John A

9 versions, all in '85. 1st set, pre-drums, post-space, encores - you name it. Anyone have a favorite? Or general commentary? I do as I am want to, but I'll refrain for now. Why drop this, Jerry? The Garcia/Kahn treatment clearly drove the muse, but how did it not work with The Dead? Of course just one of hundreds such questions, but that doesn't mean we can't ask 'em aloud...

The latest official release is both '85 Frost shows. Let me make two things clear off the bat - it's cool that rather than the more typical 3 CD single show release there's a 4th CD here and it's 2 shows. Also, I'm one of the weird freaks who thinks actually collecting this stuff on media you can touch, with photos and the like, is a worthy thing. That said... I'm fine with an encore at the end of a disc after a 1st set should that be the way to get material to fit on what's obviously antiquated media (CDs). And moreover I put all this on a hard drive where all is in its rightful order. But... 4/27/85 Frost features a 2nd set opening sequence of Scarlet -> Eyes -> GDTRFB. The Eyes into Goin' Down The Road is rare enough, happening only 2 other times. Both, I suppose unsurprisingly, were also in '85. But Scarlet Eyes is a one off, and the 3 song Jerry set 2 opener is, please pardon the pun, eye opening. 🤨 Lemieux produces these things, so it's all on him; Scarlet -> Eyes is presented at the end of the set 1 disc. Eyes winds down into an "oh man what a sequence" transition into GDTRFB. After allowing the listener to be teased with it and grasp the first few bars of GDTRFB, the disc fades and the set resumes on disc 2. YOU CAN'T DO THAT! NO, NO, NO! This isn't some unfortunate cassette flip we're talking about. Come on, man! OK, rant over, but it hit me hard enough to write this post. Don't worry though, I already knew I need help. 😳

Question to the DSO geeks: has there ever been a Playin' Reprise filler to finish the Playin' from the original show? Regardless, that's some cool shit!

How hot is it that Dupree would be wiling to kill a man for the sake of his sweet, sweet jellyroll? Oh wait, he was executed for that. Bad choice. 😱

Sounds ridiculous coming from a guy who just catches the occasional local show here and there, but that HAD to be the show of the tour. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. 😁 Two approximately hour long sets of straight to the veins 1969 vintage Dead, then an intriguing and varied essentially full elective set. Damn. Sing Me Back Home was particularly epic. Venue funky, both good and bad. Had a balcony ticket and there were sizable flat open sections on either side of the seats (I think there were only about 40 seats total) so was able to get loads of space against the balcony rail. Sound up there was tremendous.

The only thing I do at Caesar's is Joe's Stone Crab. Unfortunately the season ends May 1st, so they'll be frozen when D&C is around, but that won't stop me. While they're crazy pricey, that's one rich head pursuit I'm squarely behind. 😁

I think I'm gonna endeavor to check one of these shows out. I don't gamble a lick, but sheepishly admit to liking the spectacle that is Vegas for a couple nights here and there. Easy to get there from the Bay Area too. Dead & Co is very much not my cup of tea either, but by all accounts that venue really seems like something to experience.

Last year they did New Years anywhere but the Oakland Coliseum. You don't know what you got 'til it's gone... Such a fun run of shows, even if it was very freshly post coma and the band had so much to build on tour by tour for the next 3 years on the way back from Jerry's health meltdown. Dancin' was about to drop out, Comes A Time would get super rare, and the Playin' opening/closing treatment is unprecedented. Fun times!!

Very nice. Love that set list flow start to finish. I want to see a DSO show just exactly like that one!

Big river debuted on New Year’s Eve 1971, with Garcia taking one of the verses on lead vocal and singing duet with Bobby on a couple others. It wouldn’t show up again for 49 shows, at Boston music hall in the fall of ‘72. After which it was played virtually every show up through the hiatus and a bit thereafter. As an aside, 12-31-71 also marked the first appearance by Donna on vocals. Thanks, Count2, for the easy to look up song stats!

Jerry sings, and like he's meaning it, "the people don't care a man can be as STRONG as me." This ain't no lyrical flub. I don't recall him substituting anything for "poor as me". Is this unique? And as one might expect, he doesn't cheat anybody on the ensuing jam... I recommend the Rick Katzeff Schoeps FOB tape, assuming one's system can bring it to sufficiently high levels. 🔊 And don't miss the Knockin' encore, which sounds even better. Rick brought some gold out of a stadium on DAT that night.

