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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season six of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. As always, thank you very much for tuning in. This week we've got the third episode of our three show run focusing on the Grateful Dead and their association with Madison Square Garden and specifically the shows featured in the new box set. In and out of the garden Madison Square Garden 81, 82 and 83 head on over to dead.net deadcast check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 5. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform to so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help us by subscribing. Hit that like button and leave us a review. Thank you very much. Have you checked out the transcripts that we have for many of the episodes in seasons one through five? Well, we've got them. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index click the transcript link on the episode you'd like to explore. Well, the new Grateful Dead box set release is here, in and out of the garden Madison Square Garden 8182 83. It boasts 17 CDs from six previously unreleased concerts recorded live in New York City at Madison Square Garden between 1981 and 1983. Also available is Madison Square Garden, New York, NY 3981, a 3 CD set featuring one full show from the box. Both both titles are now available@dead.net have you checked out the Grateful Dead server on Discord? Well, download the Discord app on your mobile device or computer and search for the public Grateful Dead server. Click the Join button, find the Deadcast channel and chat with fellow heads about the latest episode you just listened to. Jesse and I are on there checking things out, so come say hi. And finally, after a three year hiatus, the Grateful Dead returned to cinemas worldwide for the 2022 meetup at the MOV this year features the previously unreleased concert film from April 17, 1972, captured live at the Tivoli Concert hall in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is the 50th anniversary of the Dead's legendary Europe 72 tour. So get your friends together, come dance in the aisles to this epic show in movie theaters for two nights only on November 1st and November 5th. More information and tickets are available at meetupatthemovies.com well, everybody's got their favorite show that they attended, and of course that usually includes some great memories from the show besides the music. So many New York heads caught shows at Madison Square Garden, including many of our guests today, and we get to hear some great stories from them in this episode. In a three show run, typically the third show is on a Sunday, and as the saying goes, never miss a Sunday show. With that in mind, let's hand this off to Jesse Jarno.
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It's.
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To reiterate a point we made in our last episode. In the early 1980s, by most popular music standards, the Grateful Dead were in the wilderness. 1983 is the kind of year that gets fast forwarded in books and documentaries. No new albums, no cataclysmic busts or breakups. There weren't even any side project albums besides some lovely Mickey Hart drone records. Just four more tours and a few local runs. The Jerry Garcia Band kept trucking, of course. Bobby Weir went to Europe twice, once with the Midnights and once without. It's what Deadheads sometimes call a transition year, but they were all transition years. But really, change was absolutely constant with the Grateful Dead and went way beyond the set lists. It was practically genetic. It's hard to call any period of the Dead's history lost, but there are a number of unusual archaeological artifacts to uncover and consider from 1983. The experimentation iterated at almost every level of the organization, a pattern of motion set in the 1960s and which continued in ways that might not be obvious. Let's start with one of the most microscopic, but no less symbolic, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
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The entire Garden box was from Cassette Masters. In the fall of 1910, New Year's 1982, the dead started recording. In addition to analog cassettes, they started recording digitally for the first time Betamax videotapes. In a Betamax videotape recorder, just like anybody would have at home on the video track. There was this system called the F1 system, where on the video track of a Betamax tape, you would record digital audio and then on the analog stereo audio tracks on there, you could also record two more tracks.
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This is what's known as PCM recording, pulse code modulation. It worked with VHS and Betamax. Naturally, the Dead chose the doomed but higher quality Betamax format.
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D
So there, there are a bunch of Dead tapes in the vault from New Year's 82 onward till the late 80s, where we have Betamax videotapes that the video track is digital audio and the. The stereo audio track on those tapes is the audience mics in analog. So it's. They're kind of interesting tapes. Some sound pretty good, they generally don't. The mix is the same as what would be on the cassette they were recording. You know, a split where they'd record a cassette and the Beta. But they don't sound very robust. They sound thin. They're a tremendous amount of dropouts.
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Sometimes new tech doesn't quite pan out, but the Dead were on it. Just one of a million tiny changes happening in their world. Their constantly changing music was merely a reflection of the constantly changing situation around it.
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For these shows, the only ones that we had Beta for were the Garden show with the 83 shows. And they didn't sound nearly as good as the cassette masters. So we used the cassette on these ones and they sound fantastic. Full mixes.
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Fly to the Seabirds Scattered like lost words Wheel through the Storm and fly.
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The 83s are very full sound. Great keyboards on the everything. They're great mixes. Everything is present where it should be. And for a cassette, I think that's a testament to Dan Healy and it's a testament to Madison Square Garden that the venue sounds so good that it comes through in the board tapes of how good it sounds.
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Another year, another pair of sold out shows at Madison Square Garden. The Dead weren't shifting too many units in 1983, give or take the dependable sales of their deep and accumulated back catalogs. They were a cult band whose members apparently used their downtime to make New Age drone records. But that wasn't the point. Even a melon could recognize that the healthiest part of the Dead's business in 1983, and the traditional metric by which the Dead weren't in the wilderness, was their ticket sales. And it was from there, in 1983, that they began to build their own civilization. From Ice 9 Publishing, please welcome Alan.
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B
Trist with the Grateful Dead. The demand for tickets and trying to get in there first was such a big hassle that in a way, doing it ourselves was the easiest route. Rather than going through the ticketmaster or any of the agencies, which wouldn't have been able to handle the personal side of it, which was so much a part of Deadheads Unite In February 1983.
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Steve Marcus, a young Dead fan and former employee of the Bay Area Seating Service, was brought on board to help organize mail order tickets for the March benefit shows at the Warfield in San Francisco. The band had tried mail order once before in 1976, but it didn't totally work. This time it did. Marcus expected the job to last six weeks, but found himself employed for the next dozen years and beyond. With the band, he established Grateful Dead ticket sales, one of the dad's most radical and consequential business moves. By the end of the year, they would even start selling books of tickets to entire tours. Considered from the most basic level, either economically or just as like a regular human. Why wouldn't the Dead want to make life as easy as possible for their best customers? Here's Jerry Garcia describing Deadheads to Studs Terkel and Abe Peck on Chicago's WFMT in 1979. They go through tremendous adventures, sometimes getting to a Grateful Dead concert, sometimes they travel hundreds and hundreds of miles. And after enough of these experiences, they get to know each other as a little internal community. You know, they bump into each other and they get to meet each other, and pretty soon they have a whole lot of stories. The same spring season in 1983 that the dead established Grateful Dead ticket sales came the publication by Quill Books of New York of the Official Book of the Dead Heads, edited by the late poster historian Paul Grushkin. It's an overflowing scrapbook of Deadhead ephemera, photographs, folklore, doggerel, deep band history, never seen photographs and more. It could keep Deadheads busy for months just decoding it, all thanks to Eric Nelson, host of the Grateful Dead Zone on K Squid in Santa Cruz. Here's what Jerry Garcia had to say about it to MTV in 1983.
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It's really Paul's effort. It's his work and his friends and input from other Deadheads and stuff like that.
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It's really the Deadheads.
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It's their publication.
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You know, in that sense, it's not really ours.
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It's them addressing themselves. I think that that is really proper.
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I think that's appropriate.
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B
I'd be a little bit afraid of something of us addressing them, though.
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The Grateful Dead movie had put the spotlight on Deadheads like Greg the dancer in the front row, and newspapers had focused on the fan base, especially after the band's Return to the road in 1976, the official book of the Dead Heads was the first work that spent time exclusively in the world surrounding the band. I highly recommend it. If you can find a used copy somewhere, so does Jerry.
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It's a great browsing book.
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And it also goes right through Beginning to end, too. Pretty well.
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I've taken it both ways.
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And it's all. I mean, it's just a. It's kind of like a reference book in a way. It's nice to go back to and just look stuff up in it. One of Garcia's big takeaways from the book was that he could relate pretty well to Deadheads.
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Our primary thrust is.
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Has always been pretty much the same.
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For some reason.
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It really just has to do with taking your friends along with you and.
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Preferring to operate to function that way.
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Than to choose something more expedient or more efficient or something like that. If it wasn't so accidental and dead like, the whole thing might sound like a contrived marketing campaign. Authorize a flattering book about how fun it is to be a fan of your band, while also organizing a way to more efficiently sell ticket packages. In the long improvisation of the Grateful Dead's business. It was a pretty sweet passage, but it would have been hard to miss. Last episode, we talked about the continued emergence of the Grateful Dead scene, and by 1983, the wilderness was in full summertime bloom. Please welcome back your pal and ours, Eric Schwartz, host of Lone Stardead on Kron in Dallas.
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I was heavily embedded by 83. I saw every single show that year except the first couple. And I missed New Year's that year because after seeing 60 shows, I was so fun. I couldn't get it together to go to New Year's. I was a senior that year, and I got out of high school that summer. So fall 83, I was able to do without worrying about getting back to high school. It was like Jerry described, you know, he's like, people ask him why people do it, and he's like, you know, I think we're just like the last bit of Wild west you can grab in America right now. You know, I mean, you can print $500 worth of tape labels and make $10,000 off them.
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You know, Eric is in no way being metaphorical.
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I made these in high school printing class with a ballpoint pen. I mean, no, there's nothing digital about them at all. And I used to be able to travel with a metal printing plate and go to Kinko's and print four a page at 5 cents a page. You know, they were like a penny a piece. And we were selling them for a dollar a dozen. So I was making my money 10 times back. And I probably did make more money than my mom that year. I mean, I don't know what, you know, a single mom's salary was in 1983, but I know I printed up 10,000 tape labels and didn't come home with any. In eight months, I made made in, spent 10, 10,000. $1983. And there were. I mean, there was no shakedown to sell these. We would grab a handful, walk up and down the parking lots, and if I talked to a show where there was 10,000 people and talked to 2,000 of them, 200 of them gave me a dollar, and that was a day's pay. Motel 6 was $18. Gas was 80 cents. So we lived like kings. We really did.
