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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.
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Please drink responsibly.
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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.
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This week we kick off a three.
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Episode 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.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through five and you can link from there to your favorite favorite podcasting platform so you can listen where you'd like to listen. Please give us a hand by subscribing. Hit that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Thanks very much for your help. Have you checked out the transcripts we now have available for many of the episodes in seasons one through five? Well, head over to dead.net deadcast index and click the transcript link on any episode you'd like to explore. The new Grateful Dead box sets release is right around the corner, in and out of the Garden, Madison Square Garden 818283 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 titles are available September 23rd and are available for pre order now at dead.net have you checked out the new Grateful Dead server on Discord yet? Download the Discord app on your mobile device or computer and then search for the public Grateful Dead server. Click the Join button, find the deadcast channel and chat with fellow heads about this episode or any other episode you just listened to. Jesse and I head over there from.
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Time to time and answer questions, so.
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We'Ll see you over at Discord. Have you checked out playing in the Band yet? It's the new interactive web based mixing board that allows you to jam with the Grateful Dead. You can mute the channel of your choice and fill in for any member of the Dead or press the solo button on any channel to listen and learn or duet. We have five songs from the August 27, 1972 Vinita, Oregon show ready for you to explore and jam along with@leastDead.net playingintheband there's just something about New York. The energy is different in Manhattan, and the Grateful Dead certainly have a long and storied relationship with the Big Apple. From historic early free concerts in the park to legendary all night shows at Bill Graham's Fillmore east, the Grateful Dead made playing in New York a priority from the beginning. So it's no surprise that the band had a special relationship with perhaps New York's most famous rock venue of all, Madison Square Garden. What was it that made the Dead fall in love with playing there? You're about to go inside MSG in the early 80s. Explore the venue, find out if the building dances along with you, and see the best band in the world, the Grateful Dead. Have your tickets out and ready. Here's Jesse Jarno.
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There are as many ways to listen to the Grateful Dead as there are Grateful Dead listeners. With many artists of the Grateful Dead's generation, it makes sense to consider their careers as discrete periods defined by studio recordings. And while that's a rewarding and weirdly novel way to consider the dead in the 60s and 70s, it doesn't work as well in the 1980s when the dead all but stop making studio albums after 1980s Go to Heaven. It can be fun going through an individual tour show by show, to hear how the band continued to evolve on a near nightly basis, as we did on our Europe 72 season. But it can also be valuable to zoom out and ponder some pictures of the Dead at different scales. Archivist and Grateful Dead legacy manager David.
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Lemieux We've kind of started in the last few years releasing things thematically held together by a region, Pacific northwest, a city, St. Louis, which which was over two different venues, the Fox and the Keel. We started realizing that this was another great way to do it. Now there's plenty of room in the Grateful Dead release schedule over the years that we'll continue to do things that are five consecutive nights, like the July 78 box, like the June 76 box. We'll continue to do those, but Then there's also room where we can step outside of that specific three night run, six nights, an entire tour or whatever it is, and do something that thematically holds together just like New York City, just like Jericho.
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You'Re most surely aware by now. But the brand new Grateful Dead box set is titled in and out of the Garden and captures three years of the Dead at New York's Madison Square Garden, two nights each from 1981, 1982 and 1983.
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They worked because they did five nights in 79. But we don't have tapes of the first two nights with Keith and Donna in January. But the ones in September we do have, and they're pretty good shows. But they didn't play there in 80. But then when they returned in 81, that's when we figured, you know, it was a nice standalone, concise three year run of shows.
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They didn't go there in 84, 85.
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86, they returned in 87. So it just seemed to hold together very well. So from there, conceptually, it, you know, concepts are cool, but they don't always work musically. That's when you start spending six or eight months on just the music. And then you realize that it does hold together musically. They complement one another.
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And not only do they complement each other, they comment on each other. A three year progress report on the Dead at the beginning of what turned out to be the second half of their career. About a month and a half after these garden shows, on April 28th, our friends David Ganz and Blair Jackson interviewed Jerry Garcia back home in California. Included in the Cornerstone book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. We'll be drawing from this throughout today's episode. Thanks, David.
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I keep saying in interviews and stuff, people say, aren't you surprised? We've been together 16 years and 15.
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Years and all that. I keep saying it's like we're just getting started.
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It is like there's so much that.
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We haven't even done.
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With the band.
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And its present incarnation, places that we've already touched into and various other forms imperfectly.
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In our past incarnations, we had imperfect versions of things we were trying to do, which we'll be able to do so much nicer with the band the.
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Way it presently is constituted. The Dead played New York intensely starting in June 1967, returning time after time to the Manhattan area, especially in the late 60s and early 70s and also the mid-70s and later 70s. And when the Dead themselves didn't come through every Few months, Jerry Garcia would pass by with the Jerry Garcia Band. The Dead loved New York. Here's Garcia talking to David Ganz and Blair Jackson in June 1981 about his impressions of Manhattan.
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When you go to New York City, you see a place that's basically not being governed. And it's not governed and it runs pretty well. I mean, New York City, it's amazing to me that there aren't a million.
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Murders on every block every day.
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I mean, when you're there, you have this feeling of out of controlness, which is unreal, but it works. It somehow works. I mean, all those people somehow are able to be. To exist as governments of one and do business and do their stuff and wander around and do whatever, play their games, however, on their own terms, whatever. And it just seems to me that.
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Consciousness wants that to happen.
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That's where we're trying to get to.
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Is something along those lines. I just don't see what's wrong with it.
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I can't figure out what the hell, where all that stuff came from.
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Collectively, they played nearly everywhere, playing gigs in four of the five boroughs, in bars and clubs, theaters and parks, decrepit movie palaces and boats floating around in the harbor. But not Madison Square Garden. In its first incarnation as a 10,000 capacity open air venue bordering Madison Square park, opened in 1879, it was easier to pretend Madison Square Garden was actually a garden. It was replaced by the second Madison Square Garden in 1890. The third iteration was 16 blocks north on 49th street, open from 1925 to 1968. An 18,000 capacity arena. The arena at 34th street and 8th Avenue, known today as Madison Square Garden, is the fourth version. Opened in 1968. It was taken as wisdom that the Dead didn't want to play Madison Square Garden. Here's how Robert Crisco put it in Newsday in 1972. The dead could sell out Madison Square Garden at will, but decline because they don't believe good vibes can survive such a vast impersonal hall. So it plays six nights at prices a dollar or so less than it might demand at the old academy of Music itself. As funky as a Dead freak. Promoter John Cher started working with the dead later in 1972 and would continue working with the band through 1995, putting on the majority of Dead shows outside Bill Graham's Bay Area turf. He remembers the Dead's resistance to Madison Square Garden.
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I think there was a lot of truth to it back in the. In the 70s. There really wasn't an arena culture. Some Acts played, but mostly it was theaters. We had the Capitol Theater, and in Jersey, the most important venue was Fillmore east in New York.
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Here's how Fillmore east promoter Bill Graham put it in 1972, the biggest fucking.
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Rip off in the city. When you can't hear, all you hear is the Garden should be just chariot races and roller derby and idiot classes. You know, that's what it's for. And boxing, but not for some acoustic guitar player.
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When the band returned from their road hiatus in early 1976, John Scherer helped them plan a tour with the express purpose of not getting sucked onto the arena circuit.
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Band called said, we'd like you to come out. We'd like to have a meeting with you. Now, they weren't playing at that point. Got on a plane. Meeting was at Bobby Weir's house, fabulous house. We sat down and basically they said, we'd like to play live again. But the last tour, where we played some bigger places, including Roosevelt Stadium, we lost the intimacy with the. With the audience, you know, that was the last tour before the break. So we. We all sat in Weir's house and said, any idea, John? I said, well, if you don't want to play arenas, which at that point, they hadn't played arenas. It just played bigger outdoor places. I said, let's do multiple days in 15 theaters. And we devised what became GD Tickets.
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In the spring of 1976, the Dead launched their first attempt at mail order tickets with John Cher's Monarch Entertainment working out the specifics. Cher, like Bill Graham, had a relationship with the band that often went beyond promoting shows.
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Nobody did anything close to the amount of shows that I did. I mean, second place is Graham, and it's probably 50 to 1. You know, I was involved in almost all aspects of their career. There were other acts that we played a lot of. We played a lot of Van Halen dates. You know, there were other acts that we played a lot, but mostly in the Northeast. They didn't really have a traditional manager, nor did they want one. All right? And except for that one time, they didn't have an agent, except for Richard, who was called the agent, but really was the manager.
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Richard Loren would depart the Dead world later in 1981, with John Cher more or less handling the band shows outside the Bay Area. Not only had Cher helped book the comeback tour in 76 and organized the band's first attempt at mail order, he'd helped organize distribution for Jerry Garcia's pet project, the Grateful dead movie, in 1977. And acted as an in between. When the band signed with Clive Davis, Arista Records in the summer of 77, Cher put on the first mega sized Outdoor Dead show since Watkins Glen four years earlier.
