JPG: It was funny that in your video announcing the box set you defended it as the longest “uninterrupted” Grateful Dead song because you know someone’s going to hassle you about the version of “Dark Star” from 5/11/72.

DL: Yeah, but there was a drum break. It was where the other guys got to take a three or four-minute break, and yes, I do see it that way. And yes, you can see it as a standalone “Dark Star” that was the same length, not longer, but the same length but this is uninterrupted, where all five guys and Donna singing, too, but all five guys were working their butts off for 47 minutes.

It’s interesting because it’s a show where they didn’t do a “Truckin’>“Jam”> “Other One.” They didn’t do “Dark Star.” They didn’t do any massive jam that would be the typical jam of the time.

You think of 1974, they didn’t play “Dark Star” very often, so their jams were a little bit different then. “Weather Report Suite” was often used as a launching pad for a jam.

JPG: Also, in ’73 they only did “Looks Like Rain” and then in ’74 they did the full “Weather Report Suite.”

DL: They didn’t start playing “Weather Report Suite” until September of ‘73. It was the rare song in the Grateful Dead repertoire that was recorded in the studio before they ever performed it live.

It’s the time when “Loose Lucy” went from being the slower version to the faster version, the three versions of “Money Money” they played at the three shows from ’74 here, and then they dropped it. So, they were really, I think, having a bit of fun with the setlist. “Scarlet Begonias” is a brand new song in ’74 and it shows. It doesn’t have the expansive jam. Later in 1974, “Scarlet Begonias” would stretch on to nine or 10 minutes with a really nice jam. These are five or six minutes. The “China”>“Rider”s from the ’73 shows are terrific. I think the ones in the ’74 shows, particularly Portland, although the Vancouver one is pretty darn special…the Portland ’74 “China”>“Rider” is, and I think in a lot of people’s opinion and, certainly, I would tend to agree, one of the top versions they ever played, which is why we did a compilation of this box set and the “China”>“Rider” from Portland opens the compilation. It’s that good.

JPG: What’s also interesting about the setlists is that there may be a number of the same songs played but it’s not like a codified setlist. Here, you see “Scarlet Begonias” followed by “Beat It On Down the Line” and “Tennessee Jed” or you see “China”>“Rider” followed by “Promised Land” as a set two opener. You don’t know what to expect.

DL: Exactly. You can have an “Eyes of the World”>“Whart Rat.” That is just another great piece of music from the Portland ’74. They play with the setlist a little bit. There was still a format, for sure, but “Playing in the Band” would have been a first set closer in this era but at the Seattle show they decided to make it the centerpiece of the second set rather than a “Truckin’”>“Other One” or “Truckin’>“Jam” or “Dark Star.” The jam of Seattle ’74 was “Playing in the Band,” which they’d done a couple of times in 1972; these 30-minute “Playing in the Band”s that were exceptional but they’d never done anything like this where they jammed consistently and constantly for three-quarters of an hour on the same song.

I can only imagine that the people at the show and who were “Playing in the Band” fans from either Skull & Roses or from Bobby’s Ace album…the Ace one is interesting because it does have a nice little jam two-minutes on it that would show where that song would go later in ’72 and onward in ’73 and ’74. But I can only imagine in Seattle and seeing them play the beginning of the song, “Great! One of my favorite songs.” Then, it just goes on and on and it comes back to it. “Holy cow! They’re still on “Playing in the Band!” Fortunate people must have attended this show. I don’t envy the shows I missed very often but I do envy this one. There are some great shows from this era that I wish I had been at.

JPG: After looking over the setlists, one of the only consistent things as far as placement is that “Johnny B. Goode” was the encore at three shows…I just noticed that after that lengthy “Playing” it’s “U.S. Blues” which is different…

DL: …Exactly. Later on, it would almost exclusively be an encore.

JPG: The tapes that were used for these shows, are they Betty Boards?

DL: They are something else. The bulk of the six shows were recorded by Kidd Candelario and two of them by Rex Jackson.

JPG: Now, on some of the songs I can hear that there are vocal mic problems. Was there consideration or the technology to boost the vocals in those situations or did you want to leaving it historically accurate to when it was performed and recorded?

DL: It’s two-track. So, what we have is what we have. There’s a couple songs from Portland ’74 where the vocal mics didn’t work. There’s no way to fix that. There’s a way to cheat it, and you can use a version of the verses from another show. In the case when we have a complete show, even if there’s a minor technical flaw or anomaly we don’t resort to fixing it in those ways.

Now, if there’s a missing piece of music, I don’t think we did it on this box set but there’s been times where we’ve used small pieces of music from another show to fix something on a release. When I say that I mean 12 or 15 seconds of an intro to a song but even that’s extremely rare and I can’t even think of any examples right now.

