The original reason to have another conversation with Grateful Dead archivist and producer David Lemieux was to discuss May 1977, a 14-disc box set that includes five complete shows from consecutive stops in St. Paul, Minnesota (5/11), Chicago (5/12, 5/13), St. Louis (5/15) and Tuscaloosa, Alabama (5/17).
Before we connected there came the announcement of a screening of Sunshine Daydream, the film chronicling the Dead’s legendary Aug. 27, 1972 benefit for the Springfield Creamery at Veneta, Oregon. It’s part of the Meet Up at the Movies showings that have occurred over the past few years. “Sunshine Daydream” takes place at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 1 (Jerry’s birthday). To find out more information or a showing near you, go to www.fathomevents.com.
Still, in the stream-of-consciousness format that usually happens between us neither subject is tackled at the beginning. A recent visit by representatives of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum brings back memories of the Dead’s exhibit in Cleveland and Lemieux’s interview appearance there.
“I just had a meeting yesterday with Howard [Kramer, Rock Hall curator] because they were returning all the Grateful Dead stuff we’d loaned them for the exhibit,” said Lemieux.
“They borrowed a lot of stuff from California, from GDP directly, quite a bit of stuff, from Mickey personally and from quite a few private collectors. They loaded up a big truck. Man, they packed it well. They had like a fine art packing company. Everything was in great shape.”
I mention that the Grateful Dead exhibit, which ended in March, has been replaced by another high-quality representation focused on the Rolling Stones’ career.
“I was absolutely blown away by the entire Museum. It really exceeded my expectations, the Dead exhibit and the two floors [it encompassed]. So, if they have that kind of space for the Stones…man, I have no reason right now to be in Cleveland but I’d like to get there and see that. It sounds really cool.
“As I told Howard last night, “You really did the Dead proud.” He did a wonderful job on that. So, I’d love to get back there.”
But that’s for another day. Getting to the first order of business…
Because this interview is a bit rushed in order to get it done before I head off to Bonnaroo, I didn’t get to plow my way through the entire box set…
Did you get the physical box?
Yes! Yes! That’s the first thing I want to talk about.
I haven’t seen it, but I heard it’s gorgeous.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t open it up for like a day or two because I just wanted to stare at it.
I’ve only seen it on my computer. So, I’m anxious to get my hands on one and I don’t think that I will for a few weeks. But I’ve heard from you now and a couple other media people who are just blown away by it, which is good. And I certainly do think the music and sound quality inside match it. So, this is not to say on my behalf or for my work but certainly the bar has been raised high going back a few years. I certainly think this one is up there with it.
Now as the producer of the box set, how much input do you have? Were you the supervisor in the construction of the box itself?
No, no, Masaki Koike of Phyx Design. There’s an interview with him on Dead.net. He’s a genius. I’ve been seeing his work for years. He did a funk box set for Rhino. He did a couple of Phish box sets. He’s done some major work. And then, when you look at some of his stuff online you’re like, “My God! He’s done some of my favorite package elements.”
So, this was completely his design. And also Doran Tyson and Ryan Wilson at Rhino on behalf of the Grateful Dead (Tyson is the box set’s Associate Producer). They certainly worked very close to Masaki. They got that ball rolling.
It goes back to October 2012, about eight months ago, when we first started talking about what we were going to do for 2013. And when we set on this box set — and we had some good discussions down in L.A. with Mason Williams, the Director of A&R at Rhino who is no longer with Rhino, but he’s the one that said “This package, I’m just visualizing this should be a Masaki package.” So, really, kudos to Mason for suggesting Masaki.
Absolutely one thing I know I’m not is a micromanager. And when we’re working together with someone as talented as Masaki, I don’t have anything to say; slight suggestions when he goes in a certain direction and I don’t think it’s right for the Grateful Dead or for the era then I give input but minimal because he generally was pretty darn bang on. He thought so far, no pun intended, so far outside of the box that I trusted his instincts. I haven’t physically held the box but when I saw it, I trusted in it completely. So, 100 per cent kudos to Masaki and zero kudos to me on the packaging besides for being blown away and approving it.