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The biggest show we did with him was in English Town, which, you know, was enormous. And I think to this day is the biggest concert event in the history of New Jersey.
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An estimated 150,000 saw the dead at the Englishtown Raceway over Labor Day 1977. A year later, over Labor Day 1978, the Dead played their New York area summer show in the not so cozy confines of Giant Stadium. John Scher wasn't the dad's manager, but he was a trusted advisor.
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I probably talked to Jerry in those days, three, four times a week on the phone. He'd actually go to the office almost every day and sit at a desk. There was always communication. Good communication with Weird, good communication with Mickey, Virtually no communication with Lesh or Kreutzman. We had a lot of dialogue. That's the one thing, you know, we had a lot of dialogue on every move that we made. And I basically said to him, guys, we can't play theaters anymore. When we first played Madison Square Garden, it was like me saying to them, guys, there's nowhere else to go. So, as usual, technically, they got into gear and thought left and right, how they can make it sound better, how the lighting could be. They had, for, you know, most of their career, brilliant lighting designer named Kansas Brightman, who is as good as anybody ever in the world. So she lighting? Nothing special, no lasers, but she was an artist and a magician. They'd stayed completely on top of sound and lights. And I didn't have anything to do with it other than I made sure those people got paid. But like I said, Candace, and then, you know, Dan Healy and a couple of other people, you know, were intricately involved, always trying to make it better, better, better. They cared that much about the audience. And they weren't going to play arenas until they thought they could get it right.
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They were booked into the garden for two nights, November 30 and December 1, 1978, though had to postpone till just after the new year when Jerry got sick. But it turned out not to be the worst. Jerry Garcia described it to Ray White on WLIR on January 11, 1979, just four days after the band's Garden debut.
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We played the Felt Forum once quite a long time ago, but never the Garden, Just because we've always heard the stories about it are so very uniformly bad. No play there is just Awful. But for the kind of room it is, it actually sounds real good. And as far as I'm concerned, it's a good place to play in New York. It sounds good from a musician's point of view, you know, on stage, the room doesn't repeat, you know, creating a time confusion, but it has a nice. It has a warm reverberance. Once they did it, they loved it because the feedback was enormous. Nobody was complaining about the sound. Quite to the contrary, it was as good as you can get. The Garden is said forever the world's greatest arena.
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It is.
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It's expensive. And that was one of the small things that they hesitated on because they were simply making a lot more money at other arenas. But it became very special for them. There was always a very serious rental negotiation. And it wasn't until we did the Guerrilla six. Six was it, or more shows there. The first time we did that long run was the first time I really could say, hey, guys, meaning the Garden. You got anybody else who's going to do six nights? And although that's relatively commonplace now, I don't know about six nights, but multiples. It wasn't then. It wasn't then. And they held the record for many, many years of the most sold out shows at the Garden.
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After their first Garden shows in early 1979, they returned again in September. Dave Davis, proprietor of the site Grateful Seconds, has been looking over the band's career, ticket sales, and notes that starting in 1979, many of the band's biggest paydays shifted away from giant outdoor gigs to arenas and especially Madison Square Garden. But perhaps the band themselves weren't quite ready for it. In the fall of 1980, they came through New York for one of their longest stands in years. But it wasn't at the Garden over eight nights at Radio City Music hall, following 15 nights at the Fox Warfield in San Francisco. In a pair in New Orleans, the band recorded a pair of double live albums, the Acoustic Reckoning and the Electric Dead Set, released in April and August 1981 respectively. We delve deep into those shows for our episode titled Dead Behind Dead Ahead, Dead Set would become the last new Dead album studio or live for more than a half a dozen years. Dead Set captured the band's sound as they entered the new decade. But the setting was untenable. The Dead's presence at the venerable Radio City, at the heart of New York's media Center, provoked national coverage.
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All right, my name's UJ Pastrana and I'm waiting here for Grateful Dead I've been here. I waited online for three days.
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Tonight is my 75th concert.
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The Dead care about their fans and they play music so that their fans lives. They make everybody feel good. I try to go to every concert they perform because they're the best at what they do.
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They might have been a cult band, but they were entering a new phase. Archivist David Lemieux, Radio City, which is.
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I think what, 7,000, 8,000. Even that was a bit of a nightmare because of ticketing and the crowds were so big and the people camping out for days. And that was eight nights at an 8,000 seat place.
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One fairly logical result of the Dead focusing so hard on New York and the Tri State area. Was a core of extremely hardcore fans in New York and the Tri State area. Shocking, right? New York had and has an incredible music scene far too vast to touch on here. It's hard to call the Grateful Dead a New York band, but collectively they played New York more often than quite a few acts actually from New York. The Dead had come up through the New York music ranks. Going from club dates and free shows in the park to ballrooms and theaters, and most lately, New York's brightest arena. There were many ways that the Dead might be considered a New York band. One was just the sheer amount of Deadheads in the New York Tri State area. Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods teemed with them. You might know some of Bob Menken's photographs of the Dead in this era. Some of his shots are included in the in and out of the Garden box. He's got several books of Dead images out, including the recent Just Bobby. We've Posted links@dead.net Deadcast Bob Minken got into the Dead as a teenager in the mid-70s. And in 1981 was a Brooklynite Deadhead. Welcome to the Deadcast. Bob Minkin I was living in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
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You know my parents house and you know my neighborhood was awash and drugs and Grateful Dead and Hot Tuna. We all felt like we were a bunch of desperados back then. Cause we're all dealing. And in 81 I turned 22 years old in 81. In June of 81 I was a rabid Deadhead. I graduated college School of Visual Arts in New York in 81 and I was living at home. My parents had a two family house as we call them and I lived in the apartment below. I was selling weed. Basically that's how I made money. Weed and photos. I thought I could just do that forever. So my girlfriend, who's now My wife was like, if we're going to stick together, you're going to probably have to do something else. So the dealing went, the photos stayed. And I was a graphic design major, so I did, I worked doing that kind of stuff, but that didn't happen till a little later. I didn't have like a career or anything at that point. So I was still kind of dealing weed and selling photos and living in the underground economy. My neighborhood like had a lot of Deadheads and it was good that way. There were older kids, of course, who were like, that sucked now. You should have seen them with Big Ben, that factor. But I was like, yeah, that's nice. And there's also a strong hot tuna contingent, you know. And it's funny, the Dead. Most people like the Dead loved hot tuna too. But not all people that liked hot tuna love the Dead. You know, they used to like to rag on the Dead.
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There's a certain generation of New York music freak who will corner you and tell you about the absolutely epic Tuna shows at the palladium. In 76 and 77. Bob plugged into the long running Dead Freak Taper network that had virtually been birthed in the New York area in the early 70s. Between legends like Marty Weinberg and Jerry Moore in the Bronx, Les Capell of Brooklyn founded the Dead Relics Tape Club, which by late 1974 spawned Relics magazine, still in action today. Its first editor was Taper Jerry Moore. Via the classified ads and Relics and good old fashioned letter writing and phone networking, local Deadhead scenes around the country began to connect with one another when the Dead themselves weren't touring. Though lots of Deadheads had local scenes, the Dead were also a portal into a bigger world. Please welcome to the Dead cast photographer Jay Blakesburg.
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My first Grateful Dead related concert was the Jerry Garcia Band in Asbury park at Convention hall in July of 77, which was a couple of months before.
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Englishtown and Jay was on the bus. Almost certainly you've seen Jay's photographs of the Dead or one of a gazillion other artists. His work is collected in numerous books, most lately the photo memoir Retro Blakesburg, which has some beautiful images of the world Jay will be discussing today. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast in the.
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Spring of 80 I met a guy at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey named bt and he was a big acid dealer, acid manufacturer and he gave me 50 hits of acid and I gave them to all my friends and basically said, hey man, when I get back to San Francisco, if you want, I'd be happy to overnight you a few thousand hits of LSD that you can sell to your friends from high school and become part of my underground LSD distribution network. And I thought that was the greatest thing I ever heard. So I just gave my father's address at home, and he started overnighting me these packages of 2000 hits of LSD at a time. And so I very quickly psychedelicized our hometown in Union County, New Jersey. We had a large number of Deadheads in our town in New Jersey, where I grew up. I had friends in high school where they took LSD so they could drink a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. And I was taking lsd, and I was seeing something different. I was seeing adventure. I was seeing inspiration. I was seeing a different life. I was listening to these songs by Robert Hunter and saying, I got to get the fuck out of New Jersey and I need to get to San Francisco. I need to go to the promised land. I need to follow those footsteps that Robert Hunter talks about in Ripple, right? And I was reading Electro Kool Aid, Acid Tests. And I read on the Road. And we were into the literature and we were into the lyrics. And we were reading Relics magazine that was reporting on what was happening in the Hate. So. So to me, that was the destination.
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More directly, the destination was Dead tour, which Jay hopped on in 1980.
