Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast

Season 6, Episode 6

IN AND OUT OF THE GARDEN: Madison Square Garden, 10/83

Archival interviews:

- Jerry Garcia, by Abe Peck and Studs Terkel, WFMT, 12/17/79.

- Jerry Garcia, by Erik Nelson, MTV, 4/83.

JESSE: To reiterate a point we made in our last episode, in the early 1980s, by most popular music standards, the Grateful Dead were in the wilderness. 1983 is the kind of year that gets fast-forwarded in books and documentaries. No new albums, no cataclysmic busts or break-ups. There weren’t even any side project albums besides some lovely Mickey Hart drone records, just four more tours and a few local runs. The Jerry Garcia Band kept truckin’ of course, Bobby Weir went to Europe twice, once with the Midnites and once without. It’s what Dead Heads sometimes call a transition year. But they were all transition years.

AUDIO: “Slipknot!” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (9:13-9:30) - [dead.net]

JESSE: But, really, change was absolutely constant with the Grateful Dead, and went way beyond the setlists. It was practically genetic. It’s hard to call any period of the Dead’s history “lost,” but there are a number of unusual archeological artifacts to uncover and consider from 1983. The experimentation iterated at almost every level of the organization, a pattern of motion set in the ‘60s, and which continued in ways that might not be obvious. Let’s start with one of the most microscopic, but no less symbolic. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

DAVID LEMIEUX: The entire Garden box was from cassette masters. In New Year’s 1982, the Dead started recording, in addition to analog cassettes, they started recording digitally for the first time [using] Betamax videotapes in a Betamax video tape recorder, just like anybody would have at home. On the video track, there was this system called the F1 system where on the video track of a Betamax tape, you would record digital audio. And then on the analog stereo audio tracks on there, you could also record two more tracks.

JESSE: This is what’s known as PCM recording — pulse code modulation. It worked with VHS and Betamax. Naturally the Dead chose the doomed but higher quality Betamax format.

DAVID LEMIEUX: So there are a bunch of Dead tapes in the vault from New Year’s ‘82 onward, until the late ‘80s, where we have Betamax video tapes, that the video track is digital audio, and the stereo audio track on those tapes is the audience mics in analog. So, they're kind of interesting tapes — some sound pretty good, [but] they generally don't. The mix is the same as what would be on the cassette. They were recording a split, where they'd record a cassette and the Beta. But they don't sound very robust — they sound thin, there are a tremendous amount of dropouts.

JESSE: Sometimes new tech doesn’t quite pan out, but the Dead were on it, just one of the million tiny changes happening in their world. Their constantly changing music was merely a reflection of the constantly changing situation around it.

DAVID LEMIEUX: For these shows, the only ones that we had Beta for were the Garden… the ‘83 shows, and they didn't sound nearly as good as the cassette masters. So we used the cassette on these ones, and they sound fantastic — full mixes.

AUDIO: “Cassidy” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (1:45-2:06) - [dead.net]

DAVID LEMIEUX: The ‘83s are very full sound — great keyboards on everything. They're great mixes; everything is present and where it should be. For a cassette, I think that's a testament to Dan Healy, and it's a testament to Madison Square Garden, that the venue sounds so good that it comes through in the in the board tapes how good it sounds.

JESSE: Another year, another pair of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden.

AUDIO: “Jack Straw” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (4:34-5:04) - [dead.net]

Dead ‘83

JESSE: The Dead weren’t shifting too many units in 1983, give or take the dependable sales of their deep and accumulated back catalogs. They were a cult band whose members apparently used their down time to make New Age drone records. But that wasn’t the point. Even a melon could recognize that the healthiest part of the Dead’s business in 1983—and the traditional metric by which the Dead weren’t in the wilderness—was their ticket sales. And it was from there, in 1983, that they began to build their own civilization. From Ice Nine Publishing, please welcome Alan Trist.

ALAN TRIST: With the Grateful Dead, the demand for tickets and trying to get in there first was such a big hassle that, in a way, doing it ourselves was the easiest route — rather than going through Ticketmaster or any of the agencies, which wouldn't have been able to handle the personal side of it, which was so much a part of Dead Heads Unite.

JESSE: In February 1983, Steve Marcus—a young Dead fan and former employee of the Bay Area Seating Service—was brought on board to help organize mail order tickets for the March benefit shows at the Warfield in San Francisco. The band had tried mail order once before, in 1976, but it didn’t totally work. This time it did. Marcus expected the job to last 6 weeks, but found himself employed for the next dozen years and beyond. With the band, he established Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, one of the Dead’s most radical and consequential business moves. By the end of the year, they would even start selling books of tickets to entire tours. Considered from the most basic level—either economically or just as, like, a regular human—why wouldn’t the Dead want to make life as easy as possible for their best customers? Here’s Jerry Garcia describing Dead Heads to Studs Terkel and Abe Peck on Chicago’s WFMT in 1979.

JERRY GARCIA [12/17/79]: They go through tremendous adventures sometimes getting to a Grateful Dead concert. Sometimes they travel hundreds and hundreds of miles. And after enough of these experiences, they get to know each other as a little internal community — they bump into each other and they get to meet each other and, pretty soon, they have a whole lot of stories.

JESSE: The same spring season in 1983 that the Dead established Grateful Dead Ticket Sales came the publication by Quill Books of New York of The Official Book of the Deadheads. Edited by the late poster historian Paul Grushkin, it’s an overflowing scrapbook of Dead Head ephemera, photographs, folklore, doggerel, deep band history, never-seen photographs, and more. It could keep Dead Heads busy for months just decoding it all. Thanks to Erik Nelson, host of the Grateful Dead Zone on K-Squid in Santa Cruz, here’s what Jerry Garcia had to say about it to MTV in 1983.

JERRY GARCIA [MTV, 1983]: It's really Paul's effort. It's his work and his friends, and input from other Dead Heads and stuff like that. It’s really the Dead Heads, it's their publication. In that sense, it's not really ours — it's them addressing themselves. I think that is really proper, I think that's appropriate. I'd be a little bit afraid of us addressing them.

JESSE: Though The Grateful Dead Movie had put the spotlight on Dead Heads, like Greg, the dancer in the front row, and newspapers had focused on the fanbase, especially after the band’s return to the road in 1976, The Official Book of the Deadheads was the first work that spent time exclusively in the world surrounding the band. I highly recommend it if you can find a used copy somewhere. So does Jerry.

JERRY GARCIA [MTV, 1983]: It's a great browsing book. And it also goes right through from beginning to end too, pretty well. I've taken it both ways, and it's all… it's kind of like a reference book, in a way. It's nice to go back to and just look stuff up in it.

JESSE: One of Garcia’s big takeaways from the book was that he could relate pretty well to Dead Heads.

JERRY GARCIA [MTV, 1983]: Our primary thrust has always been pretty much the same, for some reason. It really just has to do with taking your friends along with you, and preferring to operate, to function that way, [rather] than to choose something more expedient or more efficient or something like that.

Tour ‘83

JESSE: If it wasn’t so accidental and Dead-like, the whole thing might sound like a contrived marketing campaign — authorize a flattering book about how fun it is to be a fan of your band while organizing a way to more efficiently sell ticket packages. In the long improvisation of the Grateful Dead’s business, it was a pretty sweet passage. But it would’ve been hard to miss. Last episode, we talked about the continued emergence of the Grateful Dead scene, and by 1983 the wilderness was in full summertime bloom. Please welcome back, your pal and ours, Eric Schwartz, host of Lone Star Dead on KRON in Dallas.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: I was heavily embedded by ‘83. I saw every single show that year, except the first couple. And I missed New Years that year because, after seeing 60 shows, I would say… well, I couldn't get it together to go to New Years. I was a senior that year and I got out of high school that summer. So fall ‘83, I was able to do it without worrying about getting back to high school. It was like Jerry described — people ask him why people do it, and he was like, I think we're just like the last bit of Wild West you can grab in America right now. I mean, you can print $500 worth of tape labels and make $10,000 off of ‘em.

JESSE: Eric is in no way being metaphorical.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: I made these in high school printing class, with a ballpoint pen. There's nothing digital about them at all — I used to be able to travel with a metal printing plate and go to Kinko's, print four to a page, at five cents a page. They were like a penny a piece, and we were selling them for $1 a dozen — so I was making my money 10 times back. And I probably did make more money than my mom that year. I don’t know what a single mom’s salary was in 1983, but I know I printed up 10,000 tape labels and didn't come home with any. In eight months, I made $10,000 in 1983 dollars. And there was no Shakedown — to sell these, we would grab a handful, walk up and down the parking lots, and if I talked to a show where there were 10,000 people and I talked to 2000 of them, 200 of them gave me $1 — and that was a day's pay. Motel 6 was $18, gas was 80 cents. So we lived like kings, we really did.

JESSE: Last episode, we discussed how the zine scene crystallized in the early 1980s, and by 1983 the DIY publications around the Dead were flourishing, including the tour one-sheet called MIKEL, published by Michael Linnah. Please welcome back John Leopold.

JOHN LEOPOLD: In ‘82, we had discovered this outfit called Laser Beam Graphic, which had done a picture of the Dead on the front and a list of all the shows from the previous year. So in 1983, we did one. This is how we paid to go to shows.

JESSE: Like Eric Schwartz, John and his twin brother Dave graduated from high school that June and went on the summer tour.

JOHN LEOPOLD: Dave was the Grateful Dead of penmanship, as he was called.

JESSE: We’ve posted a link to their online store for PrintKnot, where you can still pick up some of Dave’s stunning setlist posters.

