Posted On: Wednesday - May 10th 2017 8:16PM MST
In Topics: Music The Dead
It's about 3 hours and 15 minutes, and this video is a "Dick's Picks" entire Grateful Dead show from Jersey City, NJ, September of 1972. I would call this as close to classic Dead music as I've heard, though without the space jams and the 10 minute 2-man drum solos that may be a bit much for someone not so familiar. 3 hours and 15 minutes! - There never was a more harder-working band, and they loved their audience as much as the audience loved them.
Here's another special thing about this band. Far from being bent out of shape about "unauthorized" people recording their music, these guys arranged for entire sections of the venue to be set up for the "tapers" to get good recordings. I would hope, with that history, that there are no corporate dipshits around trying to pull 3-hour Dead shows off of youtube. It seems that you can find about anything now, instead of getting 3rd-generation tapes, if you were lucky (recorded off a recording of a recording of the show).
Real Gone Music has a description and song list of this great concert from 45 years back.
This recording came up in my mind after I wrote a longer article on this All American Band last post. The faster, more familiar to me, version of the song "Around and Around", aka "Reelin' and Rockin'" is right at the end, at 3:11:35. Oh, and this a Chuck Berry song, which I didn't know at the time of the last post. It's straight-up 3-chord R&R, but Jerry still gets good leads in there. You gotta listen to that one, but in addition, there's a great version of "Deal" @ 1:52:35, a Dead-written song (meaning Jerry Garcia with the fantastic Robert Hunter, who did not play with them) with such a great solo by Jerry, and a great "Big River" @ 0:50:30 which was written and sung by Johnny Cash.
Oh, 1972 was after the Grateful Dead had been playing under that name for 7 years already, but they played for 30 years total before we lost Jerry. The fat man rocks!
PeakStupidity will get back to politics/finance/culture and other realms of Stupidity tomorrow, but sometimes this music and hanging around with 5 year-old kids helps temporarily lift us out of the toxic stew of stupidity we are normally immersed in, at least for a short spell.
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[UPDATED Years later:] The video is gone, and the description on Real Gone Music has gone 404 on us, so I just put in the one song in question here.
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