Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast

Season 6, Episode 4

IN AND OUT OF THE GARDEN: Madison Square Garden, 3/81

Archival interviews:

-  Jerry Garcia, by David Gans & Blair Jackson, Conversations with the Dead, 4/28/81.

-  Jerry Garcia, by David Gans & Blair Jackson, Conversations with the Dead, 6/11/81.

-  Jerry Garcia, by Ray White, WLIR, 1/11/79.

-  Bill Graham, press conference, Fillmore East, 4/28/71.

-  Ronald Reagan, Cow Palace, 5/12/66.

JESSE: 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 stopped making studio albums after 1980’s 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.

AUDIO: “The Wheel” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (0:45-1:01) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Archivist and Grateful Dead legacy manager David Lemieux.

DAVID LEMIEUX: We've started in the last few years releasing things [that are] thematically held together by a region, Pacific Northwest [‘73-’74 ]; a city, St. Louis, which was over two different venues, the Fox and the Kiel. 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.

AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (1:11-1:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: You’re almost 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.

DAVID LEMIEUX: It 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. They didn't play there in ‘80, but then when they returned in ‘81, that's when we figured it was a nice standalone, concise, three-year run of shows. They didn't go there in ‘84, ‘85, 86; they returned in ‘87. It just seemed to hold together very well. So from there, conceptually… 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.

JESSE: 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 Gans and Blair Jackson interviewed Jerry Garcia back home in California, included in the cornerstone book Conversations with the Dead. We’ll be drawing from this throughout today’s episode. Thanks, David.

JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: I keep saying in interviews and stuff — people say, “Aren’t you surprised you’ve been together sixteen years?” and I keep saying, “It’s like we’re just getting started.” There’s so much that we haven’t even done with the band in its present incarnation, places that we’ve already touched into in various other forms, imperfectly. In our past incarnations, we’ve had imperfect versions of things we were trying to do, which we’ll be able to do so much nicer with the band the way it presently is constituted.

Dead ‘81

JESSE: 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 Gans and Blair Jackson in June 1981 about his impressions of Manhattan.

JERRY GARCIA [6/11/81]: When you go to New York City, you see a place that’s basically not being governed, and it runs pretty well. New York City… it’s amazing to me that there aren’t a million murders on every block every day. When you’re there, you have this feeling of out-of-controlness which is unreal, but it somehow works. All those people, somehow, are able to exist as governments of one, and do business, do their stuff and wander around, play their games, however on their own terms, whatever. It just seems to me that consciousness wants that to happen — that’s where we’re trying to get to, something along those lines. I just don’t see what’s wrong with it. I can’t figure out where all that stuff came from.

JESSE: 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 Christgau 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 Scher 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.

JOHN SCHER: I think there was a lot of truth to it. Back in the ‘70s, there really wasn't an arena culture. Some acts played, but mostly it was theaters. We had the Capitol Theatre, in Jersey. The most important venue was the Fillmore East in New York.

JESSE: Here’s how Fillmore East promoter Bill Graham put it in 1971.

BILL GRAHAM [4/28/71]: The biggest fucking ripoff in the city. You can't hear — all you hear is… [makes mumbling noises]. The Garden should be just the chariot races and roller derby and idiot classes. That's what it's for. And boxing, but not for some acoustic guitar player.

JESSE: When the band returned from their road hiatus in early 1976, John Scher helped them plan a tour with the express purpose of not getting sucked onto the arena circuit.

JOHN SCHER: They had called, said, “We'd like you to come out — we’d like to have a meeting with you.” They weren't playing at that point. I got on a plane. The 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, when we played some bigger places, including Roosevelt Stadium, we lost the intimacy with the audience.” That was the last tour before the break. So we all sat in Weir’s house and [they] said, “Any ideas, John?” I said, “Well, if you don't want to play arenas”— which, at that point, they hadn't, they had just played bigger outdoor places—”let's do multiple days in 15 theaters.” And we devised what became GD Tickets.

JESSE: In the spring of 1976, the Dead launched their first attempt at mail order tickets, with John Scher’s Monarch Entertainment working out the specifics. Scher—like Bill Graham—had a relationship with the band that often went beyond promoting shows.

JOHN SCHER: Nobody did anything close to the amount of shows that I did. Second place is Graham, and it's probably 50 to one. I was involved in almost all aspects of their career. There were other acts that we played a lot… we played a lot of Van Halen dates. 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. And, except for that one time, they didn't have an agent, except for Richard [Loren], who was called the agent but really was the manager.

JESSE: Richard Loren would depart the Dead world later in 1981, with John Scher more or less handling the band’s shows outside the Bay Area. Not only had Scher helped book the comeback tour in ‘76 and organize 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 a negotiator when the band signed with Clive Davis’s Arista Records. In the summer of 1977, Scher put on the first mega-sized outdoor Dead show since Watkins Glen four years earlier.

JOHN SCHER: The biggest show we did with him was in Englishtown, which was enormous. And I think to this day, it is the biggest concert event in the history of New Jersey.

JESSE: 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 Giants Stadium. John Scher wasn’t the Dead’s manager, but he was a trusted advisor.

JOHN SCHER: I probably talked Jerry in those days three or 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 Weir, good communication with Mickey — virtually no communication with Lesh, or Kreutzmann. We had a lot of dialogue, that's the one thing. We had a lot of dialogue on every move that we made. I basically said to them, “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 most of their career, a brilliant lighting designer named Candace Brightman, who is as good as anybody ever in the world. So the lighting — nothing special, no lasers, but she was an artist and a magician. They'd stayed completely on top of sound and lights. 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 Dan Healy and a couple of other people were integrally 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.