JOHN LEOPOLD: We would have 12 heads in a room, saying we would sell our setlist pictures; you could sell like 100 of them a night or something, they only cost a buck. And that would pay for our ticket, our food, our gas, and our portion of the hotel room. We weren't there trying to make money; we were just trying to pay for the experience. In ‘83, we were definitely into… we were part of the community, and handing out stuff for free was happening in lots of different places. MIKEL was one of those places. So we started handing out these sheets — if you were in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or New York or you go to a show, you may not know what they played in Las Vegas, unless someone showed up with a tape. So these were sheets that we made and handed out, and then [reading]: “For more copies, write to us at… ” — that's my parents house, 3600 Green. And then there's little information here: “‘Shadowboxing’ is a new Bobby tune that could be called ‘My Brother Esau.’”

By ‘83, we had definitely met Michael. One of the things that I think was interesting about the time period of the early ‘80s is it's the formation of new ways of community. And so you start seeing… MIKEL might have been the first mimeograph sheets that had setlists on it — that was pretty new. Relix magazine didn't put a song list in their issues as far as I can remember, so the idea that people were sort of keeping setlists, and then MIKEL was handing out these stickers. This was part of the way we got to know Michael, and then other heads — you would try to find out what was played, you'd have to meet people, and then you'd start getting phone calls after the shows. There was a time when we went off to college and we came home, and my dad said, “I can't believe that one of your friends called at one o'clock in the morning to tell us what they played.” We said, “Aw, really?” He goes, “I don’t know what was worse, that they called at one o’clock in the morning, or that I wrote it all down.”

ERIC SCHWARTZ: ‘83 was when we started looking for MIKEL stickers, and seeing him at every show. Every day after the show, we'd run home or run to the car, put our sticker in our book and try to remember the setlist. He started doing the stickers in ‘83 in the newsletters, and from what I remember, he was funding his tour by refereeing bridge tournaments — organizing and getting people to pay for registration fees to play bridge, professionally or semi-professionally, and it was just his thing to share. He just was like, I'm gonna print stickers up for everyone. I don't know who Ethan was at all; the stickers would always say “Ethan and Michael,” and I don't really know who that was. But it was our goal, every show, to find Michael to get a sticker for our tour book, and a newsletter, and to see what happened or what's going to happen. We knew it was happening because we were there, but just to read about it and see it in print.

JOHN LEOPOLD: Michael was part of this ever growing community of people who were connected, and Michael was a great connector of folks. He had great people skills, and he was deeply committed to that sort of community. So as he met people along the way, he would try to link them up. Sometimes he would give you stickers to hand out, give you newsletters to hand out. He was just sort of sharing the wealth. He told us about this couple in Micronesia, and we would make tapes and we’d send them these setlist pictures, and we would tell them stories about what was happening at the shows. They would write us back these really cool, groovy letters. It was just like a Dead Head pen pal relationship. I think I met them at a show. Then there were things like this, this Dead Head Directory. This is how you found out where the heads were in the town you were going to when you were going to go see the show.

JESSE: Published out of Natick, Massachusetts for a few years starting in 1983, the Dead Heads Directory included a polite note, that it was “not an open invitation for house guests!” Eric Schwartz.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: I was selling shirts for Phil Brown, who… the three top Grateful Dead t-shirt artists that didn't use a single bit of Grateful Dead iconography in their work was Mikio, Phil Brown and Ed Donahue, although Ed kind of turned a few things into his own design. Chris [Goodspace] made… there was Gary Kroman’s 58 Grateful Dead Songs — the original version before it was 100, but he took the little guy with the Love Light and made a t-shirt with the Love Light guy. Everybody was biting each other's work because there was nothing digital. It was all just — there's a poster, we'll take a little piece of that and turn it into a t-shirt.

JESSE: In the 21st century, the artifacts of the Grateful Dead parking lot in the early 1980s have an enormous pull. Check out the prices on eBay. Four decades later, the artists Elijah Funk and Alix Ross of Online Ceramics continue the visual conversation that began across t-shirts in the ‘70s and especially the early ‘80s. Elijah Funk.

ELIJAH FUNK: It was not only conversational in a way—saying, like, I love this thing, and appreciating it, honoring something—but it's also functional in a sense, in a true folk art way, where it's like: this serves a purpose to my existence, because I'm making and selling this thing in order to get down the road for something that I love so much. So it's almost like ultimate fan art in a way, because it also serves the person that made it back in a strange way.

ALIX ROSS: My favorite stuff is obviously designed by someone who doesn't know how to design, and it's like they just created this shirt so they could get to the next show, and had a friend that had a screen print system and they did their best to make artwork.

JESSE: If you can find a used copy, Rin Tinaka published a wonderful book a number of years ago, the fourth in the My Freedamn! series, titled 1970s Hippie Fashion & Grateful Dead T-Shirts, which contains a chronological guide to many major parking lot shirts. You won’t find Online Ceramics in there, at least until a revised volume comes out. Or, a new open-source project titled the Deadhead Dress Archive, which aims to document Dead fashion far beyond just t-shirts and is requesting that people send in photos. Though both of the Online Ceramics artists came of age in the post-Garcia years, the music continues to speak to them in the present tense. Alix Ross arrived at the Dead through psychedelics.

ALIX ROSS: The Dead understood me in a way that other people didn't — like the music understood what I was experiencing, and I wasn't around a lot of people. I was tripping alone some of the time — I didn't have a real community in that world yet, so it was like the Dead was kind of my community within psychedelics. Through that, it started to really seep into my art.

JESSE: Some might argue that the continued presence of psychedelics helps keep the world around the Dead very much active and in the present tense.

ELIJAH FUNK: It's very much alive — you can go visit your tape collection anytime, and it's 1973, it's 1982. The artwork changes as the time goes on too, because technology is catching up. And whatever way that means: screen printing technology, computer technology. The early ‘90s, late ‘80s stuff is so sick, because people are trying to incorporate computers into the artwork. It takes a turn that now is visually… it's almost like the MIDI technology in the music.

JESSE: In our “Playing Dead” episodes, we explored how the Dead’s music became a springboard for musicians in large part because it encouraged constant change. Online Ceramics and others do the same with the Dead’s iconography.

ELIJAH FUNK: It never feels like I'm holding reverence to something from the past; it feels like a very active, participatory, exploratory [thing]. I am living in the songs — often, I will only listen to the Grateful Dead if I'm making shirts about the Grateful Dead. I have to exist within it: it's living in me, and I'm living in it. And it's really… I can almost picture the world in which we're going into. There's certain shirts that are like “Dark Star” to me, there's certain shirts that are like Bobby’s cowboy songs to me. I’m not saying that it’s just that song, I’m saying that the world that’s within that song, you can enter through the art. It’s not visionary art, it's not like an Alex Grey thing where I’m picturing things. But it’s just a way to participate within the song, and it makes me feel like I’m an active participant in the Grateful Dead, if that makes sense. I don’t feel like I’m making fan art; I feel like I’m riding along and joining in this thing. To whatever major or minor scale that is, it doesn’t really matter.

JESSE: T-shirts and tapes are merely artifacts of an unfolding world. Back in 1983, life was starting to get entertaining in the Dead parking lot. Eric Schwartz.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: Eric Price, Mark Shriver and Tom Greenleaf, may he rest in peace, were the fire jugglers — fire juggling in the parking lot, that was their hustle. Spring, summer and fall ‘83. I mean that. When I jumped into their van, filled with torches and kerosene — it was a really, really stinky ride, but that was their hustle, man. Mark was like three feet nothing, and Eric was a big guy. Mark would be on Eric's shoulders, juggling fire pins and devil sticks. They did great, they got a huge crowd.

JESSE: It was a small, weird tour family.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: Chris Goodspace, he had a van called the Goodpsace Van. He was older than us. And thank god for the older people, man — Chris was just an older dude that had a van, had his tour shit together, and we just latched onto him. We'd all gather after a show, look at our roadmap and go, “Alright, we've got 800 miles to go. Let's pick a campsite. We'll all meet there.” And 90% of the times we all met there. There were a couple of large tour buses; people were taking buses and vans out at that point. You'd see those at like Oregon County Fair-type situations, not as much on the East Coast. A guy named Whitefeather, Wind Dancer— these were older Dead Heads. Whitefeather started singing shows in Worcester, Mass[achusetts] in 1969. By 1983, he'd already had 100 or two under his belt, at least several hundred. So these older people, we kind of took our cues from them. Then there was Overthrow magazine, which was a real radical Yippie kind of publication. They used to literally publish major oil and gas companies' executives' calling card numbers.

JESSE: Overthrow was published out of 9 Bleecker Street in Manhattan, just across the Bowery and practically in loogeying distance from the legendary punk dive CBGB. 9 Bleecker Street was also the world headquarters of the Yippies!, founded on New Year’s 1967-1968 by Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin and friends. In 1983, the Yippies were still making trouble.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: It’s like, “Okay, here's a bunch of calling cards, they should work!” And next thing you know, you're able to call home on these calling cards. There was a lot of scamming going on, but like I said, we just took the cues from our elders — starting with the Dead, just being Pranksters, and we kind of pranked our way across the country.

JERRY GARCIA [MTV, 1983]: We take it as least as seriously as anybody else does. And I think that they, even at their most obsessive and crazy, they also have a certain sense of humor about it, too, which is what you have to have. And we have that too.

JESSE: A few episodes back, promoter John Scher summarized the Dead’s approach to the production of their live shows.

JOHN SCHER: Always trying to make it better, better, better.

JESSE: Dan English of Morpheus Lights joined lighting director Candace Brightman on the road in 1982. After his first few months with the band, he saw the future of lights.