This is really, conceptually, and again Ryan and Doran in terms of kind of format of what they wanted it to be was the five individual shows in their own package and the book in its own thing. Those kinds of elements would come from Rhino. In terms of execution and the actual specifics and the cut outs [on the box itself], that’s all Masaki.
It kinda looks like a psychedelic stained glass window.
Yes, exactly. And Masaki is the kind of guy who can not only visualize these kinds of concepts but he can execute them. Again, I’ve never worked with him but…oh no…you know, I did work with him when we did a vinyl release about a year ago for Record Store Day. It was the May 1971 Winterland two LP set and Masaki did the cover art, the whole lay out and package for that and it was just terrific.
So, it’s a Iove working with our usual package designer, Steve Vance but in this case it was a change that was interesting. And the reason that Steve didn’t do it, partly, Mason came up with Masaki and suggested it but also Steve has been so busy with other things that we’ve had him working on. It worked out well that we went in this other direction on this one and it’s, as you say, a spectacular box.
Before we get to the shows themselves, let me go back to it, when they say you are the Producer of the box set how would you describe what you do? Are you more on the music side and just a benevolent supervisor of the packaging and other aspects of it?
When you’re dealing with archival releases an important role certainly is selecting the shows and selecting the concept of what to do. First and foremost, what I’m doing is looking at what we’ve done the last few years. Let’s go back three or four years and we did the Warlocks box from 1989 and then we did of course, in 2011 Europe ’72 and then we did the Spring of 1990 box last year. So, we wanted to go in a direction that was a little different from all of those. We put pen to paper and say, “Okay. What year does that open up? Well, certainly the ’76 to ’78 range is a good candidate for this next release. Then, we looked into May 1977, Spring ’77 and we thought of a couple of ideas and how to do something from it. When we realized that there were five consecutive shows in the middle of the tour right after Cornell, not only five shows but five very, very good shows, five excellent shows.
Really, it always comes to the music. The concept of, “Okay, let’s come up with a box set from Spring ’77…” but then we really need to focus on the music. If the music doesn’t warrant it, we certainly don’t do a 14 CD box, just as Europe ’72 warranted a 73 CD box. And this one warranted five consecutive shows on 14 CDs. So, you’re looking at that. So, it’s conceptual in terms of what is the overall project we’re going to do and then picking the specific shows and then working closely with Jeffrey Norman, who is doing all the audio work, of course, helping him along in terms of CD breakdowns, in terms of proofing the CDs that he had been working on.
All that kind of stuff and hiring liner note writers, working with them. In this case we had Steve Silberman and Blair Jackson. That would be part of my role, and then working with James R. Anderson, our photographer, as well as Alexandra May Hunter, another photographer whose photos are included in the box and finding a good number of photos that we could end up including in the box and negotiating with them. There’s a business side of things that I have to deal with in terms of…we set production budgets and we say, “Okay, we have this much for photos and this much for liner notes…” Then, part of my job is to allocate that money to the photographers and making sure that we don’t go over budget and get as many photos as we can for the budget while also being as fair as we can to the photographer. That’s one thing that we do try to do is be very fair to our contributors, whether they’re photographers, liner note writers…
So, yeah, it’s a lot of things. It’s all consuming in terms of the music, proofing that then the package elements, approving and proofing that. And when you get to a package that’s this beautiful, there are many, many iterations of it, dozens really. I’ve got folders on my computer with images and just the constant matter of looking at things and going, “Well, this one is good but maybe a little more red would be good.” And then he goes back and tweaks it and comes back. So there’s a lot of back and forth with that kind of stuff. Again, with a package like this, it’s just so outside of the box in terms of different from anything we’ve done. We really trusted Masaki so it wasn’t really so much changing things, it was just seeing what works best. It goes right up to the marketing side of things and then the publicity side of things. Doing things as I’m doing now with you.