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Last episode, we discussed how the zine scene crystallized in the early 1980s. And by 1983, the DIY publications around the dead were flourishing, including the tour one sheet called Michael, published by Michael Linna. Please welcome back John Leopold.
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In 82, we had discovered this outfit called Laser Beam Graphic, which had done a picture of the Dead on the front and a list of all the shows from the previous year. So in 1983, we did one, and this is how we paid to go.
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To shows like Eric Schwartz. John and his twin brother Dave graduated from high school that June and went on summer tour.
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Dave was the Grateful Dead of penmanship, as he was called.
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@Dead.Net deadcast. We've posted a link to their online store for Printknot, where you can still pick up some of Dave's stunning set list posters.
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We would have 12 heads in a room saying we would sell our set list pictures. You could sell, like 100 of them a night or something. They only cost a buck. And that would pay for our ticket, our food, our gas, and our portion of the hotel room. We weren't. We weren't there trying to, like, make money. We were just trying to pay for the experience. In 83, we were definitely into, you know, we were part of the community. And handing out stuff for free was happening in lots of different places. Michael was one of those places. So we started handing out these sheets. If you were in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or New York or you gone to a show, you may not know what they played in Las Vegas unless someone showed up with a tape. So these were sheets that we made and handed out. And then for more copies, write to us at our. That's my parents house, 3600 green. And then there's little information here. Shadowboxing is a new Bobby tune. Could be called My brother Esau. By 83 we had definitely met Michael. One of the things that I think was interesting about the time period of the early 80s is it's the formation of new ways of community. And so you start seeing Michael might have been the first that had mimeographed sheets that had set list on it that was pretty new. Relics magazine didn't put song list in their issues as far as I can remember. So the idea that people were sort of keeping set lists and then Michael was handing out these stickers. This is part of the way we got to know Michael and then other heads, right? I mean you would try to find out what was played and you'd have to meet people and then you'd start getting phone calls after the shows. And there was a time when we went off to college and we came home and my dad said, I can't believe it. One of your friends called at one o' clock in the morning to tell us what they played. And I said, really? And he goes, I don't know what was worse, that they called at 1 o' clock in the morning or that I wrote it all down.
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83 was when we started looking for Michael stickers and seeing him at every show. Every day after the show we'd run home and run to the car and put our. Put our. Yeah, put our sticker in our book and try to remember the set list. And he started doing the stickers in 83 in the newsletters. And from what I remember, he was like funding his tour by refereeing bridge tournaments, like organizing and getting people to pay for registration fees to play bridge professionally or semi professionally. And it was just his thing to share. He just was like, I'm going to print stickers up for every. And I don't know who Ethan was at all. Stickers always said Ethan and Michael. And I don't really know who that was, but it was our goal every show to find Michael, to get a sticker for our tour book and a newsletter and to see what had happened or what's going to happen. And we knew what was happening because we were there, but just to read about it and see it in print.
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Michael was part of this ever growing community of people who were connected and Michael was a great connector of folks. He had great people skills and he was deeply committed to the community. And so as he met people along the way he would try to link them up, right? And sometimes he would give you stickers to hand out and give you newsletters to hand out. He was just sort of sharing the wealth. And so he told us about this couple in Micronesia. And we would make tapes, and we sent them these set list pictures, and we would tell them stories about what was happening at the shows, and they would write us back these really, you know, cool, groovy letters. And it was just like a Deadhead pen pal relationship. And then I think I met them at a show. Then there were things like this, this Deadhead directory. This is how you found out where the heads were in the town you were going to when you were going to go see the show.
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Published out of Natick, Massachusetts, for a few years, starting in 1983, the dead heads directory included a polite note that it was not an open invitation for house guests. Eric Schwartz.
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I was selling shirts for Phil Brown, who? You know, the three top Grateful Dead T shirt artists that didn't use a single bit of Grateful Dead iconography in their work, but were most, you know, was Michio, Phil Brown, and Ed Donahue, although Ed kind of turned a few things into his own design. Chris made. There was Gary Cronin's 58 Grateful Dead songs. The original version, before it was 100, but he took the little guy with the love light and made a T shirt with the love light guy. And it was like everybody was biting each other's work because there was nothing digital. It was all just, there's a poster. We'll take a little piece of that and turn it into a T shirt.
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In the 21st century, the artifacts of the Grateful Dead parking lot in the early 1980s have an enormous pull. Check out the prices on eBay. Four decades later, the artists Elijah Funk and Alex Ross of Online Ceramics continue the visual conversation that began across T shirts in the 70s and especially the early 80s. Elijah Funk.
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They're almost his. Not only conversational in a way and saying, like, I love this thing and like, appreciating and honoring something, but it's also functional in the sense in, like, a true folk art way, where it's like, this serves a purpose to my existence because I'm making and selling this thing in order to get down the road for something that I love so much. So it's almost like the ultimate fan art in a way, because it also serves the person that made it back. In a strange way. My favorite stuff is obviously designed by someone who doesn't know how to design and it's like they just created this shirt so they could get to the next show.
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And they had a friend that had.
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A screen print system and they did their best to make artwork.
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If you can find a used copy. Rin Tanaka published a wonderful book a number of years ago, the fourth in the My Freedam series, titled 1970s Hippie Fashion and Grateful Dead T Shirts, which contains a chronological guide to many major parking lot shirts. You won't find online ceramics in there, at least until a revised edition comes out. Or a new open source project titled the Deadhead Dress Archive, which aims to document Dead fashion far beyond just T shirts and is requesting that people send in their photos. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast though both of the online ceramics artists came of age in the post Garcia years, the music continues to speak to them in the present tense. Alex Ross arrived at the Dead through psychedelics.
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The Dead understood me in a way that other people didn't like. The music understood what I was experiencing.
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I wasn't around a lot of people.
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I was tripping alone some of the times. I didn't have a real community in that world yet. So it was like the Dead was kind of my community within psychedelics.
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And through that, it just started to.
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Really seep into my art.
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Some might argue that the continued presence of psychedelics helps keep the world around the Dead very much active. And in the present tense, it's very much alive.
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You can, like, go visit your tape collection anytime, and it's 1973, it's 1982. The artwork changes as the time goes on too, because technology is catching up in, like, whatever way that means, like screen printing technology, computer technology, the early 90s, late 80s. Stuff, like, is so sick because people.
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Are trying to incorporate computers into the artwork.
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It takes a turn that, like, now is. Visually, it's almost like the MIDI technology in the music.
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In our playing Dead episodes, we explored how the Dead's music became a springboard for musicians, in large part because it encouraged constant change. Online ceramics and others do the same with the Dead's iconography. It never feels like I'm holding reverence.
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To something from the past.
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It feels like a very active, participatory, exploratory.
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I am, like, living in these songs. Often I will only listen to the Grateful Dead if I'm making shirts about the Grateful Dead.
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Like, I have to exist within it, and it's living in me and I'm living in it. And it's really.
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I can almost picture the world in which we're going into. Like, there's certain shirts that are like Dark Star to me. Like, there's certain shirts that are cowboy. Like, Bobby's Cowboy Songs to me. And, like, I'm not saying it's just that song.
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I'm saying that the world that's within.
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That song, you can enter through the art. So it's like.
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It's not visionary art.
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You know what I mean?
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It's not, like an Alex Gray thing.
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Where I'm, like, picturing things, but it's just. It's a way to participate within the song. And it makes. It makes me feel like I'm, like.
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An active participant in the Grateful Dead.
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If that makes sense. Like, I don't feel like I'm, like, making fan art. I feel like I'm riding along and joining in this thing to whatever, like, major or minor scale that is. It doesn't really matter.
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T shirts and tapes are merely artifacts of an unfolding world. Back in 1983, life was starting to get entertaining. In the dead parking lot.
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Eric Schwartz, Eric Price, and Mark Schreier, and Tom Greenleaf, may he rest in peace, were the fire jugglers. Fire juggling in the parking lot. That was their hustle. Spring, summer, fall. 83. I mean, when I jumped into their van filled with torches and kerosene, it.
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Was really, really a stinky ride, but.
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That was their hustle, man. Mark was, like three feet nothing. And Eric was a big guy. And Mark would be, like, on Eric's shoulders, juggling fire pins and devil sticks. And they did great. They got a huge crowd.
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It was a small, weird tour family.
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Chris Goodspace, he had a van called the Good Space Van. He was older than us, and thank God for the older people, man. Chris was just an older dude that had a van, had his tour shit together, and we just latched onto him. And we'd all gather after a show and look at a roadmap and go, all right, we've got 800 miles to go. Pick a campsite. We'll all meet there. 90% of the times we all met there. There was a couple of large tour buses. People were checking buses and vans out at that point. You'd see those more like Oregon, you know, like Oregon County Fair type situations. Not as much on the East Coast. Guy named White Feather, Wind Dancer. I mean, these were older Deadheads that. I mean, White Feather started seeing shows in Worcester, Mass. In 1969, and by 1983, he'd already had 100 or two under his belt, at least several hundred. So these Older people we kind of took our cues from. Then there was Overthrow magazine, which was like a real radical Yippie kind of publication. And they used to literally publish major oil and gas companies executives calling card numbers.
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Overthrow was published out of nine Bleecker street in Manhattan, just across the Bowery and practically in Lugien distance from the legendary punk dive CBGB. 9 Bleecker street was also the world headquarters of the Yippies, founded on New Year's 1967, 1968 by Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krasner, Jerry Rubin and friends. In 1983, the Yippies were still making trouble.
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It was like, okay, here's a bunch of college cards. They should work. Next thing you know, you're able to call home on these calling cards. There was a lot of scamming going on, but like I said, we just took the cues from our elders, starting with the Dead just being pranksters and kind of pranked our way across the country.
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We take it at least as seriously as anybody else does. But I.
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And I think that they, even at their most obsessive and crazed, also have a certain sense of humor about it, too, which is what you have to have. And we have that, too. A few episodes back, promoter John Scher summarized the Dead's approach to the production of their live shows.
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Always trying to make it better, better, better.
