Which is your favorite Dead show? Can you even remember? These folks can.

April 14, 2009 8:29 PM

NYT article 4/12/09 Interesting article about the Dead on the eve of their tour. Bonus: link on the sidebar that shows reader photos. Find your friends. Or not.
posted by mnb64 (25 comments total)

I hate the Grateful Dead and I love this article.
posted by Joe Beese at 8:33 PM on April 14, 2009

Having registration required to view makes baby rollbiz cry.
posted by rollbiz at 8:37 PM on April 14, 2009

What a long strange trip it's been.....
posted by ginky at 8:45 PM on April 14, 2009

There was a picture of my mom in the print edition and somewhere on the nytimes.com site accompanying this article. She'd won free tickets to two of the three recent Dead shows in NYC, and the picture showed her in the front row looking as happy as I'd ever seen her.
posted by jtron at 8:46 PM on April 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

The Cornell concert referred to in the article as May 8, 1977 can be streamed for free from the Internet Archive, as well as almost every other Dead concert.
posted by twoleftfeet at 9:00 PM on April 14, 2009

Dude, it's always good to put a [via]. And I know you got this from elsewhere on mefi...
posted by koeselitz at 9:04 PM on April 14, 2009

I have tickets to Shoreline on 5/10. Oh man oh man oh man...
posted by Big_B at 9:05 PM on April 14, 2009

I've seen them live, I've streamed a bunch of shows, and I listened to that Cornell gig right after the NYT article ran, and it diminishes my warm feelings for the band and their scene not a bit to say they couldn't sing for crap - most of those "harmonies" sound worse than the local dogs yowling when a fire engine races by.
posted by twsf at 9:09 PM on April 14, 2009

Whoa -- the Dead visited the Oval Office today, and apparently, Tipper Gore sat in on drums tonight for Sugar Magnolia. (via digaman's Facebook feed)

Verizon Center
Washington, DC
April 14, 2009

1:... Read More
Cassidy
Passenger
Pride of Cucamonga
Easy Wind>
Lazy River Road
Alabama Getaway>
Big Railroad Blues

2:
Peggy-O*
Glory Road*
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall*
Ambient Interlude>
Terrifying Feral Space>
Dark Star>
King Solomon's Marbles
(I. Stronger Than Dirt; II. Milkin' the Turkey)>
Rhythm Devils>
Come Together>
Jam>
Dark Star>
Sugar Magnolia (with Tipper Gore)
E: Uncle John's Band
Ripple
posted by muckster at 9:13 PM on April 14, 2009

Oh dear god just stay retired in peace.
posted by bardic at 9:21 PM on April 14, 2009

These rehearsal videos are fun, and I dig Mickey Hart's Touring the Universe of Sound.
posted by muckster at 9:21 PM on April 14, 2009

Oh wait, there she is on page 3 of the article, next to the "exultant fan." Hi, Mom!
posted by jtron at 9:24 PM on April 14, 2009

Sorry about the snark - I just heard about this very interesting article here first - but I'm sure it was found independently. It's the goddamned NYT, after all, so, what, like half a billion people see it every day?

Sorry, OP.
posted by koeselitz at 9:52 PM on April 14, 2009

My mom was at the 5/8/77 concert. She says the acoustics of the venue were bad enough to render the music unlistenable.
posted by decagon at 10:02 PM on April 14, 2009

Well, the acoustics may have been bad but the reason that show sticks out is..., um,... hard to explain. Most listeners know it through tapes, so the acoustics were different, right? I mean, c'mon dude, listen to 5/8/77; pick it up around "Fire on the Mountain" (track 14) and... c'mon dude, c'mon! You hear that?
posted by twoleftfeet at 10:37 PM on April 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Deciding which was the best Grateful Dead show, like, everrr is a little too "best baseball team" (1955 Brooklyn Dodgers) or even "best baseball card" (Satchel Paige, 1949 Leaf, #8).

Like baseball, the Grateful Dead was of course a live experience. No television broadcast of a great baseball game beats being in the stands on a nice summer day for an otherwise unimpressive minor-league game. The ten best torrent downloads of cleaned-up digitizations of cassette dubs of reel-to-reel tapes of Dead shows that happened before you were born all together probably aren't worth the single worst Garcia-era Grateful Dead show anyone ever attended in person (Hubert Humphrey Metrodome, 1986). Nothing beats being there.
posted by pracowity at 12:16 AM on April 15, 2009 [3 favorites]

Hey -- I think Technoviking's dad is in that "live experience" Grateful Dead video starting at about 1:03.
posted by pracowity at 1:34 AM on April 15, 2009

My favorite shows will be 5/1 and 5/2 at the Rectum. Then it will be torn down, a fate it richly deserves.
posted by fixedgear at 3:17 AM on April 15, 2009

mnb64, was Pigpen the brother of a good friend of yours from college?
posted by gman at 5:08 AM on April 15, 2009

I'm surprised nobody gave the headier-than-thou answer to "What's your favorite show?" yet: "The next one."
posted by muckster at 7:35 AM on April 15, 2009

My wife and I were out and about in DC yesterday evening, with no awareness at all that there was a Dead show happening. My thought was "Man, I didn't realize there were so many cool people in DC these days." I'm disappointed it was temporary.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:12 AM on April 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

Weir's gotta lose the facial hair. That's all I got.
posted by Danf at 10:17 AM on April 15, 2009

I once dropped a gentle hint to a Deadhead that I wasn't sure the music was all that amazing and she blithely tossed her hair and said, "Oh, yeah, I know. I just go for the scene."

Bragging in reverse: I haven't seen the Grateful Dead for forty years.
posted by kozad at 11:44 AM on April 15, 2009

think I'm getting a contact buzz off those photos.
posted by Pollomacho at 12:04 PM on April 15, 2009

Interesting article about the Dead on the eve of their tour.

I read that description and got really, really excited. Then I realized you weren't talking about a zombie invasion or country-wide possessions. I tried to read the article but I was just too sad.
posted by honeydew at 6:47 PM on April 15, 2009