When you had the grand vision of doing Europe ’72 as a whole tour, at any point, was there any consideration of trying to push all of Spring ’77?
Not really and the reason was several fold. One was that six of the shows had already been released. So, there was that. Secondly, we’re missing four of the shows. So, 10 of the, however many shows are on this tour, 10 of them were, I guess you could say, unavailable. Of course, we could put the other six that we’ve already released into the box but it’s one thing with Europe ’72. We’d already released Dusseldorf. That’s one of 22 shows. We’ve done most of Hundred Year Hall. That’s another one and then we’d done the compilation from England on Steppin’ Out. But we’re really talking the total of maybe three or four shows out of 22 had been released. A lot of it had been incomplete.
In the case of Spring ’77, six complete shows had been released in very good quality and very good format on Dick’s Picks and things like that plus the four that were missing. So, no it wasn’t really considered. It would have been cool but I don’t think it would have been a project for this time either to give people a 73 CD box and then an 18 CD box (“Spring 1990”) and then come back with another… what would this have been? Probably another 60 or 70 CD box. It just didn’t seem the time to ask people to spend another four to five hundred dollars.
Hitting Spring ’77 again, do you ever feel like, “Oh, I’m going to that era again” or is it just a matter of it’s so good, it doesn’t matter?
It’s really never been a consideration that we put out too much from it. As you say, it is so good and it is some of the most widely requested material, so we try to give the people what they want. But we also try to make sure that it is of an extremely high quality. If we’re releasing something it should really be the best. This stuff, really, is some of the best music and this is the kind of music that we want people pulling off the shelves in 30 years putting on and just being blown away and really being a good representation of the Grateful Dead.
I don’t think if we’d done, say a 1978 15 CD box set of five shows, we would have had the consistent level of quality of performance that we have from ’77. S. it comes down to performance quality is what it was, and there aren’t that many eras in which you have five nights that are consistently this great. That’s really what it comes down to.
There are several eras that are certainly — ’69, ’72 to ’74 — there are a few runs that are four or five nights long that are consistently this great from those years and I think ’76 to ’77 there are some, ’78 maybe. I think ’78 is a little more hit and miss in terms of performance quality, consistency. There are some absolutely spectacular nights in 1978, but they weren’t spectacular every night.
On Spring ’77 we can all agree that they were consistently great. It wasn’t even every night was great. Every song was great. What I find amazing about the spring of ’77 is that even when they might make a big musical mistake or whatever, they dig their way out of it and create gold out of it. A lot of eras when they start something, say a song falls apart or something, that’s the end. It falls apart and they just kind of dismiss it and say, “Oh, that wasn’t a very good version of ““China Doll“” or something. On the Spring ’77 when that stuff happens, they instantly go into the Group Mind. They were playing so tight that they dug their way out of it almost immediately and created gold out of it and that’s what I dig about it. They’re so on the edge and yet they always seem to end up on the right side of it.
Yep. They were playing really well, man. This was some of the, again, most consistently great, tight, interesting, exciting, music I think by the Grateful Dead and certainly up until this point in their career at 12 years, certainly one of those incredibly consistent you hear from the band. I’ve seen interviews where they say, “Yeah, in the early days we had a lot of duds.” If you listen to a lot of nights, say in 1970, again some of the greatest music they’ve ever played is 1970, but also some of the sloppiest music ever played was 1970. Whereas, this stuff, Spring ’77, you really don’t get that flip side where you get sloppy music.
Do you have a theory as to the reason why because I read Steve Silberman’s essay in the box set’s book and he talked about Keith Olsen producing Terrapin Station and bringing a degree of discipline during the recording session and how that possibly influenced the band’s playing afterwards.