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Dan English of Morpheus Lights joined lighting director Candace Brightman on the road in 1982. After his first few months with the band, he saw the future of lights.
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G
Right between 82 and 83 is when moving lights were introduced to the rock and roll industry. Computerized lighting and my company, Morpheus was the second company to have it. The first company was very light genesis. And that whole thing. Well, six or eight months later, Morpheus had moving lights. My boss, John Richardson, one day walked in the office and he said, I just read this article. Cats on Broadway has this brand new lighting controller, and it does a hundred channels and 100 channels all laid out on a computer screen. And you can go from Q to Q and have four different windows to do these different cues. So if we just line up the lights for this channel's pan and this channel's tilt, and this channel's this color. And I think each light has like 10 functions. Then we could do these separate, separate lights. Patent with 100 channels of control. Now, some lights, there are lights that have more than 100 channels of control now, but that was enough to get the thing rolling. And one of the first shows that my boss did was Diva So they played at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium in Kansas. And I went to see them, and she saw that, and she. Her mind was blown. And she was like, we have got to have this now. I don't know what we're going to do with them, but we've got to have it. I've been doing a few shows here and there because the schedule, the Dead touring schedule, wasn't that taxing. So it wasn't like I was busy all the time. So I was out doing other shows for Morpheus. I did Paul Anka and even worked on the setup for Barry Manilow and things like that. And so I got the hang of running the moving lights. So I brought the moving lights to the Grateful Dead. And the first show with the moving lights was the Warfield Theater in 1983. The first run, we took 13 moving lights out. And, you know, if 10 or 12, 10 or 11 of them worked at the end of the show, we were like, wow, what a successful night.
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It was surely one of the first computers to appear regularly at a rock and roll sound and Lightboard, one of.
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G
Those really early computer, the monitor was built in, had some keyboard.
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Had a.
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G
Had a keyboard that was mostly numeric, but it was specifically built to do lighting. And it was made. Cleagle Brothers made it. They aren't even in business. Each channel had a zero to ten voltage. And you're back there patching it with, like, these spaghetti wires. Like, picture the old telephone where you patch the wire to get the thing. So, yeah, we used to patch up all these huge boxes.
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Dan English joined Candace by the soundboard in 1983, working alongside sound engineer Dan Healy.
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Dan Healy had a very specific distance that he wanted to be from the front of the stage. I want to say it was 90ft, but it might have been 78ft, something like that. But it was something they measured every day. They put the soundboard and Candace was right next to him, right on the left, right in the center of the arena. And then later, when we added a little station for me, I kind of sidecar to her left.
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The system required programming for every show.
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You focus them during the day, and you made all these cues and then you could replicate them. And Candice and I had sort of a numbering system and different. Different looks for different things and then different fly outs, stuff like that. Every day you had to update the focusing. And I kind of came up with a little system where you could focus a few different places and then you could compile that and you could sit out there at the machine and compile it all into the rest of your show. And since, of course, all that's been.
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Streamlined, it didn't take much for Dan to become a fan of the music.
- [32:53]
G
It was really great because as I learned the music, which was not especially easy, but as I learned how to do light under Candid says tutelage and things that she wanted to see and how. How we did it, I got to operate the moving lights that were around on the back so they had a particular look and. And then feel to them as they move, whereas she was doing all the other accents and different things and some wide audience flashes. And then later on, we both had our own moving lights, and hers were going out in the audience doing all these things, and mine were on stage hitting cues. Of course, there was no satellites, so Candace and I had little headsets, and we were talking to each other, even though we're next to each other, just because of how loud everything was, we would talk on headsets. And she was really good at knowing what song was coming up next or what she thought might come up or identifying it. Once it actually someone started playing the licks of a song, she said, oh, that's going to be tracking. And so then we sort of had some parameters on how it was going.
- [34:11]
C
To go out in the crowd. Deadheads were doing their own tech experiments in 83. After lugging his home stereo on tour a few times, Charlie Miller officially became a taper.
- [34:22]
G
When I was doing the spring tour in 83, my mom gave me her credit card with a note authorizing me to use it. And she said, this is in case of an emergency. And I came home and said I had an emergency. I had to buy a D6 and batteries and tapes. In 83, I was patching, and I would try something each night. One night in the middle of the show at set break, I switched mics and then stuck with. I went from buyer M160s to Sennheiser 421s. And then I was on a 4211 kick for the rest of the tour. And like, the. We got to Philly, and I had a seat that was like about 10, 15 rows in front of the board, but it was on the right center on the right side of the aisle, so it was a little bit more right than center. And I'm sitting in my seat, and sky shows up next to me in a business suit, his briefcase, and I'm like, oh, great. I'm never gonna find the taper to patch into, you know, He Opens up his briefcase, and he had a mic stand that came folded up into a big thing. He had his 421s, a D5, a bottle of Coke, and it was great. It didn't matter where you were sitting, you'd always find someone near you to patch into.
- [35:35]
C
A handsome new book from Anthology Editions collects an overview of artifacts from the Deadhead cassette era titled After All Is Said and Taping the Grateful Dead by Mark A. Rodriguez. What began as an art project to collect one taped copy of every Dead show turned into an impressive archival book with a thorough array of labels, also known as J cards, plus nearly 200 pages of taper interviews and ephemera. If you're a Dead freak, you want it. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast Please welcome to the Deadcast. Mark Rodriguez, who, like us, is fascinated by taping culture. In the 1980s, especially during that time.
- [36:14]
F
There was a lot of experimentation with kind of how to set up a.
- [36:18]
C
Mic and how to actually, like, make.
- [36:21]
F
A really good recording, given the advancements in technology. Like, it's like you have the frontiersmen who are, like, reel to reel and audio cassette recording and, like, trying to figure out the mic setup, but they're not exactly like audio engineers. But by the 80s, I think you get more. More audio engineer type people or people that are, like, even doing that as.
- [36:45]
H
A profession that are like, oh, you.
- [36:46]
F
Know, you want this type of mic.
- [36:48]
C
But the focus of Mark's book is very much the labels themselves. The print quality on a lot of.
- [36:53]
F
Them sometimes is, like, kind of astounding. Just speaking from an art perspective, it's like, obviously, like on a book press, so there's like, indentation.
- [37:03]
C
There's like this nice, subtle, like, two colored layout.
- [37:07]
F
So, you know, a lot of time.
- [37:08]
C
Has been spent kind of planning it.
- [37:10]
F
Or like, even thermographic technology, which is like the puffy paint of, like, printing.
- [37:18]
D
You know, it's like, always kind of.
- [37:19]
F
Raised and, like, glossy. The thermographic ink expands in an unpredictable way. So sometimes it's, like, blotchy, but it comes out kind of slick. There's even, like, the Xerox ones that I can respect from a different perspective. It's like, oh, this looks like, you know, very punk.
- [37:36]
C
Looking through Mark's book is a reminder that the people who loved live Dead tapes encompassed far more than just the obsessive tapers who made them.
- [37:43]
F
There's different types of J Cards, right? And there's different types of recordings, so.
- [37:47]
C
And there's different types of Deadheads So.
- [37:49]
F
A. I met a bunch of different types of Deadheads. There's like really sloppy, like probably crusty, kind of drugged out people that didn't have real archival organization or collecting organization to their bloodstream, let's say.
- [38:06]
C
And like, not that they're bad people for that.
- [38:09]
F
It's just like it wasn't that it wasn't as important to like keep everything clean and organized. And then you have like the opposite side of the spectrum, which is like someone who's like deep into audio and like what the source is and where they're getting it. And maybe they also started collecting in the 70s. So like their cool collection is a little bit more precious and like curated, let's say. You know what I found out was.
- [38:35]
C
Like the more boring the J Card.
- [38:37]
F
Is and like the more straightforward the information is notated on the J Card, probably the better the recording is. Actually.
- [38:45]
C
There were a lot of dead scenes by 1983 from the Committed to the Curious, as they say. There was the scene surrounding the band, there was the scene of Tor Heads and there were local pockets of Deadheads. Today Lee Greenfeld is going to be our avatar for a particular and fascinating generation of New York dead freaks. Several generations actually. In 1983, he was 12 years old.
- [39:08]
H
My first Dead records were from my parents. My dad's a huge record, was a huge record collector, more a jazz guy. But in the 60s he saw a lot of. A lot of bands. I assume he saw the dead in the 60s. Never actually asked him, but he. When I was a kid at that point I had a copy of Working Man's Dead, American Beauty and Europe 72.
- [39:29]
C
Lee was of the first generation where it was possible to get into the dead through your parents, give or take a few outliers like Elvis Costello, which we heard about in our Bickershaw Festival episode last season.
- [39:39]
H
I was hanging out in Central park in the. In the early 80s upwards. I used to hang out in Sheep's Meadow and Monument and everyone up there was into the dead. And there were city kids, they were like tough kids, but they were Deadheads too. I knew a lot of graffiti writers. I was a graffiti writer. I knew a lot of graffiti writers or into the Dead, which blows a lot of like the history away. Everyone kind of paints graffiti as like just this tangential thing to hip hop, but you know, it existed before hip hop existed before rap. And there was plenty of kids that were definitely into the dead.
- [40:14]
C
Lee was a member of the community of New York youth known as the Parkys. I wrote Extensively about the Parkys in my book, A biography of psychedelic America. Starting in the late 60s. The Parkys main hangs were Bethesda Fountain, the Nomberg Bandshell and just above and behind it, Rumsey Playfield, now the home of Summer Stage, where the parkies wrote graffiti, skateboarded, played Frisbee and became an important east west connection point in the LSD distribution network. One of the earliest nodes was a teenage graffiti writer named Chad Stickney. His graffiti tag was LSD Ohm, founder of the Rebels who passed the torch to friends like Bill Rock, founder of the Rolling Thunder, Writers named for Mickey Hart's 1972 album.