JESSE: They were booked into the Garden for two nights, November 30th and December 1st, 1978, though had to postpone until just after the new year when Jerry got sick. But it turned out to be not the worst. Jerry Garcia described it to Ray White on WLIR on January 11th, 1979, just 4 days after the band’s Garden debut.

JERRY GARCIA [1/11/79]: We played the Felt Forum once, quite a long time ago, but never the Garden. Just because we’d always heard stories about it that were uniformly bad: ‘Don’t play there, it’s just awful.’ But for the kind of room that 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. On stage, the room doesn’t repeat or create a time confusion — it has a warm reverbrance.

JOHN SCHER: Once they did it, they loved it — because the feedback was enormous, nobody was complaining about the sound. Quite the contrary, it was as good as you can get. The Garden has said forever, The World's Greatest Arena — it is. 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 six 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 is going to do six nights?” Although that’s relatively commonplace now—I don’t know about six nights, but multiples—it wasn’t then. They held the record for many, many years of the most sold out shows at the Garden.

JESSE: After their Garden debut in early 1979, they returned again in September. For the Dead, the move to the Garden represented a fairly radical change in their business. 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.

AUDIO: “Dire Wolf” [Reckoning] (0:03-0:18) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Over eight nights at Radio City Music Hall, following 15 nights at the Fox-Warfield in San Francisco and 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 delved 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-dozen years.

AUDIO: “Feel Like a Stranger” [Dead Set] (4:45-5:05) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: 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.

DEAD FREAK #1 [10/29/80, Good Morning America]: Alright, my name’s [unintelligible], and I’m waiting here for Grateful Dead! I’ve been here, I’ve waited on line for three days for these tickets!

DEAD FREAK #2 [10/29/80, Good Morning America]: Tonight is my 75th concert.

DEAD FREAK #3 [10/29/80, Good Morning America]: The Dead care about their fans, and they play music that their fans like. They make everybody feel good.

DEAD FREAK #4 [10/29/80, Good Morning America]: I try to go to every concert they perform because they’re the best at what they do.

JESSE: They might’ve been a cult band, but they were entering a new phase. Archivist David Lemieux.

DAVID LEMIEUX: Radio City, which is 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. That was eight nights at an 8,000 seat place.

NYC ‘81

JESSE: 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 they collectively 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 Dead Heads in the New York tri-state area. Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods teemed with them.

You might know some of Bob Minkin’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. Bob Minkin got into the Dead as a teenager in the mid-’70s and, in 1981, he was a Brookynite Deadhead. Welcome to the Deadcast, Bob Minkin.

BOB MINKIN: I was living in Canarsie, Brooklyn, my parents’ house. My neighborhood was awash in drugs and Grateful Dead and Hot Tuna. We all felt like we were a bunch of desperados back then, because we're all dealing. In ‘81, I turned 22 years old, in June of ‘81. I was a rabid Dead Head. 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, until my girlfriend, who is now my wife, was like, “If we’re gonna stick together, you’re gonna probably have to do something else.” So the dealing went, the photos stayed. I was a graphic design major, so I worked doing that kind of stuff. But that didn't happen till later. I didn't have a career or anything at that point, so I was still dealing weed and selling photos and living in the underground economy. My neighborhood had a lot of Dead Heads, it was good that way. There were older kids, of course, who were like, “Eh, the Dead suck now — you should have seen them with Pigpen.” That factor. But I was like, yeah, that’s nice. There was also a strong Hot Tuna contingent. It's funny, the Dead — most people who liked the Dead loved Hot Tuna too, but not all people that liked Hot Tuna loved the Dead. [They] used to like to rag on the Dead.

JESSE: 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 Kippel of Brooklyn founded the Dead Relics Tape Club, which by late 1974 spawned Relix magazine, still in action today. Its first editor was taper Jerry Moore. Via the classified ads in Relix and good ol’ 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.

Tour ‘81

JESSE: Though lots of Deadheads had local scenes, the Dead were also a portal into a bigger world. Please welcome to the Deadcast, photographer Jay Blakesberg.

JAY BLAKESBERG: 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 Englishtown.

JESSE: 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 RetroBlakesberg, which has some beautiful images of the world Jay will be discussing today.

JAY BLAKESBERG: In the spring of ‘80, I met a guy at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey named BT, and he was a big acid dealer, acid manufacturer. He gave me 50 hits of acid, I gave ‘em to all my friends, and he basically said, “Hey, man, when I get back to San Francisco, if you want, I'd be happy to overnight you a few 1,000 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've ever heard. So I just gave him my father's address at home and he started overnighting me these packages of 2,000 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 Dead Heads 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. 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 the songs by Robert Hunter and saying: I gotta 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.” I was reading Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I read On the Road — we were into the literature, we were into the lyrics, and we were reading Relix magazine that was reporting on what was happening in the Haight. So, to me, that was the destination.

JESSE: More directly, the destination was Dead tour, which Jay hopped on in 1980.

JAY BLAKESBERG: It didn't take long before I met a whole host of Dead Heads in the spring of 1980 that were going on tour. This is a time where there was, what, 100 people that were really, actually following the Grateful Dead. We're talking 100 people that were doing that, that were in cars — there were 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. To me, the summer of ‘80 for me and my friends who were on tour with, we all call that our Summer of Love.

JESSE: And Jay means it.

JAY BLAKESBERG: 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. 500 500 hits here, 200 hits there, 1000 hits there. That was our market. By the time we were starting to sell all this LSD, we also truly believed that we were saving the planet. We believed that a psychedelic planet was a better planet. We believed that we were psychedelic outlaws and cowboys and cowgirls, and that we should be doing this. And no matter how naive that sounds—and it was naive—this is what [we felt]… we were kids.