DAN ENGLISH: Right between ‘82 and ‘83 is when moving lights were introduced to the rock and roll industry, computerized lighting. My company, Morpheus, was the second company to have it; the first company was very, like, Genesis and that whole thing. Well, six or eight months later, Morpheus had moving lights. My boss, John Richardson, one day he walked in the office, and he said, “I just read this article. Cats, on Broadway, has this brand new lighting controller, and it does 100 channels — 100 channels all laid out on a computer screen, and you can go from cue to cue and have four different windows to do these different queues. So, if we just line up the lights for this channel’s pan, and this channel’s tilt, this channel’s this color”—I think each light had 10 functions—”then we could do these separate lights panning with 100 channels of control.” Now, some lights… there are lights that have more than 100 channels controlling them, but that was enough to get the thing rolling. One of the first shows that my boss did was Devo. So they played at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, and Candace and I went to see them. She saw that, and her mind was blown. She was like, “We’ve got to have this. Now, I don’t know what we’re going to do with them, but we’ve got to have it.” I had been doing a few shows here and there, because the schedule, the Dead touring schedule, wasn't that taxing. It wasn't like I was busy all the time, so I was out doing other shows for Morpheus. I did Paul Anka, and I even worked on the setup for Barry Manilow, things like that. So I got the hang of running the moving lights. I brought the moving lights to the Grateful Dead, and the first show with the moving lights was the Warfield Theatre in 1983. The first run, we took 13 moving lights out. And if 10 or 12 or 11 of them work, at the end of the show, we were like, “Wow, what a successful night!”

JESSE: It was surely one of the first computers to appear regularly at a rock and roll sound and light board.

DAN ENGLISH: One of those really early computers. The monitor was built in, had some keyboard, had a keyboard that was mostly numeric. But it was specifically built to do lighting. And it was made… the Kliegl Brothers made it, they aren't even in business [anymore]. Each channel had zero to 10 voltage, you’d peer back there at the patching, it looked like the spaghetti wires — picture the old telephone, where you’d patch the wire to get the thing… we used to patch up all these huge boxes.

JESSE: Dan English joined Candace by the soundboard in 1983, working alongside sound engineer Dan Healy.

DAN ENGLISH: Dan Healy had a very specific distance that he wanted to be from the front of the stage. I want to say it was 90 feet, but it might have been 78 feet, something like that. It was something they measured every day. They put the big soundboard in, and Candace was right next to him — right on the left of him, right in the center of the room. And then later, when we added a little station for me, I’d kind of sidecar to her left.

JESSE: The system required programming for every show.

DAN ENGLISH: You’d focus them during the day and you made all these cues. And then you could replicate them. Candace and I had sort of a numbering system, different looks for different things, different fly outs. Every day, you had to update the focusing, and I kind of came up with a little system where you could focus a few different places, and then, you could compile that, sit out there at the machine and compile it all into the rest of your show. And since, of course, all that’s been streamlined.

JESSE: It didn’t take much for Dan to become a fan of the music.

DAN ENGLISH: It was really great because as I learned the music, which was not especially easy, but as I learned how to do lighting under Candace’s tutelage, the things that she wanted to see and how we did it, I got to operate the moving lights that were around the back. They had a particular look and and then feel to them as they moved, whereas she was doing all the other accents and different things, wide audience flashes. Then, later on, we both had our own moving lights: hers were going around in the audience, doing all these things, and mine were on stage, hitting cues. Of course, there was no setlist, so Candace and I had little headsets, and we were talking to each other. Even though we're next to each other, just because of how loud everything was, we would talk on headsets. She was really good at knowing what song was coming up next, or what she thought might come up, or identifying it once someone started playing the lyrics of a song: “Nah, that’s gonna be ‘Truckin.’” So we sort of had some parameters on how it was gonna go.

JESSE: Out in the crowd, Dead Heads were doing their own tech experiments. In ‘83, after lugging his home stereo on tour a few times, Charlie Miller officially became a taper.

CHARLIE MILLER: When I was doing the spring tour in ‘83, my mom gave me her credit card with a note authorizing me to use it. And it said, “This is in case of an emergency,” and I came home and said, “I had an emergency: I had to buy a D6 and batteries and tapes.” In ‘83, I was patching, and I would try something each night. One night, in the middle of the show at set break, I switched mics and then stuck with that — I went from Beyer M160s to Sennheiser 421s, and then I was on a 421 kick for the rest of the tour. We got to Philly, and I had a seat that was about 10, 15 rows in front of the board, but it was on the right-center, the right side of the aisle, so it was a little more right than center. I’m sitting in my seat and this guy shows up next to me in a business suit and his briefcase. I’m like, “Oh great. I’m never gonna find a taper to patch into.” He opens up his briefcase, and he had a mic stand that came folded up into a big thing; he had his 421s, a D5, a bottle of Coke. It was great. It didn’t matter where you were sitting, you’d always find someone near you to patch into.

JESSE: A handsome new book from Anthology Editions collects an overview of artifacts from the Dead Head cassette era, titled After All Is Saidand Done: Taping the Grateful Dead, by Mark A. Rodriguez. What began as an art project to collect one taped copy of every Dead show turned into an impressive archival book with a thorough array of labels — also known as J-cards, plus nearly 200 pages of taper interviews and ephemera. If you’re a Dead freak, you want it. Please welcome to the Deadcast, Mark Rodriguez, who—like us—is fascinated by taping culture in the 1980s especially.

MARK RODRIGUEZ: During that time, there was a lot of experimentation with how to set up a mic and how to actually make a really good recording, given the advancements in technology. You have the frontiersmen, who are [doing] reel-to-reel and audio cassette recording, and trying to figure out the mic setup, but they're not exactly like audio engineers. But by the ‘80s, I think you get more audio engineer type people, people that are even doing that as a profession that are like, “Oh, you want this type of mic.”

JESSE: But the focus of Mark’s book is very much the labels themselves.

MARK RODRIGUEZ: The print quality on a lot of them sometimes is kind of astounding. Just speaking from an art perspective. [Some were] obviously on a book press. So there's indentation, there's this nice, subtle two-color layout. So, a lot of time has been spent planning it. Or [some were] even thermographic technology, which is like the puffy paint of printing — always kind of raised and glossy. The thermographic ink expands in an unpredictable way, so sometimes it's blotchy, but it comes out kind of slick. Then there's even the Xerox ones, which I can respect from a different perspective. It's like, Oh, this looks very punk.

JESSE: Looking through Mark’s book is a reminder that the people who loved live Dead tapes encompassed far more than just the obsessive tapers who made them.

MARK RODRIGUEZ: There's different types of J-cards, and there's different types of recordings. And there's different types of Dead Heads. I met a bunch of different types of Dead Heads. There's really sloppy, probably crusty, kind of drugged out people that didn't have real archival organization or collecting organization to their bloodstream, let's say. Not that they’re bad people for that — it wasn’t as important to keep everything clean and organized. And then you have the opposite side of the spectrum, which is someone who is deep into audio: what the source is, where they're getting it. And maybe they also started collecting in the ‘70s, so their collection is a little bit more precious and curated, let's say. What I found out was: the more boring the J-card is, and the more straightforward the information is notated on the J-card, probably the better the recording is, actually.

NYC ‘83

JESSE: There were a lot of Dead scenes by 1983, from the committed to the curious, as they say. There was the scene surrounding the band, there was the scene of tourheads. And there were local pockets of Dead Heads. Today, Lee Greenfeld is going to be our avatar for a particular and fascinating generation of New York Dead freaks. Several generations, actually. In 1983, he was 12 years old.

LEE GREENFELD: My first Dead records were from my parents. My dad was a huge record collector, more into jazz guy. But in the ‘60s, he saw a lot of bands. I assume he saw the Dead in the ‘60s, never actually asked him. But when I was a kid, I, at that point, had a copy of Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty and Europe ‘72.

JESSE: Lee was of the first generation where it was possible to get into the Dead through your parents, give or take a few outliers like Elvis Costello, which we heard about in our Bickershaw Festival episode last season.

LEE GREENFELD: I was hanging out in Central Park in the early ‘80s. I used to hang out in Sheep Meadow and Monument — everyone up there was into the Dead, and they were city kids. They were like tough kids, but they were Dead Heads, too. I knew a lot of graffiti writers; I was a graffiti writer. I knew a lot of graffiti writers thrown into the Dead, which blows a lot of the history away. Everyone kind of paints graffiti as just this tangential thing to hip hop, but it existed before hip hop. It existed before rap, and there were plenty of kids that were definitely into the Dead.

JESSE: Lee was a member of the community of New York youth known as the Parkies. I wrote extensively about the Parkies in my book, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Starting in the late ‘60s, the Parkies main hangs were Bethesda Fountain, the Naumburg Bandshell and—just above and behind it—Rumsey Playfield, now the home of Summerstage, where the Parkies wrote graffiti, skateboarded, played frisbee, and became an important east/west connection point in the LSD distribution network. One of the earliest nodes was a teenage graffiti writer named Chad Stickney, whose graffiti tag was LSD-Om, founder of the Rebels, who passed the torch to friends like Bilrock, founder of the Rolling Thunder Writers, named for Mickey Hart’s 1972 album.

LEE GREENFELD: Those guys were fucking legendary. He's one of my favorites. Chad's like… his stuff was still around in the Upper West Side, also in the early ‘80s. So I started hanging out in the Upper West Side in ‘83, ‘84, ‘85. Bilrock and all the RTW guys, they were a big deal, and I love their art the most, too — outside of what I grew up with, which was the tags in Brooklyn, because they incorporated a lot of like underground comix artwork in their pieces, and it was psychedelic.

JESSE: Another serious Dead Head who came up through the Central Park scene is Johnny Dwork, co-founder of Dupree’s Diamond News. In the ‘70s, he’d found his world with the frisbee players on Frisbee Hill.

