham pulled the plug on May 22, just five days before. And while we're on the topic, Rolling Stone's Artist Calendars column also announced that the Dead would be playing June 2nd and 3rd at Memorial Auditorium in Kansas City, also presented by Bill Graham. Given the band's eventual destination at rfk, this makes sense on the equipment route anyway. I can't find any other paper trail of the gig, but it didn't happen. The Dead's gig at Kezar, on the other hand, went great, an instant classic among local heads. Bye.

[Rich Mahan]

Once again, really one of the great, great, great ones. The Grateful Dead. Please.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Dead had two weeks off after the Kizar show that we discussed last episode. But Jerry Garcia, he did not have two weeks off. In our Garcia 73 episode, we spoke with Richard Lorenzo, who'd started booking shows for Garcia's side projects, coordinating with Sam Cutler and the out of Town tour's office. We'll use this spot to insert our weekly shout to Jerrybase.com, which keeps track of all this stuff. On May 29th and 30th, Garcia and Merle Saunders made their first trip to Southern California, playing two nights at the venerable Ashgrove in LA, presumably booked around the canceled Ontario Speedway Show. On June 2, they were in San Rafael at Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium for a benefit for the Henry C. Hall Elementary School with opening sets by Herbie Hancock and the Poynter Sisters. No tapes but Sweet Bill. After that, it was time for Garcia to head east.

[Rich Mahan]

I'm guitar Peter Rowan. I'm bass John Kahn. I'M mandolin David Grisman. I'm fiddle Vassar Clements. The banjo player is Jerry Garcia. Ladies and gentlemen, old and in the Way.

[Jesse Jarno]

Please welcome back the legendary Peter Rowan.

[Rich Mahan]

When we toured with the Grateful Dead, Old Man Away on the east coast, we did one tour. Jerry played with us one night and the Dead one night, which was way too much.

[Jesse Jarno]

That does sound like way too much.

[Rich Mahan]

Though.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's hard not to argue that Garcia wasn't totally shredding by the time he got to RFK. He played seven gigs in seven days from June 5 through June 11. Four with Olden in the way, two with the dead at RFK, and then one more with Olden in the Way. And the night before the tour, he met up with the rest of Olden and the Way in Boston, where they met their newest member, the fiddler Vassar Clements, for their first practice together. We discussed it extensively in our Garcia 73 episode. During the run up to the RFK shows, East coast dead heads had what turned out to be their only chance to see Olden in the Way. The tour opened in Boston on June 5, then hit Passaic, New Jersey, on June 6. Garcia's first visit to the other capitol theater. Bluegrass met the east coast dead freak scene for the first time. Howie Levine.

[Rich Mahan]

We go walking in and we're, you know, getting off, and we're walking into the lobby in Passaic. I was the designated driver, but that's okay. So I. I had to wait. And we. As we're walking in, I'm starting to feel it, and somebody calls my name. It's friends of my parents who are huge bluegrass fans, and they came to see Vassar. They're much younger than my parents, and they stopped me in the long B, start talking with me, hey, Howie boy, you know, how's the Paris? And I'm, like, grasping for reality to talk to these people. And after a few minutes, they gave me a big smile and they said, that's okay. We get it. Have a great time at the show.

[Jesse Jarno]

Also in Passaic was Dead cast buddy Alan Arkish. Back in New York after the demise of Joe's Lights.

[Rich Mahan]

I was living in New York, and I went out to Passaic to see it because I was driving a cab that year in New York. Jerry was touring with Olden in the Way, and they were playing in Passaic, and so I went, you know, and I'm hanging out backstage with Jerry and all this stuff, and he introduces me to the guys in Olden in the Way, and the mandolin player Is David Grisman. And I'm talking. And I realized that David grisman had been in a band that I had seen at the fillmore called earth opera.

[Jesse Jarno]

Not long after, Alan headed to Hollywood to make his way in the pictures, landing a job with infamous b movie director Roger corman. I'm working for Roger corman in editing and so forth.

[Rich Mahan]

And Roger is gonna release a movie called big bad mama with Angie dickinson, which is like Bonnie and Clyde with breasts and Angie dickinson and shoot them ups and so forth. And they need music. And the first thought everyone had is the music like Bonnie and Clyde. Bluegrass. So I get this idea, let me find David grisman and I know a bluegrass player. So I get a hold of grisman and then he was so good at it. He did a very successful corman movie called eat my dust. Ron Howard pops the clutch and tells.

[Jesse Jarno]

The world to eat my dust.

[Rich Mahan]

I wrote that everybody. So when it comes out. And he did a great score, which he still plays today.

[Jesse Jarno]

David grisman had grown up in passaic and had played in the moderately successful rock band earth opera. But the old and in the way tour put him on the psychedelic map in a new way. Howie Levine.

[Rich Mahan]

And we go in and we're sitting up close and I remember at various points staring at like grisman, who was like a serpent. His arms, he's moving so quickly. It looked like he had five arms. And Jerry with a big smile and Vassar who was just looked totally out of place. Here was this great southern guy playing with all these heads and ripping it up. I mean, just tearing the place up. It was so amazing. It was one of the best shows I had ever seen live. It was that spectacular. And it was because these guys are having fun. You look at the stage and have these big smiles and they're just having the best time playing music. I'm. This is. This is what it's about.

[Jesse Jarno]

Richard Loren had organized the tour.

[Rich Mahan]

By the time they got to the end of the four gigs they played, it was. It was kind of interesting. We went to Boston, you know, first gig, but Jerry was the big star. By the time we got to Virginia, the big stars were Peter and David.

[Jesse Jarno]

On June 8, the tour hit Virginia for a fairly epoch making appearance at the 8th Warrenton Bluegrass Festival in lake whippoorwill. Olden in the way would become an important bridge into bluegrass's still picking modern age. Though their sole album didn't come out until 1975, Warrenton was the first of only two times they appeared on a festival. Peter Rowan.

[Rich Mahan]

There's photos of that festival that were taken. There's me with Sam Bush, David, myself and Hartford. We're all in our undershirts on a stage. We are hippied out. And what it was was that was the new wave of bluegrass right there in those pictures. Also, Buck White was in those pictures playing guitar.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was a three day festival, and even the bill on Friday was just tremendous, to name just a few. Besides Olden in the way, Doc and Merle Watson, the Dillards, the Stonemans, Steve Goodman, Del McCrory and Tex Logan.

[Rich Mahan]

Jerry stayed in his motel. He wouldn't come out and do any of the jamming that we did hanging out backstage. He also felt very vulnerable. You know, there was no security. There never is at a bluegrass festival. Just people were wandering around everywhere. And I just remember when Jerry came out to play, all of a sudden from the campground over the hill comes all these guys with black hair and beards and. And cut off blue jeans, all waving the Jerry Garcia lacking middle finger sign. It was like a cult of many, many Jerry's. And there was like 30 or 40 of them. And I just remember the look on Jerry's face was like, oh, no, he didn't. You know it. That was my remembrance, and it may be enlarged by history, but I just remember Jerry was very uncomfortable being that exposed to so many people, and he had allergies. And, you know, when you're playing in the middle of a pine forest and a bluegrass festival, there's a lot of dust, there's a lot of pollen. Wild. Wild horses will ride them someday.

[Jesse Jarno]

That was the version of Wild horses from the Olden in the Way album. Out West, Garcia was just another freak in the freak kingdom, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it. But on the east coast, he was becoming a genuine celebrity. The spring of 1973 saw the beginning of what members of the Dead referred to as the mega gig. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.

[Rich Mahan]

You can look at photos of RFK and you can see the prototype of the wall of sound. Lots of things would change between then and March of 74, but certainly there's a big sense of what the wall of sound would become, I think, owing to the fact that they were playing a stadium that was bigger than any stadium they played. Again, Roosevelt Stadium is big. Kezar Stadium. These are big places. Santa Barbara stadiums, big places. RFK was a whole new thing for the grateful dead.

[Jesse Jarno]

In 1976, Jerry Garcia reflected on this period in a television interview with Father Miles Riley.

[Rich Mahan]

We felt that having reached the end of a certain level of that cul de sac that we were talking about. That in terms of for us or for a rock and roll group, for a performing musical group, the end that.

[Jesse Jarno]

Really is the colossal, what we call.

[Rich Mahan]

The mega gig, the huge stadium.

[Jesse Jarno]

On one hand, they were truly among the biggest bands in the country. While certainly the Dead were bringing in lots of money for their mega gigs, they were putting out a lot too. Here's how Bob Weir described it in September 1973 in Waer.

[Rich Mahan]

We make sure that they broke. We make sure that we spend anything that comes in.