- [40:58]
H
Those guys were fucking legendary. I mean he's one of my favorites. Chad's like. I mean his stuff was still around on the Upper west side also in the early 80s. So I started hanging out on the Upper west side in like 83, 84, 85. Bill Rock, all the RTW guys were like, they were a big deal. And I loved their art the most too because outside of what I grew up with, which was the tags in Brooklyn, because they incorporated a lot of like underground comic artwork in their pieces and it was psychedelic.
- [41:26]
C
Another serious Deadhead who came up through the Central park scene is Johnny Dwark, co founder of Dupree's Diamond News. In the 70s he'd found his world with the Frisbee players over on Frisbee Hill.
- [41:37]
B
Frisbee Hill is this little hill that's a minute's walk from the band shell at Central park and also a minute's walk from Bethesda Fountain, which was a really, really vibrant hangout scene in the 1960s before it was summer stage. It was this weird little area where you had to climb up these steps behind the bandshell and then you got to this beautiful little covered area that was just for sitting and there was, it was a shade garden that was completely covered by hundred year old wisteria vines. And of course in the spring the entire thing was covered with wisteria blossoms, which was so jaw droppingly psychedelically awesome that it was hard to see. It was like not on any main path, like the carriage path, none of the main walkways. It was behind the band shell. And so like most people who went through Central park didn't see it, but the freaks found it. And that's the place where people would go to smoke pot and to sell drugs and to trip and to lie there amidst the wisteria in the spring and sort of have this hidden little world. The cop cars, when they parked in Central park you couldn't really see what was going up there. So it's like a world within a world.
- [43:13]
C
If you've attended a show at Central park, summer stage, that's the area you pass through when you exit the venue through the southwest corner.
- [43:20]
H
When I started going to Central park in the 80s, way after that era, it was still great. Like, the vibe in Sheep's Meadow was just so cool because we had kids from every place in New York, including Brooklyn. I ended up going to school on the Upper west side, but even before I went to school, and the park still had like a vibe, you know, and it was like a really cool, mixed, true melting pot in New York, both stylistically. If people are into like, you know, classic rock, you know, that's what we used to just call it all then. Or punk rock, or early hip hop, black, white, Puerto Rican, whatever. Everyone kind of like Central Park. Like, it was a pretty magical.
- [43:56]
B
When you walked through Central park at that point, there was this confluence of pretty distinct subcultures. And you would just walking through that area, be exposed to all of them. There was the burgeoning disco roller skate scene, which also had a crossover scene with the gay scene in New York at the time, which was just really sorting to starting to blossom. You had the Frisbee players that were this combination on Frisbee Hill of the sort of counterculture alternative sport jocks who had found a sport that they could call their own. And then you had the freak scene, the hippies that were sort of intermingled between all of these different scenes.
- [45:00]
C
Though some of the faces and tags had changed, the Deadhead graffiti scene was still going strong in the early 80s.
- [45:06]
H
There was a crew called Acid Writers. The name right there gives you a clue, which was started by Chris217. His younger brother wrote, sand was a good friend of mine, so he was also a Deadhead. His buddy Dyer, who's another one, he was a Deadhead. Like, I mean, these guys would go to the train yards, you know, in the early to mid-80s. Dead shirts, long hair. I mean, sand had like, long blonde hair. And he was a graffiti RA and he got up like he was a very famous writer at the time. Those guys on the Upper west side were all into the dead, oddly enough. Steve Miller Band was a big one, especially the first record. It's actually a killer record.
- [45:42]
C
Yeah.
- [45:42]
H
And Hot Tuna. Hot Tuna was another huge, huge Upper west side band. Massive. There's this guy I knew on. In Spanish Harlem, actually on 96th street, this guy Willie, who's also a Graffiti writer who's also a Deadhead, who unfortunately died many. One of my earliest friends who died drug, drug related. He had like tons of Dead tapes. And he would like, let me just.
- [46:03]
G
Come over there, and we'd smoke weed.
- [46:04]
H
And I'd just dupe tapes from him.
- [46:06]
C
And just like New York was home to young Deadheads, it was home to young, professional Deadheads. Eric Pooley is about 10 years older than Lee. At the time of the March 1981 episodes, he just graduated from college. And in 1983, he'd moved to New York and gotten a pretty perfect entry level gig in New York media.
- [46:24]
I
I got a job as a freelance fact checker at New York Magazine and moved into town. In those days, people at New York magazine knew that I liked the Dead, but they did not approve. Right. The music editor there and I wrote some music pieces. But it wasn't until they had their resurgence in 87 that I could interest New York magazine in a piece about the Dead. And it took a couple years before it happened.
- [46:52]
C
Eric would interview Garcia in 1991, which we heard about in our 1981 episode. He made it to the first night of the Garden in 1983.
- [47:01]
I
This may have been like my only show of 83. My relationship with the Dead really changed because they were like an oasis of beauty and peace in this city that I was working my ass off in and making no money and struggling to survive the whole New York City trip. And the Garden shows were always memorable. I would have left the office and probably wore jeans to work and probably had a Dead T shirt under my office shirt or changed in the bathroom or something like that. The New York Magazine office was at 41st and 2nd in those days. I just walked straight across. The bars are filled with Deadheads, the streets are filled with Deadheads, and the Garden has these. The covered area on the 7th Avenue side, which is actually the entrance to Penn Station. But if there's kind of the awning and the overhang, and there'd be gazillions of people under the overhang, and you'd mill about and try to find people you knew and usually succeed.
- [48:13]
C
I only saw the dad at the garden once. In 1994. Coming into Penn Station from Long island, the conductor announced, last stop, Terrapin Station. There are lots of ways to get to a Dead show. Rich Farrell came by boat, 1983.
- [48:28]
E
I'm 19 years old. I'm out at sea as a cadet with a good buddy of mine who turned me on to some fantastic music. I was previously into Heavy metal and the blues. But he happened to turn me on to a band called the Grateful Dead, who I was quite receptive to. And these guys sounded pretty good. And we were just young guys having the time of our life in the Mediterranean Ocean at various ports of call. And when we reached Italy, it was the last stop, and we called home and found out that we were going to miss Grateful Dead at Madison Square Garden by probably two days. So we were pretty bummed out on the way back, on the trip back. And one day we got a. The ship got a telex from the ship owning office saying to speed up, must get to New York by October 11th. Well, the captain put his foot on the accelerator and voila, we got there right at the morning of October 11th. We jumped off the ship as the moment they let us, we jumped on a subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan. First person we saw in Manhattan had tickets to sell us when we got above ground. And wouldn't you know it, I found myself at my very first Grateful Dead show after coming all the way across the sea from Italy.
- [49:57]
C
The fall tour was only two shows old, in which Farrell's ship came in and the Dead pulled into Madison Square Garden for Tuesday and Wednesday shows. The band had toured in the early summer and late summer, wrapping up outside Santa Cruz on September 24, with the next leg starting back east two weeks later. Eric Schwartz.
- [50:15]
E
Richmond and Greensboro was the opening of Fall Tour, October 8th and 9th.
- [50:23]
C
John and Dave Leopold were ostensibly college freshmen.
- [50:26]
F
The fall of 83, we started college. And it was funny. Before we went to college, my father sat us down and he goes, boys, you're going to college. You're not going on tour. You're supposed to go to classes, you're not supposed to go to Grateful Dead shows. So I'm counting on you. And we did all right. We went to both the college and shows. So Dave went to a few more. It was during his brief period where he was a taper. And I think that the Madison Square Garden show may have been the only east coast show that I ever went to without him. He didn't make it. He had gone to Richmond and Greensboro, and he went to Hartford.
- [51:07]
C
Dave Leopold surely reported the following news to his brother that night. Eric Schwartz was an ear witness in Greensboro.
- [51:15]
E
There was a Russell in the parking lot. They're sound checking St. Stephen. So we all just tore ass to the back of the venue so we could hear them sound checking St Stephen.
- [51:28]
C
Dan English from Morpheus Lights.
- [51:30]
G
They did sound check every so often, but I mean, certainly not Regularly, I would say it was a very rare circumstance that I remember.
- [51:43]
C
If you were in the know, you were in the know. In the new in and out of the Garden box, you can see some of Larry Price's handwritten set lists. His deadhead mentor, Teddy pulled him aside on the way into the show.
- [51:54]
G
I remember walking into the show and Teddy goes, just wait, wait till what you. He predicted it.
- [52:02]
D
And so for me the energy for.
- [52:04]
E
That particular show was, was palpable. It was, it was crackling.
- [52:08]
G
I don't know if that was Teddy just telling us youngster to get excited for another show, you know, because Teddy's favorite line was leave your expectations at the door. He said that his whole life about shows. You're going to get what you're going to get, but this is one of the few times he said, watch what you're going to get tonight.
- [52:24]
C
Teddy also helped in the distribution of set lists.
- [52:27]
G
He worked for oh Man City or Chase.
- [52:30]
D
Decent level position where they had access.
- [52:32]
G
To computers that would print back then.
- [52:34]
D
Just sort of rare in 83.
- [52:36]
G
And Teddy would come out and each.
- [52:37]
J
Day the print would get smaller and.
- [52:39]
G
Smaller with the set list from the night before.
- [52:41]
D
And he would hand like, you know.
- [52:43]
G
Come with a whack of a hundred of them.
- [52:44]
E
That's also.
- [52:45]
G
He spent his day at work.
- [52:46]
C
There's no way to do the math but for every committed head like Teddy or Eric Schwartz or John and Dave Leopold, there were young freaks seeing their first shows. Lee Greenfeld, I remember he took the.
- [52:57]
H
Train to 34th and then just seas of people, like more, more tie dyed shirts than I've ever seen. Clouds of pot smoke. Obviously there was always something electric about going to Madison Square Garden just in general because it was like these tribes of people showing up and it was Madison Square Garden, you know, taking the train to the city and seeing all the people for whatever show it would be the dead in particular, just like hordes of people and like, just that experience stays with you.
- [53:28]
C
Like the other five shows on the in and out of the garden box, the 83 MSG gigs were on school nights.