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It didn't take long before I met a whole host of Deadheads in the spring of 1980 that were going on tour. And this is a time where there was, what, a hundred people that were really actually following the Grateful Dead. We're talking. There was 100 people that were doing that that were, like, in cars. There was no school buses that were converted. There was no Shakedown street that didn't exist in 1980. That didn't happen until much, much later. It was a small family scene that was truly, truly the great American adventure, like Jerry Garcia said. And for us, it was the great American psychedelic adventure. The summer of 80. And my friends who we were on tour with, we all call that our Summer of Love.
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And Jay means it.
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I wasn't one of those guys that was selling individual hits in a parking lot. I was not selling sheets in a parking lot. I was selling them to my friends back in high school. You know, a 500 hits here, 200 hits there, a thousand hits there kind of a thing. That was our. That was our market. By the time we were starting to sell all this lsd, we also truly believe that we were saving the planet. Like, we believe that, you know, a psychedelic planet was a better planet. And we believed we were psychedelic outlaws and cowboys and cowgirls and that we should be doing this and. And no matter how naive that sounds. And it was naive, but this is how we were kids.
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Naive, perhaps, but also, maybe not wrong, but the times were starting to tilt.
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When Reagan got elected president, we felt the shift, right? So he goes into the Oval Office in January of 81. And we felt it as Deadheads. You know, we were young, but we were politically aware.
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It wasn't so much that the Dead were a throwback to the 60s, but a shelter from the 80s. Another attraction for touring heads in 1980 and 1981 was that despite not introducing many new songs into the repertoire, the Dead song list was beginning to expand. John Huntley started seeing shows in 77 and really got on the bus a few years later.
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If you were going to see them in 78, for example, or early 79, the rotation was basically just three nights of music. And then by a year and a half later, they could do six or seven nights before they started repeating themselves. They had really broken out a lot of material, especially the summer of 80. Going forward, they were now doing the Wheel. They were doing Uncle John's Dance. That's when they were breaking out China Doll. Comes a Time, the Wheel. And this was all stuff that was in regular rotation. They were doing. Comes a Time, you know, they. Real high time. They really added a lot. You know, after the acoustic, they really started incorporating a lot more material.
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It was almost always a good time to be a Deadhead. But this is the 1980, 1981 edition.
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Right after New Year's 1980, I go to Hawaii for a month to just hitchhike around and camp on the beaches in Hawaii, because what else we're going to do? We wanted to stay on the west coast until the tour starts again in Chicago at the Uptown Theater. So I come back to San Francisco in early February. I hang out in the Bay Area for a little bit, and then probably staying at BT's apartment. And then 8 or 9 or 10 of us jump in a van and we drive to Chicago. And we had a. It was one of those old Ford vans that had no seats in the back. It was just open. And we had just bodies laying like sardines with everybody's backpacks all the way in the back. And the most comfortable places to sit were in the driver's seat of the passenger seat. So I just drove most of the way. We just dropped Acid and drove. We were channeling Neal Cassidy, or so we thought. And so we drove to those shows at the Uptown Theater with my buddy Dan Skinner in the passenger seat for most of it and had great adventures and, you know, bumper stickers on the back of the van that said, warning, I break for hallucinations and state troopers in Nebraska and Iowa following us through towns and shit like that.
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The shows in Chicago began a 13 show tour that would make its way east to Madison Square Garden. Another character on that late winter 81 dead tour was Jim Wise. If you're a tape collector, you probably know his name. Responsible for many of the fine audience recordings in the early 1980s, Jim made his own master tapes of all six shows on the new box set. Please extend your virtual mic stands and welcome Jim Wise.
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I noticed people taping when you go to a show and you're really impressed by the show and you want to relive it again. It was just kind of born out of a desire to capture the music and hear it again. So started meeting people and learning what was going on, what the scene was like, making friends, helping people make tapes. Eventually, when I got my own Deck in 1980, and that's when I started being able to take masters home with me. The first deck that I bought was a Sony D5. I got it at Crazy Eddies in Hartsdale, New York in April of 1980. Because Crazy Eddie can't be beat. With prices so low, he's practically giving it all away. Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane. I think I paid like 480 bucks, which was a lot of money back then for an 18 year old kid. And I think I was running at that time. I was running Sony ECM200 80s, getting patches mainly from Sennheiser 421s, Knox 700s. Whoever had the best setup that I could get. If it was better than what I had at my disposal, I would take a patch. If not, I would run up, I would run my own stand in the mics. It really, you know, really depends. Was on a show by show basis. Spring tour, 1980, I did pretty much almost all the shows. So I started out. The first few shows I had my mics taped to a crutch and that's how I was doing it in my head. I thought it was some way of deflecting attention to the fact that I was smuggling in equipment. But who knows? Fortunately, I didn't have to resort to doing that too many times. By Glens Falls, which was the middle of the tour 58 80. I befriended a guy named Jeff Hellman, and he was friends with Dan Healy. And he had permission to run a stand at the soundboard. And he was running knock seven hundreds with shotguns. And that's how I really started getting in in because he let me patch for the rest of the tour. I would hit as many as I could on the East Coast. I was based out of Connecticut, all right, in that area. But I would go all up and down the East Coast.
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Jim was in luck. His favorite band played the East Coast a ton. Though the Dead would become known for being one of the most radically pro taper bands of all time. That was still a legend in the making in 1981. The official taping section wouldn't arrive until 1984. Sound engineer Dan Healy would sometimes provide a safe haven for tapir friends.
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Some tours it was like, it wasn't an issue. In some tours it was like, you know, Strictly Forbidden. They have the. These were notorious no recording posters that they would put on the front doors just to let you know that, you know, it was a no recording show. So that's when you knew you had to have your shit together. You did whatever you had to do. You get your gear in to make the tape. The deck itself was pretty small. You know, I used to put it in this behind my back and wrap mic cords around my legs and so on and so forth. Really depended on how you know what needed to get done. It was nerve wracking. It was totally nerve wracking. Nothing was like the feeling of once you got through the doors with your equipment.
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In becoming a taper, Jim connected to a tradition that stretched back more than a decade with an accumulated decade's worth of knowledge and folklore about how to pull the best recordings.
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I was a collector, so I was always in this process of collecting, either on tour, recording, or by then I was doing a lot of trading with other collectors. Had some people that were really. Had really extensive collections. I would go visit them for a weekend and we would just have decks rolling in every room for hours on end. And that was only took a couple 24 hours of doing that. And you could amass a lot of recordings.
- [34:47]
B
I laugh at the phrase a couple of 24 hours, but only because I feel seen.
- [34:51]
A
There was a core set of guys that were older than me that had started out earlier on. And there was about, you know, five or six. Six of them. Barry Glassberg, Steve Rolfe, Eddie Claridge, Bob Menke, Dick Lotvalla was number one. These guys were like some of the earliest paper collector dudes. I, Eddie Claridge, kind of took me under his wing. And he's the one who pretty much taught me what to do, helped inspire me to make good tapes, Let me help him go through the work of taping and so on, so forth. We lived pretty close together, but mostly, most importantly, he was actually friends with Dan Healy. So we got a lot of privileges. There was a lot of times back then where they would partition off just a small area around the soundboard. Now, if you could get into that area by virtue of being friends with Healy or being friends with someone who was friends with Healy, then the security wouldn't hassle you. And so that's why a lot of times I was able to make tapes under better conditions than a lot of other people.
- [36:05]
B
Tape trading was, of course, a time honored Dead freak tradition and remains so in modern forms. But in the late 70s and early 80s, young heads like Bob Minken began to find other ways to channel their energies around the band.
- [36:18]
A
I was kind of helping support my habit of Dead shows by selling my photos outside. So I would have a. I would be basically selling my photos outside of most of these shows. The famous question I get when all the photos are out there, are these from tonight? Yep. I have a darkroom in my van there, and I whip them up. I left the show early. It's amazing how many people ask me that question. Yes, I am magic. Usually I pause and not say anything, and their friend they were standing next to would smack them and go, you idiot. How could these be from tonight? But it was great because I met a lot of people that way and it was fun just interacting with people and came away with 50 bucks. 50 bucks carried a lot of weight back then.
- [37:02]
B
You know, Jay Blakesburg had done the same thing.
- [37:06]
A
So, yeah, I had already started taking pictures of the grateful dead. In 1978, I photographed the Meadowlands was the first dead show I photographed September of 78. So I was already taking photos and definitely interested in photography and really was taking pictures to make eight by tens and thumbtack to my bedroom wall. And eventually I started selling eight by tens in the parking lot of Dead shows for a dollar or $2 a piece of to buy tickets that were $10 at the time. I'd come back with $100 in my pocket from selling eight by tens and thought I was rich.
- [37:38]
B
Jay wasn't just embedded in the Dead scene, He was part of it. A very rare, trustworthy person with a camera and his offstage photos of Turn of The decade Dead freaks in their natural habitat are a legacy unto themselves.