JOHNNY DWORK: Frisbee Hill is this little hill that's a minute’s walk from the bandshell at Central Park, and also a minute’s walk from Bethesda Fountain, which was a really, really vibrant hangout scene in the 1960s. Before it was Summerstage, it was this weird little area where you had to climb up these steps behind the bandshell, and then you got to this beautiful little covered area that was just for sitting. There was a shade garden that was completely covered by 100-year old Wisteria vines. And of course, in the spring, the entire thing was covered with Wisteria blossoms, which was so jaw droppingly, psychedelically awesome. It was hard to see — it was not on any main paths, the carriage paths, none of the main walkways. It was behind the bandshell. So most people who went to Central Park didn't see it, but the freaks found it. And that's the place where people would go to smoke pot, to sell drugs, to trip, to lie there amidst the Wisteria in the spring, and sort of have this hidden little world. The cop cars, when they parked in Central Park, you couldn't really see what was going up there. So it's like a world within a world.

JESSE: If you’ve attended a show at Central Park’s Summerstage, that’s the area you pass through if you exit the venue through the southwest corner.

LEE GREENFELD: When I started going to Central Park, in the ‘80s, way after that era, it was still great. The vibe in Sheep Meadow was just so cool, because we had kids from every place in New York, including Brooklyn. I ended up going to school in the Upper West Side, but even before I left school, the park still had a vibe, and it was like a really cool, mixed, true melting pot in New York, stylistically. If people were into classic rock—that's what we used to just call it all— or then we had punk rock or early hip hop… Black, white, Puerto Rican, whatever. Everyone kind of liked Central Park. It was a pretty magical spot.

JOHNNY DWORK: When you walked through Central Park at that point, there was this confluence of pretty distinct subcultures. You would, just walking through that area, be exposed to all of them. There was the burgeoning disco roller skate scene, which also had a crossover scene with the gay scene in New York at the time, which was just really starting to blossom. You had the frisbee players that were this combination, on Frisbee Hill, of the counterculture alternative sport jocks, who had found a sport that they could call their own. And then you had the freak scene, the hippies, that were sort of intermingled between all of these different scenes.

JESSE: Though some of the faces and tags had changed, the Dead Head graffiti scene was still going strong in the early ‘80s.

LEE GREENFELD: There was a crew called Acid Writers—the name right there gives you a clue—which was started by [FREEDOM and passed over to] CHRIS 217. His younger brother, SAND, he was a good friend of mine. So he was also a Dead Head. His buddy, Dire, who’s another one… he was a Dead Head. I mean, these guys would go to the train yards in the early to mid ‘80s, Dead shirts, long hair. Sand had long blond hair — his writing got up, he was a very famous writer at the time. Those guys, all they ever listened to were the Dead; oddly enough, Steve Miller Band was a big one, especially the first record was actually a killer record. Yeah, and Hot Tuna — Hot Tuna was another huge, huge Upper West Side band. Massive. There’s this guy I knew in Spanish Harlem, actually, 96th Street — this guy, Willie, who was also a graffiti writer and also a Dead Head. Unfortunately, one of my earliest friends who died of drug-related causes. He had tons of Dead tapes, and he would just let me come over there, smoke weed and just dub tapes from him.

JESSE: And, just like New York was home to young Dead Heads, it was home to young professional Dead Heads. Eric Pooley is about 10 years older than Lee. At the time of the March 1981 episodes, he’d just graduated from college and in 1983, he’d moved to New York and gotten a pretty perfect entry-level gig in New York media.

ERIC POOLEY: I got a job as a freelance fact checker at New York magazine and moved into town. In those days, people at New York magazine knew that I liked the Dead, but they did not approve, the music editor there. I wrote some music pieces, but it wasn't until they had their resurgence in ‘87 that I could interest New York magazine in a piece about the Dead. It took a couple of years before it happened.

JESSE: Eric would interview Garcia in 1991, which we heard about in our 1981 episode. He made it to the first night at the Garden in 1983.

ERIC POOLEY: This may have been my only show of ‘83. My relationship with the Dead really changed because they were an oasis of beauty and peace in this city that I was working my ass off in, making no money in, struggling to survive in — you know, the whole New York City trip.

And the Garden shows were always memorable. I would have left the office and probably wore jeans to work, probably had a Dead t-shirt under my office shirt, or changed in the bathroom or something like that. The New York magazine office was at 41st and Second in those days, so I’d just walk straight across. The bars are filled with Dead Heads, the streets are filled with Dead Heads and the Garden has the covered area on the Seventh Avenue side, which is actually the entrance to Penn Station. There's kind of the awning and overhang, and there'd be gazillions of people under the overhang — you’d mill about, trying to find people you knew and usually succeeding.

October 11th

JESSE: I only saw the Dead at the Garden once in 1994. Coming into Penn Station, the conductor announced, “last stop, Terrapin Station.” There were lots of ways to get to a Dead show. Rich Farrell came by boat.

RICH FARRELL: 1983, I'm 19 years old. I'm out at sea as a cadet with a good buddy of mine who turned me on to some fantastic music. I was previously into heavy metal and the blues, but he happened to turn me on to a band called the Grateful Dead, who I was quite receptive to. These guys sounded pretty good. We were just young guys, having the time of our life in the Mediterranean Ocean at various ports of call. When we reached Italy, it was the last stop, and we called home and found out that we were going to miss the Grateful Dead at Madison Square Garden by probably two days. So we were pretty bummed out on the way back, on the trip back. One day, the ship got a telex from the shipowning office saying to “Speed up — must get to New York by October 11.” Well, the captain put his foot on the accelerator and voila, we got there right on the morning of October 11th. We jumped off the ship the moment they let us; we jumped on a subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan. The first person we saw in Manhattan had tickets to sell us when we got above ground. And wouldn't you know it — I found myself at my very first Grateful Dead show, after coming all the way across the sea from Italy.

JESSE: The fall tour was only two shows old when Rich Farrell’s ship came in and the Dead pulled into Madison Square Garden for Tuesday and Wednesday shows. The band had toured in the early summer and the late summer, wrapping up outside Santa Cruz on September 24th, with the next leg starting back east two weeks later. Eric Schwartz.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: Richmond and Greensboro were the opening of fall tour, October 8th and 9th.

JESSE: John and Dave Leopold were ostensibly college freshmen.

JOHN LEOPOLD: The fall of ‘83, we started college. It was funny, before we went to college, my father sat us down and he goes, “Boys, you're going to college — you're not going on tour. You’re supposed to go to classes, you're not supposed to go to Grateful Dead shows. So, I'm counting on you.” We did alright: we went to both the college and shows. Dave went to a few more — it was during his brief period where he was a taper. I think that the Madison Square Garden show may have been the only East Coast show that I ever went to without him. He didn't make it. He had gone to Richmond and Greensboro, and he went to Hartford.

JESSE: Dave Leopold surely reported the following news to his brother that night. Eric Schwartz was an earwitness.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: In Greensboro, there was a rustle in the parking lot: “They’re soundchecking

‘St. Stephen!’” We all just tore ass to the back of the venue so we could hear them soundchecking “St. Stephen.”

JESSE: Dan English from Morpheus Lights.

DAN ENGLISH: They did soundcheck every so often, but certainly not regularly. I would say it was a very rare circumstance that I remember.

JESSE: If you were in the know, you were in the know. In the new In and Out of the Garden box, you can see some of Larry Price’s handwritten setlists. His Deadhead mentor Teddy pulled him aside on the way into the show.

LARRY PRICE: I remember walking into the show and Teddy goes, “Just wait.” And he predicted it. So, for me, the energy for that particular show was palpable — it was crackling. I don’t know if that was Teddy just telling us youngsters to get excited for another show. Teddy’s favorite line was “leave your expectations at the door.” He said that his whole life about shows — you’re gonna get what you’re gonna get. But this is one of the few times he said, “Watch what you’re going to get tonight.”

JESSE: Teddy also helped in the distribution of setlists.

LARRY PRICE: He worked for maybe Citi or Chase, a decent level position where they had access to computers that would print back then, which was sort of rare in ‘83. And Teddy would come out, and each day the print would get smaller and smaller, with the setlist from the night before. He would come with a stack of 100 of them — so, that’s how he spent his day at work.

JESSE: There’s no way to do the math, but for every committed head like Teddy or Eric Schwartz or John and David Leopold, there were young freaks seeing their first shows. Lee Greenfeld.

LEE GREENFELD: I remember I took the train to 34th and then just seas of people, more tie-dyed shirts than I've ever seen. Clouds of pot smoke, obviously. There was always something electric about going to Madison Square Garden, just in general, because it was like these tribes of people showing up. And it was Madison Square Garden: taking the train to the city, seeing all the people for whatever show it would be, the Dead in particular, just hordes of people. That experience stays with you.

JESSE: Like the other four shows on the In and Out of the Garden box, the ‘83 MSG shows were on school nights. Eric Schwartz.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: There wasn't any Shakedown Street to begin with, so we did the same thing. We walked around with our stuff, tried to sell our gear. There's no denying you're in New York City, when you walk out the door in the morning and put your foot on the ground. It's just the world goes by that much faster, and it's happening that much more intensely.

JESSE: Eric Pooley.

ERIC POOLEY: The Garden was extraordinary in all kinds of ways. Your parking lot was the streets of the West Side, Midtown. Those were the years before there was a kind of formal Shakedown. The lot was in the West 30s, and everybody was in the streets with the scalpers and the cops on horseback, who could be kind of scary.

JESSE: Promoter John Scher.

JOHN SCHER: The New York City cops, who I'm a fan of, are pretty good keeping people moving outside the Garden. I'm sure there were probably a few thousand people always outside, but the New York City police kept them moving, so they were walking around. They weren't gathering in one big group, so it all worked fine. I was very sensitive about security, both to make sure there were no problems, and to make sure that the security guards—which worked for the Garden, who we had no control over—were being kind and gentle. We control the backstage security, basically, our security crew from the Capitol did that. So they knew how to behave and what to do.