JESSE: Naive, perhaps, but also maybe not wrong. But the times were starting to tilt.

JAY BLAKESBERG: When Reagan got elected president, we felt the shift. So he goes into the Oval Office in January of ‘81, and we felt it as Dead Heads. We were young, but we were politically aware.

JESSE: 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’s songlist was beginning to expand. Jon Hunt started seeing shows in ‘77 and really got on the Bus a few years later.

JON HUNT: 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 Band.”

JAY BLAKESBERG: That's when they were breaking out “China Doll,” “Comes a Time,” The Wheel,” and this was all stuff that was in regular rotation.

JON HUNT: They were doing “Comes a Time,” “High Time,” they really added a lot. After the acoustic tour, they really started incorporating a lot more material.

JESSE: It was almost always a good time to be a Dead Head, but this is the 1980-1981 edition.

JAY BLAKESBERG: 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 were we going to do? We wanted to stay on the West Coast until the tour started again, in Chicago at the Uptown Theatre. So I come back to San Francisco and in early February, I hang out in the Bay Area for a little bit, probably staying at BT’s apartment. Then eight or nine or 10 of us jump in a van, and we drive to Chicago. We had one of those old Ford vans that had no seats in the back, it was just open. We just had bodies laying like sardines, with everybody's backpacks all the way in the back. The most comfortable places to sit were in the driver's seat or the passenger seat. So I just drove most of the way — we just dropped acid and drove. We were channeling Neal Cassady, or so we thought. So we drove to those shows at the Uptown Theatre, with my buddy Dan Skinner in the passenger seat for most of it, and had great adventures: bumper stickers on the back of the van that said “Warning: I brake for hallucinations,” state troopers in Nebraska and Iowa following us through towns, shit like that.

JESSE: 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.

JIM WISE: 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 kind of born out of a desire to capture the music and hear it again. So I started meeting people, 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, that’s when I started being able to take masters home with me. The first deck that I bought was a Sony [TC-]D5. I got it at Crazy Eddie’s in Hartsdale, New York in April of 1980.

CRAZY EDDIE AD: Because Crazy Eddie can’t be beat, with prices so low he’s practically giving it all away. Crazy Eddie: his prices are… insane!

JIM WISE: And I think I paid like 480 bucks, which was a lot of money back then for an 18-year old kid. I think I was running… at that time, I was running Sony ECM 280s, getting patches mainly from Sennheiser 421s, [Nakamichi] 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 my own stand and the mics. It really depends, it 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. 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, 5/8/80, I befriended a guy named Jeff Hellman. He was friends with Dan Healy, he had permission to run a stand at the soundboard and he was running Nak 700s with shotguns. 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, in that area, but I would go all up and down the East Coast.

JESSE: 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 taper friends.

JIM WISE: Some tours, it was like it wasn't an issue; in some tours, it was strictly forbidden. There were these notorious “no recording” posters that they would put on the front doors, just to let you know that 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 to get your gear in to make the tape. The deck itself was pretty small — I used to put it behind my back and wrap mic cords around my legs and so on and so forth. It really depended on 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.

JESSE: 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.

JIM WISE: 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. I had some people that 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. It only took a couple of 24 hours of doing that, you could amass a lot of recordings.

JESSE: I laugh at the phrase “a couple of 24 hours” but only because I feel seen.

JIM WISE: There was a core set of guys that were older than me, that had started out earlier on. There were about five or six of them: Barry Glassberg, Steve Rolfe, Eddie Claridge, Bob Menke — Dick Latvala was number one. These guys were like some of the earliest taper collector dudes. 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 and so forth. We've been pretty close together. But most importantly, he was actually friends with Dan Healy, so we got a lot of privileges. There were 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. So that's why a lot of times I was able to make tapes under better conditions than a lot of other people.

JESSE: 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 Minkin began to find other ways to channel their energies around the band.

BOB MINKIN: I was kind of helping support my habit of Dead shows by selling my photos outside. So I would be basically selling my photos outside of most of the shows. The famous question I get when I have photos are out there: “Are these from tonight?” “Yep, I have a dark room in my van there and I whipped them up… I left the show early.” It's amazing how many people asked me that question. “Yes, I am magic.” [laughs] Usually I pause and not say anything and their friend they were standing would smack ‘em and go, “You idiot! How could these be from tonight!” But it was great because I met a lot of people that way. It was fun, just interacting with people, and came about with 50 bucks. 50 bucks carried a lot of weight back then.

JESSE: Jay Blakesberg had done the same thing.

JAY BLAKESBERG: I had already started taking pictures of the Grateful Dead in 1978. I photographed the Meadowlands, which was the first Dead show I photographed, September of ‘78. I was already taking photos and definitely interested in photography, and really was taking pictures to make 8 x 10s thumbtacked in my bedroom wall. And eventually, I started selling 8 x 10s in the parking lot of Dead shows for $1 or $2 apiece to buy tickets that were $10 at the time. I'd come back with $100 in my pocket from selling 8 x 10s and I thought I was rich.

JESSE: 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.

JAY BLAKESBERG: 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. 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 were 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. Obviously, the hippie movement never died.

JESSE: In the first two episodes of this Deadcast 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.

JAY BLAKESBERG: There absolutely was a marketplace. But it's not like people had blankets set up on the sidewalk and folding tables and pop up tents. None of that happened. 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 finger, to sell for $15 to buy a ticket for that show. It was super low-key, small scale. Even like the veggie burrito thing and the grilled cheese sandwich thing — none of that started until way later. People weren't on tour trying to sell food in the parking lot.

JESSE: Fan-made t-shirts had been popping up since at least 1971, but were starting to come into their own as an art form. Jon Hunt.