I think that is a big part of it. I talked to Mickey about it very recently and he said the same thing. “Yeah, you know, we’d been in the studio where by definition we were playing a disciplined brand of music.” They really worked hard on that album, as you hear in “Terrapin Station.” It’s a really, really well-played album, well-recorded and well-played, and a lot of very complex songs like “Estimated Prophet,” of course “Terrapin Station,” the disco arrangement as we call it of “Dancin’ in the Streets.”
It’s a very, very tight album. Keith Olsen had many credits at the time, most significantly was Fleetwood Mac self titled album that he had just done it at the studio. He was co-engineer and producer at Sound City, which is a great documentary by the way, the Sound City that Dave Grohl did. A lot of interviews with Keith Olsen are in there. He came from this studio background where he’d been playing with musicians who were extremely good musicians and you listen to something like Bobby’s “Heaven Help the Fool” a year later and, again, that’s Keith Olsen producing that. Just the performance that he got out of some of the best L.A. sessions is remarkable and certainly some of the tightest music and I think you nailed it at the beginning of this question — the discipline and the drummers are playing in really, really close tight sync and playing some wonderful complimentary stuff to one another.
So, you’ve got that level of tightness and then you’ve got everybody else playing extremely well. There’s a lot of good new music, too. You’ve got to remember that “Passenger” and “Fire on the Mountain” and “Terrapin Station” and “Estimated Prophet” and “Sunrise” were all debuted between February and May of 1977. So, you’ve got all that new music. And again, some of it is pretty darn complex stuff.
Talking about “Terrapin Station” reminded me of when Bill Kreutzmann was at the Rock Hall and he did an interview session like you did. He was talking about the song “Terrapin” and they had used up all the tracks yet wanted to put strings on. To get them on something had to be deleted, so it ended up being Mickey’s timbale part. He said, “It wasn’t very nice. You don’t erase people’s tracks. You might ask him, “What do you think about this?“” Mickey, of course, got an unhappy surprise with that.
Yeah, sure. You know it’s interesting because when the Dead recorded — we talked about being limited to 16 tracks or around this time go up to 24 track machine — when the Grateful Dead recorded the Warfield and Radio City shows in 1980, they solved that problem by syncing to 16 track machines. So, all of those recordings were 32 tracks. So yeah, record as much as you can and deal with it late, but boy, erasing that hurts.
I was never a big fan of the strings in that song. I would have voted to keep the timbale.
It certainly is a very different sounding Grateful Dead record than anything they’d done previously.
Back to the box set, each of the shows ended up being a three disc set except for the second night in Chicago, which is two CDs. Was it just the way that it fit together or was there a reason for it being shorter?
I guess what you said. It fit on two. And any time we can put the show on two CDs, we prefer to do that than three because then it’s a little more manageable in a box. It’s a little less expensive for the buyer. There’s a lot of reasons for that. But yeah, it was simply a shorter show. And we didn’t have to cut anything or edit or anything. It was just a slightly shorter show than they were normally doing at the time. I would love if more Dead shows fit nicely on two CDs like this but they just generally don’t. Oftentimes, they’re just a shade over, maybe six minutes over the length of two CDs. That prompts us to do a three CD set virtually all the time.
That’s the cool thing about the Dead is that they did play so long. My point is more that I wish that CDs were longer. I wish CDs were a hundred minutes or whatever. Nonetheless, it was just a slightly shorter show than what they’d been doing up to that point. It’s interesting in the show length. In typical Grateful Dead fashion, no show is like the previous one, and then here we’ve got on May 13 a relatively short show, as you say, on two CDs and then a couple of nights later in Tuscaloosa is the final show on this box is an extremely long show. The first set goes way into the second disc and then the second set begins on the end of the second disc and then the third disc is the big jam of the second set. Over the course of, what’s that four nights apart, you’ve got a huge discrepancy in the length of the show, not to mention the set list.
That’s what I love about the Dead is that nothing is the same and you really can’t rely on anything to be consistent in terms of the show format. And I love that. I think we all do.