ERIC POOLEY: Folks would be petting the horses and I can remember cops chasing people. I never got chased, but it was always a little tense trying to get into the Garden. You have to contend with the city to get inside where it's safe. And there were people around preying on the Dead Heads.

JESSE: In 1981, Eric Pooley had easily scored a ticket outside. He didn’t have the same luck in ‘83.

ERIC POOLEY: So trusting. I handed him my money before he hands me the ticket, and then he takes off running. I’m chasing him through a department store across Seventh Avenue from the Garden, and he escapes out the other doorway. I'm standing on the street, and someone takes pity on me and gives me a nosebleed, or sells me a nosebleed ticket for cheap.

JESSE: The Dead’s big opener at the Garden in ‘83 was a song that was new to the band’s repertoire since their last pass through town. And though it didn’t have the big thump of “Shakedown Street,” it was still a party invitation.

AUDIO: “Wang Dang Doodle” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (0:58-1:17) - [dead.net]

JESSE: David Lemieux.

DAVID LEMIEUX: Setlist-wise, certainly “Wang Dang Doodle” jumps out, and that's a brand new one.

JESSE: Written by Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf was the first to record the song for Chess Records in 1961, but it was Koko Taylor’s 1965 version that made it standard.

AUDIO: “Wang Dang Doodle” [Koko Taylor, What It Takes: The Chess Years] (1:18-1:48) [Spotify]

JESSE: The Dead had soundchecked “Wang Dang Doodle” as far back as 1973, and Weir sang a verse in the middle of “Satisfaction” once. Over the summer of ‘83, it joined the rotation in Weir’s first-set blues slot that had emerged in 1980, joining “Little Red Rooster” and “C.C.Rider.”

DAVID LEMIEUX: There's a great one from a month earlier in Boise that was released as part of the Dave’s Picks series.

AUDIO: “Wang Dang Doodle” [Dave’s Picks 27, 9/2/83] (5:36-6:00)

JESSE: Lee Greenfeld.

LEE GREENFELD: I ended up going to the Dead with my mom and my uncle — that's who took me, because I would have been 12. I saw [Iron] Maiden with a childhood friend of mine, and his older brother took us as a chaperone. His mom, who was somewhat religious, allowed us to go to the show. When she heard the name of the Grateful Dead, we had tickets, and she didn't let them go to the show, which is hysterical. Iron Maiden was okay, but the Dead was not. And it had to just be because of the skull logo and the name. So I went with my mom and my uncle. It was New York in the ‘80s. It was still… it wasn't all like the cliche of what you expect at a Dead show, but it was definitely a more mild crowd than Iron Maiden. I do remember clouds of pot smoke, which was amazing and making me very jealous at the time, because I was with my mom. I was 12. It was pre- all of my… I mean, I was smoking pot at 12, but I wasn't smoking pot with my mom there. I remember the dancing. I don’t remember where I sat, but pretty far back. The dancing was pretty incredible. I was a city kid: I was a Brooklyn kid, but I was obsessed with the ‘60s counterculture stuff, I wasn’t a hippie kid. I almost watched the people more than the show. Probably my seats weren’t great either, so that kind of helped.

JESSE: The core of the first set was made of songs from the 1971-1972 era of the band, including the always special “Bird Song.”

AUDIO: “Bird Song” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (2:11-2:34) - [dead.net]

JESSE: As we’ve said before, “Dark Star” sometimes seemed to be hiding out in “Bird Song” in the ‘80s, and this version is no exception.

AUDIO: “Bird Song” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (6:06-6:36) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Over the course of the two nights at the Garden in 1983, the band played five new or newish songs, yet unrecorded. A few they’d played last time through, but not all.

DAVID LEMIEUX: The new songs, the “Day Job”s and “Touch of Grey”s and “West L.A. [Fadeaway]”s and “Throwing Stones,” they’re very much more developed in ‘83. I’m a huge, huge “Throwing Stones” fan, and “Touch of Grey” same thing, where the song structure didn’t change very much over the next few years. But the tempo did — it was a lot peppier, it was more almost “Day Job”-y in terms of its peppiness. I do feel that those songs are adding to the repertoire. And then, just a few months later in the spring of ‘83, they’re adding “Hell in a Bucket” and “My Brother Esau,” which became a huge part of the next few years, at least “Hell in a Bucket.” Till today, they still play it all the time.

AUDIO: “Hell in a Bucket” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (1:05-1:26) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Bobby’s definitely enjoyin’ the ride. Written by Weir with lyricist John Perry Barlow, “Hell in a Bucket” was an instant Weir power move, destined for In the Dark and an MTV video co-starring Weir and a duck with a leather cock-ring around its neck. While arching our eyebrows in a John Belushi manner about the sexual politics of the song, it’s got some pretty sick put-downs for the narcissistic ‘80s.

AUDIO: “Hell in a Bucket” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (2:35-2:56) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Like the other new songs, “Hell in a Bucket” would marinate for a few years before In the Dark. One upside of the Dead taking a while to record their new songs is that they were able to spend more time as new fan favorites. But of course, they still got down to business with old fan favorites.

AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (0:06-0:25) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Dan English of Morpheus Lights.

DAN ENGLISH: We developed some different moves and audience things that would go along with particular songs. Like when they started “China Cat,” I had a little thing where the lights slowly sort of went off into the audience — usually in red, but it would just depend on maybe what Candace had on stage at the time. So there'd be different things that were similar, but we never had a set thing.

AUDIO: “China Cat Sunflower” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (1:34-2:04) - [dead.net]

ERIC POOLEY: I can remember thinking that the “China” / “Rider” didn't touch the one I'd seen two years before, but it was still awesome to hear it. The jamming out of “I Need a Miracle” and the jamming out of “Bertha” into “China Doll” — all those are all really well-played. It was a really strong series of high-energy, excellent Grateful Dead tunes, culminating in a really gorgeous “China Doll.”

JESSE: It was unusual, first, for “Bertha” to appear in a second set jam slot and, second, to grow a jam. This is a pretty odd and cool moment. The song pretty much comes to a complete end but Garcia opens a new thread, starts to pull on it, and everybody jumps right in.

AUDIO: “Bertha” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (5:56-6:06) - [dead.net]

AUDIO: “Jam” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net]

JESSE: It’s not even four minutes, but it’s a richly developed open space. And it was even more unusual these days for one Jerry Garcia song to fall right into another. But nobody was arguing.

AUDIO: “Jam” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (3:05-3:35) - [dead.net]

AUDIO: “China Doll” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (0:00-0:25) - [dead.net]

JESSE: What a great transition. Photographer Bob Minkin was down on the floor with his camera. Like tapers, he had to work to get his gear inside.

BOB MINKIN: I worked in a graphic design studio in Manhattan actually in the Ed Sullivan Theater building. I didn't start getting photo passes consistently until mid-‘85. Luckily, the camera came apart — you had the lens component and the body component, the body was much smaller than the telephoto lens, obviously. So the telephoto lens, you pack down; it'd be like, Hey, are you just happy to see me? And the body could kind of stick into your waistband, have your shirt over it or something like that. Then you’d have to be sometimes careful inside. If I was bringing my camera to a show, I would do everything I could to try to get up close. If it was a show with seated tickets, you’d try to work your way up and find that empty seat, or have a friend switch with you who had a better seat. It was a whole operation, who had the good seats… or if it was GA, I'd have to try to get there really early and put in the time to wait, then try to edge your way up even closer. I had wormed my way up kind of close earlier to that, but during the “Drums,” because they did “China Doll” and “Drums.”

AUDIO: “Drums” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (5:20-5:50) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Mickey Hart had cycled some new instruments through the arsenal that year, including what I think might be a baliphone in the section we just heard. Both the “Drums” and “Space” segments had expanded to luxurious lengths in 1983, the whole sequence lasting over 20 minutes on many nights, including both at the Garden. If you know what’s coming next, you can hear some intimations of it throughout the night’s late-”Space” Garcialogue.

AUDIO: “Space” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (10:10-10:20) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Charlie Miller had heard the rumors but wasn’t believing them.

CHARLIE MILLER: We got to the Garden in ‘83 and people were telling me that they teased “St. Stephen” the night before in Greensboro. I was like, “Yeah, whatever,” because every tour from spring tour in ‘82 all the way through to ‘87 was, “Oh, I heard the new album’s coming out…” Because it was in ‘82 that they started doing “Day Job” and “Throwing Stones” and “Touch of Grey” — oh, the new album is coming out.

JESSE: But then came the night’s big moment. Bob Minkin.

BOB MINKIN: And then during the “Drums,” I had had enough of being up close. So I was starting to pull back, work my way back — and then, the first notes of “St. Stephen” and I was, like… reverse, 180!

AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (0:00-0:19) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Debuted in 1968 and instantly one of the Dead’s most beloved songs, “St. Stephen” dropped from the band’s repertoire in 1971, returned in 1976 and disappeared again in January 1979, the day after the band’s Garden debut. It was just short of five years since the last version. We certainly don’t have any definitive answer as to why the Dead brought “St. Stephen” back when they did, whatever your dentist’s dealer might’ve said. It could just be ‘cuz they were playing the Garden, and there’s pretty much a reference to it right there in the first line.

AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (0:44-0:55) - [dead.net]

JESSE: And, as we used to say whenever a movie includes the title phrase in the dialogue, we have “achieved title.”

BOB MINKIN: Nothing beats those first notes of a breakout. And then you always feel so good, you add a break in. My notes for that say “10/11/83,” and next to it: “St Stephen!”

ERIC SCHWARTZ: The place just blew up when “St. Stephen” started. It was just… you can hear it on the tapes, but when you feel that wind going by the hairs on the back of your neck, because the crowd is collectively going: [makes crowd screaming noise]. There was nothing like it — it was incredible.