JON HUNT: There wasn't Shakedown Street. You had people like Phil Brown, Mikio [Kennedy], Ed Donahue, those are some of the tie dye t-shirt artists that were selling. They were really good tie dye artists. So the art scene was small, you had people that sold jewelry, 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 they would make little small circles of them and make buttons. Those were fun to buy.

JAY BLAKESBERG: The most famous of the t-shirt artists at that time was Ed Donahue. I met Ed in ‘79, and in ‘80 we traveled together — we drove from Boulder to Portland to Seattle to Spokane together in a van, him and his wife, Linda. Ed was the first guy in the parking lot selling Grateful Dead related shirts that had no Grateful Dead symbols on them. Nowadays, his work, if you can find those vintage shirts in mint condition, they're thousands and thousands of dollars. Ed was out there selling t-shirts, and there were people out there. But people selling stickers, that was just starting to happen.

BOB MINKIN: 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, 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 you can demonstrate to stoned people how the sticker is on the inside.

JAY BLAKESBERG: People were selling bumper stickers — I'm talking about window stickers and decals, the technology was catching up. I met a guy at Red Rocks in ‘79 that was selling paper bumper stickers that said “Red Rocks” on them — hand drawn, Grateful Dead. It was 50 cents apiece, a quarter apiece, $1 apiece, whatever it was — people are 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.

JESSE: Of course, 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. Shaugn O’Donnell.

SHAUGN 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. 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 and subversive, as much as my 17-year old self could understand that concept. 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 and on crutches was perfectly fine at the opener with a bag of shrooms. Was Ronnie himself bumming me out? I'm sure of it.

RONALD REAGAN [5/12/66]: [weirdness increasing] Three rock and roll bands were at the center of the gymnasium, playing simultaneously all during the dance. And all during the dance, movies were shown 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 color liquid 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 twisting and gyrating in provocative and sensual fashion.

JESSE: Jon Hunt and Christina Schreiber noticed a space in the market.

JON HUNT: All the artwork that was out there, the famous posters of the 60s—the Rick Griffins and the Kelley and Mouse, et cetera—that kind of died, and you didn't see that. So we came up with the idea: let's resurrect the Grateful Dead poster thing.

CHRISTINA SCHREIBER: Jon 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 beaders, and I knew that I couldn't make better stuff than them. But it didn't seem like anybody had posters.

JESSE: 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.

JON HUNT: The rooster is actually a tribute to my grandfather, Gordon Smith, who was a caricaturist. So 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 did all the roses. It was really a great collaboration of both our talents.

CHRISTINA SCHREIBER: The inspiration for the posters was when we moved out to California, from back east — I was in sixth grade, I remember I didn't know too many people. My mom and I went to the mall and I got these coloring posters that had these sort of trippy designs, and you’d do the coloring with felt tip pen — 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.

JESSE: There had 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.

JON HUNT: We headed out to Chicago and we just had the Chicago poster. So we sold the posters, they were sold for $3 apiece.

JESSE: Though they also designed posters for Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden, those weren’t actually for sale until after the shows themselves.

CHRISTINA SCHREIBER: 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.

JON HUNT: We got a lot of encouragement from the other artists that were established artists, like Ed Donahue and Phil Brown and Mikio.

JESSE: 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.

JON HUNT: Stanley Theater is Casey Jones driving the train. The Utica Memorial is grandma and grandpa skeletons sitting by the fireplace. The Cleveland one is music notes going down a road and it's “Beat It On Down the Line.” The artwork is sensational on those three.

JESSE: Even so, they went on the whole tour in February and March, even without the planned posters.

CHRISTINA SCHREIBER: Jon and I rented a car for that. Jon was more organized than me; I would just hitchhike wherever I went. But he arranged to rent a car, and we pitched in on it. 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 — you get kind of punchy. So you feel really horrible in the early morning, but then around nine or 10, you start feeling punchy. And so I was like: oh, wow, okay, I feel good now. I sort of had felt my way into how things are done.

JESSE: Jay Blakesberg had it down by ‘81.

JAY BLAKESBERG: I was funding all of this fun by selling copious amounts of LSD. 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 doing a lot of photographs in the spring of ‘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 Theatre that says the “Grateful Dead” on that March ‘81 show. I did not take any pictures in Cleveland, and I did not take any pictures at the Uptown Theater. I don't know why — it just was a mindset. I was a dancer, I was a tripping hippie. I was an 18, 19 year old kid.

JESSE: It had been a tour of mostly pretty small venues.

JAY BLAKESBERG: The Uptown Theater in Chicago is a little bit larger theater, maybe 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. I have no idea… I'm sure it was like a gymnasium or something like that.

JESSE: Jay skipped the show at the University of Maryland’s Cole Field House.

JAY BLAKESBERG: 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.

March 9th

JESSE: On March 9th, 1981, the Dead opened a two-night Monday/Tuesday run at the Garden. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.

DAVID LEMIEUX: So the Dead quietly show up to New York and do their little thing — this little cult band, selling out Madison Square Garden, two nights, and then doing it again the next year and the year after.

JESSE: Bob Minkin.

BOB MINKIN: 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 on line, 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. The Dead were getting bigger. They were playing larger places, because up until before then, they were also still playing theaters.

JESSE: In the 21st century, Charlie Miller is one of the more revered names in Grateful Dead taper circles. In 1981, he was a high school student in Forest Hills, Queens.

CHARLIE MILLER: My mom… coolest freakin’ mom ever. She wrote me a note to miss 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 from the train, dropped me off to the train station, gave me money for the tickets — I had a joint rolled, so when I got those tickets, I was gonna smoke this joint. I got the last ticket that they had at Madison Square Garden for 3/9/81. It was the absolute worst seat, but I remember walking out, lighting up the joint, and this business man in a suit walked by and he smoked it with me.