5-19-77 is my favorite show, full stop. 2nd half of set 2 is "music plays the band" to another degree. Sugaree is so perfect it defies reason. Why is this the only show Spring Tour '77 with no encore? Because it didn't need one.

Tangled up in Dew! Believe It Or Not in the "pre-St. Stephen Reprise ballad slot" is an awesome twist. Also cool to see both Hard to Handle and Box of Rain after the presumably (or at least very possibly) set ending Let It Grow

Playful to dangle medium school (Women, Quinn, and Wang Dang) and new school (Last Time) with old school theme.

FWIW, that's one of 5 Brokedowns in 5 years. All 5 from '74 to '79 being in '77

10/9/89 defies comprehension.

Man, that Compton Terrace show was a rip off. 50 cent service fee? $16 out the door? To see Garcia? Highway robbery!! 🤣

One other comment on the site itself - while Chris has tweaked it to be perfectly sufficient on mobile platforms, it deserves the respect of a computer / tablet to get the full gist of how useful, while remaining deceptively simple, the page layouts are.

Thanks for the kind words, Chris. I must say, this project is all that. While the concept of this might have been something I'd have expected to come together many years ago, it never did, not even in a remote shadow of what Grateful Sets currently is. It's everything one could have expected of DeadBase should DeadBase have been born in the modern technological world. Just an overall damned impressive effort, and I'm proud to be even a tangential part of it. As an example of its power, I recently was wondering about a full accounting of Fire On The Mountain performances without Scarlet played at the show. Well, I quick little search easily uncovers there were 12 instances of a Fire and no Scarlet. A few are famous, like the Egypt performance out of Ollin Arageed, the Radio City version out of space that ended up on Dead Set (and at all of 6 min 30 sec perhaps "infamous" is more apt), and the '91 Boston show where Jerry supposedly said to Hornsby before Help on the Way to "pay attention" only to launch from Slipknot! -> Fire. Others are downright cool, like the '85 show in Ventura that opened with Saturday Night -> Fire and the '86 Greek 2nd set opener. And then there's the 3 iterations of Hell in a Bucket -> Fire - maybe not the best transition. But in any event, where else could someone so readily generate that data? Nowhere! 👏

'89 Cal Expo was the first shows I was involved in DAT taping... no flipping necessary! ☺️

Love how the flow of that 2nd set looks.

I once was funneled into the back of a horrific lot at Shoreline, and I knew from experience that getting out of it could potentially take over an hour. Had a great seat FOB in the center section. I left the seat before the encore, and positioned myself at the rear aisle ready to bolt. Then Jerry went into Baby Blue and I found myself loitering until the end of it. Couldn't leave early. 😀 There were rail rats hardcores at later era Oakland Coliseum Arena shows that would leave before the encore to hustle outside and be the first to get the priority tickets to line up the next morning. That's some "method to my madness" shit right there.

For 7-22-84 Ventura, listen to Loser as loud as possible, paying particular attention to the Phil bomb at the end of the jam and Jerry's ensuing vocals. Good shit!

Saying "I saw The Grateful Dead with Jerry" is so painfully redundant. What a tool.

I finally got to this, and I'm through 2 of the 4 episodes. Thus far it's awesome. Looking forward to the rest of it. Episode 1 has a seemingly nonstop barrage of Dead tunes, most of which are integrated into the Walton narrative remarkably well. But especially impressive are Eyes of the World, when Walton has achieved top level high school success after a crazed growth spurt and is now considered the next real hoops deal, and Estimated Prophet, when they're hammering home the unbeatable nature of UCLA basketball, Pauly Pavilion in particular, and Walton's arrival there. Episode 2 has an epic inclusion of Morning Dew. They retrace the big anti-Vietnam rally on UCLA's campus that Walton was a part of and was arrested over. During the narrative of "this is where everyone on campus went this day" the Dew seemlessly reached the "where have all the people gone today" verse. Of course the concept whereby Dead songs mean different things at different times to different people based on life's circumstances is well known to Deadheads , but I thought it was a wickedly good how they reinterpreted the pathos of the song's meaning. Instead of "there's no people here because civilization's been obliterated", they used it to amp the intensity that all the people ARE HERE, and moreover they're all participating in this important political statement on a college campus. But even more powerful was the montage of grizzly, rapid fire, still images involving the police response, which was done in perfect time with Phil's big dramatic base notes at the opening of the first jam. Brilliant stuff.