ERIC POOLEY: The crowd noise at the beginning of “St. Stephen” was unbelievable. It definitely drowned out the band for a while, and it was joyous — it was fun.

AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (3:14-3:28) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Dean Heiser.

DEAN HEISER: From the first note, those fans went bonkers and raised the roof and energy level on the Garden to which I've never experienced it since. I remember sitting next to a guy, he was about six foot five, 260 pounds. When they played “St. Stephen,” he was bawling like a baby, and he made sure he hugged everybody in the row. He was exhilarated.

JESSE: Dan English of Morpheus Lights.

DAN ENGLISH: That first year that I was doing moving lights was the year that they played the first “St. Stephen” in a while, at Madison Square Garden. So, when they started going into it, I said, “Oh, what’s this?” Candace says, “Oh my god, it’s ‘St. Stephen.’” And then the crowd, the roar of the crowd, was overwhelming. It was… it just sent tingles through you. It was so loud, like a jet engine — that’s what it sounded like. [makes jet engine sound] Fortunately, I didn’t do as good a job of lighting “St. Stephen” then as I do now.

JESSE: Let’s rewind and let Jim Wise’s audience tape capture that incredible rush from the beginning of the song. Imagine Dan and Candace trying to communicate through their headsets under this.

AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [10/11/83, Jim Wise audience tape] (0:00-0:30)

JESSE: The excitement even made it to taper Jim Wise, who was very busy at the time making his tape of the show.

JIM WISE: In ‘83, I was probably more back of the board and on a stand, and those were different mics — only for one night, I don't know why. This was the most important thing to me at the time, just going to the shows and making the recordings was everything. My entire life revolved around it for quite a while. It was just really, really all encompassing. Getting that I didn't even get to enjoy the show until I got home and started listening to it, except for something like, “Oh Jesus Christ, they’re playing ‘St. Stephen’.” But other than that, I was just busy in my own la la land of taping to really be in the here and now of enjoying the show. All I can remember about that show is the brightness and vibrancy of it, and the incredible excitement of the fact that they were playing “St. Stephen” in New York City. Anything that they would do in New York and at the Garden had a little bit of an extra zest, an extra boost to it.

AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (4:35-4:50) - [dead.net]

BOB MINKIN: It was just a powerful, powerful version. If I had to list great moments of Grateful Dead in my life, that was certainly one of them.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: It was anticipated and appreciated by everybody. We just couldn't believe it.

AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (4:50-5:20) - [dead.net]

JESSE: They didn’t go into “The Eleven,” but “St. Stephen” was back. Jim Wise’s tapes would circulate quickly, but not as quickly as the news. Out west, phones started ringing. Mary Eisenhart was a Bay Area head.

MARY EISENHART: It was during when the Dinosaurs were playing. They were playing a show at Wolfgang’s, and at the set break we were all down in the basement on the payphones, because on the East Coast, they had just brought “St. Stephen” out of mothballs. There were people going — this is all pre-cell phone, pre-anything: “They played WHAT?” But that's how it was. People on the East Coast called you at a payphone in the basement of Wolfgang’s, to tell you that they were playing “St. Stephen.”

JESSE: Corry Arnold is the proprietor of the sites Lost Live Dead, Hooterollin’, and other projects.

CORRY ARNOLD: I started dating my wife in spring ‘83. Not very many people knew — my family knew and my friends knew, but it wasn't a big thing. And she knew I liked the Grateful Dead, but didn't really approve… whatever. We're at her house, I was still at the level where, other than maybe my sister, nobody has my girlfriend's phone number. We're not that far yet. Her phone rings, and she says, “It's for you” — which is, like, unheard of. It was my friend calling from the lobby of Madison Square Garden to tell me they played ‘St. Stephen.’ He shouted at the top of his lungs— “They played ‘St. Stephen!!’”—so loudly that my wife could hear it, and then he hung up. And she said, “What was that?” “That was Bobby, calling from Madison Square Garden to tell me the Dead played ‘St. Stephen.’” She’s like, “Okay…” I said, “I’ve gotta call Josh,” who was our mutual friend. I called him and his line was busy because Bobby had called him next. My wife was like: Who are these people?

JESSE: To answer Corry’s wife’s question, people like Corry and his east friend Bobby were the energy cores of the Grateful Dead information network in 1983, and at the center of the diffuse and ongoing research efforts of Deadologists that would soon fall together in works like Deadbase.

CORRY ARNOLD: He was like the most connected guy, a real hustler, and I mean hustler in a nice way — in terms of finding tickets or knowing about shows. He was way ahead with primitive technology. He bought every copy of The Village Voice in some flea market and one day, one time I visited New York, we spent the whole weekend looking through them and stumbled across the Feb. 12, ‘70 Ungano’s ad. This is like doing archaeology with a spoon.

JESSE: The mysterious ad for the February 1970 Dead showat the Upper West Side club Ungano’s, a show they probably didn’t play, and one of the biggest rabbit holes in Lost Live Dead history. In the age before social media, Corry and his friends were part of a small self-created social network, as he realized when he visited New York. I bet something like this has happened to other listeners.

CORRY ARNOLD: We're sitting in Yankee Stadium, the three of us talking about weirdos that we knew, had met in Dead shows, and we realized all three of us—one was from LA; I'm from San Francisco; and Bobby is from Manhattan—we were talking about the same guy. He would repeat what you just said, you'd say something to him. You’d say, “I saw the Grateful Dead and they did ‘Truckin’’ in…” something. And then five minutes later, he’d say to you, “I know a guy who saw the Dead and they did ‘Truckin’’...” “Yeah, me, five minutes ago.” But all three of us had met this guy, in L.A., San Francisco and Manhattan, and we didn’t know his name.

JESSE: “St. Stephen” would only be back briefly — one version a few days later in Hartford, another on Halloween back home in San Rafael, and then gone for good. Rumors of the song’s return circulated all the way through 1995. Information exchange and information hunting were just as important to the Dead world as tapes, hoping to see that elusive song on the setlist. David Lemieux.

DAVID LEMIEUX: There were tapers, and there were the people who were setlist freaks who wrote down everything. They were just as diligent as we are. I would be so desperate and eager to get the setlists—and there was no Internet, I’m talking ‘87, ‘88—that the show would end… and my friends knew I lived with my mom, so they knew not to call me at 1 in the morning, crazed and waking my house up to say, “Oh my god, they did ‘Dark Star’.” So they knew not to do that. I had no other way to find out, so if I didn't know anybody specifically at a show or know what hotel they were staying at, a couple of times—and I remember doing this at the Spectrum, because I knew the hotel friends had stayed there before—right in the parking lot, there was either Sheraton or a Hilton at the Spectrum. I remember calling a couple of times, that hotel, and getting the front desk on, about midnight, and I said, “Hey, are there Dead Heads in your lobby?” He goes, “Oh yeah, they’re everywhere.” I said, “Could you put one on?” He goes, “Well, who are you looking for?” I said, “It doesn’t matter. Just put one on.” And they’d say, “Okay, hold on a second.” And I got this to work two or three times — they’d pass the phone to some random Dead Head, and they’d be like, “Hello, is it my mom?” And so I’d say, “Hey, I’m calling from Canada. Can you tell me what they played tonight?” And a couple… well, I know one time in particular, I got the full setlist, and I got a little review that they opened with this great “Bertha” / “Greatest [Story Ever Told]” or whatever it was. Then sometimes it was like, “Yeah, man, I think they had ‘China’ / ‘Rider…’” So it was a little more vague. But to me, at least it was something. Now, I’d be watching it live on the Nugs livestream.

JESSE: Eric Schwartz.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: It wasn't uncommon to see a payphone off the hook, where people would just call their friends and let them listen to the hallway. But it wasn't uncommon at all, especially with those calling cards.

DAVID LEMIEUX: I had a friend at the Garden in ‘88 when they did the two-week run culminating with the Rainforest [Action Network benefit] show. A friend of mine, Pat Crossley — somehow… I have no idea how he did this, but he went to the two weeks of shows with no tickets, and got into every show. But he somehow got his way into a private box at the Garden, one of the VIP boxes. I'll never forget this: he did call my house about 10 at night, I don't remember what show was. They did “Morning Dew” twice in that run, I think; it was the second one. And he called from the private box, and then let the phone hang off the balcony of the private box. It just… we talk about bad audience tapes from 1971, whatever. I have never heard audio quality so bad — I could just make out what song it was. And the thought occurred to me for a split second to run and get something to record this through the telephone, but I didn’t do it because of the sound. But I got to hear the Dead play “Morning Dew” live — without a doubt, the worst quality I’ve ever heard. I’ve heard some bad audience tapes. I’ll never forget that ‘88 “Morning Dew,” Pat hanging the phone off the balcony. My mom would come into the room, and my mom said, “What are you doing?” I said, “The Grateful Dead are playing live!” She didn’t understand what was going on.

JESSE: Anyway, the point we’re getting at here is that, dude, they totally played “St. Stephen.” Bob Minkin.

BOB MINKIN: 10/11/83 possibly has my favorite version of “Throwing Stones” in that one. Everybody talks about “St. Stephen” of course, but that “Throwing Stones,” man… they were still probably coming off the “St. Stephen” high.

AUDIO: “Throwing Stones” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (5:15-5:45) - [dead.net]

ERIC POOLEY: “Throwing Stones” was… I don't know if it was the first time I'd heard it, but it was new-ish to me. And it was before they had settled on the very “Samson”-like instrumental break; they didn't have that “Samson and Delilah”-like Jerry part, which I felt like I saw at every Grateful Dead concert for the rest of my life. But I remember liking… it was kind of a crescendoing jam.

AUDIO: “Throwing Stones” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/11/83] (6:30-7:03) - [dead.net]

DAVID LEMIEUX: I'm a huge fan of “Throwing Stones,” you might have noticed. By ‘83, it's already a 10 or 11-minute song because they're stretching it out, they're realizing where they can jam, the vocal power at the end.