[Jesse Jarno]

A report from Alemx Ron Wickersham written on May 29, 1973, a few days after the Keyzar show and before RFK specifies a list of Alembics in progress projects for the Dead, including the difference condenser, microphones, difference preamp for dynamic microphones, mixer for monitors, delay line bucket brigade type. Don't know what that is either. Phil lash guitar system, PA array and general maintenance. It was also a period of great expansion for the Dead as they prepared to launch their own record company, which we got into in our Grateful Dead and Company episode, in which we'll detail more down the line.

[Rich Mahan]

Well, we got into sort of a spiral scene where we have a lot of employees in a huge overhead in this PA that we've been building. In order to pay for it all, we had to play bigger places. In order to play bigger places and get decent sound, we had to buy a bigger pa. And in order to buy a bigger pa, we have to make more money and play bigger. Paul, think about that too closely.

[Jesse Jarno]

Manager John McIntyre was along for the interview.

[Rich Mahan]

Well, at one point you made the decision to play large halls. We did do that, and that is when we started increasing the equipment. So that decision came first. And that was caused by the fact that we were drawing more than the small halls could hold. And on the east coast we were having troubles. Like at Boston University, we had a riot. You know, there were problems in small halls. We were being forced into large halls. And so we increased the sound system to come up with that.

[Jesse Jarno]

If you've never had a chance to read through the band's newsletters from the early 1970s, it can be slightly unsettling how homemade and direct they are. We've Posted [e-mail] deadcast There are tour dates, sure, but there are also whole dense pages filled with doodles by Garcia and Hunter, marbled with Transmissions from St Dilbert, other pages with psychedelic art by the under acknowledged Mary Ann Mayer and A startling amount of financial transparency about their operating expenses. In the newsletter that went out to Heads around the time of the RFK shows it featured an illustration of the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, alongside a typically thoughtful state of the changes report from Alan Trist.

[Rich Mahan]

The Ouroboros diagram, which was in one of the newsletters, was just a symbol for that very process. So we were. Are we eating our tails here with the sound system and getting too big without understanding, you know, it was all part of that process. Absolutely.

[Jesse Jarno]

The state of the change is read in part. We like a variety of concert situations. Ambience comes in different sizes. We like a small hall, and so do you. And an outdoor gig in the sun and a large hall when it can be made to sound good. Few halls over 6,000 capacity aren't sports arenas. With novel acoustic and environmental puzzles, the megagigs brought with them their own strange vibrations. Here's Garcia in 76.

[Rich Mahan]

And then at that point, the experience.

[Jesse Jarno]

For us got to be one that.

[Rich Mahan]

Was totally controlled in the sense of airplanes to motel, motel to gig backstage, heavy security, nobody near the stage, you know.

[Jesse Jarno]

And what's worse is that it's also.

[Rich Mahan]

Reflected in the way those very large venues deal with people.

[Jesse Jarno]

They deal with them in that sort.

[Rich Mahan]

Of cattle prod methodology. You know, lots of cops, lots of crisp lines, lots of. Of tightness.

[Jesse Jarno]

Though the tapes are excellent, Weir didn't think the band really had the stadiums under the control yet when he spoke about it that September on waer.

[Rich Mahan]

Well, we've never really mastered the technique of playing those big places. I imagine that should be forthcoming shortly. Mastered that technique. And then when that happens, we're also putting our minds, like I say, to. To work reasonable ways of playing smaller places without incurring the hassles that we.

[Jesse Jarno]

Incurred over the next decades of the band's career. All of those things would happen, but on slightly different timescales. The sound system would get bigger, for one. The version the band brought to RFK in June was certainly the biggest yet. One witness we have who we're really excited to have on the Dead cast is Buddy Thornton, part of the Allman Brothers in House engineering team.

[Rich Mahan]

The first time I had any interaction with any of those guys was RFK Stadium gig D.C. june 9 and 1073. Right. It was infamous kind of a thing. But I went to RFK and the Dead, they had their sound system set up. Monster. I'd never seen anything that big. They had some side fills, but they had those big stacks with. With Phil's bass rig and Jerry's cable. It's like. Like the Owsley Stanley design, I guess, and those guys. But I didn't know any of those people until then.

[Jesse Jarno]

The exact nature of the split billing hadn't been specified in the ads, but worked out that the Dead would open the Saturday show and close the Sunday show. Plus different opening acts on each day, which gave the weekend a certain topography. Because they opened on Saturday, the Dead, of course, used the occasion to continue to fine tune the system. The first members of their sound team had arrived on Wednesday. The band's itinerary for Friday, June 8 simply read, a day of tests.

[Rich Mahan]

Some of us were throwing football field around the RFK stadium, right? Just. Just hanging out and. Until they opened the gates and let all these kids in. And I remember talking to either. I don't know if it was Ron Wickersham or Healy, but somebody was doing some measurements with a slide rule. Actually, you know, there were no inhale computers trying to figure out how far to put speakers, I guess away from the. The stage. So I briefly talked to them about how this, you know, they were doing the sound and they had some auxiliary speakers, but I'm not sure who did that. There's big black cabinets and they were. They were located out in the stadium.

[Jesse Jarno]

In the state of the changes. Alan Trist had spoken of the novel acoustic environments at different venues. And the delay system at RFK was its own custom fix. When we spoke with Ron Wickersham of Alembic a while back, he remembered this show.

[Rich Mahan]

Yeah, there was also another big one in Washington, D.C. that one was another tilted one. Everybody said the acoustics were terrible at this place because they had a vertical back wall that was exposed concrete. Vertical back wall that was. So you got the bounce back from that. So we tilted the system physically. Nowadays we could do it by adjusting phase, like radar, but tilting it so that we didn't hit that. Then we had delay towers that were tilted up. And so they went up, hit the wall and then went out through the. Because it was partially covered seating, but there was a big hole in the middle so we could get rid of the reflection out through the hole by doing it that way. So those were the kind of things that we tried to solve. Those phased arrays of speakers were. Were definitely cool. I remember those stacks were a little tilted. I couldn't figure out how they didn't tumble over. But, you know, I didn't see any real bracing. But a lot of things they did that, and the brothers too, that were kind of defying gravity at the time.

[Jesse Jarno]

Here we'll insert a shout to one of our favorite characters from the thoughts on the Dead universe, the semi fictional Grateful Dead. Rhodey Precarious Lee. Yo. The Dead's archives contain a folder with a bunch of undated sketches of the sound system in progress from this era, along with notes about the specific stages constructed for RFK and Watkins Glen, alongside even more pages of calculations that are just totally inscrutable to me. But amid all the calculations is also some psychedelia. One page has a small sketch of the speaker system along with some notes, dense knots, floating galaxies in the retina.

[Rich Mahan]

And I got to go backstage with Twigs London and I saw how they had the Macintosh amps all interfaced with those giant stacks of speakers. First time I'd ever seen a big rig like that up close.

[Jesse Jarno]

There's a handwritten gear list from early 1973 in the archives, prepared sometime that spring. Pigpen is included, noting that he plays a Hammond B3 through four Leslie speakers. It runs down everybody else's gear in detail. At the bottom there's an asterisk with a note that reads, all amps have personalities. Buddy was witness to a rare specimen.

[Rich Mahan]

When I first heard backstage with Twigs, I hear a note from coming out of one stack over here and another note, another string coming out on the right. So he had his split, I think, where he could play for the eadg. It split so that each stack was a different string, and he had all these controls on it to do that.

[Jesse Jarno]

Phil Lesh's quadraphonic bass is the stuff of legend, new in early 1973, specified in the aforementioned gear list, and only deployed very occasionally. Having four strings coming out of four speakers turned out to be slightly more disconcerting than desired, except under certain circumstances. Somewhere in the tangle of the Dead's gear at RFK was Owsley Stanley, though he was old and in the way as usual. Taper. He'd skip the tour, presumably to keep working on the sound system at rfk. He was running tape both nights, and it's his recordings that we'll be listening to today. We'll take a moment to sample them before we fully dive into the show with Jeffrey Norman. David Lemieux has overseen the transfer of many Bear recordings.

[Rich Mahan]

Bear, I think, quite famously. He didn't use EQ very much, he didn't use compression, he didn't add a lot or any reverb. Bear's recordings are drier in these. They're not pejorative terms, they're just Objective terms, and they're facts, but it's drier. Bear was very adamant that we not manipulate the audio when we master things that he recorded. Because in his mind what he recorded was perfect. It was a perfect reflection of what you were hearing. And I remember a couple of times where, you know, as an engineer, Jeffrey would say, if, if I can make it better with some compression or some reverb or some, some EQ, I'm going to. I think that was his notion 15, 20 years ago.

[Jesse Jarno]

But a couple times I distinctly remember.

[Rich Mahan]

Being in the Dead studio with Jeffrey and we put on a Bear recording to master it for Dave's Pick. Dick's Picks at the time. And Jeff would say, I can't improve this. He's right. Like it's. Maybe there are little things you can do, but in terms of the normal amounts of sonic manipulation a mastering engineer would do with a two track source tape, there was nothing to do. I know. Broken Heart don't feel so bad.