JESSE: 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 not in Long Island. Please welcome Marty Meyer, who grew up on Long Island.

MARTY MEYER: I was probably on spring break or something from school. So I drove down to Long Island and took the train in and just took a 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, you could hang in a parking lot. Even at the Coliseum, you could do that, you could do your pregame. But MSG, it's just in the city — like, you go, and that's it. So it was like an invasion of heads, just a swarm. Like a beehive: all the workers came back to the hive, we’re buzzing around, and other normal people didn’t want to get too close to it.

JESSE: Other people boldly attempted to drive in Manhattan, like Frank Boesch and his friends.

FRANK BOESCH: I had been going to concerts from high school for a couple years, 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 roadmap to get there. We pulled up in front of the Garden — literally, underneath the marquee, amongst all the taxi cabs. I stumbled out of his car, 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.” He literally left his car, locked it, amongst all the cabs right out in front of the Garden.

JESSE: We’ll meet up again with Frank after the show. David Lemieux.

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, magical places like that. But the Garden had the third element of being the Garden.

JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: The Garden used to be tremendously frightening and intimidating. We always heard the worst things about it — the report was terrible. But god, playing in there has been nothing but fun for us so far. Every time we play in there, it’s been good. You never can tell about a place, you really can’t. In the Garden… I don’t know whether it’s the energy of the New York crowd or whether it’s the place itself, but for some reason we play well in there, and we like, we enjoy playing in there.That is really somethin’ good. That’s a real good score, because it’s just tough to play in New York City. I feel we play with greater sensitivity and clarity here than we do on the East Coast. We play with greater energy there.

DAVID GANS [4/28/81]: More rock and roll there, more spacey here?

JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: Well, that’s the simplistic way of looking at it, but you could put it that way. The ones around New York City are their own… they have their own flavor.

JESSE: Chris Goodspace saw the Garden shows in ‘81, ‘82, and ‘83.

CHRIS GOODSPACE: Madison Square Garden, Spectrum, other big venues, you can literally feel the energy rippling around the venue — kind of like The Wave almost, but without people standing up and doing their hands. It's just all this energy contained. Especially at outdoor West Coast shows, you don't get that intensity. So an East Coast Dead show is totally a different animal than a West Coast show.

BOB MINKIN: The thing about the Garden is the shows always tended to be rowdy, the New York crowd. When I came out to California and saw them, it seemed almost lethargic when the Dead came out on stage. People barely interrupted their conversation talking to somebody. But at 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.

AUDIO: “Tuning” [3/9/81, Steve Rolfe audience tape] (1:00-1:13)

JESSE: That was that moment, from Steve Rolfe’s audience tape of March 9th. And now.

AUDIO: “Feel Like a Stranger” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:17-0:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

DAVID LEMIEUX: 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.

AUDIO: “Feel Like a Stranger” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (3:46-4:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: The 1981 shows on In and Out of the Garden come from sound engineer Dan Healy’s master cassettes.

DAVID LEMIEUX: 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. It’s a big problem with a lot of ‘81 soundboard recordings, you can hear it with the vocal sound. But when it’s out of phase, it’s almost directionless and 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 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. You wouldn’t know there’s anything wrong with it — it sounds fantastic.

JESSE: Shaugn O’Donnell.

SHAUGN O’DONNELL: Me and my girlfriend at the time had made a whole bunch of homemade like smiley faces, like out of regular dots. She had a grocery store gig that had pricing stickers, and we spent hours hand-shoring 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.

AUDIO: “Feel Like a Stranger” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (6:15-6:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Eric Pooley caught the first night at the Garden in ‘81.

ERIC POOLEY: 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. I was never a tour rat; I always was either in college or then working in New York after college. I graduated from college in ‘81, so the Garden show—what is it, March 9—I was still in college for that. I'd been down at College Park two days before for the Cole Field House show. 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 a lot of the crowd. You kind of feel like you’re a hundred foot tall drummer from there. And that’s a great place to savor some of the things that make the Garden unique.

JESSE: Jon Hunt’s crew hung out back there, too.

JON HUNT: 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. They 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 loge sections, sometimes you could get a little bit too much alcohol-fueled drunken energy. So it was more us all sticking together and hanging behind the stage.

ERIC POOLEY: The energy levels were off the charts. Something about being in Manhattan, and being inside a moving drum, a trampoline, a spaceship — it would reconfigure the course of the evening. And the Dead consistently rose to the occasion there over the years.

JESSE: If you’ve been to the Garden, or even heard anybody talk about it, you’ve probably heard that the venue bounces.

ERIC POOLEY: The floor is on the fifth floor. The roof is completely supported only by cables around the side, and that's why they're 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 or 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.

AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:47-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIC POOLEY: That was an amazing “Ramble On Rose.” That show was ridiculously good, and it became a well-circulated audience tape.

JESSE: We’ll let Jim Wise’s audience tape do the duty for the song’s big line that adorned Jon Hunt and Christina Schreiber’s poster.

AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [3/9/81, Jim Wise audience tape] (1:07-1:27)

JESSE: And while we’re going to mostly be playing music from the new In and Out of the Garden box set, we’ll stick with Jim’s 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.

AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [3/9/81, Jim Wise audience tape] (1:30-1:56)

JIM WISE: Almost everything was identical that tour: same mics, same position, just different city. It wasn't till later on that I realized how good those particular shows were. 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 a pre-taper section — I swear, it was a better spot. It seemed like there was no lighting board behind the soundboard, so it was a good spot. It really depended on the acoustics of the venue.