ERIC POOLEY: On the way out, somebody's talking about the “Stephen,” everybody was talking about the “Stephen” breakout. And I said, “You know, that ‘Throwing Stones’ was pretty good, too,” and they looked at me like I was a little crazy.

JESSE: Eric Schwartz.

ERIC SCHWARTZ: We might have stayed on Long Island because there was that faction. I can't imagine we got a hotel in the city, so I'm sure we stayed at a local Long Island head’s house. I'm almost positive.

JESSE: The new lighting crew had recently updated their quarters, as Dan English remembers.

DAN ENGLISH: When I first got there, I thought that they didn't have any respect for us lower echelon kind of guys because the promoter would stick us in these funky hotels, and sometimes we’d get hung up on our transportation of the gig. But then I realized it wasn't about that — they had a very nonchalant way of dealing with things. So one day, Don Pearson, who is the head of the sound company—he worked with Healy—just said, “Well, what? You're not booking your own hotels and billing them after? We will stay at the Ritz with them.” And I'm like, Oh, god. After that, we were at the Ritz too. That was only because the Dead had some connection to the Ritz-Carlton chain or something — they were getting their rooms for next to nothing. But yeah, after that, we were at the band’s hotels with the band.

JESSE: But as low-key as the Dead’s scene was in ‘82 compared to the rest of the world, it could still be a crazy bubble, especially in New York.

DAN ENGLISH: I know at the Garden, every one of those passes must have been given out because, when you walked backstage there, there were more people there, it felt like, than there were out front. Anyone who’s anyone was there, from politicians to rock stars to… you name it. But they didn't get up on stage because, to get up on stage, there was only ever one set of steps. And that one set of steps went right up by Robbie Taylor, Kidd Candelario and Steve Parish. If you went up those steps, you’d better have a really good reason to be there, and the three of them would have to appreciate the fact that you were there. One time, Robbie was putting all of the Grateful Dead passes in order or something in his road box by the side, huge stacks of backstage passes for each show. I went, “Whoa, that's a lot of passes.” “Yeah.” I said, “Well, how do you control that?” And he said, “Well, look: there's 500 backstage passes printed for each show. And after they've been given out, there's no more.” [laughs]

October 12th

JESSE: We’ve discussed how the Dead’s touring was sometimes adjacent to other events, like the summer Rainbow Gatherings. The band’s October 1983 shows at Madison Square Garden intersected with a different annual rite — the Audio Engineering Society conference. Attending that year were John and Helen Meyer, proprietors of Meyer Sound. Last episode, we heard about how the Dead had begun to use a crystalline new Meyer sound system on the road in fall 1982. They had it with them in ‘83 as well.

HELEN MEYER: When they were at Madison Square Garden, they had a whole system at

Madison Square Garden and they let us use it for a demo for AES. We brought a whole bunch

of customers to Madison Square Garden in the afternoon. We turned on the whole system, and it was an amazing demo for everyone.

JOHN MEYER: We were working on, with Stanford University — CDs were just coming out, and we wanted to do a test record, because Sony agreed, along with Phillips, they all agreed they wouldn’t put square waves on CDs, because of the time smear of aliasing filters and stuff like that. I go, “Guys, let's do a CD ourselves, we'll publish it, and we'll put a square wave on it. This is outrageous, that square wave is gonna be fixed. They're just being lazy.” I said, “We'll put a square wave on it, we'll put some noises, we'll make it… but what I'd like to do is record something that goes very, very, very quiet, and build it up to say…” And we talked about it, and they decided what they would do is a cricket field, near an airport —

AUDIO: “The Digital Domain: A Demonstration” (1:14-onward; audio grows in volume and continues)

JOHN MEYER: — and when the jets take off, they would go over this field. So what happens in this recording takes about 10 minutes. It starts off as little cricket sounds. You hear the crickets, and then you hear this kind of something in the background — very low, you can't quite determine what it is. The crickets stop chirping, and then pretty soon, the birds stop. You can tell it's some kind of machine sound; it's still very, very low level, it builds and builds and builds. And pretty soon, you can start to hear the whine of an engine of some kind. And it gets [to be a] louder and louder sound, then just moves overhead. So we went from this very, very low level sound to shaking Madison Square Garden at full power.

AUDIO: “The Digital Domain: A Demonstration” (2:50-3:06)

HELEN MEYER: Everyone ducked when the whole thing went over, the sound went overhead.

JOHN MEYER: I said, “This is what digital can bring us if it's done well.” I mean, this is… you cannot do this analog.

HELEN MEYER: That was Dan Healy, who gave us the permission to do that.

JESSE: The relationship between the Dead and Meyer Sound was only just beginning. The engineers cleared out in time for the show that night. John Leopold.

JOHN LEOPOLD: I missed the first show because my mother who was… I love my mother, but she made an unexpected trip. She told us a couple of weeks beforehand that she was going to be in the area and she was going to come to Pittsburgh, so I had to be there for that. I was very disappointed to hear that they played the “St. Stephen” on the show I didn't go to. But the show I did go to was amazing.

JESSE: It was a different age of commercial air travel. Bob Minkin.

BOB MINKIN: We had cars, we had a little bit of money, and we were able to travel to shows, especially when PEOPLExpress started, that low-cost airline. I read an article about PEOPLExpress and the Grateful Dead, how PEOPLExpress were responsible for the massive [amount] of Grateful Dead fans getting to see them in multiple cities far from home, because it was unbelievably cheap to fly on PEOPLExpress.

JESSE: That was probably Corry Arnold’s piece, “The Grateful Dead and the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978.”

BOB MINKIN: I remember going down to Norfolk, Virginia in ‘82, and it was like $17 to fly there. The plane would be full of fans going to the show, and we'd be snorting coke off the dash thing.

JESSE: John Leopold.

JOHN LEOPOLD: I knew how to get from Newark to the show. I took the bus in, and I think it let you off really close to Penn Station. So we’re right there, basically, and then all you had to do is wander a little bit and you would run into somebody that you knew. I knew that Rick and Lou Medvin and his brother Barry and some other friends were there. So you just kept an eye out for ‘. It was super exciting to go to New York, anytime you went to New York. That was great, and it was the first time I was at Madison Square Garden. Madison Square Garden has its own reputation as a historic venue. I went in there and met up with a bunch of friends, heads that I had met already from tour. Some were from Harrisburg; our friend Ricky D was there, some were other people that we had met along the way. The New York crowd was incredibly excited. And of course, because of the “St. Stephen” the night before, there was great anticipation. And the set was fantastic.

AUDIO: “Cold Rain and Snow” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (0:38-1:11) - [dead.net]

JOHN LEOPOLD: There are so many different communities, and so much New York-ness. But when you came to the Garden for a Dead show, it was the Dead — it was the Dead Head community. It really felt different because you're among your people. It felt incredibly relaxed, and you saw so many familiar faces. If there were cops around or people hassling, there was always a great group of people who you could be with. You didn't feel alone when you were in a Dead crowd in New York City. So that was really fun. For someone like me, I'm a twin: I shared the womb, I was going to the same college with my twin brother. Up to that point in ‘83, we had seen every Dead show together. So ‘83 was the first time that we were trying things on our own. He went to a couple of Dead shows, I went to this show without him. That was a pretty new experience for me. And so to be among friends and feeling totally comfortable, being 18 in New York City — that was a great experience.

AUDIO: “Cold Rain and Snow” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (5:25-5:53) - [dead.net]

JOHN LEOPOLD: I remember where we were for the show. My tape at the time, the way I wrote the first set was: “‘Cold Rain’ and Phil, ‘Minglewood’ Phil, ‘Ramble On’ Phil” — I just thought Phil was just very present.

AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (3:40-4:13) - [dead.net]

JOHN LEOPOLD: We might have had reserved seats, but we never sat in our seats — we never had really good seats to begin with, at that point. So we would go someplace where we could dance. I didn't like going outside in the halls, there wasn't a place you could do that at Madison Square Garden. So we'd usually be towards the back, and you would just start seeing everybody you knew. That was a great community of folks. That stayed for years for the Dead, because there were people that you knew by first name, that you would see on a regular basis and know something about, but you didn't really know them, other than they were your show buddies. That was the guy you saw, or the girl you saw, at the back of the hall dancing to the Grateful Dead. I remember being in the back towards the top — you didn't have to fight for seats. They were playing “Hell in a Bucket” and I found something that Dave had written at the time on some print thing, where he said, “The name of the new tune is ‘Eloquent Eyes.’” We didn’t know what it was. And you could hear “shadowboxing,” [but] we weren’t sure what “My Brother Esau” was called.

AUDIO: “My Brother Esau” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (0:27-0:54) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Also new to the Dead’s repertoire since last time at the Garden was “My Brother Esau,” another Weir/Barlow joint.

DAVID LEMIEUX: “Esau” was a big part for four years. It was a song that really changed every single time they played it.

AUDIO: “My Brother Esau” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (1:35-2:02) - [dead.net]

DAVID LEMIEUX: “My Brother Esau” — I'm very glad one of those snuck on here, because I love “Esau.” I saw it at four of my first six Dead shows, and then they dropped it. They never played it again. I love it. I think it's a quirky song. It never was played the same way twice. And I know every Dead song is never played the same way twice, but this one really wasn't. Sometimes, it would open with the whole band coming in at once, with that big explosion; sometimes it would open with just the drummers, with this nice little beat. And sometimes, Weir would start strumming the song. And then you’ve got the one on In the Dark that starts with helicopters coming in.