[Jesse Jarno]

We spoke with a number of Deadheads for this episode about their experiences at the RFK shows. There were certainly many heads who saw the Dead for the first time at these two gigs. But the Dead had hit the Northeast so relentlessly over the previous seven years that for many in their growing fan base, it was just time for the Dead's seasonal visit. Howie Levine had been seeing them since the film or east days.

[Rich Mahan]

We saw what I thought was one of the first large shows. We went to New Haven in the summer of 71 and they played in the Yale ball, but it wasn't the Yale ball. It was like one end of the Yale ball. They sort of put the stage in, you know, like the end zone, if you will, of the football field. And they played to maybe 10, 12,000 people, which was pretty big at the time. That was, you know, going from a little theater to the Yale boys. Geez, we see olden in the way on a Tuesday or Wednesday and then Friday night we're going down to dc.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ihorse Labicki was another Brooklyn head of the Fillmore East Vintage. You might know him from his great complete discography which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast.

[Rich Mahan]

I ended up basically going by myself and taking the train from New York down to Washington dc. And so the plan was to go down there for Winchell Saturday, take the train and walk from the station to rfk, catch the show and then take the train back. I think the train left New York, I don't know, 11 o' clock or midnight or something. Like that. So you pulled into Washington, I think it was in the morning sometimes. And so there are a lot of people going to the concert on the train. So there were, like, little scenes happening in between the cars, like in the vestibules. People would open up the window, and then they would have a little party scene going on or something like that. So one of the things we traveled with reasonably frequently was a big tank of nitrous, a medical tank of nitrous that we had acquired through some, I guess, devious ways. But we have this giant tank, and we said, oh, great, we'll take the tank with us. Of course you're going to see the dead. You got to take the tank. So we get my friend's VW Square back, and the three of us are driving down there, and on the way down, we're getting pretty ripped. And I remember driving up to the tunnel and seeing no compressed gas. A sign like, don't go into the tunnel with, like, the tanks of gas. And I'm thinking, yeah, we'll probably be okay. And as I, you know, I'm driving the tunnel, I said, what if we're not okay and this thing explodes in a tunnel? So now I'm losing it, but we're good. We get out the other side. We went to some campground in Virginia for the night, and it's peaceful and dark, except for every so often you hear spray of the tank.

[Jesse Jarno]

Have you ever been experienced? Dan o' Hanklin has. We hung out with Dano during our sunshine daydream episodes last year. Dano, known to some of you freaks as TP Dan traveled down to RFK from Connecticut. Since Vanita, he'd only gotten further experienced. He knew going in that Grateful Dead shows could be powerful journeys. And as he learned on June 9th at RFK, they could also be unpredictable. Welcome back, Dano.

[Rich Mahan]

We went down there in two cars, seven or eight of us, mixed, men and women. The summer of 73 was very turbulent for me because my heart was broken by my first girlfriend. My girlfriend split up with me in the parking lot of RFK Stadium when we arrived there. But hello, because I wasn't driving on the way down, about a half an hour before we got there. And so I had my heart broken in a heightened state as we walked into RFK Stadium.

[Jesse Jarno]

Oh, man. The gates opened around noon.

[Rich Mahan]

IHors Labicki, where you walked in. You walked in, like, kind of. I'm gonna say, like mid level in the seats like that. You weren't on the field. You were kind of in the mid level and you could go down or up, but it was just grab any seat anywhere. It was wide open.

[Jesse Jarno]

That is a giant metropolitan football stadium run entirely general admission. Don't see much of that these days.

[Rich Mahan]

And so I'm walking in there and it felt like I was walking into a Roman amphitheater about to be slaughtered on the floor of the amphitheater with my heart and my mind torn apart. And I was holding steady, rough steady and calm as I could be, already seasoned and ready to withstand whatever fate delivered to me.

[Jesse Jarno]

Brian Schiff had been seeing the dead since 68. That took a few years to really click.

[Rich Mahan]

It was just brutally fucking hot. It was a classic summer RF Washington D.C. day where it was. It was in the 90s and it was super humid. I remember that lots of people swarming on the field and we were cruising around, went to the field, sat a little bit in the stands just to get perspective and could get a few minutes off the feet. Had a great time walking around, seeing the show. Alan Paul it was 50,000 on the first night, 53,000 on day one, I think, which was Saturday, and 30,000 there on Sunday. And I do think it is worth pausing again to just reflect on getting 80,000 some people to a stadium six weeks before. You're playing in front of what turned out to be 600,000. But they were selling tickets, they thought, for 150,000. Not that far away, I mean, in the same region of the country.

[Jesse Jarno]

I think it'd be possible to argue that. The weekend at RFK served to build hype for Watkins Glen, what turned out to be a record shattering festival. The backstage scene at RFK Stadium over the two days in June was predictably bananas. The Dead's guest list burst at the seams as normal. And also they were inside the Beltway.

[Rich Mahan]

Bunky Odom, Carolina Kennedy was there. We took care of her. You know, she came backstage. She must have been what, 16, 17 years old then somewhere in there, she was a big All My Brothers band Grateful Dead fan.

[Jesse Jarno]

Out in the field, people were finding their zones.

[Rich Mahan]

IHORS labicki When I got to rfk, like two rows away from where I was sitting is a friend of mine with his girlfriend. They're from Newark in New Jersey. So I was like, whoa, there was a surprise. And so I ended up hanging out with them. And they were staying at his sister's place, I want to say, not Baltimore, but somewhere, somewhere close to Washington. So we moved down towards the front where we always did. And sometimes they used to in These outdoor venues, they used to have a soundboard that was strategically placed. And we usually like to get just in front of the soundboard. Not right in front, but somewhat in front, halfway to the stage, maybe from the soundboard. So there we were.

[Jesse Jarno]

The first act on Saturday was Doug Somme, the Texas Groover, one of the acts in Sam Cutler's out of town touring stable. He started pretty early in the afternoon, around the time the gates opened. Dano is already a fan of Somme's instant classic Doug Somm and Band, released earlier in 1973. And it burned itself deeper under the.

[Rich Mahan]

Day'S circumstances when he was doing Faded Love. Oh my God, my heart was breaking My heart was breaking into this day. That song is one of my all time favorites. And I love Bob Wills because Doug Somme turned me on to Bob Wills at that show with the album Doug Somm and dance more and more every day as he would miss the stars above and with every heartbeat I still think of you and remember our f in love.

[Jesse Jarno]

No tapes have ever surfaced of Doug Somm's RFK set, but it'd be great to hear them. And after Doug Somm left my home in Norfolk, Virginia, California on My Mind straddled that granite road did fast rallying.

[Rich Mahan]

On Across Caroline, stopped in Charlotte and.

[Jesse Jarno]

Fine fangs roughing we never was many places. We was 90 miles out of Atlanta.

[Rich Mahan]

By sundown, rolling across Georgia state.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was a true co headlining show with the Dead in no way curtailing their usual habits, playing two sets over three hours, only skipping the third set they played at the other shows on this box. Phil Lesh hit the stage showing off an eat a peach shirt. David Lemieux.

[Rich Mahan]

The performance is a revelation because it's just as good as any of the other four in this box, but unexpectedly.

[Jesse Jarno]

So, because nobody had really heard it.

[Rich Mahan]

Like this, and nobody, I'm not saying nobody. But the attention that we've all given Kezar and June 10th, I had personally never given June 9th that attention. Now that I have, I'm like, I'm bowled over by it.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's true. The June 10 show has long been held in high and deserved esteem by tape collectors. And June 9th maybe a little less so. But Dan O' Henklin gave the show his full attention.

[Rich Mahan]

Now the soundtrack of our lives builds slowly as songs become linked with life events.

[Jesse Jarno]

Some people might have Bob Dylan's blood on the tracks burn into their heart for, you know, reasons, But Danhos got June 9, 1973, at RFK Stadium.

[Rich Mahan]

The concert as per usual, or per often Was a tapestry of darker and lighter themes expressed in the music. It wasn't like candy coating anything. It was reminding me that hey, happens, man. But there's a good side too, you know, the skull and the rose, those are very important to me. The skull and the rose linked together symbolizes the triumph of love over death. Houston town people there who care a little about me and they won't let the poor boy down Shows up on their Bought me a suit suit with luggage in my hand and woke up high over Albuquerque on a jet to the promised land. They used to open with promised land in those days quite a lot. And that was a good opener song. And then deal a negative theme. The guy's at the end of his rope. I'm feeling this. I am feeling this in my heart, my mind and my very body. Because of the sound waves, even martial you and me might spend some time watching what you show. You don't ever know. Watch each country play it slow. Wait till that de don't you let that be. And then after that. Can you believe it looks like rain? Oh my God, you know my heart is breaking and the raindrops are coming down Rain the start to come oh, it surely comes like rain.

[Jesse Jarno]

Love that lush harmony which lasted through the early fall. Nice sound on the roads from Keith God show too. Ihore.

