grateful dead best tours

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Top 10 Grateful Dead Shows

It's no easy task, trying to pick just 10 great Grateful Dead shows from the band's decades of active touring. However, for the aspiring Deadhead, or the curious traveler, these shows, listed chronologically, are the stone tablets that await you atop the psychedelic mountain.

Feb. 14, 1968

"We respectfully dedicate this set to the memory of Neal Cassady..."

A classic example of "Primal Dead", this energetic Grateful Dead show features the band working out with new material that would figure heavily in the years to come. The embryonic "Dark Star" and "China Cat Sunflower" are speedy and brief. The second set, which Jerry Garcia dedicates to the memory of the recently departed Neal Cassady, is a scorching dress rehearsal for the soon-to-be-released Anthem of the Sun album, including a complete reading of the "That's It for the Other One" suite, "New Potato Caboose" and Bob Weir 's supersonic "Born Cross Eyed." The whole thing wraps up with Ron "Pigpen" McKernan taking the lead on a slick and spunky version of "In the Midnight Hour."

April 5, 1969

By April 1969, the Grateful Dead were already starting to undergo a serious evolution in their sound. This night at the Avalon opens with two acoustic songs, "Dupree's Diamond Blues" and "Mountains of the Moon," both of which would appear that summer on  Aoxomoxoa .  "Dupree's" is a loose re-imagining of the old folk standard "Betty and Dupree" and features the kind of folksy Americana territory that would shape later albums like  Workingman's Dead   and  American Beauty.  While "Dupree's" is fun and funky, "Mountains of the Moon" is like a psychedelic Edwardian ballad, especially in its acoustic reading here. The few times that the band would play "Mountains" in early 1969, they would often conclude the song with a delicate exploratory passage that would lead into "Dark Star." The pairing on this night is dynamic and exhilarating, with the latter being an absolutely monstrous take that illustrates just how far the band could stretch out beyond the previous year's tentative versions. The second set is highlighted by one of the few performances of "Doing That Rag," another  Aoxomoxoa  track that has a terse, jazzy energy. Garcia plays a smoky rendition of Eddy Arnold's "It's a Sin" that features Pigpen blowing some soulful harp, and Weir leads the band through an era-defining version of "The Other One."

Feb. 14, 1970

"Swore we'd never had such times before..."

The Grateful Dead's stand at the Fillmore East in February 1970 is the stuff of legend. On the 11th, Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac , Arthur Lee of Love , and the Allman Brothers Band jammed with the band on "Dark Star" and "Lovelight" On the 13th and the 14th, the band performed a single-set early show and then a longer late show with Weir, Garcia, and Pigpen performing an acoustic set in the center. The arguments for the 13th vs.14th are strong (the existing tapes from the 11th are incomplete) and both shows are extremely potent, but the 14th gets the upper hand, if only for the monumental "Lovelight." That Valentine's Day, just two years after the lysergic madness at the Carousel Ballroom (see above on our list of the Top 10 Grateful Dead Shows), the era of the "Primal Dead" came to an end. "The Eleven" would be played once more after this night and then never again. "Saint Stephen" would stick around through 1971 but would also drop from the repertoire.

Aug. 6, 1971

1971 was another year of development for the band. With Mickey Hart taking some time off, the band settled in with one drummer and new keyboardist Keith Godchaux, and they focused on a sleek country-rock sound rather than the psychedelic exploration of previous years. Even when the band does stretch their musical limbs on a furious "The Other One," they manage to squeeze the cowboy tune "Me and My Uncle" into its center. (Sharp-eared heads will notice Weir playing a few bars of his "Weather Report Suite Prelude" as the band heads back into "The Other One") Pigpen is on fire here, delivering the band's finest rendition of "Hard to Handle" and sending the crowd home happy with an epic "Turn On Your Lovelight."

Aug. 27, 1972

"This is really where we get off the best!" -  Phil Lesh

Even with all the amazing nights at the Academy of Music, the Europe shows, the Berkeley Community Theater run, Sept. 21 at the Spectrum and so many others, the Veneta is the standout Grateful Dead show from the flawless year of 1972. On this strange, 104-degree day in Oregon, they were asked by Ken Kesey to play a benefit show for the Springfield Creamery of Nancy's Yogurt fame. Despite the heat, the band is on fire, from the raucous "Promised Land" that opens the show to the mournful "Sing Me Back Home" near its finale. The jamming on "Bird Song" and "Playing in the Band" is as intense as it gets, but they are only a foreshadowing of the heights that the exquisite "Dark Star" would reach in the third set, which was one of their best-ever renditions of the song. Whether by cosmic prank or strange design, the whole thing comes back to earth with Weir's sunny take on Marty Robbins' "El Paso," while the pairing of "China Cat Sunflower" and "I Know You Rider" just rips. Ken Babbs' stage commentary and announcements provide some colorful context and serve as a much-needed tether to this earthly plane of existence.

