JPG: I didn’t know if the technology was there in the studio that you could fix a really good audience tape in such a way that it would not sound too jarring.
DL: It really depends on the recording. Some audience tapes sound great. They really do. But some early ’70s, mid-‘70s, there are some that they don’t match very well with soundboards and there’s really nothing that can be done. It hasn’t come up too often because generally we have a secondary board tape to fix it from, ideally, from the actual show we’re working on. If not, then within a couple of days. We’ve done that many times. Taken 10 or 15 seconds of the same song from a different show and fixed it. It’s happened. I won’t say all the time, but it does happen.
JPG: That’s interesting. Going back to Dave’s Picks, whose ideas was it. Was Rhino like, “Okay, we’re going to end Road Trips, come up with a new idea”?
DL: That would be Rhino. I think they’ve got a great idea. (laughs). Rhino, they know what they’re doing. They’ve got a very good ability to look at the big picture. I work very closely with Rhino but I also work for them. This was their idea. They felt that having a name change in the series and a philosophical change in terms of the announced intention of the series.
Rhino is doing a very good job of conveying the message that the focus of these new Picks will be on complete shows, not always. When they contacted me and said, “Look, we want to do this, and put your name on it,” I was flattered, obviously. If they think that’s a good idea, I’m certainly not going to argue with it. This was them and obviously in consultation with me. They didn’t want to slap my name on something without my okay, but…it’s good.
It doesn’t change my role at all. It’s exactly what I’ve been doing for 10 or 11 or 12 years almost. So, a rose by any other name is still a rose or in this case, a skull and roses is still skull and roses. It’s really nothing different than what we’ve been doing. A slight tweak from the beginning of the Road Trips but like I say the last 10 or so Road Trips have been primarily complete shows, pleasing many people in the process. Rhino made the decision that it was time to pack up the Dick’s Pick’s series at number 36. They decided to try something new with Road Trips and did very well and people liked them for the most part. But now it’s time to try something new. Change is good.
JPG: Overall, other than the name change, you’ve pretty much been responsible for the releases since Dick passed away, yes?
DL: Primarily yes, with, obviously, a heck of a lot of input and a lot of checks and balances. And that all remains the same. This truly is in a lot of ways nothing more than a name change of the series, especially when you look at the last 10 Road Trips that we’ve gone towards that full show.
But, you know, really nothing changes. It’s not like this is a new role for me at all. It’s the exact same, I’ll call it pressure that you put on yourself to make sure that you’re getting something out that people are going to enjoy and that will, ultimately, when you look back on it many years later will represent the Grateful Dead legacy properly. And that’s what we really try to do. And now the focus is a little more specifically on the complete shows, which I love. I’m a huge fan of complete show listening. And it’s nice because with the team I have in place, which is, generally, a bunch of friends who are hardcore Deadheads…when I start thinking of an idea and let them know and say, “Go listen to this” and the conversations we have, that’s how we come to the consensus on things. It’s a lot of fun, where you start bouncing emails around. “Oh man, there’s a great version of “Let It Grow.”” “Oh, wow. That reminded me of the version from…” and it becomes these great conversations. Then, consensus gets built. “Yes, this is a great show to release. Go for it.” “And if you’re looking for something from this era, we should also look into this one.” Then we spend a few more weeks listening to that show from the same era.
And then, a good dilemma is when there’s two great shows from the same tour. Let’s say, I think I mentioned to you once, when we pick something, we decide quite a bit in advance that, “Okay, it’s time to do a Spring of 1977.” Then you get down to so many good shows there. That’s a funny example but you get down to those five shows that you want to focus on and the conversation you get going — it’s great when you get to that dilemma — where there’s two shows that comes to the very top of the crop. And you’re like, “Well, what do we do?”
An interesting thing, and this is something that I’ve always found curious that people… okay, how do I explain it…well let’s say we put something out from a certain era and people love it and they’re like, “Oh, this is great, but boy, I really wish they’d done the show three nights before because it’s even better.” What I want people to try and understand that we view it as a long term project. So, let’s say that show comes out now and the one night that you really wanted from three or four days later didn’t come out because we went with this one. Rest assured we know that that show three or four days later is also a great show. The fact that we picked this one now certainly doesn’t negate that one coming out later down the road. It’s kind of like when we did, let me think a good example…
JPG: I can think of one real quick if that helps. Truckin’ Up to Buffalo was from ’89.
DL: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
JPG: I was there in ’90, which I thought was a supremely excellent dancey show, especially compared to the week before when I saw them in Pittsburgh, which was more of a musical exploratory type of show in front of 60,000 people.
DL: I understand completely. And when you look at something more specifically on that summer tour of ’89, “Truckin’ Up to Buffalo,” a lot of people said, “Great pick for this Buffalo thing, but man I really wish they’d done the Philly thing.” Well, if people just have a little patience, four years later, Philadelphia comes out. And then we put Philly out and everybody’s like, “Aw, great pick, but man, I really wished they’d do Foxboro. I’m so bummed they didn’t do Foxboro.” Have patience, you know? We know what the good shows are that we have in the Vault and we’ll get to them.
It’s not like we can put out…well, I guess we can put out an entire tour, as Europe ’72 just proved. But Europe would have been a similar thing where any show we picked from that tour, if we picked Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or 5/26 in London, you would have had people say, “That’s a great idea, but man, I really wished they’d done that other one.” Just have patience and stuff will get released.
And that is going to mean we’re going to repeat certain eras. We do hope we’re also going to hit things that haven’t been hit frequently enough. That was one great thing, when we did Road Trips about a year ago from the spring of 1988. That was an era that we hadn’t done anything, literally nothing, from 1988.To find such a great show and it sounded great from the DAT master. It was a perfect time to release that. Likewise, we know there’s eras we haven’t hit. There’s ’84. We know ’85 and ’83 are very underrepresented. We’ll get to them and, more importantly, when we do put something out from an era that people wish, “Aw, I wish they’d done the night before or the night after,” don’t worry we’ll get to it.
Again, we view this as a long term project. I know that patience when you want something is tough. We’re all in the same boat. There’s a million examples like this – well, thousands at least — where we put something out and even we have that struggle when we get down to pulling the trigger and making that final decision on what the show is going to be. There’s always second and third candidates that we really came close to putting out and all that means is that when it comes time to hit that era again that will be the show that gets hit.
That’s a frustration that whatever you do you’re going to disappoint people, and we all have thick enough skin that it doesn’t really bother us. We’re very comfortable in what we’re doing, but I do understand that it’s hard when you want a certain show to be released and the night before you want released gets put out instead.
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