[Rich Mahan]

There are a lot of people trying to climb up on stage onto the stage which was like, I don't know, like 20ft high or something like that. Hey, I'm sorry everyone has to listen to this, but just for the folks down here in the front, right, please don't keep jumping up. It's a real drag on the people up here to ask you to have to get back down. The reason the stage is so high is so everyone can hear and see. Okay, so have a good time. Thanks. They're boosting them up on their shoulders and a couple people actually got on and they got escorted off really quickly by some of the roadies.

[Jesse Jarno]

One way to spot the difference between photos of the first day at RFK and the second is that on the ninth there's a ring of Christmas lights along the stage's edge, but fans apparently rip them down by the 10th trying to scale the 20 foot stage and discovering a row of lights when they reach the top. Good spotting, Vokey. There's an invoice for the lights from the promoters in the band's archive. $211.25 for Twinkle Lights for stage border that were destroyed by crowd and then.

[Rich Mahan]

Loose Lucy which is basically A song about the perils of promiscuity. And I love that early version of Loose Lucy that they did. That was good old fashioned rock.

[Jesse Jarno]

The band debuted Garcia and Robert Hunter's Loose Lucy at Maple's Pavilion in February and played it in this bouncy form less than a dozen times. The version from RFK is actually the last of the early tempo versions. Probably my preferred arrangement too.

[Rich Mahan]

They didn't get around to Big river until the second set, but of course, when that came through, there it was. I mean, that's. That's it right there.

[Jesse Jarno]

Dano could do this all day and sadly had to in real time at RFK. David Lemieux, the June 9 show.

[Rich Mahan]

It is a remarkably tight show and it's got jams in it too. It's got a really cool second set jam. It's not your traditional he's gone truck and other one Eyes sort of jam. It's like a playing in. The band snuck in there. It's a pretty cool thing, that second set jam. But the tightness of it is remarkable. They went into Eyes of the World right after Big river. So, I mean, I was peaking, man. The original version of Eyes of the World had this break in the middle that was quite a bit of sonic sculpture.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was a piece of music as dramatic as any of the Dead created and Heads consistently cited as something they remember from the gigs tonight. It opened into the place that Dano needed to go.

[Rich Mahan]

Take up your china dark Take up your china dark it's only for you Just a little nervous from afar. And then they actually did China Doll. And that was appropriate because. Pick up your china doll it's only fractured, you know, they're telling me it's. It's gonna be okay, man. You know, that's what they were telling me. And. And I took it to heart. I bloody well took it to heart. After my soul was dragged through the catharsis of all of those Dead songs that were already woven into my soundtrack and then thrown back in my face with full force by actual life events. Then there was a stillness and a calmness when they went off the stage. And then the Almonds set up and started to come on. Brian Schiff was a huge delay until the Almonds came on. I think they maybe didn't want to play till it was dark out or something. Well, a lot of energy has been put out over the years to bring these bands together, you know, and prior to this date, it hasn't happened for a while. Everybody from our end of the music is Real happy that at long last we've been able to welcome on the same bill both the Grateful Dead and now the Allman Brothers Band. Please welcome the Almond Brothers Band. I have some very rich memories of that. And the very first thing that I noticed when the Almonds came on, this was my first time I saw the Almonds was Dicky Betts coming out. And Dickey Betts was quite visible from where we were because he was wearing like a. I don't know, it was a pink or salmon or peach shirt. And then all of a sudden this huge cloud of incense that blew a huge cloud of peach scented incense out over the cloud.

[Jesse Jarno]

Eat a peach for peace, man. Almonds historian Alan Paul notes that the Almonds almost certainly didn't have peach incense as part of their stage show. Doesn't mean that an enterprising Almonds freak didn't do it, though.

[Rich Mahan]

Alan Paul it's sort of astounding to look for me to look at the set list like an rfk. I mean, the Alma Brothers played almost the same set list two days in a row. Was it. It was not exactly the same. Some of the songs could be really wildly different on a different night, but not all of them. And it's sort of wild to me that they were taking that approach. And really, they stuck with that more or less until Warren Haynes was more and more in charge of the set.

[Jesse Jarno]

In general, Deadhead seemed to dig the newest version of the Allmans. Like a lot of heads, Jay Curly had been listening to the Allmans for years, but it was his first dose of the band. Post Duane, which featured Dickey Betts as the sole guitarist, center stage alongside two new additions.

[Rich Mahan]

Oh, I remember them being really tight. The bass player, he really impressed me. But Greg Allan's just incredible. And I didn't know quite what to expect without Duane Allman, but I was not disappointed at all. Oh my goodness, that was good stuff.

[Jesse Jarno]

On bass was Lamar Williams driving differently than the late Barry Oakley. And on piano is Chuck Lovell, which to my ears gives this iteration of the Allmans their distinct sound. With Lavelle and Betts playing off each other in a way that reminds me a little of Keith Godschow and Jerry Garcia. The Almonds played two sets as well before their encore. Sam Cutler returned.

[Rich Mahan]

This is where the scene gets a little loose and probably various people from various well known and unknown outfits will be joining the folks on stage to play a little. Have a good time just one last time for the folks right in the front. Don't climb up on the stage. We just gotta ask you to get down here, okay?

[Jesse Jarno]

By all reports, nobody joined the Allmans for the whipping post that followed, but Bob Weir and guitarist Ronnie Montrose joined for the closing Mountain Jam. Though the mix makes it a bit tough to hear them ask a taper as we.

[Rich Mahan]

We only had tickets for the first night, but then Sam Cutler got up after the Dead set and said, well, if you hang out and pick up a bag of trash, give you a ticket for tomorrow's concert. So I did that. That was just incredible. It took me like 45 seconds to fill up my bag with trash and wandered outside with my. With my tickets and all my friends, they picked up trash too, and they all had tickets. So we were all ready for the 10th Howie Levine. We get out of the stadium, and the stadium was like this round thing plopped in the middle of nowhere, and we don't know where our car is. So we start walking around the circle, around the stadium looking for a car. And this is going on for a while. Although time is not something you're particularly concerned with, until at a certain point, I realized that we've passed the same place on the stadium, like three times. I was exhausted. I passed out by the flagpole and spent the whole night there. Yeah, right outside the main gate. I was so tired. I just lay down and next thing I know is morning. So I crashed out on the grass. When I went back there for the concerts with the Dead and Dylan and Tom Petty, I looked at where the flagpole grass was. I said, I can't believe I crashed out there. That's crazy.

[Jesse Jarno]

Along with the Des Moines show in May, the gigs at RFK were among the first to officially allow overnight camping in a venue's parking lot. There's some silent Super 8 footage of the parking lot and the show on the tent that we've posted a link [e-mail] deadcast so we've walked around.

[Rich Mahan]

We've walked around and walked around. So I stop and there's probably a couple of hundred people who are doing the same thing. Totally walk around the stadium because there was no signpost. If you didn't remember that you were in section, you know, 12. There was no way. And who paid attention to section 12? You just walked into the show. We literally. These couple hundred people had to wait until the entire parking lot emptied so you could actually see your car so you can go and get it and get out. Took us a couple hours to get out, but luckily there was a tank in the car, so we were able to stay in the lot for a bunch longer. Had some people hang out with us and appreciated the. The respite before having to get in the car and drive. Went back, did our camping.

[Jesse Jarno]

The co bill at RFK even trickled down to the opening acts. Doug Somme, represented by out of Town Tours, had opened on Saturday and on Sunday. The openers were labelmates of the Almonds from Phil Walden's stable at Capricorn Records. Wet Willie, promoting their new live album, Drippin Wet.

[Rich Mahan]

Went on in Alabama. I found my. One of the other similarities between the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead was the relationship they had with the crew and that the crew had in the overall bigger picture scene. I mean, you know, someone like Red Dog with the Allman Brothers or I think Kid, you know, with. With the Grateful Dead or Big Steve had a level of influence and impact on decisions and things that went on that's completely unusual and, you know, frankly, sort of bizarre if you really stop and break it down.

[Jesse Jarno]

In the high heat of Washington D.C. in the summer, things got a little bit woolly. But what's rock and roll in 1973 without a few Harry roadie stories? As an employee of Capricorn, Buddy Thornton's reason for being at RFK was to help record the show.

[Rich Mahan]

Johnny had hired the record plants remote truck to come try to record this. So those guys were from the Record Plant. I think they had Chris Stone that the Record Plant had in New York, had been working with Wally Hider's remote truck and a guy named David Hewitt, I think put that together, and Frank Eubeck. They would set up the mics on stage and run the cables and splitters and try to interface with the dead, which that was a difficult thing to do at that time. And I was back in the truck running tape machines while Johnny monitored the levels and and so forth.

[Jesse Jarno]

It put the mild mannered former aeronautical engineer ringside for some genuine rock and roll chaos.