- [53:34]
E
Eric Schwartz There wasn't any Shakedown street to begin with. So you know, we did the same thing. We walked around with our stuff, tried to sell our gear. There's no denying you're in New York City when you walk out the door in the morning and put your foot on the ground. It's just the world goes by just that much faster and it's happening that much more intense.
- [53:54]
I
Eric Pooley the Garden was extraordinary in all kinds of ways. Your parking lot was the streets of the west side Midtown. And those were the years before there was a kind of a formal shakedown. But the lot was in the West 30s and everybody was in the streets, along with the scalpers and the cops on horseback who could be kind of scary.
- [54:22]
C
Promoter JOHN the New York City cops.
- [54:25]
G
Who I'm a fan of, are pretty good, keeping people moving outside in the Garden. I'm sure there were probably a few thousand people always outside, but the New York City police kept them moving. So they were walking around. They weren't gathering in one big group. So it all worked fine. I was very sensitive about security, both to make sure there were no problems and to make sure that the security guards, which worked for the guard and we had no control over, were being kind and gentle. We controlled the backstage security. Basically our security crew from the Capitol did that, so they knew how to behave and what to do.
- [55:06]
I
Folks would be petting the horses and I can remember cops chasing people. I never got chased, but it was always a little tense trying to get into the Garden. You have to contend with this city to get inside where it's safe. And there were people around preying on the Deadheads.
- [55:28]
C
In 1981, Eric Pooley had easily scored a ticket outside. He didn't have the same luck in 83.
- [55:35]
I
So trusting, I hand him my money before he hands me the ticket. And then he takes off running. I'm like chasing him through a department store across 7th Avenue from the Garden, and he, like, escapes out the other doorway. And I'm standing on the street and someone takes pity on me and gives me a nosebleed or sells me a nosebleed ticket for cheap.
- [56:00]
C
The Dead's big opener at the Garden in 83 was a song that was new to the band's repertoire since their last pass through town. And though it didn't have the big thump of Shakedown street, it was still a party invitation tonight.
- [56:13]
G
We.
- [56:33]
C
David Lemieux setlist wise.
- [56:36]
D
Certainly Wang Dang Doodle jumps out, and.
- [56:38]
C
That'S a brand new one written by Willie Dixon. Howlin Wolf was the first to record Whang Dang Doodle for chess records in 1961, but it was Coco Taylor's 1965 version that made it a standard.
- [56:58]
G
All night long.
- [57:02]
B
All night long all night long all night long all night long we gonna fetch our Wayne Doodle.
- [57:17]
C
All night long the Dead had sound checked Wang Dang Doodle as far back as 1973, and Weir sang a verse in the middle of Satisfaction once. Over the summer of 83, it joined the rotation in Weir's first set blues slot that had emerged in 1980, joining Little Red Rooster and CC Rider.
- [57:36]
D
There's a great one from a month earlier in Boise that was released as part of the Dave's Pick series.
- [58:05]
H
Lee Greenfeld I ended up going to the Dead with my. With my mom and my uncle. That's who took me because I would have been 12. I saw a Maiden with a childhood friend of mine and his older brother took us as a chaperone, but his. His mom, who was somewhat religious, allowed us to go to the show. When she heard the name the Grateful Dead, she. We had tickets. She didn't let us go to the. She wouldn't let them go to the show, which is hysterical. Iron Maiden was okay, but the Dead was not. And it had to just because of the, you know, the skull logo and the name. So I went with my mom and my uncle. It was New York in the 80s, so it was still, you know, it wasn't all like the cliche of what you expected at that show, but it was definitely a more mild crowd than Iron Maiden. I do remember clouds of pot smoke, which was amazing and making me very jealous at the time because I was with my mom. I was 12. It was pre all my. I mean, I was smoking pot at 12, but I wasn't like smoking pot with my folk with my mom there. I remember the dancing. I don't remember where I sat, but pretty far back. And the dancing was pretty incredible and very like, you know, I was a city kid, I was like a Brooklyn kid, but I. But I also was obsessed with like 60s counterculture stuff, but I wasn't a hippie kid. It's just kind of like I almost watched the people more than the show. Probably my seats weren't great either, so that kind of helped.
- [59:30]
C
The core of the first set was made of songs from the 1971, 1972 era of the band, including the always special Bird song.
- [59:52]
B
The Wind.
- [60:00]
C
As we've said several times before, dark stars sometimes seemed to be hiding out in birdsong in the 80s, and this version is no exception. Over the course of the two nights at the Garden in 1983, the band played five new or newish songs, yet unrecorded a few they played last time through.
- [60:47]
D
But not all the new songs. The Day Jobs and Touch of grays and West La's and throwing stones, they're very much more developed in 83. I'm a huge, huge Throwing Stones fan and Touch of Gray same thing where the song structure didn't change very much over the next few years, but the tempo did. It was a lot peppier. It was almost day job y in terms of its peppiness. But I do feel that those songs adding to the repertoire. And then just a few months later in the spring of 83 they're adding hell in a Bucket and My Brother Esau which became a huge part of the next few years at least Hell in a Bucket till today. They still play it all the time.
- [61:27]
B
You imagine Ishiva Champagne from the Food for a taste of your elegant pride.
- [61:34]
C
Maybe going to Hell in a Pocket Bobby's definitely enjoying the ride. Written by Weir with lyricist John Perry Barlow, Hell in a Bucket was an instant Weir power move. Destined for in the Dark and an MTV video co starring Weir and a duck with a leather cock ring around its neck while arching our eyebrows in a John Belushi manner about the sexual politics of the song. It's got some pretty sick put downs for the narcissistic 80s.
- [62:11]
B
You analyze me dare to despise when you laugh When I stumble and fall.
- [62:18]
C
There may come a day I will.
- [62:20]
D
Dance on your grave if unable to.
- [62:22]
B
Dance, I will crawl across it if.
- [62:25]
C
Unable to dance I'll still crawl cry like the other new songs, Hell in a Bucket would marinate for a few years before in the Dark. One upside of the Dead taking a while to record their new songs is that they were able to spend more time as new fan favorites. But of course they still got down to business with old fan favorites. Dan English of Morpheus Lights we developed.
- [63:09]
G
Some different, different moves and audience things that would go along with particular songs. Like when they started China Cat, I had a little thing where the, the light slowly sort of went off into the audience, usually in red, but would just depend on maybe what Candace had on stage at the time. And you know, so there'd be different things that were similar, but we never had a set thing.
- [63:50]
B
People Colors on the fire in the river Crying Leonardo Words from our sealant bell in the shower of Pearls and eager with palace of the Queen.
- [64:08]
I
I can remember thinking that the China Rider didn't touch the one I'd seen two years before, but it was still awesome to hear it. The jamming out of I Need a Miracle and the jam out of Bertha into China Doll. Those are all really well played. It was a really strong series of high energy, excellent Grateful Dead tunes, culminating in a really gorgeous China Doll.
- [64:33]
C
It was unusual first for Bertha to appear in a second Set jam slot, and second to actually grow a jam. This is a pretty odd and cool moment. The song comes to an almost complete end, but Garcia opens a new thread, starts to pull on it, and everybody jumps right in.
- [65:03]
B
Sam.
- [65:29]
C
It'S not even four minutes, but it's a richly developed open space. And it was even more unusual these days for one Jerry Garcia song to fall right into another. But nobody was arguing.
- [65:54]
B
Sa.
- [66:36]
C
What a great transition. Photographer Bob Menken was down on the floor with his camera like tapers. He had to work to get his gear inside.
- [66:44]
J
I worked at a graphic design studio in Manhattan, actually in the Ed Sullivan theater building. I didn't start getting photopasses consistently until mid-85. Luckily, the camera came apart. You had the lens component and the body component. The body was much smaller than the telephoto lens, obviously. So telephoto lens, you pack down and be like, hey, you're just happy to see me and the body. You could kind of stick into your waistband and have your shirt over it or something like that. And then you had to be sometimes careful inside. If I was bringing my camera to a show, I would do everything I could to try to get up close. And if it was a show with tickets, tickets, seated tickets, you try to work your way up and find that empty seat or have a friend switch with you who had a better seat. You know, it was a whole operation who had the good seats and. Or if it was ga, have to try to get there really early, put in the time to wait, and then try to edge your way up even closer. I had wormed my way up kind of close earlier to that, but during the drums, I guess, because they did China doll, then drum.
- [68:16]
C
Mickey Hart had cycled some new instruments through the arsenal that year, including what I think might be a balophone in the section we just heard. Both the drums and space segments had expanded to luxurious lengths in 1983, the whole sequence lasting over 20 minutes on mini night, including both at the Garden. If you know what's coming next, you can hear intimations of it throughout the night's late space. Garcia log. Charlie Miller had heard the rumors but wasn't believing them.
- [68:51]
G
We got to the garden in 83, and people were saying, telling me that they teased St. Stephen the night before in Greensboro. I was like, yeah, whatever. Because every tour from spring tour in 82 all the way through to 87 was, oh, I heard the new album's coming out. Because, you know, they in 82. And then they started doing, like, day job and throwing Stones and Touch Growl. The new album's coming out.
- [69:10]
C
But then came the night's big moment. Bob Menken.
- [69:13]
J
During the drums, I was like. I had enough of being, like, up close. So I started. I was starting to pull back, you know, like, work my way back. And then the first notes of St. Stephen, I was like, Ah. Reverse 180.
- [69:45]
C
Debuted in 1968, and instantly one of the Dead's most beloved songs. St. Stephen dropped from the band's repertoire in 1971, returned in 1976, and disappeared again in January 1979, the day after the band's Garden debut. It was just short of five years since the last version. We certainly don't have any definitive answer as to why the dead brought St. Stephen back when they did. Whatever your dentist's dealer might have said, it could just be because they were playing the Garden. And there's pretty much a reference to it right there in the first line of the song.
- [70:17]
B
St. Stephen in the road in out of the rocky coast country Garden in the wind, in the rain Wherever it goes the people all complain.
- [70:35]
C
And as we used to say, whenever a movie included its own name, somewhere in the dialogue, we have achieved title.
