Give the people what they want. That seems to be the motto for those at Grateful Dead Productions and its label, Rhino Records. With each passing year the team puts out an archival release that’s been highly anticipated by fans. This year is no different with a 40th anniversary celebration of the show that’s been at the top of the wish list for those who believe that it was the band’s finest moment.
Following years of circulating among tape traders who dealt with multiple generations of clarity, the legendary May 8, 1977 concert at Cornell University’s Barton Hall has been released in multiple formats – three-CD set, limited edition five-LP set, digital download and streaming.
That show is also part of the already sold out 15,000 limited edition May 1977: Get Shown the Light box set, which compiles the Cornell date with New Haven (May 5), Boston (May 7) and Buffalo (May 9).
Due to demand and a desire to get the music out to as many people as possible, a May 1977: Get Shown the Light – All Music Edition is available. It includes the remastered audio from the four concerts on 11 CDs in four folios and a booklet of liners, housed in a slipcase.
Of course, none of this would have happened if the Dead did not acquire the wonderful-sounding Betty Board Master Tapes from that era. Several of the tapes have already been released as part of the Dave’s Picks series. While they are being scrutinized for their physical quality following years of being stored in less than hospitable conditions for magnetic tape, it’s still likely that fans haven’t heard the last notes of goodness from the Bettys.
In my interview with Grateful Dead archivist and producer David Lemieux we discuss the May 1977: Get Shown the Light box set, acquiring the Betty Board tapes for this and other releases and that particular era of the Grateful Dead.
JPG: I saw your video announcing the May 1977: Get Shown the Light box set and it brings up several things. Let’s start with the Betty Boards. It sounded as if there were years of negotiations and then you finally got your hands on them six months ago or was it earlier?
DL: I have been working for the Dead almost 20 years, coming from a tape trading Deadhead background. These were shows. I won’t say tapes at that point. They were shows that were incredibly well-known amongst Deadheads. We all traded them going back to the late ‘80s and through the ‘90s as the copies got better.
I remember getting my first cassette copy of Cornell, Boston and Buffalo. New Haven came for me a bit later. Those three from the seventh, eighth and ninth of May got around, probably in 1988. I remember that I was so excited that I got fourth generation from the master cassette tapes. “Wow! Fourth generation of these great tapes and they sounded fantastic.” As the ‘90s rolled on and DAT started becoming more popular and, then, of course, CDs after that and then digital copies, we all got copies that were a little better.
Then, 20 years ago almost, I started working for the Dead and I instantly had to put my love and listening of those shows sort of on hold. The only reason I say that, the bulk of my listening is spent on things that we can release or are going to release or considering releasing. When any of those Betty Boards that I was listening to — Cornell 1977, all that April ‘78 stuff on and on — I didn’t really have the time to listen to that because we couldn’t do anything with it. So, for me to have a limited amount of time to listen in the day, I found myself in those first many years working for the Dead only listening to things that we were working on, things that we could release. I’d occasionally, just for pleasure, “You know what? I’ve got to hear Buffalo. I wanna hear it a couple times. It helps some things. I’ve got to hear Boston with that great second set and the great first set.” Of course, Cornell was a given that I did listen to quite frequently…
Around 2013, we started discussions with the people who owned the tapes with specific interest that we obviously wanted to do something that was very major for the 50th anniversary in 2015, which of course became the 85 CD 30 Trips Around the Sun box set. It’s something we’re absolutely thrilled with but one of the first things we considered was, “Hey, let’s do Cornell. What could be bigger? What could be more exciting for Deadheads than doing Cornell?” We really worked hard to make that happen and we just couldn’t get it together on both sides. And it wasn’t a malicious ugly negotiation. There were so many details to it because it was a lot of tapes that we just didn’t make it happen. We knew we needed a good six months at least to get into production on it.
So, it didn’t happen. That’s fine. And then we kept the discussions going with the owners [of the tapes]. Again, they were really good. Around mid-2015 that’s when we decided to really work hard on making it happen or try to make it happen for the 40th anniversary. Right around that time we started working closely with Rob Eaton on behalf of the owners of the tapes, and Rob’s a good guy and also a well-known person in the Dead community. Then, a friend of his named Prescott [Carter] and Rob and myself approached this strictly as Deadheads. “Let’s make this happen. Let’s just do this.” They were representing the tape owners. I was working on behalf of Rhino and the band. We worked through ideas.