Also, in regards to Tuscaloosa I thought it was nice, and not too surprising, that “Sunrise” was played there and a couple other numbers where Donna was highlighted since it was kind of a hometown show for her.
Exactly. And I think that’s part of it. “Sunrise: had only been debuted a couple weeks before. It’s amazing that the Dead got to play in Tuscaloosa and apparently it was a pretty big crowd. It was a nice big arena. Yeah, I love this show. This has always been one of my favorite shows from the tour. So, I’m very happy that this one is out there now, the Tuscaloosa one. I like them all. I think they’re all great shows but I think the Tuscaloosa show is just a monster.
And then, in a bit of what you could call musical perversity playing “Promised Land” to start the set with the first show in St. Paul yet they didn’t do a Chuck Berry tune when they were in his hometown of St. Louis.
Yeah, that’s interesting because even more recently Bobby’s played St. Louis with whether it’s RatDog or The Dead or whoever, they certainly do pay tribute to that and play something if not even get somebody up onstage to play with them. I never even thought of that. There you go. That’s the thing. The more you think about things and then you’re like, “Wow!” and before you know it there all these little nuances that are just unique to the Grateful Dead.
Do you think at some point if this sells out will the individual shows some day be available?
I don’t think so. It’s a similar situation to the Spring 1990 box set where we put those six shows inside the Spring 1990 box and when they were gone, they were gone. We did not release them individually. We did a terrific two CD compilation from the tour but certainly not the individual shows. I believe that’s the plan here. So, if you want these get them in the box. Certainly, it’s five shows absolutely worth having. Maybe people would be interested in picking and choosing. Ultimately, it’s five really good shows. I highly recommend it.
With the box sets do you think there would come a time when there would be a release based on a city, all the shows from Pittsburgh or St. Louis or…New York would be kind of tough just because of amount but…
Not really because, again, our releases always come down to the music. Always. When you’re picking dates on a city, all of a sudden, you’re picking on something that has really nothing to do with the music.
For example, they played some good shows in Cleveland but they also probably played some mediocre shows, and if you were going to do a complete Cleveland box, all of a sudden, you’ve got to put in shows that you know are mediocre in there, but you’re doing them because of…I hate to put it this way, the gimmick of doing a Cleveland box set. So, no. The idea has come up a couple times and it’s been very quickly, I won’t say quickly, we certainly do our due diligence on these things. When you start looking at it, yeah, it’s a cool idea like Red Rocks. Do all the Red Rocks. Now, Red Rocks is interesting, they usually play pretty darn well at Red Rocks but we do have very inconsistent tape quality from Red Rocks. All of a sudden you’re putting out a box that has some very subpar sounding shows. We haven’t put serious thought about it but we put a lot of thought into it and we’ve done a lot of background and research into it but I would absolutely say we’ve never got to the point of saying, “Okay, let’s do it. A complete St. Louis box.” There were a lot of good shows in St. Louis but, nonetheless, you’re picking on something other than the music and that’s something that we’ve never really done.
I see or even as a compilation over the years like five CDs based on Oklahoma City.
Possibly. Yeah, yeah possibly. Then, you’re getting into putting in some Pigpen and then some Keith and Donna and then some Brent and then some Vince and Bruce and then some Vince. How well does a box like that hold together on five CDs or ten CDs? I don’t know. That’s, again, another thing. So, not really. We really haven’t done it. We’d rather let the music be the driving force in choosing a box.
There are a lot of very eclectic box sets like that that would work but…I would never say no. I never say never when it comes to these kinds of ideas but in our previous talks about them that’s what it always comes down to. Well, ultimately, musically it would be a challenge to make this thing a perfect box. I’d think you’d see a lot more future box sets where like the Winterland ’73 box or things like that where we take a complete run of shows. We could do it…St. Louis October ’72, a great three-night run at the Fox in St. Louis in ’72. That’s the kind of thing that I would be more inclined to do than start trying to wedge some later St. Louis or earlier St. Louis that might not be great. So yeah, I see other box sets that would be more along the line of a complete run from a certain year.
