Grateful Dead

one slight relocation of a letter, and you have a completely different meaning.

united states
untied states

wait, is this the Jeopardy board?

Are you now, or have you ever been a robot?

Giving the release a first, casual listen. Using When Push Comes to Shove to get me mentally settled in for a date tonight.... been quite a few years since I've done this!

So a closer listen will have to wait until the weekend (but I did catch a perfectly placed Phil bomb in Row Jimmy).

....you make an excellent point; I see what you did there.

We'll need to get Jimmy's word on this once he has consumed the sauce and reports back.

Sixtus

Rapids Run Hot Sauce>Rapid Runs Hot Sauce

So this is an audience recording made at the mixing board instead of the taper’s section?

I had a chance to listen to the first show through my stereo system last night. Usually I listen through headphones, so it was harder to gauge the sound quality, but i still got a good handle on the show overall.

Midnight Hour - Great surprise to open the show and the crowd loved it. According to Deadbase they played this about 30 times, with half from 66-71 and the other half scattered about from -'82-'93, but 7 times in '85. Bobby gets the vocal chords stretched out early.

Cold Rain - The crowd is clearly pumped to see and hear Jerry and he gets a big cheer for his first tune and his first and second solos. This is one of my favorites and its well played.

CC Rider - In the standard position. I can hear Phil's bass well and Brent has a nice solo about halfway in. The energy level is still up until

Row Jimmy - kid of plods. I was never a huge fan of this tune, but its pretty well played.

Esau/Push Comes to Shove - gets the crowd back into it. Two newer tunes both played well and the energy level rebounds. Jerry has to nail the lyrics on PCtS for a good version, and he does it pretty well here. Not as good a version as 7-12-87, which is the best i've heard them play the tune. Always great to hear Esau.

Desolation Row - Well played and sung and it moves by pretty fast given how many words are in it. For my money, no version will ever touch the Dylan studio cut, with Bloomfield's fills and Dylan's delivery, but Bobby does the tune justice.

Bird Song - Nice jamming here. Solid non-72 Bird Song.

Promised Land - Promised Land is Promised Land.

I got a beer and took a wiz during set break. No lines was nice. The dog was in my seat but I asked him nicely and he moved.

China/Rider - Always welcome. I prefer '73-'74 but this was nice and smooth.

LLR - I really like this tune and this version stood out to me. The pace was a little faster than usual and the song was very well played. Good solos. Good bobby vocal embellishments.

He's Gone - Crowd was into this one. Nice placement and playing.

Drums -> Space - Drums was pretty uneventful for the first half. I can get into a good drums but this one didn't really do it for me, at least until the second half. Space was perfunctory.

Miracle - Well played. Short and to the point.

Black Peter - Crowd was into this one, along with He's Gone the crowd was feeling this, given Jerry's comeback. Always nice to hear this tune in place of Warf Rat or Stella.

Around/Good Lovin - Double dose of Bobby to close out the second set. Good energy and playing.

Quinn - Great encore.

I think the crowd noise really added to the good vibe of the show. The more I hear '87 the more i like it. I'm happy to have this show. Ill revisit along with the Giant's stadium show and the Sept 18 MSG 30 trips show.

Show packaging is nice. The 4th disk has a proper home. They didn't try to jam the disc in the usual format Dave's picks - they redesigned it for 4 discs. One might expect this, but given some of the customer service snags we've seen over the years, it wasn't a guarantee. Solid late 80s Hartford hippy pics and a Lemieux narrative rounds out the accotrements. And I suppose i'd be remiss to not mention the pic of the 3-26 setlist at the end of the booklet, which I hope was scribbled by an offspring of the band or crew, but fear could be the handiwork of one of the band members themselves.

On to 3-27!

I do a lot of audio recording and post-show mixing for a live band, and I'd like to respond to a few comments about the audio. One person said with certainty that unrelated audience noise was patched-in (like a laugh track - LOL), others not happy that the audience noise is so high.

I can tell you that it's not that easy to manipulate the audience noise itself. I haven't gotten the release so I haven't read the liner notes, but I'm guessing they "matrixed" this mix from the soundboard and a separate audience taper recording. "Matrix" means they sync up the two recordings so you get the best qualities of both recordings. Soundboards tend to have great vocals, keys and drums, but the recordings tend to be very bland, with keys and vocals much higher in the mix (since the guitars' stage amps are already blaring). But when you add in the audience recording to balance out the instruments (pulling the guitars forward in the mix and adding room ambience), you're necessarily adding audience noise as well... you can't suppress it.

The exception to the "soundboards usually don't sound great" is, of course, Betty's mixes from the 70's, but that's because she was NOT mixing the room sound/PA. Her husband was doing that. Betty ran a parallel board and mixed to the headphones only, balancing the instruments perfectly and then adding reverb to make it sound like a big hall (listen to Cornell where she admits she was a little generous with the reverb - think Jerry's vocals on Scarlet>Fire).

The 80's recordings didn't have the benefit of Betty's parallel board, which is why 80's sbd's by themselves generally sound, um.... "not as good as the 70's Betty shows". (Spacebro may disagree, which is fine - respect)

So basically the point is that the audience is likely that loud because they were focused on balancing the sources to get the music (regardless of the audience bleed thru) sounding as presentable as possible. I agree that made the audience a little louder then I'd like - kinda distracting. This is why we should all say a little thank you to Betty Cantor Jackson every night before we go to bed.

EDIT - I just re-read JimInMD's comment. He said Healy would use an audience mic and add that to the room mix DURING the show... I may be wrong Jim but my understanding is that the matrix (or "ultramix") recordings were created after the show so they didn't sound like sh__ on playback. I'd be shocked if they were feeding the audience mics back into the PA - that would invite feedback, echo, and time-blur headaches. But I could be wrong.

....eta Monday.

A true matrix is using a soundboard recording and a mic recording and blending them to compensate for the inherent idiosyncrasies in both. If it’s done well it’s awesome, if not.....

When you say a "PA recording" does that mean Healy recorded the sound coming over-the-air just like any taper? It does sound that way. Why would he do that if he was at the soundboard and could have just recorded the mix directly and then patch in the audience levels to his liking?