Concerts 1974-1979
This was a great show to attend at the old Wohlman rink concert venue. We sat outside the venue on the rocks in Central Park and enjoyed the weather as a cool breeze came through after a storm earlier that day. From that vantage point we could see part of the movie screen above the stage and hear it really well. We took a walk and could still hear the music on the famous old bridge that crosses the pond.
I was a freshman at Ithaca College and I pretty quickly found a bunch of cool people and serious GD heads.
Even during the summer orientation I become friendly with someone who was tied in as a tape trader, and right when we got back up to school he let me pick six tapes from his collection. I had listened to GD tapes before, including some reel to reels that a friend’s brother had recorded at the Fillmore East, but I had no copies of those, and I don’t think I had heard much at all that took place after 1971 other than shows that had been broadcast live on the radio. In that week before this show I got my first copies of 6-16-74, parts of the classic April 71 Fillmore East run, a classic Avalon Ballroom tape, and the Binghamton show from 5-15-70. My mind was blown by hearing them for the first time and I will never forget what it was like when I first popped a crystal-clear soundboard of the second set of 6-16-74 in my tape player.
My new friends invited me to head down to Giants Stadium for this show. One of them was a Sophomore who had a car and was as psyched to go as was I.
The Dead were on their way to Egypt to play at the Great Pyramid and this was kind of an unusual stand-alone show before that excursion. They had to watch the time, and someone in the band motioned to their watch during the jam.
I remember that when I heard that Willie Nelson was opening. It was the first time I had ever (like, ever) heard of him.
Few good tapes surfaced for a long time, and until recently I don’t think I ever heard any soundboards of this show. Nowadays I hear stuff like the Looks Like Rain from this show played on The Grateful Dead channel in soundboard form. Fun to hear, unexpectedly, while driving in the car, for the first time in 40 years.
I had become a Little Feat fan in High School after learning about them from a friend's sister who was attending College at the time in Maryland, and really got into them after taping a replay of the classic 1974 Ultrasonic Recording Studios performance on WLIR. So I was very happy when I learned that the Feat were going to play on my own college campus during my first semester at school.
What really surprised me is what I saw when I walked down from my dorm on the hill to my first class that day - lots of fans camping out in front of the gym early in the morning, to get the best seats inside for the show that night.
Before the show started, the fire marshals spent lots of time clearing the aisles, insisting that the show wouldn't start until the aisles were completely clear and everyone was in a seat.
When the band took the stage, Lowell George immediately said something to this effect: "You don't need to listen to them, feel free to come on up closer to the stage." For a moment, nobody moved. Lowell then repeated himself, saying, "hey, I'm serious, just come on up if ya want to." At that point, tons of fans all at once broke free of their seats, raced up toward the stage, and filled the aisles, and much to the chagrin of the marshals the show started - Little Feat on what would be considered a classic 1978 tour, burning through another hot performance.
During this show, Paul Barrere was wearing a NY Yankees jersey bearing the number 9 - as worn by Graig Nettles that year. I got a chance to meet Paul at the Jamaica Little Feat excursion in 2016, and I mentioned this recollection to him. He proceeded to tell me what a huge Baseball fan he is (he’s a SF Giants fan) and told me how a friend of his brother had gotten the jerseys. (The 1978 world series had taken place just a few weeks before the show, NY sports fans were still thrilled by the Yankees' performance in the series, including several amazing defensive plays by Nettles that perhaps saved many runs and made the difference in the Yankees' triumph over their rivals, the LA Dodgers.)
Sadly, Lowell George passed away only a short time later, at only 34 years old.
Below: 1979 Relix magazine article about the 1978 tour.
This is another of the great shows I saw at the Palladium before it was demolished. Jorma sat on a chair and played solo acoustic during the first set, then played an electric set with only a drummer accompanying him. We had excellent seats in the first section of the Orchestra which cost only $8.50.
This was the very first show ever played by the Dead at MSG .... the shows had been rescheduled from the Fall of 1978 when Jerry was ill.
I sat in the row directly behind the soundboard and - very coincidentally - met members of the Dead's crew, including Dan Healy, before the show and at the break. I say “coincidentally” because it was a particularly bad night for them as they had some bad sound problems that caused a lot of aggravation to the crew. In the second set an awful loud screeching feedback suddenly came from the PA - and provoked a mad scramble by everyone at the soundboard to try to find the source of the problem; they were running around and checking all of the wire connections that ran along the floors even. They were just frantically scrambling, trying to find the problem, as the Dead played on through NFA and then Black Peter. I am not sure what the culprit was but it was a level 1 emergency for the sound crew that night.
The Spring Concert my first year at school. I arrived in the early afternoon after returning from Syracuse where had my broken left thumb set in a splint by a hand specialist up there.
{Photos to be posted}
I got my ticket from a close friend - my freshman pal who got a bad infection in the days before the show. A junior at school (who we hung out and listened to the Dead with) had the wheels and he drove down from Ithaca. We got there with time to spare and as we walked into what was a fully GA arena, we were free to choose wherever we wanted to be in the arena. We decided to sit in the stands up on the left side, where we would be close but still comfortable for the show. My roommate from school wanted to tough it out on the floor - and he got right in front of the stage. He later told us all about how people were passing out due to the heat - during the show some some of those folks were lifted up over the crowd to security at the stage in front.