In other big Grateful Dead news, after I don’t know how many times we’ve discussed it in the past “Sunshine Daydream” is finally getting a public viewing.
It’s so worth seeing and I’ve seen probably as much as you have with bootlegs, VHS and now DVDs and online and whatever, and the restored version looks so good and the sound was so good. It was mixed over at Bobby’s studio at TRI in San Rafael and Jeffrey [Norman] spent a very long time mixing. It’s perfect. It’s really great. And then they mastered the audio for the screening at Airshow Mastering in Boulder, Colorado with our good friend, Dave Glasser. He’s been doing a lot of video and surround sound work with us. He mastered the “Europe ’72” box as well. Certainly, it couldn’t be better.
It’s going to be a great night out. I’m excited to see it. I’ve been watching it now for months during this production process, watching clips of it with the new sound and that kind of stuff, and that’s watching a DVD or stream online. To see it like this, it’s going to be very, very cool. I think it’s one we’ve all been waiting for.
Is there going to be different or additional footage than what we’ve seen in the bootlegs?
Yeah. I don’t think you’ve seen “Bird Song,” not in its entirety, for sure. And “Bird Song” has been restored and put back in. Now, the filmmakers, they filmed, luckily, most of the best stuff of the day – “China”>”Rider,” “Dark Star,” of course, “Playing in the Band,” “Jack Straw,” all that kind of stuff — but they didn’t film the entire show. So, everything that was filmed was in there and that now includes the “Birdsong,” which is very cool. It’s very similar in terms of structure to what you’ve seen over the last 20 or 30 years.
It’s still very sunny when they’re playing “Bird Song.” It’s right in the middle of the second set and it’s very, I used this the other day, in talking about it on Sirius, it’s very crisp. It’s a very crisp “Bird Song.” They’re very engaged, and Jerry just punching the bottom end on this thing is incredible. That’s the one thing that always lacking on the circulating audio copies of the show. And the video, of course, has never really had good audio but the bottom end they produce on this is just amazing. So, yeah, big news as you say, big, big news. It’s going to be a great night.
Is there going to be a soundtrack?
There’s been no officially released Veneta. I don’t know I’m not sure what the specific plans after the screening. Certainly, I would say we tell people to check dead.net ‘cause that’s where any announcements get made. But certainly our focus the last few months has been this screening on August 1 and beyond that it’s really just a matter of how much work we’ve all put into this screening, not to mention the May ’77 box.
The screening has really been the focus because the screenings have really proven to be incredibly popular in terms of getting people out. We do a lot of really great stuff in terms of making the archives accessible in terms of the May ’77 box, the Europe ’72 but the one thing we don’t do that often is get people out and dancing and into a room together because we’re not a live band. We’re an archival release record company but we did something in Port Chester, New York with the Capitol Theatre. We played a complete Grateful Dead show (2/24/71) and they have a full light show, the in-house light show, and they played it through the huge sound system. A thousand people came out to come and listen to this. It was a very good Dead show from a very good era that happened to also be at the Capitol Theatre.
What it showed us is that there’s really an appetite…well, we know that there’s an appetite for Deadheads together. Look at the crowds at Furthur shows, at Dark Star Orchestra shows. People love getting out and hearing Grateful Dead music, whatever the content, and for us to go to play a Dead tape or CD as the case were of an unreleased show certainly there was in interest in that.
Likewise, the meet-ups at the movies. Two years ago, we did The Grateful Dead Movie. Last year, we did the July 18, 1989 in Alpine Valley show, the middle night at Alpine ’89. The response was just absolutely huge in terms of both the amount of people that came out and we played it at more than 500 theatres around the country. Then, the feeling about it after the fact is, “Could you please do more of this at least once a year but hopefully even more than that?” To us that’s what we’ve really been focusing on. It’s nice to once in awhile get people out.
Okay, because it would just make sense to package the DVD and CD together. “Here’s the video. Here’s the audio. You’re set.”