- [70:41]
J
Nothing beats those first notes of a breakout, you know, and then you always feel so good you were at a breakout. So my notes for that say 10, 11, 83, next to it, St. Stephen, exclamation point.
- [70:52]
E
And the place just blew up. When St. Stephen started, I mean, it was just. I mean, you can hear it on the tapes, but when you feel that wind going by the hairs on the back of your neck, because the crowd has collectively gone, you know, just. There was nothing like it. It was incredible.
- [71:09]
I
The crowd noise at the beginning of St. Stephen was unbelievable. It definitely drowned out the band for a while. And it was joyous. It was fun.
- [71:19]
B
Get it down onto the chat. Dancers are many. Am I getting back? One man, guys.
- [71:29]
F
What?
- [71:29]
B
Another man spills.
- [71:33]
C
Dean Heiser.
- [71:34]
G
From the first note, those fans went bonkers and raised the roof and energy level on the Garden, to which I've never experienced it since. I remember sitting next to a guy, he was about 6 foot 5, 260 pounds. When they played St Stephen, he was balling like a baby and he made sure he hugged everybody in the row. He was exhilarated.
- [72:04]
C
Dan English of Morpheus Lights that first.
- [72:07]
G
Year that I was doing Moving Lights was the year that they played first St. Stephen in a while at the Madison Square Garden. So when they started going into it, I said, oh, what's this? You know, can't assist. Oh, my God, it's St. Stephen. And then the crowd. The roar of the crowd was overwhelming. It was. It was just. Just sent tingles through. It was so loud, like a jet engine. That's what it sounded like. Fortunately, I. I didn't do as good a job lighting Stephen then as I do now.
- [72:48]
C
Let's rewind and let Jim Wise's audience tape capture that incredible rush from the beginning of the song. Imagine Dan and Candace trying to communicate through their headset under this. The excitement even made it to taper. Jim Wise, who was very busy at the time making his tape of the show in 83.
- [73:35]
B
I was probably more back at the board and on a stand, and those were different mics and only for one night. I don't know why. This was the most important thing to me at the time. Just going to these shows and making the recordings was everything. My entire life revolved around it for quite a while. It was just really, really all encompassing, getting that. I didn't even get to enjoy the show until I got. Got home and started listening to it. Except for something like, oh, Jesus Christ, they're playing St. Stephen. But other than that, I was just, you know, busy in my own la la land of taping to really be in the here and now of enjoying the show. All I can remember about that show is the brightness and the vibrancy of it and the incredible excitement of the fact that they were playing St. Stephen in New York City. Anything that they would do in New York and at the Garden had a little bit of an extra zest and an extra boost to it. He show us Father's love is in the. Yeah, so long. He's got to call it home.
- [75:03]
G
It was just.
- [75:04]
J
It was powerful, powerful version. And if I had to list moments, great moments of Grateful Dead in my life, that was certainly one of them.
- [75:12]
E
It was anticipated and appreciated by everybody, and we just couldn't believe it.
- [75:47]
C
They didn't go into the 11, but St. Stephen was back. Jim Wise's tapes would circulate quickly, but not as quickly as the news out west. Phones started ringing. Mary Eisenhart was a Bay Area head.
- [75:59]
G
It was during when the dinosaurs were playing and they were playing a show at Wolfgangs. And at the set break, we were.
- [76:11]
F
All down in the basement on the payphones because on the east coast they.
- [76:15]
B
Had just brought St. Stephen out of mothballs.
- [76:19]
G
And there were people.
- [76:20]
B
This is all pre cell phone for anything.
- [76:22]
G
And we're like, they played what you know.
- [76:25]
B
But that's how it was. I Mean people. These guys called you at a payphone.
- [76:28]
F
In the basement of Wolfgang to tell.
- [76:31]
G
You that they were playing St. Stephen.
- [76:33]
C
Corey Arnold is the proprietor of the sites Lost Live, Dead, Hooterolin and other projects.
- [76:38]
B
I started dating my wife in spring 83. Not very many people knew. I mean, my family knew and my friends knew, but it wasn't. It was a big thing. And she knew I liked the Grateful Dead, but didn't really approve, but whatever. And we're at her house and I was still at the level where other than like maybe my sister, nobody has my girlfriend's phone number. Right. You know, we're not that far yet. Right. And her phone rang and she said, it's for you. Which is like unheard of. And it was my friend calling from the lobby of Madison Square Garden to tell me they played St. Stephen. He shouted at the top of his lungs so loud my wife could hear it. And then. And he hung up. And she said, what was that? And I explained, I said, that was Bobby calling from the Madison Square Garden to tell me the Dead played St. Stephen. She's like, okay. I said, I gotta call Josh, who's our mutual friend. And I called him and his line was busy because Bobby had called him next. Who are these people?
- [77:52]
C
To answer Corey's future wife's question, people like Corey and his east coast friend Bobby were the energy cores of the Grateful Dead Information Network in 1983, and at the center of the diffuse and ongoing research efforts of Deadologists that would soon fall together in works like Dead Base.
- [78:07]
B
He was like the most connected guy, the real hustler. And I don't hustler in a nice way, but in terms of finding tickets or knowing about shows or. He was like way ahead with primitive technology. He bought every copy of the Village Voice in some flea market. And one day, the one time I visited New York, we spent the whole weekend looking through them and stumbled across the Feb. 1270 onganno's. So this is like doing archaeology with a spoon.
- [78:36]
C
The mysterious ad for the February 1970 dead show at the Upper west side Club Ngannou's, a show they probably didn't play, and one of the biggest rabbit holes in lost Dead history. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast. In the age before social media, Corey and his friends were part of a small self created social network as he realized when he visited New York. I bet something like this has happened to other listeners.
- [79:01]
B
We were sitting in Yankee Stadium, the three of us talking about weirdos that we Knew had met in Dead shows. And we realized we were all three of us. One was from la, I'm from San Francisco, and Bobby is from Manhattan. We were talking about the same guy. He would repeat what you just said. You'd say something to him. He'd say, oh, I saw the guards, the dead, and they did trucking and something. Five minutes later he'd say to you, I know a guy who saw the dead make a truck in like, yeah, me, five minutes ago. But all three of us had met this guy in la, San Francisco and Manhattan, and knew about him. We didn't know his name.
- [79:39]
C
St. Stephen would only be back briefly. One version a few days later in Hartford, another on Halloween, back home in San Rafael, and then gone for good. Rumors of the song's return circulated all the way through 1995. Information exchange and information hunting were just as important to the Dead world as tapes. Hoping to see that elusive song on the set list, David Lemieux.
- [80:01]
D
There were tapers, there were the people who were like, set list freaks who wrote down everything. They were just as diligent as we are. I would be so desperate, eager to get the set lists, and there was no Internet. I'm talking 87, 88, that the show would end. And I mean, my friends knew. I mean, I lived with my mom, so they knew not to call me at 1 in the morning, you know, crazed. And you wake by house up and say, oh, my God, they did Darkstar, whatever. So they. They knew not to do that. So I had no other way to find out. So if I didn't know anybody specifically at a show or know what hotel they were staying at a couple of times. And I remember doing this at the Spectrum because I knew the hotel. Friends had stayed there before, right in the parking lot. There was either Sheraton or a Hilton at the Spectrum. And I remember calling a couple of times that hotel and getting the front desk on about midnight. And I said, hey, are there deadheads in your lobby? He goes, oh, yeah, they're everywhere. I said, could you put one on? He goes, well, who are you looking for? I said, it doesn't matter. Just put any deadhead on. And they'd say, okay, hold on a second. And I got this to work two or three times, and they pass the phone to some random deadhead and be like, hello, is it my mom?
- [81:15]
G
And.
- [81:16]
D
And so I'd say, hey, I'm calling from Canada, and can you tell me what they played tonight? And a couple of. Well, I know one time in particular, I got the full set list and I got a little review. Oh, they open with this great, you know, birth the Greatest or whatever it was. And then sometimes like, yeah, man, I was. I think they had China Rider, so there's a little more vague. But to me, at least it was something. And now, I mean, well, now I'd be watching it live on the Nuggs livestream.
- [81:44]
C
Eric Schwartz.
- [81:45]
E
It wasn't uncommon to see a payphone off the hook, you know, where people would just call their friends and let them listen to the hallway, you know, but it wasn't uncommon at all, especially with those calling cards.
- [82:00]
D
I had a friend at the Garden in 88 when they did the two week run, culminating with the Rainforest show. Friend of mine, Pat Crosley, somehow, I have no idea how he did this, but he went to the two weeks of shows with no tickets, got into every show, but he somehow got his way into a private box at the Garden, one of the, like, the VIP boxes, and he. I'll never forget this. He did call my house about 10 at night. I don't remember what show it was. They did Morning Dew twice in that run. I think it was the second one. And he called from the private box and then let the phone hang off the balcony of the private box. And it just, I mean, we talk about bad audience tapes from, you know, 1971, whatever. I have never heard audio quality so bad. I could just make out what song it was. And the thought occurred to me for a split second to run and get something to record this through the telephone. And I didn't do it because the sound. But I got to hear the dead play Morning Dew live. Without a doubt the worst quality I've ever heard. I've heard some bad audience tapes.
- [83:06]
G
I'll never forget that.
- [83:07]
D
88, Morning Dew, Pat hanging the phone off the balcony. And my mom would come into the room and I'd be sitting there and my mom said, well, what are you doing? I said, oh. The Grateful Letter played live. She didn't understand what was going on.
- [83:19]
C
Anyway, the point we're getting at here is that, dude, they totally played St. Stephen.
- [83:24]
J
Bob Mencken, 10 11, 83 possibly has my favorite version of Throwing stones in that one, which, you know, Everybody talks about St. Stephen, of course, but that throwing stones, man, they were still probably all coming off the St. Stephen High.