- [37:50]
A
One of the reasons why those photos look so freeing and so different than what we experience today or even a decade later is that first of all, we were really only a decade away from the 60s at that point. Right. And so the late 70s, pop culture had shifted. So much punk rock, new wave music, the way people were dressing, the hairstyles, we were forgotten about as hippies. In some way, we were an endangered species. Yeah, there was things going on in the west coast and the hippies who had left San Francisco and went to Oregon and Washington and Mendocino and Humboldt and pot growers and I mean, obviously the hippie movement never died.
- [38:35]
B
In the first two episodes of this dead cast season, we visited the Pacific Northwest circa 1972, where heads were more or less actualizing Stewart Brand's whole earth catalog as the 60s spilled into the 70s. By 1981, though, Dead Tour was beginning to resemble a traveling weirdness refuge in Ronald Reagan's America. The first glimmers of the Shakedown street fan bazaars were just starting to emerge.
- [39:00]
A
There absolutely was a marketplace, but it's not like people had blankets set up on a sidewalk and folding tables and pop up tents. Like none of that happened. I mean, I have friends that traveled with me in my car that would make a pair of beaded earrings one day and walk around holding them between their thumb and their index fingers to sell for $15 to buy a ticket for that show. Right. It was super low key, small, small scale even, like the veggie burrito thing and the grilled cheese sandwich thing. And none of that started until way later. You know, people weren't on tour trying to sell food in the parking lot.
- [39:38]
B
Fan made T shirts had been popping up since at least 1971, but were starting to come into their own as an art form. John Huntley.
- [39:45]
A
There wasn't Shakedown Street. You had people like Phil Brown, Mikio, Ed Donahue. Those are some of the tie dye T shirt artists that were selling. They were really good at tie dye artists. And so the. So the art scene was small. You had people that sold jewelry and people selling buttons was another thing that was kind of popular then. People would take pictures from Europe, 72 liners to Jim Marshall, pictures from Life magazine, and then they would make little small circles of them and make buttons. Those were fun to buy. The most famous of the T shirt artists at that time was Ed Donahue. Right. And I met ed in 79 and in we traveled together, we drove From Boulder to Portland to Seattle to Spokane, together in a van, him and his wife Linda. And, and you know, Ed was the first guy in the parking lot selling Grateful Dead related shirts that had no Grateful Dead symbols on them. And, and nowadays his work, if you can find those vintage shirts in mint condition, they're thousands and thousands of dollars. But, you know, Ed was, Ed was out there selling T shirts and there were people out there, but like people selling stickers. Like, that was just starting to happen. Stickers were pretty popular. My friend Cliff had an ingenious idea. He came up with the inside window sticker for the steal your face. Now most stickers before, all stickers before then would stick affixed to the outside of whatever it was on. And then of course, they would get ratty looking. He came up with this plastic steal your face that went on the inside of the window. So he would have a plastic acrylic thing so it could demonstrate to stoned people how the sticker is on the inside. People were selling bumper stickers. I'm talking about like window stickers and decals. Like the technology was catching up, you know, like I met a guy at red rocks in 79 that was selling like he was selling paper bumper stickers that said red rocks on them. You know, hand drawn, Grateful dead. No, it was, you know, 50 cents a piece, a quarter a piece, a dollar a piece, whatever it was, you know, people were just trying to make $10 and $15 and $20 a night because that's what tickets cost. $10, $8, $7, $12, $14. So much of the fan merch back then was so folk art and so homegrown, Obviously. No computers to help you illustrate things, of course.
- [42:12]
B
Some of the biggest folk art on the scene was the LSD blotter filled with different designs that changed by the season, sometimes commenting on current events.
- [42:20]
A
Sean o', Donnell, the Reagan blotter that was around during the spring 81 tour. I managed to avoid it for the Garden run in March because it seemed like a negative talisman to start a journey. And there were a lot of other options around in those days, particularly some nice dolphins, if I remember right. But at Nassau in May, I thought, okay, it's kind of funny. I'm subversive as much as my 17 year old self could understand that concept. And I wound up taking it the second or third night of the run. It was the worst. I definitely should have stuck with my initial instinct. It's tempting to blame my broken leg. Somewhere between the Garden and Nassau, I fell off the roof of a car. But that wasn't it. Being in a full dayglo leg cast on crutches was perfectly fine. At the opener, with a bag of shrooms, it was Ronnie himself bumming me out, I'm sure of it. 3 Rock and roll bands were in the center of the gymnasium, playing simultaneously all during the dance and all during the dance. Movies were shown I on two screens at the opposite ends of the gymnasium. These movies were the only lights in the gym proper. They consisted of color sequences that gave the appearance of different colored liquids spreading across the screen, Followed by shots of men and women on occasion. Shots where the men and women's nude torsos on occasion. And persons twisted and gyrated in provocative and sensual fashions.
- [43:38]
B
John Huntley and his friend Christina Schreiber noticed a space in the market.
- [43:42]
A
All the artwork that was out there, the famous posters of the 60s, the Rick Griffins and the Kelly Mouse, et cetera, that kind of died, you didn't see that. So we came up with the idea, let's resurrect the Grateful Dead poster thing. John had these entrepreneurial ideas like selling the posters. A lot of people were selling T shirts. Some people were selling Guatemalan stuff. Some of the women were really good beaters. And I knew that I couldn't make better stuff than them. But it didn't seem like anybody had posters.
- [44:16]
B
They designed their own posters for a number of shows on the late winter 81 tour. Like the 60s posters they loved, they included the names of the promoters and the ticket prices. They got ready to put the first on sale at the tour opening shows at the Uptown Theater in Chicago at the end of February.
- [44:32]
A
The Rooster is actually a tribute to my grandfather, Gordon Smith, who was a caricaturist. So I did the. I. I did the artwork on that, but for the most part, I did the writing, the calligraphy, and Christina did the artwork. She did all the roses, she did both the mandalas. She did the spring tour poster. All the artwork. She. She did all the roses. It was really. It was a great collaboration of both our towns. The inspiration for the posters was that when we moved out to California and from back east and I was in sixth grade and I remember I didn't know too many people. So I went. My mom and I went to the mall and I got these color in posters that had these sort of trippy designs. And you do it, do the coloring with felt tip pen. So it wasn't like kids crayons. It was really an intricate design. I could never make posters as good as the ones that came out in the 60s with Kelly and mouse and Rick Griffin and stuff. We did sort of take the design idea from those, especially with the fancy lettering. I just thought, can we actually make something somebody would want to buy? And people did end up buying it. I don't remember how many we actually sold. I think it might have been a few hundred.
- [45:56]
B
There'd been a slight mix up at the printer. Instead of a little red rooster, they ended up with a little pink rooster, which I think looks pretty cool, personally.
- [46:05]
A
So we headed out to Chicago and we just had the Chicago poster. So we sold the posters. They were sold for $3 apiece, though.
- [46:12]
B
They also designed posters for Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden. Those weren't actually for sale until after the shows themselves.
- [46:20]
A
I think I said to John, look, I had a blast when I was in sixth grade doing these coloring posters. Let's just have people be able to color them in themselves. And so after that, it was just black and white. We got a lot of encouragement from the other artists that were established artists like Ed Donahue and Phil Brown and Mikio.
- [46:43]
B
They would go on to sell another poster over the New Year's run out west that year. But they also designed three posters for the February and March 81 tour that never got printed.
- [46:53]
A
Stanley theater is Casey Jones driving the train. The Utica Memorial is grandma and grandpa skeleton sitting by the fireplace. Cleveland 1 is music notes going down the road and it's beaded on down the line. The artwork is sensational on those three.
- [47:14]
B
Even so, they went on the whole tour in February and March, even without the planned posters.
- [47:19]
A
John and I rented a car for that. John was more sort of organized than me. I would just hitchhike wherever I went, pretty much. But he arranged to rent a car, and we pitched in on it, and we just went from city to city. I remember going to Ohio, driving in the middle of the night, and I felt horrible the next morning because it's like, oh, I haven't been able to sleep in this car. I had never really stayed up all night before. And I realized that you get a second wind and you get kind of punchy. So you feel really horrible in the early morning. But then around 9 or 10, you start feeling punchy. And so I was like, oh, wow, okay, I feel good now. And I sort of had felt my way into this is how things are done.
- [48:13]
B
Jay Blakesburg had it down by 81.
- [48:15]
A
I was funding all of this fun by selling copious amounts of LSD and We thought that was the right thing to do. And along with that came a mindset of myself that I was not as interested in taking pictures and more interested in being in that moment with that music and my friends. I was not taking a lot of photographs into spring 81 for a variety of reasons. One, because I was deep into psychedelics at the time and we were dosing very heavily at a lot of these shows. I have a picture of the marquee of the Stanley Theater that says the Grateful dead on that March 81 show. I did not take any pictures in Cleveland. I did not take any pictures at the Uptown Theater. And I don't know why. Like, it just was a mindset. Like, I was a dancer, I was a tripping hippie. I was an 18, 19 year old kid.