[Rich Mahan]

I was back in the record plants remote truck and during the set change the canvas over the stage got caught fire. I'm standing on the side of this. They're doing a set change. I think one of the lights had somehow overheated and it was close to the canvas and started a fire.

[Jesse Jarno]

When we spoke with Ben Holler of the Dead's Light Crew for our Europe 72 episodes, he recalled this incident.

[Rich Mahan]

I remember one night in Washington D.C. they'd hung a net over the backstage, they call it shade cloth or something, and someone had got some bottle rockets and the net caught on fire and Ramrod was a little drunk. And I go around and the idiot promoter had not got any fire extinguishers. Ramrod's standing there drinking a Heineken. He's a little tipsy, but he's drinking a Heineken. Everybody in a fire extinguisher as far as. And Ramrod goes and then holds his thumb over and squirts the fire out with his beer, right? And so now the whole crew is shaking beers and spraying the fire out. Mike Callahan, who's the brother's first sound guy, was on stage with a bunch of twigs. And everybody else, instead of getting a fire extinguisher, they're looking for a fire extinguisher. He shakes up a beer bottle and gets up there and squirts it. Puts the fire out, right? That place could have gone up in flames.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ben Haller and the promoters from the Electric Factory didn't particularly see eyeball to eyeball in our Des Moines episode. The promoters of Music Circuit presentations had received a copy of the band's writer, a 24 page document that was titled the Book by whoever was charged with compiling it. Without knowing anything really, though I'd speculate the authorship to be crew member Kid Candelario, who also worked closely with Sam and out of Town to advance the venues where the band would be playing. Chapter six of the book is a page devoted to food and drink, including the meals required by the band and crew. The evening meal was to steak, good steaks, medium rare, forget the other crap with jello and limp salad, and focus on good, nourishing steaks. We'll call back to Steve White of Music Circuit here.

[Rich Mahan]

We read that writer, you know, it had Heineken beer and steak and chicken. We thought we were going to have some cost saving measures. Bring out hot dogs and Old Milwaukee beer. That's one of the things, you know, when Bill Graham, you know, told Barry Fay, white needs all the help he can get.

[Jesse Jarno]

Electric Factory didn't read the book, and one of the promoters would wind up with a plate full of pasta over his head, courtesy of a certain irate member of the lighting crew. Along with other tensions, it was why the dad and Electric Factory parted ways for a few years. Bunky Odom.

[Rich Mahan]

We had problems at RFK Stadium, but the bands didn't have problems. We had problems with the road crews. That was the problem at rfk. And anytime that the road crews get upset, it upsets the band, you know. And the old saying goes, the worst thing that can happen to a concert is the eggs are cold. In the morning. And that's basically what happened at rfk.

[Jesse Jarno]

The bigger incident occurred with the Allmans crew and in a way symbolized the tensions between the Road Warrior Allmans and the hit making Allmans that were just on the audible horizon with the impending release of Brothers and Sisters.

[Rich Mahan]

These record company people for some reason want to get on stage and it caused a problem, and it caused a problem between the band and the fight broke out. You know, it wasn't a good scene, but it didn't, it didn't affect the music. Dick Woolley, who was the head of promotion at Capricorn, he was basically the guy who got things on the radio. And he was the one, by the way, who pushed, pushed and basically demanded that Ramblin man be a single. It was such an anomalous song for the band that they were heads of hesitant for that to be the lead single. But he put it out as a test pressing to radio stations and the feedback was tremendous. And so he pushed it. And I'm just telling you that to give you an idea that he was an important person. He was also apparently the first person to really come up with the concept of a coast to coast and then even international through military radio live radio broadcast, which was later that year, 12-31-73, New Year's Eve at the Cal palace, which became a de facto Almond Brothers Grateful Dead collaboration during. That's one of the set changes. Was that one of the Capricorn guys, Dick Willie was an A R guy, I guess he wanted to come on stage. And I guess Scully or Tuffy Phillips, one of the drivers for the brothers, had been told to not let anyone on the stage and Dick insisted he wanted to go anyway. And so they got in a fight and it became really ugly. Dick got hit in the head with a beer bottle.

[Jesse Jarno]

There are a lot of Allman scene politics involved. And once again, I'd highly encourage you to read Alan's book Brothers and Sisters when it comes out. It's hard to find a better encapsulation of the ultra-70s roadie versus record company battle.

[Rich Mahan]

And then the rest of the crew jumped on Dick Woolley and just put a real beating on him. It's like a kicking in the ribs and that type of thing. And they pushed him off the stage and then went down and were descending on him. And this is where it gets sort of interesting from a Grateful Dead perspective. Dick said that he was momentarily afraid he was going to die again. Could be hyperbole, but that's how he feels. Years later and probably how he felt in that moment when a very large Grateful Dead Rhodey reached down, picked him up, put him on his shoulder, carried him away and threw him in the back of a limousine. Now, a very big Grateful Dead roadie would seem to indicate Steve Paris. I talked to Steve about it. He says he doesn't remember that. That he didn't do it. And quote, that was their problem, not ours. I never would have gotten involved, just as I would expect them to get involved in our problems. They got the fight with Dick Willie with Capricorn Records, and it didn't suit Bill Wall at all. Couple of them got fired because of what happened after that is when some of the road crew got fired, right? Callahan Campaign, Phillips were all fired. And I guess that was in June. And that's all I remember about the rfk that. That became a fiasco for the. I still work for the record company Capricorn. Right. Then they. The brothers did a few more gigs after that. Johnny Sandlin and I had to go out and mix front of house for the brothers and fast forward all the way up before Wackins Glenn.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's hard to call it a promotion exactly. But the fight during the set changeover resulted in Buddy receiving a new job, one that would put him in much closer contact with the grateful LED sound team. We'll hear more from Buddy down the line. I'm pretty excited to welcome our next guests as avatars and scene reporters for the June 10th show at RFK. Jim Cooper and Lori Oliver were New York City music freaks of the Fillmore east generation.

[Rich Mahan]

We would go to the early show and the late show. We didn't have money for food or the rent, but we went to the dad shows.

[Jesse Jarno]

With Jim's instigation, they also became early important tapers. Starting in January 1970, he, his girlfriend Laurie, and another pal caught a ride down with a friend from Queens.

[Rich Mahan]

We were supposed to take our own car. We had this big 61 Chrysler, the space Mobile. And we were ready to go. And these other people said, oh, we're going too, so why don't you come with us? And we thought, sure, why not? First thing we noticed was that there were a lot of firecrackers going off all over. And that's continued throughout the whole night. And you could hear it on the. You could hear it on the tapes. And also when we got up to the gate, there were a lot of, like, teenage kids hanging around who weren't going to the show. They were just sort of hanging around. I think they were Neighborhood kids, a lot of them, and some of them had made holes in the chain link fence and they were charging people five bucks to get in and didn't pay any attention to it. Went in. We went first to the infield and set up. We found a good spot. There were people there already, some people, but it wasn't that crowded yet. So we got a real good spot, you know, maybe 40, 50ft from the stage, dead center in the infield, and stayed there for a little while.

[Jesse Jarno]

By mid 1973, Jim was three and a half years into his taping career.

[Rich Mahan]

I had a couple of friends who were into the dead and they said, we're going to get a tape recorder. They bought a Hitachi. It's a Hitachi TRQ222, the big ass deck with two speakers that could come off. So it had a little lamp in it and 6D cells. So I bought one of those in late 69 and then started January 3, 1970, the Fillmore, getting the dead. And that was it. There were times, you know, you couldn't tape legally then, even with the dead, you weren't allowed to tape. So I would take this big tape recorder and I'd put a pillow over me and make believe I was pregnant and I'd sneak in.

[Jesse Jarno]

Pro tip. Thanks, Laurie. We're thankful for every single person who rolled tape, officially or clandestinely, in the early 1970s. It's almost easy to forget that every taper had their own motivations.

[Rich Mahan]

When I started the taping thing, I just wanted to tape people shows and listen to them when I got home. I didn't even think people would want to trade or anything like that. And even now I love listening to music, but the shows that I was at, it's still. Because it brings it all back. And that's. That was my intention at the beginning. Just to capture that vibe, that feeling that night or day. Because it was wonderful. It was so wonderful. Jimmy mostly did the controls and sometimes I would be holding mics.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jim and Lori started to meet some other tapers too.

[Rich Mahan]

I never saw another woman doing it. If there were other women, I just wasn't aware of it.

[Jesse Jarno]

They worked as a team.

[Rich Mahan]

There was one show we went to, and I just remember that it was an outdoor concert and at the time we weren't supposed to be taping. And one of the bouncers came up and he caught us and I distracted him while Jimmy switched the tape and gave him a blank.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jim and Laurie's tapes are out in trading circles. And if you dig audience Recordings, you should seek them out. By 1973, it was time for some upgrades to the rig.