ERIC POOLEY: There were still people that wanted to dance and wanted to move, and the inner concourse was the place for that.

JESSE: The inner 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 venue’s most distinct features. Promoter John Scher.

JOHN SCHER: A lot of the great dancing was going on out there.

JESSE: Chris Goodspace.

CHRIS GOODSPACE: Watching people try to walk a straight line through a bunch of crazy dancers… you just can't do it. You’ve got to bounce off somebody, instead of just kind of wiggling yourself through.

JESSE: 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 inner concourse.

JOHN SCHER: We stayed reserved seats, because we felt that it was just more controllable. All right. If people wanted to get up out of their seat and dance, fine — but they had some place to go back.

CHRIS GOODSPACE: Madison Square Garden is a horrible venue for intimacy, and they really, shall we say, lock things down, so you’re in sections. And to try to get to other sections — of course, the hallways are packed with people, but the great thing about some Dead Heads 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.

ERIC POOLEY: 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 seating sections, and you could get around scooching from section to section wherever you were. It was also possible to get out of the nosebleeds and sneak into the lower rungs.

JESSE: This story from Charlie Miller doesn’t take place at this show, but we’ll place it here anyway.

CHARLIE MILLER: 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 3/9/81… no, it was actually Nassau 5/8/81. I was tripping, and I got down to the floor at set break, and they asked me for my ticket stub. I opened my hand and there were two blotters in there. And the guy said, “Okay, just go on through.”

JESSE: 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.

DAVID LEMIEUX: They haven't started integrating the new songs. There are older songs that, thanks largely to the acoustic stuff, they brought back into the repertoire.

JESSE: Bob Minkin.

BOB MINKIN: Spring of ‘81, Radio City was fresh in everybody's mind. That was only like six months earlier.

DAVID LEMIEUX: “Bird Song” and “Deep Elem Blues” started coming in, some of the songs that had been part of the Warfield shows, specifically acoustic, a few of them made their way into the setlist electrically, which was cool.

JESSE: Here’s Garcia talking to David Gans the next month.

JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: All of that acoustic stuff that we did, and that’s on the acoustic double set [Reckoning], was the result of about three afternoons of rehearsal. Some of those songs we hadn’t done for a long time, and Brent had never done “Bird Song” and all those. That means the harmonies, working out the whole arrangement and everything. We spent such a small amount of time preparing for that, and it yielded an enormous amount of results. I don’t know whether that’s illustrative, but what I’m trying to point out is that rehearsal time for the Grateful Dead at this point is the thing that we need most to be able to mine our own wealth, to get at the things that we’re capable of.

JESSE: The first set on the first night at the Garden included fresh re-electrified versions of both “Deep Elem Blues” and “Bird Song.”

AUDIO: “Deep Elem Blues” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:00-0:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: “Deep Elem 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 Sara on May 4th, 1963 at the Top of the Tangent in Palo Alto, now on the Before the Dead box set.

AUDIO: “Deep Elem Blues” [Jerry & Sara Garcia, Before the Dead] (0:21-0:42) - [Spotify]

JESSE: 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 1st, 1966.

AUDIO: “Deep Elem Blues” [12/1/66] (0:28-0:50)

JESSE: And then to an acoustic arrangement in 1970, which is how it also sounded in 1980, when they recorded the canonical Dead version for Reckoning.

AUDIO: “Deep Elem Blues” [Reckoning] (0:31-0:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: And then, nearly as soon as the acoustic instruments were away, it started popping back up in 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.

AUDIO: “Deep Elem Blues” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:40-0:58) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: 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 “Bird Song,” the most guaranteed home for delicate, celestial jams.

AUDIO: “Bird Song” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (5:03-5:33) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Shaugn 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 “Bird Song,” and we’re gonna let him get a little musicological.

SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It always was a chance to have second set action in the first set — I was all about that kind of exploration. It's got the same openness as “Dark Star” once it gets going. It’s always more grounded than “Dark Star” because you have more substantial landmarks. You arrive and you stay in a song bit for a longer part. To my mind, the year that they were written has an impact too. Post the ‘70s albums, to get “Bird Song” together — that’s a big dividing line for me, what they were doing and how they were composing. The text leans cosmic in “Dark Star,” and less cosmic and more grounded in “Bird Song,” ironically. But where they’re really similar is they’re both basically one-chord jams when they get going to the exploratory part.

AUDIO: “Bird Song” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (6:07-6:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

SHAUGN O’DONNELL: “Dark Star” is an A Mixolydian jam, but leans heavily to E Dorian; “Bird Song” is an E Mixolydian jam that leans to B Dorian at times. This passage captures some of that “Dark Star” tonal ambiguity in the ‘81 MSG “Bird Song.” Jerry’s repeating a high Bm7 arpeggio, with a G# passing tone, and that reversal—since G# 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 any minor seventh arpeggio. The musical payoff here is how the subsequent scale passages, after a few belligerent bends, climax on a G# that tastefully feeds back, bringing Jerry home to the real tonic, E.

AUDIO: “Bird Song” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (6:33-7:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JON HUNT: I had a friend, Gordy Janow — he went to Ithaca College with me and he called that the DeepBeatBird Set because, towards the end of the first set, they did “Deep Elem,” “Beat It On Down the Line,” and “Bird Song.” So he dubbed it for short the DeepBeatBird Set.

ERIC POOLEY: They closed the first set with “[New] Minglewood [Blues]”; I didn’t think that could be a set closer, but I do remember they rocked it fucking hard. There was a big weird Brent solo in there, too. “Minglewood” was always fun, but it seemed really big that night.

AUDIO: “New Minglewood Blues” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (3:21-3:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: John Scher kept busy during the shows.