- [49:04]
B
It had been a tour of mostly pretty small venues.
- [49:07]
A
The Uptown Theater in Chicago is a little bit larger theater, maybe like 4,500 to 4,800 people. The music hall in Cleveland and the Stanley, I think are right around 2,800. And then they go to, I think a room in Maryland on that tour at the University of Maryland. And I have no idea. I'm sure it was like a gymnasium or something like that.
- [49:28]
B
Jay skipped the show at the University of Maryland's Cole Field House.
- [49:32]
A
And then they go to Madison Square Garden for two nights, which is what, 20,000 people. Small venue, small venue, small venue, mid venue at a college. Madison Square Garden.
- [49:42]
B
On March 9, 1981, the Dead opened a two night, Monday, Tuesday run at the Garden. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
- [49:50]
A
So the Dead quietly show up to New York and do their little thing, this little cult band, yet selling out Madison Square Garden two nights and then doing it again the next year and the year after.
- [50:00]
B
Bob Minkin.
- [50:01]
A
It was still kind of an underground thing, even though they were playing multiple nights at the Garden. When they played small plays like the Palladium or something, you had to wait out all night online or like Radio City, but the Garden, I'm not sure. I don't recall ever having to wait out for Garden shows. Maybe with the Garden, the fact that there were 20,000 tickets available, it wasn't that difficult to get seats. I guess you just had to go when they went on sale. I mean, the Dead were getting bigger, they were playing larger places because up until before then they were also still.
- [50:29]
B
Playing theaters in the 21st century. Charlie Miller is one of the more revered names in Grateful Dead Tapir circles. In 1981, he was a high school student in Forest Hills, Queens.
- [50:40]
A
My mom, coolest freaking mom ever.
- [50:43]
B
She wrote me a note to miss.
- [50:45]
A
The first half of a day of school so I can go to the Garden and buy tickets for those 1981 shows. And she gave me money for the train, dropped me off the train station, gave me money for the tickets, and I had a joint roll. So when I got those tickets, I was going to smoke this joint. I got the last ticket that they had at Madison Square Garden for $3,981 and it was absolute worst heat. And I remember walking out, lighting up the joint. This businessman in a suit walked by and he smoked it with me.
- [51:13]
B
You can visualize Madison Square Garden as a hub of energy with heads from the Tri State area pouring in from all directions. Built on top of Penn Station, with train tracks connecting out onto Long island in the east and into the New Jersey suburbs in the west, it was literally and figuratively a transportation node. As a lifelong New Yorker, I'd like to note that properly one grows up on Long island and not in Long Island. Please welcome Marty Meyer, who grew up on Long Island.
- [51:41]
A
I was probably on spring break or something from, from school, so I drove down to Long island and took the train in and just took the Long Island Railroad right into msg, which was great. MSG is not a venue that allows itself to have any kind of shakedown street ish gathering. Like if you went to SPAC or you went to some other places, like you could hang in a parking lot, even at the Coliseum, you could do that, you could do your, your pregame. But msg, like, it's just in the city, like you go and that's it.
- [52:22]
B
So it was like an invasion of heads.
- [52:26]
A
And it's just a swarm. It's like a beehive where all the workers came back to the, to the hive and were buzzing around. And you know, other normal people didn't want to get too close to it.
- [52:37]
B
Other people boldly attempted to drive into Manhattan, like Frank Bosh and his friends.
- [52:42]
A
And I had been going to concerts.
- [52:44]
B
From high school for a couple years.
- [52:46]
A
But that was our first experience with the dead. We had always taken the train out from the suburbs of New Jersey to the Garden to concerts. But this particular night, one of my friends who just got his license decided that he was going to drive to the Garden. We had no clue how we were getting there. It was pre GPS days, of course, so I think we used an Exxon road map to get there. And we pulled up in front of the Garden, literally underneath the Marquee amongst.
- [53:14]
B
All the taxi cabs, stumbled out of.
- [53:16]
A
His car and looked around at the sights and the sounds, and we were just like, this is going to be great. Yeah. There's no signs that say no parking. You should be fine.
- [53:25]
B
He literally left his car, locked it.
- [53:28]
A
Amongst all the cabs right out in front of the Garden.
- [53:30]
B
We'll meet up again with Frank after the show.
- [53:33]
A
David Lemieux, as Jerry very famously said once, he loved playing the Garden because that place is juiced. It's got an energy of its own. The energy is entirely a dynamic between band and audience. And that's it. There's nothing else. Maybe Red Rocks, maybe there's a magical places like that. But the Garden had the third element of being the Garden.
- [53:54]
B
The Garden used to be tremendously frightening.
- [53:56]
A
And intimidating, and we always heard the.
- [53:57]
B
Worst things about it, you know, I mean, the reports were just terrible. But, God, playing there has been nothing.
- [54:02]
A
But fun for us so far.
- [54:03]
B
Every time we play in there, it's.
- [54:05]
A
Been good, you know, I mean, you never can't tell about a place.
- [54:08]
B
You really can't, you know, in the.
- [54:10]
A
Garden, I mean, I don't know whether it's the energy of the New York.
- [54:12]
B
Crowd or whether it's just the place itself, but for some reason, we play well in there.
- [54:16]
A
We like, we enjoy playing in there.
- [54:19]
B
And that is really something good.
- [54:23]
A
That's a real good score. Because it's just tough to play in New York City.
- [54:27]
B
I feel that we play with greater.
- [54:30]
A
Sensitivity and clarity here than we do on the East Coast.
- [54:33]
B
We play with greater energy there.
- [54:36]
A
More rock and roll there.
- [54:37]
B
More spacey here.
- [54:38]
A
Well, I think the audience is. That's a simplistic way of looking at it, but you could put it it that way. The ones around New York City are their own.
- [54:45]
B
They have their own flavor. Chris Goodspace saw the Garden shows in 81, 82 and 83.
- [54:51]
A
Madison Square Garden Spectrum, other big venues. You can literally feel the energy rippling around the venue and kind of like the wave almost, but without people standing up, doing their hands. It's just all this energy contained. Especially outdoor west coast shows, you don't get that intensity. So an East Coast Dead show is totally different animal than a West coast show. The thing about the Garden is the shows always tended to be rowdy, the New York crowd, because when I came out to California and saw them, it seemed almost lethargic. When the Dead came out on stage, you know, people barely interrupted their conversation talking to somebody. But in the Garden, when the lights went down and as soon as people could see the outline of Garcia, it was pandemonium. The place actually shook.
- [55:49]
B
That was that moment from Steve Rolf's audience tape of March 9th. And now.
- [56:12]
A
Inside you're burning I can see glitter your eyes tell more than you mean that too lit up and.
- [56:21]
B
Flashing like the reds and blues.
- [56:28]
A
It'S very much the Reckoning Dead set version of the band. It's still that incredibly high energy. Grateful Dead, they're about to go to Europe and do five shows right after. Four in London and one in Essen, West Germany, with the who. So they're pretty pumped. Feel like a stranger Feel like a stranger that's right. Feel like a stranger Feel like a stranger Silky, silky, crazy, crazy night the.
- [57:10]
B
1981 shows on in and out of the Garden come from sound engineer Dan Healy's master cassettes.
- [57:16]
A
There was a bit of a phase issue on the 81 shows. The vocal tracks as recorded to these stereo cassettes were recorded out of phase. And it's a big problem with a lot of 81 soundboard recordings. You can hear it where the vocal sound, but when it's out of phase, it's like. It's almost directionless and it's kind of all over the place. Plangent Processes did a wonderful job. We've been working with plangent for 15 years now on a lot of projects, not everything, but especially on things that are problematic on a speed correction level and on a case of a phase issue, they did a wonderful job. Jamie and John at Plangent did a great job on making it work. And you wouldn't know there's anything wrong with it. Sounds fantastic. Sean o' Donnell Me and my girlfriend at the time had made a whole bunch of homemade, like, smiley faces, like, out of regular dots, you know. She had a grocery store gig that had, like, pricing stickers and we spent hours hand drawing smileys in advance and sticking them on every single possible person. That whole tour, it was just such an energetic show. Feel Like a Stranger, which wouldn't normally be my go to. I just felt like set a tone that then kept up the whole. That whole show. Saric Pooley called the first night at.
- [59:11]
B
The garden in 81.
- [59:12]
A
I moved to college in New England in 77. I didn't see the spring 77 tour, but I started catching every tour after that. And I was never a tour rat. I always was either. In college and then working in New York after college. I graduated from college in 81. So the garden show, what is it? March 9th. I was still in college for that. And I'd been down at College park two days before for the Cole Field House show. And on the way back to college I stopped off in Manhattan and caught the Monday night show, which was amazing. I went there by myself and I copped a ticket outside, which wasn't that hard. And I was sitting behind the stage, high up enough so I could see the a lot of the crowd. So there you kind of feel like you're a hundred foot tall drummer or something, you know from there. And that's a great place to savor some of the things that make the Garden unique.
- [60:22]
B
John Huntley's crew hung out back there too.