In 2016 we released a five-show box set from July of 1978. Those included the two very famous Red Rock shows, the first time the Dead played Red Rocks. They also included the three shows that really nobody knew. There were some audience tapes but there were no board tapes that circulated. I don’t know why they never got copied but, nonetheless, we were very happy and the shows were exceptional. So, we worked with the owners of the tapes on those shows. We said, “As a gesture of good faith, to show you that we’re serious, we would love to do a release with these.” We worked out arrangements. We ended up releasing that box set. Everyone was happy with it — the band, myself, Rhino, Deadheads, and the owners of the tapes.
JPG: Now, those July ‘78 shows, all five, those were all Betty Boards?
DL: They were all from the collection, correct. They came as one from the owners. So, we acquired those and put that box set out. That was when it really heated up; almost right after we released that mid-2016.
That’s when we all got very determined to make the rest of the stuff happen. With the 40th anniversary of Cornell, Boston, Buffalo and New Haven coming up in May of 2017, we really wanted to make that happen. We worked through the summer of 2016 and, then, around September is when everybody got on exactly the same page and said, “Okay. Let’s just get this done.” We did and it was pretty quick.
Once we realized that we were all on the same page and wanted the same thing — we wanted what was fair for all parties — we went into it and by, I don’t remember the exact date, but it was sometime late 2016, around October when all of the tapes were delivered to the Dead’s archives.
Then, we went through a very, very, very active phase of reviewing them in terms of determining what preservation needs they had, which ones needed more treatment in terms of special care. Some of these tapes, as the story is well-known, particularly by a story by Dean Budnick What’s Become of The Bettys? from a few years ago. Some of the tapes were not stored in the best of conditions. It was pretty crazy. We spent quite a bit of time.
The first ones we analyzed, of course, were those four shows. They were beyond fine. They were phenomenal. Then, probably around the middle to late October we pulled the trigger on setting it in stone that this was going to be a big 2017 release. Since then we’ve been working fulltime—the entire team of everybody involved. Plangent Processes did the transfer and restoration and Jeffrey [Norman] did the mastering. And then we’ve got the same designer Masaki Koike who did the first May 1977 box a couple of years ago. It’s been a really wonderful, wonderful situation to see it come together and, honestly, musically, I don’t know if there is any box set that matches this, maybe Europe ’72. We’ve done some pretty spectacular box sets. This one is really gorgeous. And (Dead scholar) Nick Meriwether wrote liner notes for the ages for the box set. For the Cornell stand alone, he did a separate note.
It’s nice to go back but it’s not a case of everything could come out now. We’re going to be very diligent in making sure that the preservation of the tapes is fine, that everything is in good shape. So far, so good. We haven’t run into anything that is problematic…yet. But, there’s a lot of tapes in here. They’re very well-known tapes. We all know what they are — anybody who has been trading tapes since the late ‘80s — what tapes are in the collection.
In addition, being all that great material from ‘76-’78, there’s also a very, very good amount of ‘71-‘73 and, in particular, the Dave’s Picks is from December 7, ‘71 at the Felt Forum. That one is in there, too. There’s a lot of material in here. The Dave’s Picks from April 2, 1973 Boston. That’s also from the collection.
JPG: I was just rereading the article that Dean wrote about the Betty Boards and as a fellow Head, it blows my mind that it’s taken all these years for them to finally acquire the Betty Boards. It’s just an amazing the story, the tale of the tapes.
DL: Yeah. As a Deadhead and an archivist…it’s funny, I really don’t look in the past at those types of things. It’s totally understandable why it didn’t happen in 1988 and why it took so long from 2013 when discussions really started. I feel that in this case, everything happens for a reason. They’re all back and that’s the important thing. I’m hoping, my fingers are crossed, that everything that came back is release-able. The storage conditions on some of these tapes, we’ve heard the stories, like a goat barn and stuff like that. Is it all releasable? I don’t know. Both Jeffrey and Dave Glasser have done substantial assessments of a lot of the tapes and so far, so good.
JPG: I read how Rob Eaton baked the tapes in order to repair them. Other people made copies of other original tapes. Now, what you’re working with are original masters? You’re not using the copies?