JESSE: “My Brother Esau” would make it to In the Dark, but only on the cassette version. It lasted in the Dead’s repertoire through the fall of 1987. Just like the Dead worked on different time scales and economic matrices than other popular bands, their material evolved and still evolves in its own way. Bob Weir revived “My Brother Esau” in 2014, and—despite being associated with the Dead’s best-selling album—continued to tinker with it, recording the newest version with the Wolf Bros. on Live in Colorado, available from Third Man Records.

AUDIO: “My Brother Esau” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros., Live in Colorado] (1:30-1:58) - [Spotify]

JESSE: I kinda liked the bits about roller skates and selling real estate in LA, though probably because they’re très 1983. Weir got another showcase in the first set that was coming into its own in the ‘80s, more than a decade after it had been recorded for Weir’s solo debut, Ace. “Looks LIke Rain” now built to a space for some cool Garcia, as well as for Weir to occasionally work blue during his extended vocal outro.

AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (7:27-7:57) - [dead.net]

JESSE: Dan English liked lighting it.

DAN ENGLISH: I also liked doing “Looks Like Rain,” because at the end — we had very limited controls on the lights in those days. But one thing we could do is we could put a breakup pattern, either in the light or not in it. So I would put it in the light, and this is before they rotated — you couldn't rotate them. Nowadays, you can rotate. So what I’d do is I'd point the light straight down, and I’d just pan them back and forth, and that would give you the idea that the gobo was rotating on the stage.

JESSE: The second set opened with another Dead Head favorite that hadn’t been in the band’s rotation the last time they were through New York.

AUDIO: “Help on the Way” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (0:20-0:49) - [dead.net]

JESSE: The dense and tricky “Help on the Way” / “Slipknot!” / “Franklin’s Tower” suite opened Blues for Allah in 1975, but barely lasted a year in the band’s rotation after they returned to the road in 1976.

DAVID LEMIEUX: “Help” / “Slip” / “ Franklin’s” had come back in the spring of ‘83 after a six-year absence, which is amazing. “Help” / “Slip” / “Franklin’s” was a pretty complex piece of music, “Help on the [Way]” / “Slipknot!” in particular. But what I liked about it: “Franklin’s Tower,” in the non-“Help” / “Slipknot!” eras—which is to say, from late ‘77 through ‘83, and then from ‘86, ‘87 and ‘88—in those years when they weren’t playing “Help on the Way” and “Slipknot!,” “Franklin’s Tower” was this kind of free agent, and it never really had a home. It had some common places: coming out of “Stranger” to open a show; coming out of “Half-Step” to open a show. I think I saw “Playing in the Band” into “Franklin’s Tower” once, to open a second set. It wasn’t very good; it was very short. And I just felt that it was always missing something. It would be kind of like the Dead all of a sudden dropping “China Cat” and continuing to play “I Know You Rider” quite often, but not [being] really sure where it belonged. I always felt… it’s almost like I felt bad for “Franklin’s Tower,” because it had lost its friends — it had lost its home. And then when it came back for those two years, ‘83, ‘84 and into the fall of ‘85—I guess September ‘85 was the last one—then it felt like all was right in the world again.

AUDIO: “Slipknot!” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (3:20-3:45) - [dead.net]

DAVID LEMIEUX: This is an incredibly well-played, very dense and dynamic “Slipknot!” in particular.

AUDIO: “Slipknot!” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (9:13-9:43) - [dead.net]

DAN ENGLISH: There were some major cues that you never wanted to miss, like the transition into “Franklin's Tower,” say, something like that. You don't want to miss that cue.

AUDIO: “Slipknot!” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (9:42-10:04) - [dead.net]

AUDIO: “Franklin’s Tower” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (0:00-0:26) - [dead.net]

DAN ENGLISH: When they went into “Franklin's Tower,” the crowd was bouncing, so then the arena started to bounce. So, we're in the middle of the floor, and the whole thing is going like this, up and down. And so now, I'm literally holding the lighting consoles down so that they don't slide off the table.

JESSE: The core of the second set was a 55-minute “He’s Gone” into “Drums/Space” into “Truckin’” into “Black Peter.” At the Garden in 1982, the band had played the “Throwing Stones” / “Not Fade Away” combo for the first time, which is pretty much how it’d stuck since then. Tonight was a now-rare “Not Fade Away” set closer, but it was the encore from this show that most people probably remember.

AUDIO: “Revolution” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (0:17-0:47) - [dead.net]

BOB MINKIN: “10/12/83” — next to it: “Revolution!”

JESSE: Possibly, like the cover of “Satisfaction” played in ‘82, this falls into the category of never actually rehearsed. Also big news was that Phil Lesh was joining Bob Weir to sing back up vocals. Big ups to Phil & Weir for doing the shoo-bee-doo-wop part, which I think technically makes this a cover of “Revolution 1,” from the White Album, not just your regular ol’ “Revolution,” the B-side to the “Hey Jude” single.

AUDIO: “Revolution” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (3:54-4:11) - [dead.net]

DAVID LEMIEUX: When we do our Dave's Picks releases and we put the credits together, there are entire… not quite decades, but very long, years long chunks where Phil simply doesn’t get a vocal credit. Phil had stopped singing in ‘77-‘78, but on “Truckin’,” he would sing. You can hear him really belting it out on some ‘77-’78 versions of “Truckin’,” particularly ‘78. He is all over those “Truckin’”s, and I love it because you get to put Phil as a vocal credit there. But I think that’s a really nice way to cap the box because, just a few months later in ‘84, he got his own mic, and that’s when his microphone came back. He could sing backups anytime he wanted, and then he could start bringing in “Gimme Some Lovin’” with Brent, “Keep On Growing.”

JESSE: Bob Minkin got back down front for the encore.

BOB MINKIN: I only saw them singing together on the same mic once before and that was at either Blacksburg, Virginia or William and Mary in April ‘78, when Phil, Bobby and Donna sang at the same mic — or maybe it was Jerry, Bobby and Donna? But unfortunately, my shot is very overexposed, so I never put that out there. But they were singing together at the same mic, so it was very unusual to see Bobby and Phil at the same mic. People next to me, when I got the shot of Weir and Phil singing at the mic together, they were like: “Did you get that? Did you get that?” And I'm like, “I hope so, I think so.” Everything was manual, manual everything: manual exposure, manual focus. I did all the black and white myself, all the developing, I had a darkroom in my house. I come home and the next day, I develop them and the next day, as soon as I was able to take the negatives out of the fixer, as it was called, I’d hold them up still wet in the light, scanning them.

JESSE: The shots of Lesh and Weir sharing a microphone did in fact come out. You can see them in the new In and Out of the Garden box. It would become one of Bob’s most famous sequences of photos. For Dan English, the 1983 fall tour made both a lifelong impact but also an immediate one the following spring.

DAN ENGLISH: I definitely had some great times there, during that, and it changed my life. It changed my life and the course of my life, what I did. I took the initial moving lights down to install in a rehearsal studio for The Jacksons’ Victory tour. And my boss said, “We'll get someone else to work with Candace — I want you to do this thing with the Jacksons,” blah, blah, blah, it’s really important, etc., etc., etc. After about a week of that, to try to put that together, I was like, “Nope, can't do it. The Dead tour’s starting next week… I’m coming back to do that.” We got my good friend Dave Chance, who later became Candace’s board op after myself — he went down, and he did the Victory tour and had a great time.

JESSE: Dan English also witnessed one of the most important changes in Dead history. By 1983, the tapers were everywhere. And more specifically, their microphones were everywhere. And even more specifically, they were blocking the view of front-of-house engineer Dan Healy.

DAN ENGLISH: I think on that ‘83 tour is when Dan started to [be] like, “This is out of control,” to regiment this. How it happened was — I forget which arena we were at, but we’re all set up, we’re on a riser that’s only maybe a foot-and-a-half tall, in the middle of the arena. Before the show, everything’s great. And as soon as the house lights went out, all these people started raising their mic stands, and they did so right in front of us. So, Dan Healy couldn’t see the stage, Candace couldn’t see the stage, I couldn’t see it.

JESSE: The next year would be another year of innovations in the Grateful Dead’s world. In the spring, they would launch the Rex Foundation, a charitable wing to help organize the band’s numerous benefits. In the fall, they introduced the tapers section, actually originally referred to in the band’s meeting minutes as the Tapester Section. How’s that for a different identity, all you Tapesters out there? Both would become new corners of the Dead economy. On the fan side, 1984 would also see the introduction of both Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon’s fanzine The Golden Road, as well as a new tour publication, Terrapin Flyer. The Dead kept on touring, perhaps obviously, though they didn’t return to Madison Square Garden for a few years, playing the Meadowlands in New Jersey in 1984 and 1985. In 1986, John Scher would book them a three-night Madison Square Garden return, three years to the day of their last visit, but Jerry Garcia fell ill and the band canceled their fall tour. When the band came back, they were big enough to play Brendan Byrne Arena and Madison Square Garden, and then a few years later, Giants Stadium and Madison Square Garden. But that’s a different box set. And now’s the part where out of the Garden we go. John Scher.

JOHN SCHER: Once the Meadowlands arena was built, there was another place to play. And remember, they played a lot, and wanted to play a lot. I'll never forget, I had a conversation with Jerry, once after probably the first outdoor stadium tour, at the end of the tour. It's hot, it’s hard to do a summer outdoor stadium tour, and everybody was pretty pooped. And at the last show, he asked me to come over. They used to have these little tents in the back of the stage that they hung out in… they weren’t really dressing room people. He said, “John, I'm going to go to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, and then let's do a Garcia Band tour.” And I said, “Are you fucking nuts? You just did 15 stadiums or whatever. Take it easy, take a little bit of time.” And he looked me straight in the eye and he said, “John, let me tell you something: I play my guitar 365 days a year. There are no days that I don’t play my guitar, alright? So, I might as well get paid for it.”

AUDIO: “Might As Well” [In and Out of the Garden, 10/12/83] (0:34-0:54) - [dead.net]