- [84:09]
I
Throwing stones was. I don't know if it was the first time I'd heard it, but it was new ish to me. And it was before they had settled on the very Samson, like instrument Break right. They didn't, didn't have that Samson and Delilah, Delilah like Jerry part, which. Which I felt like I saw at every Grateful Dead concert for the rest of my life, you know, But I remember, I remember liking the. It was kind of a crescendoing J.
- [84:55]
C
We gave it lost and we're all the same.
- [85:00]
B
No one left the place.
- [85:02]
C
To take the blame Will we leave.
- [85:06]
E
This place and have this stone and.
- [85:10]
B
That shiny ball of blood I'm a.
- [85:13]
D
Huge fan of Throwing Stones. You might have noticed by 83 it's already a 10 or 11 minute song because they're stretching it out, they're realizing where they can jam. The vocal power at the end.
- [85:23]
I
On the way out, somebody talking about the Steven. Everybody was talking about the Stephen breakout. And I said, you know, that Throwing Stones was pretty good too. And they looked at me like I was a little crazy.
- [85:34]
E
Eric Schwartz we might have stayed on Long island because there was that faction. I can't imagine we got a hotel in the city, so I'm sure we stayed at a local Long island heads house. I'm almost positive the new lighting crew.
- [85:48]
C
Had recently updated their quarters, as Dan English remembers.
- [85:51]
G
When I first got there, I thought that they didn't have any respect for us lower echelon kind of guys because the promoter had like stick us in. In these funky hotels. And sometimes we get hung up on our transportation of the gig. But then I realized it wasn't about that. They had a very nonchalant way of dealing with things. And so one day Don Pearson, who was the head of the sound company, worked with Healy, just said, well, what, you're not booking your own hotels and billing them after. We will stay at the Ritz with them. And I'm like, oh God. After that we were at the Ritz too. And that was actually only because the Dead had some connection to the Ritz Carlton chain or something. And they were getting their rooms at like next to nothing or something. But yeah, after that we were at the. We were at the band's hotels with the, with the band.
- [87:00]
C
But as low key as the Dead scene was in 82, compared to the rest of the world, it could still be a crazy bubble. Especially in New York.
- [87:07]
G
I know at the Garden, every one of those passes must have been given out because when you walk backstage there, there are more people there, it felt like, than there were out front. You're like, you know, and every. Anyone who is anyone, you know was there, from politicians to rock stars to, you name it, but they didn't get up on stage. Because to get up on stage, there was only ever one set of steps. And that one set of steps went right up by Robbie Taylor, Kid Candelario and Steve Barish. If you went up those steps, you better. You better have a really good reason to be there. And the three of them would have to appreciate the fact that you were there. One time, Robbie was. Was putting all the Grateful Dead passes in order or something in his root box. And I saw huge stacks of these backstage passes. Free Chef. I went, whoa, that's a lot of passes. He said, yeah. I said, well, how do you control that? And he said, well, look, there's 500 backstage passes printed for each show. And after they've been given out, there's no more.
- [88:34]
C
We've discussed how the Dead's touring was sometimes adjacent to other events like the Summer Rainbow gatherings. The band's October 1983 shows at Madison Square Garden intersected with a different annual Rite the Audio Engineering Society conference. Attending that year were John and Helen Meyer, proprietors of Meyer Sound. Last Episode. We heard about how the Dead had begun to use a crystalline new Meyer sound system on the road in the fall of 82. They had it with them in 83.
- [89:02]
G
As well, when they were at Madison Square Garden. They had a whole system at Madison Square Garden, and they let us use it for a demo for AES. We brought a whole bunch of customers to Madison Square Garden in the afternoon, and we turned on the whole system and we did this amazing demo for. We were working on with Stanford University. We work on. CDs are just coming out and we want to do a test record because Sony agreed, along with Eric and Phillips. They all agreed they wouldn't put any square waves on CDs because of the time smear of aliasing filters and stuff like that. I go, well, we can, you guys, let's do a CD ourselves. We'll publish it and we'll put a square wave on it. I mean, this is outrageous that square waves can be fixed. I mean, they're just being lazy, you know. I mean, you know, it's like, you know, so we'll put a square wave on it, we'll put some noises. We'll make it. But what I'd like to do is record something that goes very, very, very quiet and build it up to say. And they. And we talk about. They decided what they would do is they would do a cricket field that's near an airport. And when the jets take off, they would go over this field. And so what happens in this recording takes about 10 minutes, is it starts out this little cricket sound and you hear the crickets and then you hear this kind of something in the background, very low level. You can't quite determine what it is. The crickets stop chirping and then pretty soon the birds stop and you can tell it's some kind of machine sound, but still very, very level. It builds and builds and builds and pretty soon you can start to hear the wine. It's an engine of some kind and it gets louder and louder and sound and then it just swoops overhead. So we went from this very, very low level sound to shaking that. Since we're driving full power, Everyone shocked when the whole thing went over the. The sound went over their head. And I said, this is what digital can bring us if it's done well. I mean, you cannot do this analog. And that was Dan Healy who gave us the permission to do that.
- [91:07]
C
The relationship between the Dead and Meyer Sound was only just beginning. The engineers cleared out in time for the show that night.
- [91:14]
F
JOHN LEOPOLD I missed the first show because my mother, who was. I love my mother, but she made an unexpected trip. She told us a couple weeks beforehand that she was going to be in the area and she was going to come to Pittsburgh and so had to be there for that. I was very disappointed to hear that they played the St. Stephen on the show I didn't go to, but the show I did go to was amazing.
- [91:36]
C
It was a different age of commercial air travel. Bob MENKEN we had cars and, you.
- [91:41]
J
Know, we had a little bit of money and we were able to travel to shows, especially when People's Express started that low cost airline. I read an article about People's Express and the Grateful Dead, how People's Express were responsible for the massive Grateful Dead fans to get to see them in multiple cities, far from home, because it was unbelievably cheap to fly on People's Express.
- [92:07]
C
That was probably Cory Arnold's piece the Grateful Dead and the Airline deregulation act of 1978, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [92:16]
J
I remember going down to Norfolk, Virginia in 82 and it was like $17 to fly there. The plane would be full of fans going to the show and we'd be snorting coke off the dash thing.
- [92:29]
F
John LEOPOLD I knew how to get from Newark to the show. I took the bus in and I think it let you off really close to Penn Station. So we were right there, basically. And then all you had to do was wander A little bit. And you would run into somebody that you knew. And I knew that Rick and Lou Medvin and his brother Barry and some other friends were there. So you just kept an eye out for him. It was super exciting to go to New York anytime you went to New York, right? So that was great. And Madison. It was the first time I was at Madison Square Garden. So that was, you know, Madison Square Garden has a. Has its own reputation as a historic venue. And I went in there and met up with a bunch of friends, heads that I had met already from tourists. Some were from Harrisburg. Our friend Ricky D. Was there. Some were some other people that we had met along the way. The New York crowd was incredibly excited. And, of course, because of the St Stephen the night before, there was a great anticipation, and the set was fantastic.
- [93:46]
C
Me out in the cold rain and snow.
- [93:53]
B
Rain and snow Run me out.
- [94:05]
F
In the cold rain There are so many different communities and so much, you know, New Yorkness. But when you came to the Garden for a Dead show, it was the. It was the Dead. It was the Deadhead community. It really felt different because you were. You were among your people, and it felt incredibly relaxed. And you saw so many familiar faces. And if there were cops around or people hassling, there was always a great group of people who you could be with. You didn't feel alone when you were a Dead crowd in New York City. And so that was really fun. And for someone like me, you know, I'm a twin. I shared the womb. I went to the same. I was going to the same college with my twin brother. We had seen, up to that point, up to 83. We had seen every dead show together. So 83 was the first time that we were trying things on our own. So he went to a couple Dead shows. I went to this show without him. That was pretty new experience for me. And so to be among friends and feeling totally comfortable being 18 in New York City, that was a great experience.
- [95:13]
B
Run me out in the cold Rain and snow Run me out in the cold Rain and snow Run me out.
- [95:30]
C
In the cold.
- [95:41]
F
I remember where we were for the show, and my tape at the time, the way I wrote the first set, was Cold Rain and Phil Mingle. Phil Ramble on. Phil. I just thought Phil was just very present.
- [95:59]
B
Sam.
- [96:27]
F
We might have had reserved seats. We never sat in our seats. We never had really good seats to begin with at that point. And so we would go someplace where we could dance. And I didn't like going outside in the halls. That wasn't A place you could do at Madison Square Garden. So we'd usually be towards the back. And you would just start seeing everybody you knew. And that was the great community of folks that stayed for years for the Dead because there were people that you knew by first name that you would see on a regular basis and know something about, but you. You didn't really know them other than they were your show buddies. And that was the guy you saw or the girl you saw at the back of the hall dancing to the Grateful Dead. I remember being in the back, towards the top that was, you know, you didn't have to fight for seats. They were playing Hell in a Bucket. And I found something that Dave had written at the time on some print not thing where he said the name of the new tune is Eloquent Eyes. Right. Because, you know, we didn't know what. And you could see shadowboxing. We weren't sure what that. Brother Esau was called Brother Esau pillar.
- [97:34]
B
Back in 1969.
- [97:39]
D
Before the killing was done.
- [97:41]
C
His inheritance was mine but his birthright.
- [97:46]
B
Was a water wave before we remained.
- [97:52]
C
Esau gave me sleeplessness and peace of moral land. Also new to the Dead's repertoire since the last Time of the Garden was my brother Esau. Another Weir Barlow joint.
- [98:04]
D
Esau was a big part for four years. It was a song that really. It changed every single time they played it.
- [98:11]
B
Esau is on a roller skates today.
- [98:25]
C
Yet sometimes the night I dream he's.
- [98:29]
B
Still that hairy man.
- [98:32]
C
Shadow Box in.
- [98:33]
D
The apocalypse My brother Esau. I'm very glad one of those snuck on here, because I love Esau. I saw it at four of my first six Dead shows and then they dropped it. They never played it again. And I love it. I think it's a quirky song. It never was played the same way twice. And I know every Dead song has never played the same way twice, but this one really wasn't. And sometimes it would open with the whole band coming in at once with that big explosion. Sometimes it would open with just the drummers with this nice little beat. And sometimes Weir would start strumming the song. And then you've got the one on in the Dark that starts with helicopters coming in.