DL: We’re definitely working with the master tapes. What we acquired, what came home were the master tapes, what we’re using for production are always the master tapes. It’s very rare that we would use anything but the master tapes on something.
JPG: The reason I asked about the timetable on this is that in the past we had talked about the planning and work on a major box set release can be close to a year in advance. This seems to be extremely quick for you.
DL: It is and it isn’t. We had a good feeling this was going to happen going back to early September. So, for instance, Nick Meriwether has been working on the ideas for the liner notes back in September. That’s always a big part of it. He kind of knew that that was going to happen. We’d already been looking for archival elements from the archive at UC Santa Cruz as well as photos and items like that. When it came time to, as we say, pull the trigger on something and that goes back to mid-October 2016. That gave us all of November, December, January, February into March. Package design had just been finalized pretty much including booklet. It’s a good five month production schedule, which for something like this it’s pretty normal, actually. It comes out in May. The lead time is usually a little more planning. We would have probably planned it starting back in May of last year. It wasn’t the case this year but we’re totally fine with it. Certainly, nothing suffered in the project. We had plenty of time to do everything we needed to do.
JPG: Years ago, I traded for soundboards of Boston, Cornell and Buffalo ‘77. Were they some version of the Betty Boards? Were other soundboards circulating at the time?
DL: The boards that you got, those are absolutely from the Betty Boards. Absolutely they are copies of the Betty Boards for sure.
JPG: So, the box set is a cleaned up version and sounding fantastic?
DL: Yeah, they’ll be all cleaned up They’re restored properly. These are like a typical Dave’s Picks that comes from everything that we do. Master tapes cleaned up, restored. The whole bit.
JPG: I swear that when we were talking about Cornell years ago, I don’t know if you were just trying to be evasive about things but you weren’t too enthusiastic about wanting to release it because everybody already has it and there were all these other things to put out. Was there any particular thing that changed other than you got the Betty Boards to use now?
DL: No, I think it was more a case of realizing that there was a very good chance that we would never get to release that and coming to terms with that. My attitude was more, “We have plenty of great stuff to release.” It was the kind of thing where I didn’t listen to Cornell as much as maybe some Deadheads would have because we couldn’t release it. It was more a case of being aware that there was a very high likelihood we would never get a chance to release it. So, we focused on the things we could release, which are pretty darn amazing anyway. Think of the stuff we’ve released in the last decade or so — the Hartford show, the Richmond, Virginia show, the five shows in the May ’77 the first box set and on and on. So, we’ve released some really, really fine, fine music.
JPG: Now do these Betty Boards fill holes in the Vault where you guys didn’t even have a good copy?
DL: …We didn’t have in any format. We had stuff like DAT copies but those were just reference, if anything.
That’s a hole where our tapes in the Vault went May 1, May 3, May 4, May 11…so, we were missing May 5th, 7th, 8th 9th. Another good example, tape traders from back in the day, we all had these incredible tapes from April of ’78, April 6th and 7th and 11thand 12th and 14th, 15th, 16th. We never had any of those in any format. And then April 18th, starting in Pittsburgh, we have every show for the rest of that tour for April and May of ‘78. We were always missing that first chunk of the first leg of the spring tour of ’78, April 6th to April 16th we were always missing. So, those came back.
Likewise, a lot of the January ‘78…it’s a pretty darn impressive collection of music. It was not only some big hole in the collection but it was holes that included some of the best music. It wasn’t just missing shows, it was missing depth shows. Think of the summer of ’76 — and there’s some pretty good shows in the Vault — but there’s also some pretty good shows missing from the Vault that have now been returned. It’s things like that.
We certainly filled some holes that were glaring. It’s very similar to what happened when we got the Houseboat Tapes where the whole summer of ‘71 was missing and, all of a sudden, virtually overnight they all returned. And that’s July through August of ‘71. Lots of other stuff returned as well. The Berkeley Community Theater ‘72 stuff, some spring tour ‘73, some alternate copies that sound phenomenal, December ‘71. Quite a bit of cool stuff came back.
JPG: Now, Betty Cantor-Jackson did other recordings. Did you acquire everything such as studio recordings or Jerry Garcia shows in the deal?
DL: No, just the Grateful Dead. We didn’t acquire any Jerry solo material. No other bands.