[Rich Mahan]

I was using the mics that came with the thing, just these kind of plastic Hitachi mics, and use those for like a year or two. Started to buy like a little better ones. And in 73 then I started to get better ones. I pretty much borrowed a couple. And then for rfk, my friend had a musician and he had a pair of AKG D2 hundreds. And that's what we used for, for RFK.

[Jesse Jarno]

But that wasn't all.

[Rich Mahan]

And we also brought in a couple of poles, little like half inch conduit, aluminum poles, put them together to get the mics up because we had kind of started to, you know, get tired of holding the microphones.

[Jesse Jarno]

This was kind of a big evolutionary moment for tapers. From what I can tell, it seems like several tapers landed on the IDEA Simultaneously around 1973, after a few years of more painful methods.

[Rich Mahan]

We didn't really use anything but my arms until then because, you know, those shows were like marathons. They were hours. It's torture. It's a torture fest. I would have to switch arms and stuff. Most of the shows, though, you couldn't even put them up in the air.

[Jesse Jarno]

Laurie figured out how to help get the mic stands in too.

[Rich Mahan]

Sometimes I had the mic pole down my pants. I was limping along pregnant, supposedly. And that's how I got into shows. I would distract them and they would think, oh, you know, this poor pregnant, limping lady.

[Jesse Jarno]

The mic stands in the Grateful. That taper section are now fairly iconic. But Jim and his buddies had to be slightly more DIY to get the gear in.

[Rich Mahan]

My friend brought in two foot lengths of aluminum conduit, you know, for like put wires in and you could put them together. They had screws in them. So we, we had those, we brought those. You could poke them in the ground. And that's what we used at rfk. We were at the infield on the, you know, at the. @ RFK and we just stuck them in the dirt.

[Jesse Jarno]

The taping scene was growing, and Jim encountered some others.

[Rich Mahan]

The brothers played for a while too, during the Brothers. Now some guys came over to us. They saw that we had poles and stuff and they asked us to record the brothers. And we weren't gonna because the recorder used 6D cells and we didn't really have that. We had maybe a spare set and that was it. And we knew the dead were gonna play a long time, so we didn't do it. But these Guys, I don't know who they were, but they were light years ahead of us. It was. I think they had reel to reel and they had a car battery. And yeah, the problem was their car battery died. So, you know, they were. They were out of luck.

[Jesse Jarno]

The heat was just as intense as the day before, by all accounts. At some point there was apparently a brief rain shower and other heads recall the crowd occasionally being misted with a giant fire hose.

[Rich Mahan]

People were fried and getting more fried, you know. So my friend who drove us, he and his girl, girlfriend, they did not want to stay in the sun, so they went up in the stands to get some shade.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was brutal out there. Brian Schiff.

[Rich Mahan]

The place was only half filled. Like where the first day, I mean, it was where the then Washington Redskins played. And like I said, the whole place was completely packed. But the second day, there was like nobody in the upper deck at all. Like, everybody was either on the field or in the lower bow. Might be over. It was an insane scene. Think of it, it's this sort of southern rock band. Bands. People were shit faced beyond belief. We had some. Some acid and we were waiting. We were. We took it. I think we took it during the Brothers, but before that, things were still really, really hot and crazy and they just got crazier as that started to take effect. But we had the cooler, and that kept us sane throughout the whole thing. That crowd is just wild. We had the cooler and somewhere along the line, like, people started to like, you know, want to be our friends and stuff. And we had this. This big girl suddenly shows up and she sits on the cooler and she tells us, just let me have some water and I'll keep everyone out. And she did. She sat on the cooler the whole show and kept people away because, you know, we were kind of distracted with the taping and everything.

[Jesse Jarno]

As the afternoon began to cool, it was time for the Grateful Dead. Jay Curley.

[Rich Mahan]

It was so hot and we were living on apples. We had a couple of huge bags of apples that we were consuming. That was our food for the weekend. Fat and acid. Breakfast of champions. But the whole crowd was kind of like pie eyed and, you know, cross eyed and we're getting a little toasty. And then the Dead come out and open with Morning Dew. Wow, that woke us up right away. Oh, my gracious. They opened up with Morning Dew. And it was wild. 12 minutes.

[Jesse Jarno]

Howie Levine.

[Rich Mahan]

Sun started to go down. Dead came on with a morning dew. That was great. If you were there, it just blew you away. It was spectacular.

[Jesse Jarno]

Dead Base wasn't around yet in 1973, and while there were some obsessive Deadheads, for sure, people weren't tracking setlists with any degree of regularity. But a Morning Dew opener was hard to miss.

[Rich Mahan]

Brian Schiff My experience up to that point, which may be seeing them, you know, like close to 20 times. Like, it seemed like every show either started with With Bertha or Promised Land and that show, all of a sudden the show opened up with Morning Dill was like, mind blowing to most of us like that. That's what they were playing to open the show with. So I guess we sort of should have known that it was going to be extra special. Walk me out in the morning Walk.

[Jesse Jarno]

Me out the morning.

[Rich Mahan]

Do today.

[Jesse Jarno]

Even before Darkstar, Morning Dew had a reputation as perhaps the Dead's first special song. And in the psychedelic years of 1969 and 1970, they opened shows with it with some regularity. By 1973, it was a statement. They'd only do it once more after RFK. Five months later in Denver, a show that's now on Dix Picks 14, Dan O' Hanklin was back at the site of the psychic gladiatorial combat he'd experienced the day before, and naturally still somewhat shaken.

[Rich Mahan]

I don't even remember being deeply touched by the music that day, except for the first day when they came on with Morning Dew and I'm like, oh my God, break my heart. Now it's the end of the world. There's no such thing as an acid hangover, but when you're a little dehydrated and it's hot and you're miserable and you're bumming out and you just had your heart broken, you're not having a good time, and there I am. And they open with this song about resignation to this unthinkable fate. I guess it doesn't matter anyway. Heartbreaking healing on a certain level, but still the heartbreaking course of last resort resignation.

[Jesse Jarno]

By most other estimations, though, the second night at RFK was an instant winner.

[Rich Mahan]

Howie Levine the Sunday show was, in my opinion, way beyond, way beyond the Saturday show. It was really something else. They really showed who they were. RFK for post 1970. For me, it's definitely the best overall show that I saw, and I didn't see a ton, but I saw a few in 73. I saw them at NASA Coliseum, Buffalo Boy, Ston Gardens in April was really good, and then RFK in July and then Watkins Glen, then Roosevelt Stadium, and then again at Nassau in September. And the RFK on the 10th was spectacular.

[Jesse Jarno]

Not a ton, huh?

[Rich Mahan]

I guess in my mind it was like showing the Allmans who was, you know, who was really the band that people came for. Although it was probably half and a half of that crowd. It was just tons of fun, you know. That was a great weekend to basically kick off the summer.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jay Curley.

[Rich Mahan]

I remember quite vividly during Jack's draw, my friend Buddy, who was one of the eight people that caravan down for the concert, his name was Buddy, and he was flying and decided to take all his clothes off and was jumping all around. And then during Jack's draw, after they sang, My old Buddy, you're moving much too slow, he goes, yes. Oh, my God. And ran, sprinted towards the stage.

[Jesse Jarno]

No use chasing. Good luck, Buddy. One of the other new songs debuted in February, makes its only appearance of the spring on the second night at rfk. Wave that Flag was the first draft of the song that became US blues in 1974. But if the version performed in February was wave that flag 1.0, it would take some serious tracking to figure out the version Garcia and Hunter had landed on by June, with lots of little bits of doggerel coming in and out of the lyrics over the different versions, perhaps mixed and matched on the fly by Garcia. Alex Allen has some of them over on his white gum site, and we've posted a [e-mail] deadcast.

[Rich Mahan]

Stretch the truth Pull the tube Be the poor Start the flow.

[Jesse Jarno]

The version at RFK was the final Wave that Flag. When the song returned in early 74, it had the same basic groove and chorus with tightened lyric and flow. But those are details for another day. There was also a topical song in the first set on the 10th.

[Rich Mahan]

This is a song of our times.

[Jesse Jarno]

The previous day, the racehorse Secretariat had set a new record at the Belmont Stakes and won the Triple Crown.

[Rich Mahan]

They're trying not to fall My heart's out on the running True love Scraps for another sing the race is all that it looks like with the dead. A lot of times the first set would be kind of meandering a little bit and you'd get like a really, really good song. And then bang, they would do something like, go, I don't. Something slow, maybe like Ro Jimmy or something, I don't know. But even the slow ones were great that night. I say Ro Jimmy Roll seems a common way to go. Birdsong was spectacular. It's just spectacular. Playing in the band was just beyond belief. They. They were just getting better. Every song was getting better. Is how it was. And they started off great. They started off, you know, unbelievably great.

