Grateful Dead

I was there.
I’ll buy it on Blu-ray if released, but won’t be making it to the movie theater.

Last year was the first one I missed. AMC bought a 10 year old nice theater from a competing theater chain. Then COVID hit and things changed fast around here. Many older structures have been torn down to make way for newer larger facilities. Enormous R/E boom here. Sux cause last year and now this year we want be having muatm as the older AMC theater complex was demolished, waiting for a buyer on a large piece of R/E close to the heart of town. Wish they would at least run some small run bluray/dvds of these shows. Really not happy about missing these. Go to movie sight and it only shows 1 theater in the whole state. Whereas previously, there would be 8-10 theaters statewide. Not sure if the movie web sight is wrong, will continue to look for it though, maybe change browser for search.

Daytime show at Compton Terrace.
Good solid show. My first Bruce show.
Beautiful weather and fun Shakedown scene.
Everything available and no law enforcement on the Reservation.
Not exactly a pretty venue but a good trade-off for the freedom.
Never saw the earlier venue with that name. In Phoenix proper?
Desert Sky Pavilion (3-6-94, my final GD show) was a bit nicer but over-policed.
Cheers
I'd buy that PHX-Denver 1990 mini-box Spacebrother.

I really hope this year's showing of the 91 Soldier Field show gets released on CD at the very least if not a Blu Ray CD combo. I personally thought this show was superior to both RFK and Giants Stadium, which are great shows and releases.

The second night of Compton Terrace combined with the three in Denver from December 90 are also top notch.

Also 9/26/91. Possibly one of the last truly epic shows from the post Brent era.

Sixtus -thanks for that post about Bob Weir and his experience of hearing cowboys singing and playing when he was young. It seems as though it was more the context of the songs sung than the actual songs themselves that defined them as cowboy songs. If Jerry Lee Lewis had sung the same songs, they wouldn't have been defined in quite the same way.
I have a book on the history of National Resonator guitars, and that has several photographs of men dressed as cowboys playing these exceptional instruments in the 1930's. Names I would never otherwise of heard of - Hoot Gibson is one, and I have a great cd which compiles country slide guitarists called from the 1930's..."Country Slide". A guy called J.D Farley is referred to in the sleeve notes as a singing cowboy.
Apart from that - I am reminded of the singing cowboys who were occasionally show in old films on T.V. when I was a child - Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey.

I am getting anti-virus warnings over at dead and company site due to expired security certificate for livedead.co. I am trying to see if there may be some pay-per-view opportunities for D&C's final shows. Can you let the web admin know this. THANKS!

Sorry to interrupt, back to scheduled discussions...

Here's a novel idea Dave stop making box sets with a bunch of novelties and just sell bricks of shows in a nice sturdy storage box to lower the price. All those novelties I can't use anyway, so they just sit in the box not to break up the item.

Over $200 after cost, tax, and shipping is a bit too high. How about 5 shows twice a year at a $100 each?

Sixtus - That really is an inspired quote by Weir regarding his passion for Cowboy songs. Thanks for sharing. Not just a “cool” thing to do, this music really touched him. I feel the same about guys like Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, in that it was not just a fad with the Burritos repertoire, it was a vocation of sorts.

So I recall reading this snippet from an article a few years back when Bobby was getting Blue Mountain off the ground. This is what he said about the origin of the cowboy songs and how they got their name:

"...back in the early ‘60s when I was working ranches as a kid and living in bunkhouses. My eyes were opened to a culture, which still existed that predated radio. It was a total oral culture and a rich one. And what the old cowpokes did at night—what they naturally fell into—was storytelling and songs. I was a kid with a guitar, so I learned to accompany those songs, and it was good ear-training because I had to intuit what the next chord was gonna be and when it was gonna arrive—or I was gonna suffer some abuse. That was something that stuck with me. Over the years, if a cowboy song came up and caught my ear for one reason or another, I might do it with the Grateful Dead simply because it seemed natural, whereas other folks wouldn’t have thought it was cool to do a song like “El Paso.” It was a little bit of an enigma to me and I felt I could breathe a little life into that stuff."

Inspired,
Sixtus

With the complete show release model, there will always be repeats, often of songs that don’t jump off a setlist as special. On the other hand, if you just release the special favorite tunes, you are going to end up with a lot of out of context highlights, at which point the question may become “how many Dark Star, Eyes of the World, Fire on the Mountain or other highlights do you need”. I am eager to collect more complete shows, very strongly preferably not chopped onto the disc out of order, as I find the highlights to be more special in the context of a complete show, and sometimes it is an unexpected tune that turns out to be the gem of a show. The ebb and flow of the individual shows is part of the appeal for me. The other factor is that today’s perception that a particular performance is “meh” may be replaced by tomorrow’s perception that the performance is cool in some way that I had not realized before. More than once I have put something on to give another listen to something that might not have really hit the spot on the first listen and found myself asking, “holy shit, what was my glitch last time, how did I miss how cool this actually is.”

My appreciation of different music varies by mood and season - what hits the spot on a melancholy fall day is probably not what is going to hit the spot on a sunny summer day and a bright mood., at which point the June 1976 or July 1978 Box Sets are often the stuff. Sometimes I want to hear “the Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five or maybe “Nice Shot Man” by Filter, or “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath. Loud. Other days it might be “Quiet Storm” by Smokey Robinson, or some mellow jazz. If I’m feeling weird it might be some King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard or some Butthole Surfers, maybe the Desaturating Seven album by Primus. Not to mention all of the well known and often discussed bands of the 1960s and 1970s, all of the great soul and funk, as well as all of the cool stuff from this century that has come out over the past 23 years. I don’t seem to have any trouble finding new (or new to me) stuff to pick up despite my best efforts to rein in my compulsive acquisition of new CDs. And now that King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has apparently decided not to release Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava on CD, just opting for a vinyl release, I may have to pick up new vinyl for the first time in decades. I’m running out of space for CDs, let alone adding vinyl back into the mix. But, the more choices, the more everything stays fresh. Besides, there is way too much cool stuff out there to limit yourself to a single band or genre of music, even one as cool as the Grateful Dead.