Grateful Dead

I could be wrong.. but wasn't this the last item produced by GD Merch? I think so.. Wikipedia has the record label = "Grateful Dead"

I would bet Lemieux pushed to get it released in it's entirety.. by then the battle of the completists vs. the best of war was already well underway. If there was pushback on getting it released in it's entirety, I bet it was on the GD side.. band members, Cutler, who knows.. not that I think there was not push back, I bet there was.

Still.. one of the early truly great releases. I listened to 2/27/69 in it's entirety quite mood enhanced yesterday back country skiing on some fresh show at one of the local mountains. Sublime. That Dark Star is really something. A masterpiece.

oh.. comments on DaP 9, 5/14/74? Frightening.. Don't listen to that Dark Star at high volume on a day when you missed your meds.. Atonal madness that seemingly symbolizes the end of the world and just when you can't take it anymore, the bittersweet sounds of China Doll deliver you safely back to earth. A great release, albeit a bit scary at times.

...hello All my brothers & sisters , hope everyone is doing well.
Today I put Daves Pick #9 on play. I started with disc one and enjoyed it once again! Jerry guitar is so strong on these recordings, ear piercing at times, I love the Fat Man playing on this release.
David L. Didn’t write much in the liner notes/booklet that was included with this release. ‘Gratefully’ a lot of primo photographs and news paper clippings are found in the booklet.
Anyone have any thoughts on Daves Pick #9, would love to read any feedback...
Thank you, peace be with you all.
: )

gone are the days

Winterland 73 was recorded by Kid Candelerio. I believe he recorded most of the November 73 releases like Dave's 5 and RT 4.3, which are top notch as well. With the Winterland 73, we also got the Plagent Process bonus.
I do remember buying 100 year hall in the mid 1990s and it was just a two disc best of set at that point. I personally had no idea the treasures they had for E72. Of course this was all pre-internet days, so most the information we got was from Relix. Remember those days? A long time ago.

I am new to the releases as well, but i have heard that they had to fight for Fillmore West to get released in completion, since Rhino did not think that people would want to buy full shows with mostly repeats. I feel the success of this box opened the door for the runs of shows that we occasionally get.

Unless you just got robbed or worse, usually not a good sign.

Good catch Stolie:

Garcia to Blair Jackson in '88 on why they stopped playing St Stephen. "We used it up... It's got little idiosyncrasies and verses that are different from each other...it's unnecessarily difficult. It's been made tricky. It's got a bridge in the middle that doesn't really fit in... It has a couple of things that work real good, but finally, the stuff that doesn't work overpowers the stuff that does work... If you don't remember every bit of it: 'Let's see, what verse is this?' They're not interchangeable - you have to do them in order. So a song like St Stephen is a cop. It's our musical policeman: if we don't do it the way it wants to go, it doesn't work at all. That means it's inflexible. "When you get good enough at those kinds of pieces, people think, 'Wow, that's really far out and open,' but that's an illusion. It's just written complicated - what we need is material that is authentically open."

mine is my metrognome (sic)

St. Stephen was their "musical cop"

Clearly KF's dad was a rabid touring deadhead. Makes perfect sense to me. :D

I suspect The Seven was a work in progress.. Mickey brought to the game more focus on polyrhythmic and syncopated accents and beats. The fact that half the time they played this.. it was under the moniker of Mickey and the Heartbeats might indicate Mickey was at least partially involved in pushing this theme forward. This is also about the same time The Main Ten (prelude to Playing In The Band, again written by Mickey and later adopted by Bob) came to be. Add in The Eleven and you see a theme, seven, ten, eleven, etc. They were experimenting with non-standard time signatures and syncopation (and experimenting with 'other' things which plays a very big part in it all).

I suspect Phil was a big part of this push too, but have no proof. Phil and Mickey seem to have that funk and sense of (off)beat rhythms and strange timing signatures. If you look at the 74 Jam between China and Rider (I forget what people are calling this, anyone??), but it is also a play on changes in timing signatures and beat emphasis.. seems to have Phil fingerprints as does the jam from Eyes > China Doll from this period which again is some sort of planned arrangement they slipped into preexisting transitions. Great stuff.. and for me is the drippy antimatter that keeps my attention.

A lot of these jams disappeared over time, perhaps because as they evolved they became less fluid and cumbersome to play?? This is especially true of the older songs like Seven, The Eleven, I have heard Garcia comment that St. Stephen and a lot of the stuff on Aoxomoxoa was often cumbersome to play so it was dropped over time.

Anyway.. just my two cents on how these songs came to be, why they might have been dropped as time went on. Oh.. it's suffice to say these guys were pretty high a lot in this time period and were somehow really good at playing in this condition. How on earth they were able to pull this off is beyond me, but I have a hard time remembering stuff when I am feeling other worldly.. if that makes sense.

I also need to go back and get a good listen to The Seven as I don't recall exactly how it goes or what it did....but I do recall it was only played a handful of times.

It's funny, we think about all of the great songs the GD played and how some came and went, others came back again - we know this pretty well being the rabid base that we are. But, I recall reading an interview with Jerry (not sure when it was) and he was discussing Here Comes Sunshine, and he said something along the lines of "we only played that song like 4 times in the early '70's...." which of course if completely off base, but still quite interesting in terms of how *he* recalled this memory. Now of course, we all know Here Comes Sunshine was a MONSTER in '73 and '74, played many more times than '4'......and it was one of the hearkening calls to that era in my opinion. It's just funny to reconcile our attention to detail with others' who were actually there....

As for the contemporaneous releases of the aforementioned Europe '72 fodder, i distinctly recall going to the record store and finding Hundred Year Hall and being f%#@ing ELATED to have more of those crispy Boards at my disposal. Not to mention that Lovelight > Jam >NFA Tease > GDRFB blew me away time and time again (and still does). Indeed, I found it curious then when 'Steppin' Out' was released, but I had not thought so far ahead to believe they would EVER release the entire tour. The delay could have been a few things, like not being 100% sure the fandom/cash-in-hand was there to justify such an enormous box; it could have also been due to the fact that Dave's Picks hadn't started up yet (this was in 2012), so there was not yet a "main focus" on the releases, so perhaps they used that lull to put the big box out in fall of 2011. Or, it could be some other reason simply because I am throwing pasta at the wall here.

Always happy to speculate and find a good Seven.
Sixtus