[Jesse Jarno]

Every bird song from 1972 and 1973 contains special moments, a mode of improvisation that sounds both utterly joyful and life giving, but also yearning and even sad, depending on your ears. The band closed their first of three sets with 30 minutes of jamming following Birdsong with one of the great conversational playing in the bands. A jewel at nearly every show in this era with more great roads by Keith Godshow, Ryan Schiff.

[Rich Mahan]

They just really wanted to play because the first set was phenomenal and then, you know, there was a break and it got dark and they started. And the second set, which also was an anomaly, was they started it with Eyes of the World and just every song was phenomenal played, played at its as good as it could have been played. Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world we now discover that you are the song that the morning pray heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs. I remembered the phrase eyes of the world and that was. And then the seven jam, that was extremely unusual. It just knocked everybody out. The whole seven jam really just grabbed me by the collar and shook me around for a while.

[Jesse Jarno]

Tonight the jam in seven landed in yet another unreleased song. Garcia sings Stella Blue with a slightly different approach to the melody of this show. And I can't tell if it's an intentional reinvention or just because he can't hear himself. He gets it so well by the second verse that maybe intentional.

[Rich Mahan]

Down. There's nothing left to see there's just the pavement now and rope and dream.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jim Cooper came away with a pretty special audience recording of the show.

[Rich Mahan]

It seems like was just a dream. The thing about the Stella Blue and the place was that on our tape you can hear the echo. When Jerry sang Stella Blue, it echoed and the timing of the echo was perfect. Just so like ethereal. You got shivers when it happened every time. Stella Blue is something that I'll never forget because it really was. It was magical and there were fireworks going, going off and the Stella Blue just was filling the air and echoing and it was something like I've never heard, never heard before since. It was very special.

[Jesse Jarno]

The tape that Jim made of RFK is one with a special quality all its own worth. Seeking out wherever you get. Your audience tapes everything lightly drenched in the stadium's perfectly timed echo. But then we are going to tune.

[Rich Mahan]

Up real good for this next one.

[Jesse Jarno]

And for the only time in the five shows on the new box Set.

[Rich Mahan]

And then of course, that Dark Star. Oh, my gracious, that was amazing.

[Jesse Jarno]

After getting played nearly every other show on the Europe 72 tour, the band had begun to deploy Darkstar slightly more sparingly on the tours that followed. Not a rarity yet, by any means. It didn't often make sense in daylight. And June 10th was the first time they'd played in darkness since April.

[Rich Mahan]

Brian Schiff this Dark Star was phenomenal, and I thought it was very, very different. Ehorst labicki this was a really nice Dark star too, from what I recall. I think it was just kind of a. A mellowing down of the whole event, you know, I mean, things were really hectic and it was a hot day and a lot of music played and this was sort of a chance for everybody to sit back and relax a little bit. That Dark Star. Oh, man, you've heard that, right? Oh, the Phil man. The whole night it was Jerry and Phil kind of trading off each other. And that's when they were really good. When, you know, one would play a little note, a little couple of lines of something, and Jerry would pick up on it, Jerry would play a couple of lines and Phil would, you know, start bombing away. There was lots of music before singing, which included Phil does a bass solo like in the beginning of Dark Star and he's just bombing away.

[Jesse Jarno]

On the bass. Phil Lesh, he wrote this. Some deadologists might label that as the Philo stomp, the thromping motif lesch occasionally used in bass interludes in that era. After the verse, there's all kinds of great moments featuring Keith Godcho's sometimes nearly ambient Roads. By way of He's Gone, the band gets to Warfrat. One thing I really like about this version is the way that almost the whole band, and especially drummer Bill Kreutzman, lay out entirely and stop playing here. And the Dead play this extremely intimate passage of music inside the enormous confines of rfk.

[Rich Mahan]

I know that I'm living no good.

[Jesse Jarno]

I'll get a star.

[Rich Mahan]

Live the life I should.

[Jesse Jarno]

And then after that, they explode the virtual confetti guns and probably a few more celebratory rounds of fireworks and firecrackers. If you seek the audience tapes. I mean, gadzooks, right? Pretty sure I'd be high fiving and hugging everybody in sight after that set. So I can totally sympathize with the way the rest of Jim's Night unfolded from here.

[Rich Mahan]

After the second set, when they decided they were going to come out and do like a little Jam with some of the brothers. My friend and his girlfriend came down and said that she had to take a test in the morning and they had to leave. And we were like, what? Yeah, you know, we were. I was like, what? And, you know, I tried to talk. At that point, I was. I couldn't believe it.

[Jesse Jarno]

Lori wasn't having it either.

[Rich Mahan]

They said, oh, we. We're gonna go. And I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. No way. And we figured we could. No, no problem. We'll get a ride, right? Hitchhike. No problem. Everyone's going to New York. We'll get a ride.

[Jesse Jarno]

You're lost, dude.

[Rich Mahan]

I travel Mail train Mama we can't find love Trim I been up all.

[Jesse Jarno]

Night Mama leaning on a window Sea Howie Levine.

[Rich Mahan]

The end of the second set, some of the almonds came out and jammed with them, which was. Which was great.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jay Curley.

[Rich Mahan]

That third set really knocked me out because, you know, I was a major Dylan freak. In the open with Train to Cry. Say, whoa if I die on top of the hill I don't make it oh, my faith I've always. The Dead with special guests. And I've said this before, it doesn't always work, because with the Dead, you've got the group mind that's now been playing together for eight years and Keith for a couple, and so you've got the group mind. So to add somebody else to that and playing music that is very different from other people's music, to throw people into that chaos and that fire, it's not easy.

[Jesse Jarno]

There are a few different accounts of the musicians on stage and seemingly no photographic evidence. Jay Curley.

[Rich Mahan]

I remember Jerry, Billy, Phil, Chuck Lovell on piano, Dickey Betts, Jay Johansson on drums.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's a dense sound, and it's great to hear Betts and Garcia side by side. Two tastes that do actually go great together.

[Rich Mahan]

The third set ended up being, you know, over an hour long itself. And they did a Dylan song and they did that Elvis song, that's All Right, Mama.

[Jesse Jarno]

Betts drew from a very similar well of bluegrass and folk influence as Garcia, not to mention being influenced significantly by Garcia himself. And hearing them side by side is pretty wonderful. And not only two guitars, but two keyboards with piano and rhodes playing against.

[Rich Mahan]

Each other throughout ihor, especially at rfk. That worked out well. I think that they picked the right songs to jam on as well.

[Jesse Jarno]

Bob Dylan's It Takes a Lot to Laugh Takes a Train to Cry was a staple in Garcia's repertoire with Merle Saunders, as was Arthur Big Boy Crudup's that's All Right, Mama and both would be on the Garcia Saunders album out later that year. Train to Cry would return to the dead's repertoire briefly in the 90s. There's some dispute about whether Merle Saunders himself was present at this jam. He's listed in Dead Bass as being there. That there's no audible organ to my ears.

[Rich Mahan]

I don't remember Merle, but he might have gotten lost in the mix, I don't know.

[Jesse Jarno]

But just because there's no organ in the mix doesn't mean Merle wasn't there. There are a lot of places where I hear one person playing piano and one person playing Rhodes and can't tell if it's Keith or Chuck lavelle or maybe even Merle. Or maybe Merle was playing organ and Bear didn't have a chance to root it through his submix. Brian Schiff.

[Rich Mahan]

I think he was there for sure. I remember him being on that stage. And again, let's remember, it's 50 years ago, but yes, that was. The three who joined were Butch Trucks and Dickey Betts and Merrill.

[Jesse Jarno]

When we spoke with Merle Saunders Jr. For our Garcia 73 episode, this gig came up as part of the family memory. The Merle junior Himself wasn't there.

[Rich Mahan]

I remember he. He was on the east coast and wound up playing a gig with them somewhere or sat in with them and like the Allman Brothers were playing. It was somewhere on the east coast in the early 70s. It was a big show.

[Jesse Jarno]

Sounds familiar. David Lemieux Special guests don't always work.

[Rich Mahan]

With the Dead because the Dead are who they are. I feel that this second set, third set, Super Jam, is some of the most inspired Grateful Dead music I've ever heard. And it reminds me a lot. Well, it's some of the same musicians of 211 70. Going back to Bear's Choice from the Fillmore east run, where it just worked incredibly well. I think the Dead and the Allmans had a kinship, and they played music in a very similar way, which is to say they let the music guide them as opposed to rehearsing a piece tremendously. And it had to be this certain way. Well, you know what? If you gotta add 12 more bars to your solo, take it. I mean, that's cool with me. So I just found that this is one of those cases.

[Jesse Jarno]

Brian Schiff then.

[Rich Mahan]

Unbelievable. Not fade and going down the road and back in. And they did it. And I was thinking this Billy and Books Trucks did a drum solo like they had played almost six hours and these guys were still playing drum solos like it was unbelievable to me.

[Jesse Jarno]

Like I said, there are no photos that we know of, but it was probably more likely Jamaux, Alan Paul, Jim.