- [99:14]
C
My brother Esau would make it to in the Dark, but only on the cassette version. It lasted in the Dead's repertoire through the fall of 1987. Just like the Dead worked on different timescales and economic matrices than other popular bands. The material evolved and still evolves in its own way. Loud Weir revived my brother Esau in 2014 and despite being associated with the Dead's best selling album, continued to tinker with it, recording the newest version with the Wolf Brothers on Live from Colorado, available from Third Man Records. These two LA Hairy men.
- [100:06]
E
Shadowboxing the apocalypse and wandering the land.
- [100:12]
C
I kinda like the bits about roller skates and selling real estate in LA though, probably cause they're trey 1983 Weir got another showcase in the first set that was coming into its own in the 80s, more than a decade after it had been recorded for Weir's solo debut, Ace Looks Like Rain now built to a space for some cool Garcia as well as for Weir to occasionally work blue during his extended vocal outro. Dan English liked lighting it and I.
- [101:07]
G
Also like doing Looks Like Rain because at the end we had very limited controls on the lights in these days. But one thing we could do is we could put a breakup pattern either in the light or not in the light. So I would put it in the light. And this is before they rotated. You couldn't rotate them nowadays you can rotate. So what I do is I point the light straight down and I just pan them back and forth. And that would give you the idea that the gobo was rotating on the stage.
- [101:38]
C
The second set opened with another Deadhead favorite that hadn't been in the band's rotation the last time they were through New York, the dense and tricky Help on the way. Slipknot Franklin's Tower Suite opened Blues for a LA in 1975, but barely lasted a year in the band's rotation after they returned to the road in 1976.
- [102:23]
D
Help slip Franklins had come back in the spring of 83 after a six year absence, which is amazing, you know. Help Slip Franklin is a pretty complex piece of music. Help on Slipknot in particular. But what I liked about it I always Franklin's Tower in the non help Slipknot eras, which is to say from late 77 through 83 and then from 86 and 87 and 88 in those years when they weren't playing Help on the Way in Slipknot Franklin's Tower was this kind of free agent and it never really had a home. It had some common places. Coming out a stranger to open a show, coming out a half step to open a show. I think I saw playing in the band into Franklin's Tower once to open a second set. It wasn't very good, it was very short and I just felt that it was always missing something. It would be kind of like the Dead, all of A sudden dropping China Cat and continuing to play. I know you rider quite often, but not really sure where it belonged. I always felt it's almost like I felt bad for Franklin's Tower because it had lost its friends, it had lost its home. And then when it came back for those two years, 83, 84 into the fall of 85, I guess September 85 was the last one. And then it felt like all was right in the world again. This is an incredibly well played, very dense and dynamic Slipknot. In particular.
- [104:46]
G
There were some major cues that you never want to miss, like, you know, the transition into Franklin's Tower, say, or something like that. You don't want to miss that.
- [105:15]
B
Sam.
- [105:46]
G
When they went into Franklin's Towers, the crowd was bouncing. And so then the arena started bouncing. So we're in the middle of the floor and the whole thing is going like this, up and down. And so now I'm like literally holding the lighting consoles down so that they don't slide off the table.
- [106:09]
C
The core of the second set was a 55 minute, he's gone into drum space, into Truckin, into Black Peter. At the Garden in 1982, the band had played the Throwing Stones not Fade Away combo for the first time, which is pretty much how it had stuck since then. Tonight was a now rare not fade away set closer. But it was the encore from this show that most people probably remember.
- [106:34]
B
You say you want a revolution where.
- [106:39]
C
You know.
- [106:42]
B
We all want to change the world.
- [106:59]
J
10, 12, 83, next to it, Revolution.
- [107:02]
C
Exclamation point, possibly like the COVID of Satisfaction played in 82. This falls into the category of never actually rehearsed. Also, big news was that Phil Lesh was joining Bob Weir to sing backup vocals. Big ups to Phil and Weir for doing the shooby doo wop part, which I think technically makes this a cover of Revolution 1 from the White Album, not just your regular ol Revolutions, the B side to the hey Jude single.
- [107:41]
D
When we do our Dave's Picks releases and we put the credits together, they're entire. Not quite decades, but very long years, long chunks where Phil simply doesn't get a vocal credit. Phil had stopped singing 77, 78. But on truckin, he would sing. He'd sing it. You can hear him really belting it out on some 77, 78 versions of truckin, particularly 78. He's like, all over those truck ins. And I love it because you get to put Phil as a vocal credit on there. But that's, I think, a really nice way to cap the box. Because just a few months later, in 84, Phil started, he got his own mic. And that's when his microphone came back and he could sing backups anytime he wanted. And then he could start bringing in Gimme Some Lovin with Brent. Keep On Growing.
- [108:28]
C
Bob Minkin got back down front for the encore.
- [108:31]
J
I only saw them sing together at the same mic once before, and that was at either Blacksburg, Virginia or William and Mary in April 78, when. When Phil, Bobby and Donna sang at the same mic. Or maybe it was Jerry, Bobby and Donna. But unfortunately my shot is very overexposed, so I never put that out there. But they were singing together at the same mic, so it was very unusual to see Bobby and Phil at the same mic. People next to me, like, when I got the shot of Weir and Phil singing at the mic together, they're like.
- [109:03]
B
Did you get that?
- [109:03]
J
Did you get that? I'm like, I hope so. You know, I don't. I think so because, you know, everything was manual, manual everything. Manual exposure, manual focus. I did all the black and white myself, all the developing. I have darkroom in my house and then I'd come home and the next day I develop them. And while as soon as I was able to take the negatives out of the Fixer, as it was called, hold them up still wet, you know, in the light, like scanning them, the shots.
- [109:28]
C
Of Lesh and Weir sharing a microphone did in fact come out. You can see them in the new in and out of the garden box. It would become one of Bob's most famous sequence of photos. For dan English, the 1983 fall tour made both a lifelong impact, but also an immediate one the following spring.
- [109:45]
G
I definitely had some great times there during that, and it changed my life. It changed my life and the course of my life. And you know what I did? I took the initial moving lights down to install in a rehearsal studio for the Jackson Victory Tour. And my boss said, we'll get someone else to work with. Candace, I want you to do this thing with the Jackson's blah, blah, blah, really important, etc. Etc. Etc. And after about a week of that, trying to put that together, I was like, no, can't do it. So the Debt tour is starting like next week. I'm coming back to do that.
- [110:35]
B
And we got.
- [110:36]
G
We got my good friend Dave Chance, who later became Candace's board op after myself. He went down and he did the Victory Tour and had a great time.
- [110:47]
C
Dan English also witnessed one of the most important changes in dad history. By 1983, the Tapirs were everywhere. And more specifically, their microphones were everywhere. And even more specifically, they were blocking the view of front of house engineer Dan Healy.
- [111:02]
G
I think on that 83 tour is when that, when Dan started like, this is out of control. I got a regiment this. And you know how it happened was I forget which arena we were at, but so we're all set up, we're on a riser that's only maybe a foot and a half tall or something like that out in the middle of the arena. And so for the show, everything's great. And as soon as the house lights went out, all these people started raising their mic stands and they did so right in front of us. So Dan Healy couldn't see the stage, Candace couldn't see the stage. I couldn't see the stage.
- [111:43]
C
The next year would be another year of innovations in the Grateful Dead's world. In the spring, they would launch the Rex Foundation, a charitable wing to help organize the band's numerous benefits. In the fall, they introduced the Tapers section. Actually originally referred to in the band's meeting minutes as the Tapester section. How's that for a different identity, all you tapesters out there? Both would become new corners of the Dead economy. On the fan side, 1984 would also see the introduction of both Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon's fanzine, the Golden Road, as well as a new tour publication, Terrapin Flyer. The Dead kept on touring, perhaps. Obviously, though, they didn't return to Madison Square Garden for a few years, playing the Meadowlands in New Jersey in 1984 and 1985. In 1986, John Cher would book them a three night Madison Square Garden return three years to the day of their last visit. But Jerry Garcia fell ill and the band canceled their fall tour. When the band came back, they were big enough to play Brendan Byrne arena and Madison Square Garden, and then a few years later, Giant Stadium in Madison Square Square Garden. But that's a different box set. And now's the part where out of the Garden we go.
- [112:54]
G
John Sher Once the Meadowlands arena was built, there was another place to play. And remember, they played a lot and wanted to play a lot. I'll never forget I had a conversation with Jerry once after probably the first outdoor stadium tour. At the end of the tour, and it was hot, it's hard to do summer outdoor stadium tour. Everybody was pretty pooped. And the last show he asked me to come over. They used to have these like little tents in the back of the stage that they hung out in. They weren't really dressing room people. And he said, john, I'm going to go to Hawaii for a couple weeks and then let's do a Garcia band tour. And I said, are you fucking nuts? You just did 15 stadiums or whatever.
- [113:41]
C
Take it easy.
- [113:41]
D
Take a little bit of time. And he looked me straight in the.
- [113:45]
G
Eye and he said, john, let me tell you something. I play my guitar 365 days a year. There are no days that I don't play my guitar, all right? So I might as well get paid for it.
- [114:16]
A
We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Alan Trist, David Lemieux, Eric Schwartz, John Leopold, Elijah Funk, Alex Ross, Dan English, Charlie Miller, Mark Rodriguez, Lee Greenfield, Johnny Dwark, Eric Pooley, Rich Farrell, Larry Price, John Scher, Bob Minkin, Dan Heiser, Jim Wise, Mary Eisenhart, Corey Arnold, Helen Meyer and John Meyer. Extra special thanks to friends David Ganz and Blair Jackson for contributing audio from their interview archive. And thanks very much to you for tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe and subscribe. And keep your tour stories coming by recording yours over@stories.dead.net See you at the next show. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.