JOHN SCHER: 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 did it sound up there?” And I didn’t want to lie. I said, “Well, you know, I was there for a couple songs, and it sounded great.” Then of course with my staff, a great staff, we had to deal with the venue and the expenses and the merch deal. So, I kept very busy.

JESSE: Backstage, of course, was pretty wild.

JOHN SCHER: It was insane. Once we started playing the Garden, it was the hottest ticket in town. So even people that weren't really diehard Dead Heads still wanted to come. Everybody that worked for the Dead, band members and the crew, sort of had equal vote. In actuality, that wasn't true — but Parish, Kidd, those guys, they flaunted it. 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.

JESSE: The roadies did actually wield a lot of power in 1981.

JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: They’re there when we have our business meetings. We’re dragging them through life… we're all working on the same thing, and why should we treat each other any differently?

JESSE: Not only did the Dead’s roadies attend business meetings, but according to meeting minutes from the early ‘80s, actually chaired the business meetings, in the case of Kidd Candelario. Some of the band's friends in New York included the East Village’s notorious Hells 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.

JOHN SCHER: Jerry had a relationship with them, Mickey had a relationship with them. Everybody had a little bit of a relationship, and the crew, especially Steve Parish, had a very close relationship with them. And usually once a year, Jerry would play a benefit for them out on a boat in the Hudson. We'd go out, I don't know, 500 people or whatever. And I was always told, by Jerry, to work something out with Sandy. And we did. Sandy Alexander 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 for backstage passes, but never 100 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 times, they were there, but no huge presence. And they were pretty respectful — they’d call, say, “We’re coming, can you make room for our bikes?”

JESSE: And on to the second set.

ERIC POOLEY: Before they started to play “China Cat [Sunflower],” 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 that they claimed afterwards that they had caused the Dead to play it.

AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:00-0:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Shaugn O’Donnell.

SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The opening of “China” is just bonkers compared to… it really stood out as — this is weird… and not in a bad way. Brent quacking away with the envelope was really a strange moment.

AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:29-0:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It doesn't really follow, but I feel like the weirdness sets up what then becomes a kind of longer segue and some more time in that magic zone between “China” and “Rider” on that one.

ERIC POOLEY: The jam out of “China Cat,” before they get to “I Know You Rider,” 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 these phrases, adding more measures to the solo. Everybody, everybody is 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.

AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (7:54-8:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIC POOLEY: And Phil is right there with him. I remember the two of them, kind of bounding up to the stars.

AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (8:51-9:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: We haven’t really spoken much about the Dead’s jamming in the ‘80s on the Deadcast. In the late ‘60s, they’d first started to create suites 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 “Dark Star” 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’ faves by Weir. The Dead lived to break their own rules, of course, but on March 9th, it followed that course, beginning with Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow’s “Estimated Prophet.”

AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (2:03-2:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: It’s given its very late ‘70s/early ‘80s color by Garcia’s Mu-Tron pedal and Brent Mydland’s twinkling Dyna-Rhodes keyboard.

AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (2:38-2:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIC POOLEY: The “Estimated” was really good. And the jam out of it was spacey and transporting and it slowed down.

AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (10:28-10:58) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIC POOLEY: 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.

AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (11:10-11:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIC POOLEY: And suddenly, he's playing some very calming arpeggios. We're coming out of it, it sounds like the beginning of the old tune, “Mr. Sandman.”

AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (12:04-12:15) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: Totally.

AUDIO: “Mr. Sandman” [The Chordettes, The Chordettes’ Best] (0:02-0:14) - [Spotify]

JESSE: By the Chordettes.

ERIC POOLEY: And then, the happy sound of “Uncle John’s Band,” and I’m up and dancing.

AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (13:34-13:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:00-0:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: 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…

AUDIO: “Drums” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (1:15-1:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIC POOLEY: In 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. And when the drumming gets crazy, it feels like the whole place is playing along.

AUDIO: “Drums” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (7:56-8:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

ERIC POOLEY: And then coming down into a super delicate “Stella Blue” where everybody's holding their breath after having been screaming their lungs out.

AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (0:21-0:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]

JESSE: There was some rock and roll, and then out into 7th or 8th Avenue and the chaos of midtown Manhattan in 1981.

ERIC POOLEY: I do remember kind of being outside — you hit the streets, you’ve got to be cool, you gotta keep your wits about you, there's all these people traipsing across the West Side. I think Manhattan being dangerous is over. Especially right now, we happen to be in a moment in history 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.

JESSE: Frank Boesch and his friends had parked with the taxi cabs under the marquee in front of the Garden on 7th Avenue.

FRANK BOESCH: We went inside, had a blast and stumbled out.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.

JESSE: Chris Goodspace.

CHRIS GOODSPACE: We're walking the streets at like 2 in the morning after the show. It's a small street and we come in front of a building and they’ve got military guards outside. You can see everybody inside all dressed to the tees, 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. The sound just reverberated through the canyon of the buildings. That was one of my memorable nights after.

JESSE: Bob Minkin.

BOB MINKIN: New York City was still dangerous in ‘81. They still had multiple thousands of murders a year, and the neighborhoods that are nice today are 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.

March 10th

JESSE: Jay Blakesberg.

JAY BLAKESBERG: 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: I would drop ten hits of acid, because I wanted to celebrate. 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 basically, I

was still able to function as a human being, but it was not easy.

JESSE: Jay’s gonna have a blurry night. We’ll get back to him.

AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (0:00-0:24) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Not entirely sure what’s happening here, but Garcia and Weir’s amps disappear, and a pretty impressive kabong emerges from somebody’s reverb tank.

AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (0:56-1:26) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Some people recall it as falling cymbals, but the sound is almost certainly amplifier-made. Anybody know?

BOB WEIR [3/10/81]: That loud noise in the beginning of the first song, that wasn’t a mistake — that was art…

JESSE: 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.” Shaugn O’Donnell went back for a second night.

SHAUGN O’DONNELL: 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 place.

JESSE: Dario Endozo saw his first show at the Garden in spring 1981, but he wasn’t expecting to. He and his friend Danny were art school students, headed home for the day.

DARIO ENDOZO: We were on our way home back to Staten Island, walking along the Garden. We were like punk rockers: leather jackets, chains and spiky hair, punk buttons on the lapel of our 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 the Grateful Dead. We knew that they were a cool band. So he was desperately trying to sell us tickets, because [the] concert had long been started. It was, I believe, already in the second set. So we walked in and we sat in the nosebleed section. The whole scene there was like nothing we have experienced before.

AUDIO: “Fire on the Mountain” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (1:55-2:16) - [dead.net]

DARIO ENDOZO: That was a big transformation. Most of the songs we heard were new to us at that time. But that didn’t matter, because it took us to another dimension that we’d never been to before. After the concert, that was the end of our punk days — we were transformed.

AUDIO: “Fire on the Mountain” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (2:59-3:28) - [dead.net]

JESSE: 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 Gans and Blair Jackson in April 1981.

JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: We end up closing the door just like we open up the door. In that sense, we create that framework.

JESSE: Let’s observe that moment from March 10th, 1981. And while we’re at it please welcome back Jay Blakesberg.

AUDIO: “The Wheel” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81, wooziness dialing back to reality] (1:22-1:52) - [dead.net]

JAY BLAKESBERG: But we dosed early enough, so by the time you get to the second set on 3/10/81, which I think coming out of “Drums” is maybe “The Wheel,” “China Doll,” “Truckin’” — really, even by the beginning of the second set, you’re past the point of where you're full on major peaking, and you can actually deal with a little bit of reality. You actually can see things in front of you and see humans, dance with humans and be in that moment. 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.

JESSE: But even if Jay wasn’t quite thinking it through all the time, Robert Hunter may’ve been.

AUDIO: “The Wheel” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (1:53-2:02) - [dead.net]

JESSE: If you were a tour head, you might start to see patterns. Charlie Miller.

CHARLIE MILLER: They started “Uncle John’s Band” on March 7th in Maryland, and then they played it the next show, which is March 9th at the Garden. But on March 9th, they tease “The Wheel,” and then they played it March 10th. Then, on March 10th, they play “Smokestack Lightnin’” out of “Truckin’” — everybody I knew was like, “We have to go to Boston, because they’re gonna bust out ‘Smokestack Lightnin’.’”

AUDIO: “Truckin” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (7:00-7:13) - [dead.net]

JESSE: The “Smokestack Lightnin’” bust out would have to wait a few more years. The encore included a kind of ridiculous cover that had come into their repertoire the previous fall in a fit of… let’s call it inspiration.

AUDIO: “Satisfaction” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (0:00-0:34) - [dead.net]

JESSE: In November of that year, Bob Weir told David Gans, “‘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.”

AUDIO: “Satisfaction” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (1:40-2:00) - [dead.net]

JESSE: 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, uh, arrangement not too long thereafter, is the drum break. Or in the Dead’s case, the drummer break.

AUDIO: “Satisfaction” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (2:01-2:14) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Jay Blakesberg.

JAY BLAKESBERG: 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 ten hits of acid the night before, and probably couldn't travel. But everything really changed for me exactly a month later, on April 11th 1981. I went to pick up a package that BT had sent me from San Francisco and the fuzz were waiting for me. They grabbed me and threw me against my car — just like in the movies, they said, “You're under arrest, motherfucker.” And everything came crashing down. So I was not able to go to any more shows for a little bit. I was grounded, to say the least.

JESSE: And the wheel continued to turn.

JAY BLAKESBERG: We quickly became aware of the 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. 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. I was fortunate, I got sentenced to five years in prison, and I ended up only spending eight months in jail. If I had gotten one of those sentences, one of those mandatory minimum sentence sentences, I would not be sitting here talking to you. I would not have created the body of work that I created. And that freaks me out a little bit.

AUDIO: “The Wheel” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/10/81] (3:35-3:54) - [dead.net]

JAY BLAKESBERG: When I was 18, 19, and we'd see these older Dead Heads that were 50 or 60 years old at that time, we'd be like, “Whoa, man, they're so old. Wow, they're like such old grizzled hippies. I bet they were at Woodstock!” And now, we're those people — but we've been doing it consistently for 40 years. None of us stopped. None of us got off the Bus. Over this last summer, summer 2022, there was a whole tribe of younger kids that did the entire Dead & Co. tour. This is their Summer of Love — I met a lot of them, I photographed them and I became 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 and caravans: Emma and Jen and Deanna and Jeremiah and Noah, all these incredible young humans, that… they're the last tribe, the lost tribe and the last tribe. But they’re not, because there’ll be somebody following them. But in 20 years, they'll think about this, but the difference is they’ve got all of it documented on their phones. If they can keep 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. We sold jewelry, or grilled cheese or food or t-shirts or stickers at every show on Shakedown Street, and we did every show. We did not miss one show, and we kept that spirit alive.”

JESSE: 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 is MIA, but we’ve got Eric here to read from his raw transcript.

ERIC POOLEY: 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. 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 Dead Heads 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 New York also has great heart. It's an amazing place on every level, some powerful bummers and some amazing great shit.”

AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [In and Out of the Garden, 3/9/81] (7:22-7:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify]

[YouTube]