[Rich Mahan]

Also told me, and I believe this is a book, that there are only three drummers that he ever enjoyed playing with, which is Butch Trucks, Bill Kreutzman and Buddy Miles. So. And his explanation for that was, quote, because they listen and if you do that, it doesn't really matter if there are 13 guitars, 15 basses, 20 sets of drums. I always love playing with Bill and Bill has nothing but great things to say about JMO. So there was a certain kinship there.

[Jesse Jarno]

Though the 16 track in the Record Plant remote recording truck didn't tape the Dead, the Capricorn engineers switched it back on for the Super Jam. This is den manager John McIntyre speaking on WAER later in 1973 to clarify.

[Rich Mahan]

The all new brothers, Macon, Georgia have the tapes of the Jam that all the musicians did together and they are hoping to be able to release it as sort of a benefit for Indian causes. And we haven't heard it yet, so we don't really know about it. We haven't signed a release or any such as that. We'd have to. The musicians would go over the quality of it, you know, and then we'd make a decision on that. But the tapes do exist in 16 track form and may or may not be used, depending upon how they deem them.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's a bitchin jam and I don't usually go for Super Jams, but for reasons that I'll have to wait for another episode, the Dead Allman relationship didn't quite last long enough to get the tape out. In the 90s, the two camps reconnected via their tape loving archivist Dick Lotvalla, and on the Allman side, Kirk West. The two were planning to release a joint box set when Dick died unexpectedly in 1999. And as David Lemieux mentioned earlier, the shows have come close to release since then. Just like the shows themselves, it took longer than expected to get together. Remember Jay Curley's naked Buddy?

[Rich Mahan]

Buddy and I never saw him again until after the concert, where somehow he had snagged a pair of shorts and was standing around just looking completely blissed out. As I recall, we ate yet more acid, got in the car and drove back to Connecticut.

[Jesse Jarno]

They escaped easily. By some accounts, the vibrations were a bit bad outside RFK on the second day of the long hot weekend. If you're triggered by content warnings I suggest you skip forward 30 seconds or so.

[Rich Mahan]

Cool.

[Jesse Jarno]

So a brief content warning. There's a story involving sexual assault. You can skip forward a minute if you don't want to hear it. Back to the very intense weekend of Dan o'. Hinklin.

[Rich Mahan]

And here's the final capper to this tragic but transforming event. As we were leaving and walking out of the RFK Stadium, our group of friends that had begun to separate the second day were gathering back together to go to the parking lot. And one of the women that we was with was raped in the shadows of RFK Stadium under some bushes. She was raped at either knife point or gunpoint. And then she joined us in the parking lot and looked at us and said, I was just raped.

[Jesse Jarno]

And, yeah, that's just truly awful. A reminder that some terrible things happen on the periphery of dead shows. Not nearly on that magnitude, but Jim and Laurie and crew had a fairly rough time.

[Rich Mahan]

We leave, we had our stuff. We figured again, we're like, so confident that we're going to get a ride. And so we're out there hitching. We had a sign, nyc, and we couldn't get a ride. No one picked us up. No one stopped. We were there for an hour. A little more the place, the parking lot was getting empty. Starting to get a little weird because it's getting late and there were still people roaming around who weren't people who went to the concerts. There was still, like a lot of teenagers kind of hanging around. So we started to go to cars that were still around. We had a sign saying New York, and car after car passed us. And it was quite the shocker that nobody picked us up. And then the parking lot was empty except for one van. And I went over to them and they said, yeah, we're going to New York, but we're going to crash for a while. We found a little spot with some grass right next to the parking lot and, you know, put our stuff down and we couldn't wait to hear that one tape. That tape with the. That. We weren't sure exactly which tape it was, but we knew that it was the good one, the one with Eyes of the World and Stella Blue. And so we found it and we started listening to it. And somehow, you know, we fell asleep and we woke up, fell asleep listening to the tape. We woke up because we heard some commotion, and it was the people in the van, and they were getting ready to go. So yelled over. I said, you guys going? Yeah, yeah, we're going. So we grabbed our stuff, get into the van. And we go in the back of the van, put the stuff down, and we kind of crashed out a little bit. It's about a. I think it was a four or five hour ride back. So after a couple hours, it was getting close to. We had to go to work. So I look for my wallet to get my work number. And I couldn't find my wallet and go through the stuff and I can't find. Now I can't find. I noticed that this little white valise that I had with like mixtapes in there, cassettes. But I also had sound checks from Nassau Coliseum earlier that year. And they were doing box of Rain. And there had to be like four, five, six of them. And it was. It was one of my favorite things to listen to. And I was like, oh. So I said, artie, how's your stuff? And he looked through and he said his microphones were gone. Some of his other stuff was gone. I had a camera, I think it was a Minolta that was gone. The tapes were all gone except for the tape that was in the machine that we were listening to when we fell asleep. And I'm thinking they didn't take that tape because they didn't want to wake us up, maybe that. You know what I mean? They probably figured that if we stop the music, they're going to notice something different, blah, blah, blah. Because we couldn't have been sleeping that sound late. You know, at 50 years later, I could be philosophical, but boy, oh boy, I'll tell you, we were really messed up.

[Jesse Jarno]

For a New Yorker, Ihors labicki had it about as easy as you can get.

[Rich Mahan]

I ended up going back with my friend Stirats to their house and stayed over there again, thanks to their sister. And then I ended up. They drove back the next day to Newark, dropped me off at the PATH station, and I took the path into New York, got on a subway into Queens, and that was it.

[Jesse Jarno]

I know that feeling when your traveling crew dwindles to a gang of one.

[Rich Mahan]

Headphones and music help, you're on the train. But secretly you're saying, I just saw the Grateful Dead and you didn't. Or something like that. Because that glow lasts for a while. Brian Schiff I think we slept in Washington that night too. I came home the next day and I probably slept till noon. And I like, wake up and my mother and father said to me, oh, like, what's going on? Or something? And I said, oh, I'm getting ready to leave because I'm going to see Jerry Garcia's. Bluegrass band. And they're like, they're like, sit down. What are you doing with your life? Like, I had incredible liberal Jewish parent upbringing. Anything I did, they almost never, like, questioned me or criticized me about it. I was a good kid. I was totally respectful to that. I went to school, I went to college. I did all the things you're supposed to do, but that was the only time they ever released anything like, what the are you doing? You were just there for two days and now you're going to see it again. And I'm going like, well, this is completely different, dad. You gotta understand. This is like Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hey, man, you don't have to tell us. The Dead themselves headed back west, but maybe not by the route you'd expect. If you're following along on the recordings, the next show is picked up in Vancouver on June 22, now in the Pacific Northwest box set. But it wouldn't be 1973 without more cancellations, and there are two that would have connected the Dead's touring route from D.C. to Vancouver. When the RFK Superjam finished, the Dead thought they'd be playing both, which would continue with the pattern of widely spaced megagigs. The next was five days after RFK on June 15th at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati, and in fact, the itineraries in the archive from Fly By Night show much of the crew actually flying to Cincinnati after D.C. presumably to do the same kind of intense audio setup they'd done at the other gigs. Tickets went on sale at the end of May, and the show was only canceled the day before June 14th due to insurmountable problems. And after that, on Wednesday, June 20th, they'd been supposed to appear at the Denver Coliseum, but that deal immolated under even sketchier circumstances involving scams and auto theft. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a plan to have a show. Our Dead cast, Comrade Queen City Jams, found some investigative reporting in the Straight Creek Journal, which we've linked [e-mail] deadcast. But what's more fun than canceled Dead shows or Dead shows that happened six weeks after rfk, the Dead and the Allmans would meet up again at the Watkins Glen Speedway in central New York and make rock history. Many of the Dead heads we spoke to in this episode would make it to New York in July, too. It was legendary in its own way, but the spring sunshine was its own variety of special limited edition, you might say, becoming something else. When summer arrived, it'll be summer soon enough and and we'll talk to you then. But what this box set presupposes is maybe we should just keep hanging out in spring 73 thanks very much for.

[Rich Mahan]

Tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast and hanging with us through Season seven. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Bunky Odom, Buddy Thornton, Ron.

[Jesse Jarno]

Wickersham, Alan Trist, Ben Haller, Peter Rowan, Richard Lauren, Alan arkish, Merle Saunders Jr. Steve White, Jim Cooper, Lori Oliver, Dan Hanklein, Howie Levine, Ihors Labicki, Jay Curley, Brian Schiff, David Lemieux and Alan Paul.

[Rich Mahan]

Extra special thanks to our friend David.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ganz for contributing audio from his interview archive. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to like subscribe and share an episode on your social media and give us your 1973 tour stories by recording yours over at stories.Dead.net executive producers.

[Rich Mahan]

For the good ol Grateful Dead cast.

[Jesse Jarno]

Mark Pincus and Dorin Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno.

[Rich Mahan]

Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.