30 Days of Dead
It's a Dead Head's most wonderful time of the year! Welcome to another 30 days of unreleased Grateful Dead tracks from the vault, one for every day of the month, selected by archivist and producer David Lemieux. The tracks are yours, 100% free gua-ran-teed, but the real fun is taking part in the challenge for the chance to win some sweet swag from the Dead.
Those of you who know what to do, feel free to skip right on ahead. For those of you who need a refresher, here's the drill:
You know your Ables from your Bakers from your C's, but can your finely tuned ears differentiate the cosmic "comeback" tour from a spacey 70s show? Each day we'll post a song from one of the Dead's coveted shows. Will it be from that magical night at Madison Square Garden in '93 or from way back when they were just starting to warm it up at Winterland? Is that Pigpen's harmonica we hear? Brent on keys? If you think you know, lob your answer in and you just might find yourself taking home our daily prize of a 2025 Grateful Dead wall calendar or the grand prize – a copy of limited, numbered, FRIEND OF THE DEVILS: APRIL '78 boxed set!
I'm stumped too. Proper Deadhead deduction leads me to a specific period in time when the guitar solo hadn't quite been codified. There are a couple of close calls in the archive, but nothing that really clicks. I too will be making a guess tonight.
I have the year and the month in mind, given that this version lacks an instrument heard in versions before, and that the Jerry guitar solo at the beginning of the instrumental break disappeared by the following month. However, none of the solos are just exactly perfect (focusing on the riff when the instrumental version of the chorus starts and haven’t had that a-ha! moment).
Great clue! After sniffing around for an hour, I found it in 30 seconds. I looked at this show but was missing something...
Got it. My clue is you have to go to the guitar solo. Unique to it's time period. That helps narrow it down....
Based on the available information, I have narrowed the possible list down to about seven shows. I have a theory about which one it is and if I can't find out anything more I'm going to take a stab in the dark and see what happens.