- [60:25]
A
We would all always meet behind the stage, back behind the drums, down low. They started setting up speakers behind the drums so there was always lots of room and the sound was really good, so you had more dancing room. All of us were really into going wild dancing. There wasn't a lot of alcohol fueled energy. It was weed and Sydney and not overindulgence, just everybody getting a glow. Certain places where it was a general admission floor, we could just be right out there dancing behind the soundboard. But in venues like the Garden, there was an intense energy. Like in the low section, sometimes you could get a little bit of too much alcohol fueled drunken energy. So it was more us all sticking together and hanging behind the stage. The energy levels were off the charts. And something about being in Manhattan and, and being inside a moving drum, a trampoline, a spaceship. It would reconfigure in the course of the evening. And the Dead consistently rose to the occasion there over the years.
- [61:42]
B
If you've been to the Garden or even heard anybody talk about it, you've probably heard that the venue bounces.
- [61:49]
A
I think the floor is on the fifth floor. The roof is completely supported only by cables around the side. And that's why there are no support pillars in the Garden. But there's something else that gives it the bounce. I've never seen an account of exactly how they built the thing, but there's definitely some springs, some heavy duty shock absorbers on the girders for whatever reason, because the whole thing does bounce, there's no question about it. And it bounces differently depending on what's going on in the show. So in Ramble On Rose, everybody's swaying and the whole place starts to sway. Just like Jack the River, just like Mojo Hayes, just like Billy Sunday in a shotgun Red Tom Bank. That was an amazing Ramble On Rose. That show was ridiculously good. And it became a well circulated audience tape.
- [63:06]
B
We'll Let Jim Wise's audience tape do the duty for the song's big line that adorned John Huntley and Christina Schreiber's poster.
- [63:16]
A
Just like New York City, just like Jericho.
- [63:33]
B
And while mostly we're going to be playing music from the new in and out of the Garden box set, we'll stick with Jim's audience tape through the chorus so you can get a sense of the volume with which people were singing along with the band in the Garden.
- [64:11]
A
Almost everything was identical, that tour. Same mics, same position, just different city. And that's. It wasn't till later on that I realized how good those particular shows were. And my tapes came out good. And they were some of the first to get circulated, but not honestly the best recordings that were made that night or either of those two nights that would have been at the soundboard, but the soundboard then before pre taper section. I swear, it was just a bit. It had. It was a better spot. It seemed like there was no. There was no, like, lighting board behind the soundboard. So it was a good spot. I mean, it really depended on the acoustics of the venue. There were still people that wanted to dance and wanted to move, and the inter concourse was the place for that.
- [65:13]
B
The inter concourse was an open pathway that ran around the entire inside of the venue so you could walk around the band while they played. One of the Garden's most distinct features, promoter John Scher.
- [65:25]
A
A lot of the great dancing was going on out there.
- [65:28]
B
Chris Goodspace.
- [65:30]
A
Watching people try to walk a straight line through a bunch of crazy dancers just can't do it. You're gonna bounce off somebody instead of just kind of wiggling yourself through.
- [65:38]
B
It was like an infinite MC Escher loop of heads filtering by. Incredible. For people watching from a distance or whether in the thick of it, unfortunately, between 2011 and 2013, the venue's owners gutted the arena, crammed the seats closer to one another, added a pair of view and sound obstructing bridges over the venue floor, removed the inner concourse, and in this reporter's opinion, kind of totally destroyed the place's vibe for concerts. So long Intercourse, we stayed reserved seats.
- [66:08]
A
Because we felt that it was. It was just more controllable.
- [66:15]
B
All right?
- [66:16]
A
People wanted to get up out of their seat and dance, fine. But they had someplace to go back. Madison Square Garden is a horrible venue for intimacy, and they really, how should we say, lock things down. So you're in sections and to try.
- [66:30]
B
To get to other sections.
- [66:32]
A
Of course, the hallways are packed with people but great thing about some deadheads is that they know how to make themselves invisible. It's all a matter of distraction. You see the guard talking to somebody, some cute girl, or you send over one of your friends to talk to the guard. Next thing you know, boom. You slide right through like you're invisible. It was always a challenge. Security was tough. If you tried to get on the floor and you didn't have floor seats, they would throw you out for that. But they were not enforcing, you know, seating sections. And you could get around scooching from section to section, wherever you were, and. And it was also possible to, you know, get out of the nosebleeds and sneak into the lower rungs.
- [67:26]
B
This story from Charlie Miller doesn't take place at this show. Who will place it here anyway?
- [67:31]
A
I was just a young kid. I was really little. These big, wide eyes, just so amazed by everything. I was just kind of wandering. And I got to the floor of 3981. No, no, no. It was actually NASA 5881. And I was tripping. And I got down to the floor at Sepbreak and they asked me for my ticket stub. And I opened my hand and there was two blotters in there. And the guy said, okay, it's going through.
- [67:55]
B
That particular strategy might not work these days, but it could. Section hopping is even more of a challenge since the garden's early 21st century vibe crushing. But rest assured, heads have still figured out how to get exactly where they want to inside Madison Square Garden. But the main event was still on the stage. David Lemieux.
- [68:15]
A
They haven't started integrating the new songs. There are older songs, thanks largely to that acoustic stuff they brought back into the repertoire. Bob menken, spring of 81 Radio City was fresh in everybody's mind. That was only, like, six months earlier. Birdsong and Deep Ellen Blues started coming in, like some of the songs that had been part of the Warfield show, specifically acoustic. A few of them made their way into the set list electrically, which was cool.
- [68:43]
B
Here's Garcia talking to David Ganz the next month.
- [68:46]
A
All of that acoustic stuff that we did, and it's on the acoustic double set we were doing in those shows and stuff, is really the result of.
- [68:54]
B
About three afternoons of rehearsal. Some of those songs we hadn't done.
- [68:57]
A
For a long time, and Brent had never done Birdsong and all those. And that means the harmonies and everything.
- [69:03]
B
You know, the whole. Working out the whole arrangement to them and everything.
- [69:06]
A
And, you know, I mean, really, we spent such a small amount of time preparing for that, and it yielded an enormous amount of results. You know, so it's like that. I don't know whether that's illustrative, but what I'm trying to point out is that.
- [69:23]
B
Rehearsal time for the Grateful Dead.
- [69:26]
A
At this point is the thing that.
- [69:27]
B
We need most to be able to get.
- [69:31]
A
To be able to mine our own wealth, in a way, and to be able to get at the things that we're capable of.
- [69:37]
B
The first set on the First Night at the Garden, included fresh re electrified versions of both Deep Ellen Blues and Birdsong. Deep Ellen Blues was one of the most durable tunes in Jerry Garcia's repertoire. He probably learned it from the Sheldon Brothers. Here's Jerry singing it with his then wife Sarah on May 4, 1963, at the top of the tangent in Palo Alto. Now on the before the Dead box set.
- [70:18]
A
Well, once I knew a preacher preach the Bible through the and true well, it went down too deep alone now his preaching days are true oh, sweet mama, your daddy's got them deep alum blue oh, screen mama, your daddy's got.
- [70:34]
B
Them deep alum blue it became a jumpy electric number for the early Dead, a little more arranged than it would become. Here's a bit from the Matrix, December 1, 1966.
- [70:51]
A
Deep in the Blue, and.
- [71:08]
B
Then to an acoustic arrangement in 1970, which is how it also sounded in 1980 when they recorded the canonical Dead version for Reckoning. And then nearly as soon as the acoustic instruments were away, it started popping back up in the electric sets, but not often. And it wouldn't stay in the Dead's repertoire for long. The one at the garden in 1981 is only the second known electric version since 1966.
- [71:59]
A
Oh, sweet mama, your daddy's got that deep belle oh, sweet mama, your daddy's got empty.
- [72:16]
B
As many learned heads have observed, and which I'll attribute, as usual to deadcast pal Christian Crumlish, is that for much of the 1980s, Dark Star was hiding out in Birdsong, the most guaranteed home for delicate celestial jams. Sean o' Donnell was at the show as a young slacker, but has since become an excellent musicologist and Dead scholar. You may remember him from our Cumberland Blues episode and elsewhere. I love what he has to say about Birdsong, and we're gonna let him get a little musicological.