In this case there’s certainly nothing we could do to the tapes. Those are the kind of decisions you make. Let’s say an entire show was missing its vocals. No matter how great the show was played the vocals did not make it to tape. That would be a pretty easy consideration to simply not release that show. Often times in this era, whether it was Kidd recording or Rex, when a crew member who had many many other jobs to do – keeping an eye on the piano or Jerry’s guitar, the drums, whatever – recording was a secondary task. So, when the show opened and you’ve got to fix all these things onstage that need to be fixed immediately, the secondary thing you’re going to do is keep an eye on the tape. That’s why so many tapes from this era – the first half of the first song will have serious sound problems where Weir’s guitar will come and go until it gets dialed in, then all of a sudden it’ll only be drums and then one-by-one the instruments come in. That’s fine.

When you have 166 songs [on Pacific Northwest] and when 10 or 12 of those have in the big picture minor sonic anomalies. None of them are missing. None of them are egregious. When the music that is there is that good, honestly, I don’t even notice that stuff anymore. I’ll hear it. I’ll notice it because I’m making very detailed notes but in terms of my enjoyment of the overall show and a listening experience on the box set itself it doesn’t faze us at all. We all recognize that these tapes are 44, 45 years old and this is the way that a lot of two-track recordings are.

When we have a complete show that’s perfect start to finish – let’s say a Betty Board from 1977 or 1978 – that’s something that’s a nice gift to work with. We have something that is flawlessly recorded throughout but it’s becoming more and more rare as we’re 200 and some shows into releases out of the Vault. We work with what we have and generally that’s pretty darn spectacular recordings. If there’s minor sonic anomalies, Jeffrey does everything he can to fix them. If there’s low bass, Jeffrey can bring some of the bass up but it’s two-track so you’re not remixing, you’re enhancing through EQ. When something is flat out missing then we can’t do anything about it.

If the problems are somewhere it’s usually on the first song of the show. Not always, as we see in the case of Portland. It’s a phrase I don’t like but it falls into “It is what it is.” When you have so much other great music you really can’t do much about it.

JPG: I recall all the stories about the Vault being digitized from the original tapes for safety sake but then I notice for this release, “Masters transferred and restored by Plangent Processes.” So, what do they do? Are they dealing with the original tapes?

DL: They are absolutely dealing with the tapes. Everything we do, even if something had been hi-res digitized 10 years ago, we always go back to the master tape. Always. When we do a production, and a lot of our tapes, particularly of the studio albums and a lot of the shows, have had high resolution digital copies made. Those are safeties. Those are backups so that in 10 years we produce a release from Vancouver ’73. We go back to the master tape, which 10 years ago when we made our digital transfer and it played beautifully and sounded great. So, we put that tape on and it’s dead, which has not – knock wood – happened yet. We’ve not encountered any tapes where we had to go back and use the digital backup.

Any mastering engineer will always want to go back to that original analog tape for any new use they’re doing on a project. When you see anything we do from an analog source – everything we do is from an analog source – everything is coming from the master tapes.
So, Plangent does transfers and they do them in a way that restores them to be as close to the day they were recorded. They really are exceptional. The first time I heard what Plangent could do was about 10 years ago. We were doing the Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings box set. Those were shows I knew extremely well. I knew them from the master reels. Dick had made DATs and they sounded great. Jeffrey said, “There’s this new system that I’ve been doing a lot of research into and it’s called Plangent. I’ve heard some tests. It’s really remarkable. Let’s see if we can do it.” We talked with Rhino and they said, “If it’ll make it sound better, do it.”

We sent the tapes off to Jamie Howarth at Plangent. He did his work, his Plangent processing, and sent them to Jeffrey who did his mastering from the Plangent transfers. I called Jeffrey. I was giddy with joy, almost in tears at what I was hearing. To me it sounded like I was hearing the original analog reels played on the best quality analog reel-to-reel player through a $20,000 stereo system. I wasn’t doing any of that. I was listening to the digital transfer on a decent stereo system. It sounded like I never heard digital music before, as in a CD or a download. It was identical to the analog recording, and I had heard the analog master in the studio. Jeffrey had put it up and we listened to it on the Dead studio, which is a great system.

You listen to the Winterland ’73 box. As good as the circulating tapes have sounded over the years, particularly the third night, November 11th, it sounds remarkably better. It’s dramatic.

So, what Plangent does…it’s not appropriate for every project but for projects that it will benefit we generally do try to find the budget to get it done. We’ve done the studio records that way. They definitely help.

The best way for me, not an engineer but as a listener, to describe what Plangent does, the digital file that’s made for production purposes from which the CDs are made, it makes it sound as close to or identical to the analog tapes that it came from. It really is remarkable.

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