I love it, man. I really do think it’s a great show. The legend of the show is certainly matched by the performance. You think of so many of the legendary Dead shows like Woodstock and Egypt and Watkins Glen and I’m not talking about sound check, but the actual show. And the legend is there but the performance sometimes doesn’t match up with the legend. Europe 1990. Europe ’81. Some very good shows there but these didn’t end being at the level of Europe ’72. That kind of thing.
So, a lot of legendary performances don’t measure up to the legend where this one not only is that but I think performance absolutely surpasses the legend. You take the legend of this show away, the 20,000 hippies in a field at a benefit show. You take all that stuff away and you listen to this as music and it’s one of the best Dead shows ever. And obviously, you’ve got the songs like “Dark Star” and “Playin’ in the Band” and “China”>”Rider,” which are some of the bigger songs of 1972. They’re some of the best versions of those songs ever. “Bird Song,” all that stuff, it’s the smaller songs that are absolute monsters. You think “Jack Straw,” “He’s Gone”…I was working on “He’s Gone” from the show, just a few months ago. It’s a great show, the smaller songs. So anyway, the point is I would love to see this thing come out. It’s a show I certainly would put on the top of my CD pile as I listen through things.
Speaking of unreleased, when you were at the Rock Hall you played some unreleased stuff.
Right. Well, we released a couple of ‘em. We played a little bit from Fillmore Auditorium12/2/69. I played that really spacey sequence from “Dark Star.” That was released ( Dave’s Picks Volume 6) and then I played that sequence of “Lovelight into “Not Fade Away” back into “Lovelight” in St. Louis on 2/2/70 (also packaged on Dave’s Picks Volume 6). So, those have been released.
I think I also played some May 1979 material from Brent Mydland’s third and fourth concerts. No plans to release those. You know, the problem with some of those shows is we don’t have complete shows from…actually of few of them. Hampton on 5/4/79 we don’t have a complete show. We’ve got a good chunk, but not a complete show. We’ve got Easton, Pennsylvania. We’ve got the end of the first set and the end of the second set but we don’t have the rest of that show. What else is there? Amherst, Massachusetts, I think we’re missing a few songs on 5/12/79.
So, no specific plans to release that material but it certainly is good that you heard…there was a great “Estimated Prophet” and it sounds good and crisp. We’re just beginning to wrap up selections on Dave’s Picks Volume 7. We’re really not that far ahead of the curve.
Even releasing that little bit of Brent stuff was surprisingly strong for how early it was in his time with the band. Even if you put it out on like an odds and ends compilation…
I agree totally and I’ve looked into that, actually. I’ve looked at some of the material from that tour and I think it’s just such a unique sound for the Grateful Dead. Brent has joined the band literally two weeks before and he was really working through the sounds that work and which ones didn’t work and the most interesting thing is how seamlessly his voice and his organ playing and all those people playing fit in perfectly with the Grateful Dead sound.
And they transformed the sound but they transformed it in incredibly good ways, really, from the beginning. You listen to stuff and you think, “How could this band have ever existed without him?” kind of thing. Don’t get me wrong! I’m a huge fan of Keith and TC and Pigpen’s organ playing but boy, It transformed the Grateful Dead sound.
You listen to Dave’s Picks Volume 3, which is from October of ’71, Keith’s second or third show, and it’s the same thing. It just transformed the band’s sound immediately. It’s still that core of…in that case it was Billy, Phil, Bob and Jerry but then all of a sudden you add this keyboard player, this piano player, that is unlike anything you’ve ever heard with the Grateful Dead sound and yet, it’s absolutely Grateful Dead music.
To me the cool thing about Dead music, it’s so different. People say, “How do you listen to so much?” And that’s the cool thing is that you can listen to ’67, ’68, ’69 and then you can listen to ’79 and you can listen to ’84 and then you can listen to ’91 and they’re very, very different, and yet it’s still the Grateful Dead.