- [73:12]
A
It always was like a chance to have second set action in the first set. Like I was all about that kind of exploration. It's got the same openness as Darkstar. Once it gets going, it's always more grounded than Darkstar because you have more substantial landmarks. You arrive and you stay in a song bit for a longer part. And to my mind, the era that they were written has an impact too. Post the 70 albums to get Birdsong together. Whereas, I mean, that's a big dividing line for me. And like what they were doing or how they were composing. And then the text leans cosmic and Dark Star and less cosmic, more grounded in Birdsong, ironically. But where they're really similar is they're both basically one chord jams when they get going to the exploratory part. Darkstar is an A Mixolydian jam, but leans heavily to E. Dorian. Birdsong is an E Mixolydian jam that leans to B. Dorian at times. This passage captures some of that Darkstar tonal ambiguity. In the 81 MSG bird song, Jerry's repeating a high B minor 7 arpeggio with the G sharp passing tone. And that reversal, since G sharp is really part of the tonic chord, momentarily centers our attention on B minor instead of E major. This bit could easily be a transposition of a passage from Dark Star, where it would have been an E minor 7 arpeggio. The musical payoff here is how the subsequent scale passages, after a few belligerent bends, climax on a G sharp that tastefully feeds back, bringing Jerry home to the real tonic, E. I had a friend, Gordy Jano, he went to Ithaca College with me, and he called that the deep. We called that the Deep Beat Bird set because at the. Towards the end of the first set, they did deep Ellen Beat it on down the Line Bird song. So he. He dubs it short the Deep Deep Bird set. They closed the first set with Minglewood because I didn't think that could be a set closer. But I do remember they rocked it fucking hard. And there was a big, weird Brent solo in there, too. Minglewood was always fun, but it seemed really big that night.
- [76:59]
B
John Cher kept busy during the shows.
- [77:01]
A
I'd be running around a lot. I'd go all over the arena, listen to a song or two, because inevitably somebody would ask me, how'd it sound up there? And I didn't want to lie. I said, well, you know, I was there for a couple songs and sounded great. And then of course, with my staff, had great staff. We had to deal with the venue and the expenses and the merch deal. And so I kept very busy.
- [77:26]
B
Backstage, of course, was pretty wild.
- [77:28]
A
Yeah, it was insane. Once we started playing the Garden, it was the hottest ticket in town. So Even people that you know, and even people that weren't really Die Hard Deadheads, you know, still wanted to come. Everybody that worked for the Dead, band members and the crew sort of had equal votes. All right, so in actuality, that wasn't true. But Parish, Kid, those guys, they flaunted it. So there were a lot of guests. We tried very hard to give guests seats so that they weren't all on the stage or backstage. But they had a lot of friends.
- [78:10]
B
The roadies did actually wield a lot of power in 1981.
- [78:14]
A
Well, they're there when we have our business meetings and stuff. We're dragging them through life. We're all working on the same thing.
- [78:21]
B
Why should we treat each other any differently? Not only did the Deads roadies attend business meetings, but according to meeting minutes from the early 80s, they sometimes actually chaired business meetings. In the case of Kid Candelario, some of the band's friends in New York included the East Village's notorious Hell's Angels. When the Dead had played at The Palladium on 14th street, formerly the Academy of Music, just a dozen blocks from the Angels clubhouse, the Angels had just ridden their bikes directly into the venue.
- [78:48]
A
Jerry had a relationship with him. Mickey had a relationship with him. Everybody had a little bit of a relationship. And the crew, especially Steve Parish. I had a very close relationship with him. And usually once a year, Jerry would play a benefit for them out on a boat in Hudson. We'd go out. I don't. 500 people or whatever. And I was always told by Jerry, work something out with Sandy. And we did. Sandy Alexander, that was the head of the New York chapter. Mostly a reasonable guy. I didn't make any money at it, which was fine. And so we kept peace in the Valley. They were there, they came. Their names were left on the guest list and backstage passes, but never hundred of them or 50 of them, maybe a dozen of them. I was never backstage at the Fillmore, so I can't speak to that. But even at the Capitol in Passaic, that they played a couple of times. I mean, they were there, but no huge presence, and they were pretty respectful. They'd call, said, we're coming. Can you make room for our bikes?
- [79:57]
B
And onto the second set before they.
- [80:00]
A
Started to play China Cat, there were a bunch of people up in the nosebleeds above me, behind the stage or to the side of the stage maybe, who were screaming for China Cat loud enough and sustained enough so that they claimed afterwards that they had caused the Dead to play it.
- [80:41]
B
Sean o'. DONNELL.
- [80:42]
A
The opening of China is just bonkers compared to. It really stood out as like, this is. This is weird and not in a bad way. Brent is quacking away with the envelope was really a strange moment. It doesn't immediately follow, but I feel like the weirdness set up. What then becomes like a kind of longer segue. And so more time in that magic zone between China and Ryder on that one. The jam out of China Cat, right, is before they get to I know you, Ryder is unbelievably great. And it went on forever. It seemed like Jerry just wanted to stay there. And so he just kept adding these runs and elongating his phrases and adding more measures to the solo. And everybody's. Everybody's just waiting to see how long is it going to go on. It became this sort of suspended animation here where he just keeps doing these unbelievable, incredible runs. And Phil is right there with him. I remember the two of them kind of bounding up to the stars.
- [83:13]
B
We haven't really spoken much about the Dead's jamming in the 80s on the Dead cast in the late 60s, they'd first started to create sweets out of their songs, connecting them together either with jams like China Cat, Sunflower, I know you, Rider, or with simple intentionality like the pregnant pause between Darkstar and St. Stephen. Or perhaps a drum break like between Truckin and the Other one. When the band returned from their year and a half road hiatus in 1976, they used these tools to evolve a structure that their shows would follow for the rest of their career, which cemented by 1978, at the heart of nearly every second set was a suite following a psychedelic arc, usually alternating between songs led by Jerry Garcia and songs led by Bob Weir. The jams getting deeper and weirder before a drum break. Freeform and episodic space jams. And as the night's journey headed homewards, a quiet Garcia song and some rockin faiths by Weir. The Dead lived to break their own rules, of course, but on March 9, it followed that course, beginning with Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow's estimated profit. It's given its very late 70s, early 80s color by Garcia's Mutron pedal and Brett Midland's twinkling Dyna Rhodes keyboard.
- [84:39]
A
California, a prophet on the burning shore. California now knocking on the golden door. Like an angel standing in the shadow light Rising up to paradise. You know I'm gonna shine, you're gonna sleep. You would not believe it. The estimated was really good and the jam out of it was spacey and transporting. And it slowed down. The band leaves the fractured reggae groove behind and they go into this gently swinging groove. And Jerry's doing these kind of quasi bop licks. Spiraling up Sam suddenly he's playing some very calming arpeggios. You know, we're coming out of it. It sounds like the beginning of the old tune, Mr. Sandman.
- [86:46]
B
Totally.
- [86:55]
A
Mr. Simon.
- [86:58]
B
By the Chordettes.
- [86:59]
A
And then it's the happy sound of Uncle John's band and I'm up and dancing.
- [87:37]
B
I love hearing Uncle John's band in the second set jam slot where it feels as connected to its roots as a psychedelic jam as it does to the riverside folk music it conjures. And then, of course.
- [87:58]
A
Drum solos. You feel like you're inside a drum because it looks slightly oval, I guess it wasn't perfectly round, but because there's no support columns, it feels open. When the drumming gets crazy, it feels like the whole place is playing along and then coming down into a super delicate cell of blue where everybody's like holding their breath after having been screaming their lungs out.
- [89:15]
B
There was some rock and roll and then out onto 7th or 8th Avenue in the chaos of Midtown Manhattan in 1981.
- [89:21]
A
I do remember kind of being outside. You hit the streets, you got to be cool. You got to keep your wits about you. There's all these people traipsing across the west side. And I think Manhattan being dangerous is over, especially right now. We happen to be in a moment in history right now when people are pretending like New York City is much more dangerous than it really is. I never had an issue. I can remember getting a little freaked out sometimes.
- [89:51]
B
Frank Boesch and his friends had parked with the taxicabs under the marquee in front of the garden on 7th Avenue.
- [89:57]
A
We went inside, had a blast and stumbled out. And I don't know how it happened, but his car was still sitting there in front of the Garden amongst all the cabs underneath the marquee. It was truly a miracle that it wasn't towed away. But we got in his car and drove off. And literally that's the first night all of us got on the bus.
- [90:20]
B
Chris Goodspace.
- [90:21]
A
We were walking the streets at like 2 in the morning after the show. And it's a small street and we come from a building and they've got military guards outside. And you can see everybody inside all dressed to the tees and dancing and military uniforms. And all of a sudden there's this thunder coming down the street and it's two hells Angels, man, those guards put those guns up really fast, and the sound just reverberated through the canyon of the building. That was one of my memorable nights after Bob Minkin. New York City was still dangerous in 81. They still had, like, multiple thousands of murders a year. And the neighborhoods that are nice today were definitely not nice then. So just taking the subway from my neighborhood to the Garden was. Even at night, coming home was like a precarious situation.
- [91:14]
B
Jay Blakesburg.
- [91:15]
A
March 9 and March 10, those were my 99th and 100th Grateful Dead concerts. For my 100th Grateful Dead concert, I did what every good suburban New Jersey hippie would do, and I would drop 10 hits of acid because I wanted to celebrate. And what I failed to think about was that I was in New York City in this giant venue, and I would be so high that I actually wouldn't be able to make out the human figures that were in front of me. So I basically was. I was still able to function as a human being, but it was not easy.