The 1970 Binghamton (Harpur College) show with its great acoustic set was one of the first Dead tapes I got at school earlier in my first school year. I would also find over the next few years that the upstate Dead shows had a slightly less hectic and more intimate feeling than city arenas. When you came in and looked at the stage all set up with the Dead’s own equipment and the double drums, it seemed more like some of the good old days. Phil Lesh displayed his flannel shirt and Bobby remarked that the shirt had belonged to Pigpen (you can hear this on the tape).
Opening the second set, China Cat was pulled out from what seemed, at the time, like a permanent retirement, to an arena filled with frenzied fans. It was played in the midwest in February before Brent joined, but most of us had no idea, really - there were few mechanisms at the time to find out about setlists.
The audience recording of this show is a real classic; on this tape you can hear the reaction of the crowd at the beginning of the second set… like, are they really playing this? its a really energetic and unique version, with Brent’s percussive Fender Rhodes very prominent, only to be outdone by the Truckin jam that came later in the set.
“Blazing” is the word (and its a good one) they use on Dead.net to describe the Spring tour in 1979. It was certainly a very focused, energetic performance on this night. The energy and excitement that came with hiring Brent and having a new configuration was obvious in those early Brent days. And as noted below, the tape is a classic, but honestly fails to fully reveal the sonic eruptions from the various instruments that we experienced live that night.
Soon after the show we got a copy of that classic audience recording - the same one that has circulated for years. It was written up with great praise in Deadbase, and has gotten tons of listens since then. (References herein to Deadbase are to my 1994 version, Deadbase VIII). The fan comments on Archive.org for this particular show are a sort of classic collection of fun posts mostly from people who attended.
Below: One of my all-time favorite editions of Relics magazine from that year, with coverage not only of the Dead’s trip to Egypt but also the 1978 Little Feat tour and David Gilmour’s first solo album.
Another outdoor summer's end concert on the first weekend of September. This was the last time I slept over in a lot for a show, and the only time I did so to gain priority in admittance to a (general admission) show.... We drove up from Ithaca the night before. The friendly folks in the parking lot kept us up late and someone thought they would let everyone know, loudly, when the clock struck 6 am. So we were among the first hundred people to bolt onto the field when the gates opened, and stake out our spot. But the trade-off was that we were mostly sitting in the sun all day on what ending up being a brutally hot day. The Dead's equipment truck was late and by the time we sat through two opening bands, and the equipment delay, it was a longgggg day.
Fans of the Good Rats - a LI club-scene band, screamed "rats!" in excitement as black rubber rats were thrown from the stage to the audience toward the end of their set. The sun was still blazing late in the afternoon when the Dead came on, and by that time I was wearing a yellow towel on my head to reduce the sun stroke I felt in my sleep-deprived head. I could see the band real well during the show from about 30 or 40 yards back, on Jerry's side. At one point Jerry looked straight at the towel on my head and literally made a goofy face at me, like hey, "it cant be that bad that you need to wear that thing on your head."
It was my second show with Brent on keyboards, and interesting to really see him up close this time - right up front with his long hair, energetically playing hammond organ and electric piano. I was pleased to see him playing a Fender Rhodes, as I had bought one just a couple of years back in time, inspired a lot by Keith Godchaux's playing, although Keith played it mostly in 74 and 75 and had migrated from an acoustic grand to the Yamaha electric in 1977. In those early shows with Brent he just killed it on electric piano and organ, changing the Dead's entire sound, playing unique rocking and funky percussive styles on the Rhodes (and adding grand piano by the time they did the acoustic sets in 1980).
When Brent was hired and started playing with the band in early 1979 there was no publicity about him - no announcements or anything that I ever saw - a stark contrast to today’s over-hyped world. My appreciation for all of what Brent brought to the band and his songs has only grown and grown over the years.
The show is written up in Deadbase and tapes of this show rate very highly among fans; a wonderful recording is available on the Archive.
At the end, all the hassles of driving up the day before, trying to sleep in a parking lot with people screaming, and then sitting through the good rats on an excruciatingly hot day.... was worth it.
For me and for many all over the world, Bob Marley and the Wailers were right at the core of the music I loved, and right there on levels beyond music, expressing so many timeless and important things poetically and beautifully.
This show was a Halloween spectacle, but no one in the band donned a costume, only some of the audience members.
We drove the back roads of NY from Ithaca to Colgate, one small town after another with its civil war monument, each with the children out trick or treating. On the way home we were happy to get a healthy dose of a Led Zeppelin's recently released "In Through the Out Door" on FM radio.
I was amazed at how LOUD the show was; it seemed to peak during the guitar solo of "Heathen."
I had been a fan for years, listening to Marley and reggae and listening to Carribean radio in NYC , but my exposure to and appreciation for reggae would only expand during the next few years.
The concert committee at IC was known for doing a great job - and this was another big event at our school.