- [91:46]
B
Jay's gonna have a blurry night. We'll get back to him. Not entirely sure what's the happening here, but Garcia and Weir's amps disappear, and a pretty impressive Gabong emerges from somebody's reverb tank. Some people recall it as falling cymbals, but the sound is almost certainly amplifier made. Anybody know that loud noise in the.
- [92:53]
A
Beginning of the first song? That wasn't a mistake. That was art.
- [92:55]
B
Jerry Garcia, for one, really loved the second night at the Garden. Two months later, he told Mary Campbell from the Associated Press, we recently did two nights at Madison Square Garden, and the second night we played extremely together music for a place that big. The music had a lot of motion and beauty to it, a lot of improvisation. Sean o' Donnell went back for a second night.
- [93:16]
A
Listening back, the energy isn't quite as high, but it did not feel that way in person. It felt like this was a continuation of the prior, like there was no gap. It was sort of like you were still in the same, or I was still in the same place.
- [93:35]
B
Dario Andozo saw his first Dead show at the garden in spring 1981, but it was kind of an accident. He and his friend Danny were art school students headed home for the day.
- [93:45]
A
We were on our way home back to Staten island. Walking along the Garden, we were like punk rockers. Leather jackets, chains and spike hair. Punk buttons around the paddle of the jacket. We were approached by a scalper. We had no plan of going to a concert. We didn't Know much of the music or, you know, I mean, the Grateful Dead, we know that they were cool bands. So he was desperately trying to sell his tickets because the concert has long been started. It was, I believe it was already on the second set. So we walked in and we sat in the nosebleed section. But the whole scene there was like nothing we have experienced before. There's a dragon with matches that's a loose on the town Take a whole pail of water Just a cool day Fire Fire on the mountain Fire that was a big transformation. And most of the songs we heard were like, you know, new to us, but didn't matter at that time because it took us to another dimension that we've never been before. But, you know, after that concert, that was the end of our punk days. We were transformed. It.
- [95:48]
B
If Dead shows were structured to go out into the psychedelic zones, they were also structured to come back. Here's Garcia speaking with David Ganz and Blair Jackson in April 1981.
- [95:58]
A
We end up closing the door, just like we open up the door, you know what I mean?
- [96:03]
B
I mean, in that sense, we create that framework. Let's observe that moment from March 10, 1981. And while we're at it, please welcome back Jay Blakesburg.
- [96:41]
A
But we dosed early enough, so by the time you get to the second set on. On 3, 1081, which I think coming out of drums is maybe the wheel, China Doll Trucking, really, even by the beginning of the second set, you're past the point where you're full on major peaking. And you can actually deal with a little bit a reality, and you actually can see things in front of you and see humans and dance with humans and be in that moment. But it was probably not the smartest idea to take that much LSD at a single Grateful Dead concert. But I was 19 years old, and when you're 19 years old, you're not thinking things completely through all the time.
- [97:18]
B
But even if Jay wasn't quite thinking it through all the time, Robert Hunter may have been. If you were a tour head, you might start to see patterns. Charlie Miller.
- [97:37]
A
They started Uncle John's band at March 7, right, in Maryland. And then they played it the next show, which is March 9th at the Garden. But on March 9th, they teased the Wheel, and then they played at March 10th. Then on March 10th, they stayed. They played Smokestack Lightning out of Truck. And so everybody I knew was like, we have to go to Boston because they're going to bust out Smokestack Lightning.
- [98:14]
B
The Smokestack Lightning Bust out would have to wait a few more years. The encore included a kind of ridiculous cover that had come into their repertoire in the previous fall in a fit of let's call it inspiration.
- [98:45]
A
I Can't get.
- [98:58]
B
In November of that year, Bob Weir told David Ganz, satisfaction came up one night, one of those little clouds of madness that drifted across the stage. We have never done that one remotely the same way. And obviously we've never, ever rehearsed the song. There are a number of songs that we've never rehearsed, but that one's the prototypical song that rehearsal would ruin.
- [99:20]
A
When I drive down to my TV When a man comes on a Jetliff Just how white my shirt should be when he can't be a man he doesn't smoke Same cigarette.
- [99:38]
B
I mean, death, no happens all the time when I drive my TV Are we not men? One of my favorite devolved parts of the Dead's unrehearsed version of Satisfaction, and one that disappeared from their arrangement not too long thereafter, is the drum break. Or in the Dead's case, the drummer break. Jay Blakesburg.
- [100:08]
A
I did not go to the Boston Garden. I think I ended it there. And I don't remember why, but probably because I had done Tenants of Acid the night before and probably couldn't travel. But, you know, everything really changed for me. Exactly a month later, on April. April 11, 1981, I went to pick up a package that BT had sent me from San Francisco, and the fuzz were waiting for me. And they grabbed me and threw me against my car. And just like in the movies, they said, you're under arrest, motherfucker. And everything came crashing down. And so I was not able to go to any more shows for a little bit. I was grounded, to say the least.
- [100:45]
B
And the wheel continued to turn.
- [100:47]
A
And we quickly became aware of their war on drugs, their failed war on drugs. We quickly became aware of the evil Nancy Reagan and the evil Ronald Reagan and his cronies. And there were a lot of people that got arrested a year, two years, three years after me that spent 20 years in prison and had their lives taken away from them. And I was fortunate. I got sentenced to five years in prison, and I ended up only spending eight months in jail. And so if I had gotten one of those mandatory minimum sentences, I would not be sitting here talking to you. I would not be. Have taken what I. I would not have created the body of work that I created. And that freaks me out a little bit. Turned by the grace of God every time that Wheel turn round Bound to cover just a little more ground Bound to cover just a little more ground when I was 18, 19, and we'd see these older deadheads that were 50 or 60 years old at that time, we'd be like, whoa, man, they're so old, you know. Wow. They're like such old grizzled hippies. I bet you they were at Woodstock, you know, and now, like, we're those people, right? But we've been doing it consistently for 40 years. None of us stopped. None of us got off the bus. Over the last. Over this last summer, summer 2022, there was a whole tribe of younger kids that did the entire Dead and Co tour. And this is their Summer of love. I know. You know, and I met a lot of them and I photographed them, and I become friends with some of them. And it's an incredible group of people that are 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25 years old. They're living in their vehicles. They're traveling in caravans. You know, Emma and Jen and Deanna and Jeremiah and Noah and all these incredible young humans that they. They're the last try the Lost tribe and the last tribe. But they're not, because it'll be somebody following them. But in 20 years, they'll think about this. But the difference is, is they got all of it documented on their phones, right? And if they can keep that. That data safe, in 20 years, they can look back when they're 45 years old and be like, holy shit, we did that entire 2022 tour, and we had no money and gas was $6 a gallon, right? And we sold jewelry or grilled cheese or food or T shirts or stickers at every show on Shakedown Street. And we did every show, and we did not miss one show. And we kept that spirit alive.
- [103:34]
B
A Decade later, in 1991, Eric Pooley interviewed Jerry Garcia for New York magazine. And naturally, they got to talking about the dead, New York and the Garden. Unfortunately, the tape itself is mia, but we've got Eric here to read from his Raw transcript.
- [103:50]
A
I was a crime, politics and urban affairs reporter for New York magazine, and I'm spending all my time kind of marinating in the dark side of the city. So I really need that Jerry stuff in a much deeper way than I did when I was following the band from College Park, Maryland, to New York City to catch that show. Obviously, it's a big deal for me to interview Garcia. He was just like you dream that Jerry Garcia would be. He's ready to talk about anything. And he was listening carefully. When I asked him, you're going to be in Manhattan for two weeks, do you go out? And he's like, sure, I go out. I love New York. I wish I had an excuse to be there for some length of time and get into it, because the place is happening. He said, I mean, it's New York. There's only one New York in the whole world, and that's it. There's no place like it. Playing the Garden is a big juice. Playing Manhattan is different than playing Long island or Brendan Byrne. The Garden has gotten sort of institutionalized for us, and I look forward to it. And I said, well, we do, too. You know, there's always some race riot or murder spree. He says, some New York bummer. I'm like, right? And for a lot of us New York adults, taking time out for a Dead show or popping in a bootleg after a dismal day can be a lifesaver. And Jerry says the good times get harder to come by. The Grateful Dead experience and Deadheads have made it this as much as we have. We're just around. It's kind of like an alternative to two weeks at the beach. It's a little vacation that you can have, sort of blow the tubes out and feel good about people for a few moments. And I say, yeah, be in an environment where nobody wishes you harm. He laughs and says, yeah, that's really something in New York, but. But New York also has great heart. It's an amazing place on every level. Some powerful bummers and some amazing great shit. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. David Lemieux, John Sher, Jay Blakesburg, Bob Minkin, Charlie Miller, Christina Schreiber, John Huntley, Jim Wise, Chris Goodspace, Eric Pooley, Sean o', Donnell, Marty Meyer and Frank Bosch. Extra special thanks to friends David Gans and Blair Jackson for contributing audio from their interview archive. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to like 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.