Nov. 11, 1973

In March 1973, Pigpen  died tragically at the age of 27. The band tried to find ways to fill in the gaps that he left behind. Without "Good Lovin" or "Turn on Your Lovelight," rockers like "Sugar Magnolia" became the show stoppers and closers, and the band continued to write new material. Jams became filled with jazzy nuances courtesy of Godchaux's piano and Weir's creative chord structures. Bill Kreutzmann was still the sole drummer, and he wins the MVP award for keeping up with the rolling musical behemoth that was the 1973 Grateful Dead. This show, from the band's three-night run at Winterland, represents everything good about that year. The jewel in the crown here is definitely the legendary "Dark Star," "Eyes of the World" and "China Doll" triptych. They crackle with an intense energy and the rest of the show is just as exhilarating with Weir's proggy "Weather Report Suite," Jerry's tender "To Lay Me Down" and a three-part encore of "Uncle John's Band," "Johnny B. Goode" and their old closer, "And We Bid You Goodnight."

May 9, 1977

1977 is generally regarded as one of their finest years on the road. The band's grueling spring tour from late April to early June is a treasure trove of amazing Grateful Dead shows. While the May 8 show at Cornell University often takes the title for their best show ever, the following night in Buffalo may be even better. They sound just as tight and focused as they did on the night before, with the same vibe, energy level and polished sound. The opener of "Help on the Way," "Slipknot!" and "Franklin's Tower" is absolute perfection and Garcia is just on fire. The amazing second set, which includes "Estimated Prophet," a rip-roaring "Other One," a joyous "Not Fade Away," the all-too-rare "Comes a Time" and a major rager of a "Sugar Magnolia" gives it the nod.

Sept. 18, 1987

The '80s are filled with amazing Grateful Dead shows, but the third night of this five-night stand at Madison Square Garden is a barn-burner from top to bottom and the best of the decade. The first set may be brief, but everything from that hot “Hell in a Bucket” opener to the trippy and blissful “Bird Song” is crackling with energy. The “Shakedown Street” that opens the second set is as funky as anything the band played in the late '70s. The exquisite “Terrapin Station” is one for the ages, and it’s impossible not to smile when the tumbling riff of “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” rises from “Space." The version of “All Along the Watchtower” that follows is insane, with Jerry using a distorted guitar tone that sounds like a rain of hellfire. That is aptly followed by an apocalyptic “Morning Dew.” There’s a moment when you can first discern the group-voice of the audience singing along with Jerry. It’s a haunting, ethereal echo that underscores the sheer emotional weight of this version. Jerry’s voice is confident and strong, and his playing is absolutely unreal. The ending solo is an absolute fireball. Jerry sings a few verses of “La Bamba” in the middle of Bob’s “Good Lovin’,” which provides a joyous rock and roll benediction at the end of an emotional show.

March 24, 1990

No matter how inspired the show, no matter how on the boys were at the beginning of 1990, the year is indelibly marred by the passing of Brent Mydland that summer. Brent’s husky voice and soulful R&B style helped to develop the band’s sound throughout the '80s. Listening to this wonderful show, one can’t help but feel a pang of sadness when Brent takes his verse on the “Let the Good Times Roll” opener. His keys are a major force in the mighty “Help > Slip > Frank” triumvirate that follows. When this show (and other nights during the run) was compiled for official release as  Dozin’ at the Knick , the powerful version of “Loser” here was oddly left out. It’s a smoker and one of the best versions around. The second set features some truly spaced-out jamming during “Playing in the Band”, “Uncle John’s Band”, and the surprise of the night, the “Mind Left Body” jam out of a killer “Terrapin Station”. A descending, four-chord progression named for its similarity to Paul Kantner’s “Your Mind Has Left Your Body,” "MLB” shows up a lot throughout the Dead’s history during various jams. Here, it gets a full eight minutes of explorations on the theme, creating a transcendent and meditative sound space. After the sonic storm of “Drums” and a terrifying “Space”, a pretty jam into “The Wheel” returns us to that gentle place of bliss. “Watchtower” follows, and like Sept. 18, 1987, it’s a monster. The “Stella Blue” here is as gorgeous a version that Jerry ever sang. By this point, Jerry’s voice now had a grandfatherly quality that knew how to deliver a ballad.

Sept. 10, 1991

After Mydland's passing, the band hired on Tubes/ Todd Rundgren veteran Vince Welnick on keys. Bruce Hornsby also joined in for a time to help Vince get acclimated to his new role. With Hornsby on grand piano and Welnick on keyboards, the new seven-piece Dead could create some brilliant moments with Jerry’s guitar and Hornsby's piano often creating some dynamic interplay. Boston's Sept. 26 show and the Halloween run at Oakland are highlights, but there was nothing else like the night saxophonist Branford Marsalis sat in with the band. With such a respected guest in their midst, the whole band really stepped up their game. “Shakedown Street” is an absolute monster and Branford’s saxophone lends lots of color and flash to a diverse first set that features “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” “Black Throated Wind” and an especially spirited “High Time.” The second set is a sprawling psychedelic voyage with a tripped out “Dark Star” at its core.

The Grateful Dead Reunited: 2015 Photos

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Top 5 landmark Grateful Dead concerts

June 29, 2015 / 5:17 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Let the countdown begin :

The Grateful Dead's final five shows have arrived.

With shows Saturday and Sunday last weekend in Santa Clara, California, and another three at Chicago's Soldier Field on July 3-5, the five shows cap roughly 2,300 concerts over 30 years.

Pioneers of psychedelic music in the 1960s, the Dead brought jazz-style improvisation to rock music. No two Dead shows were the same - not just the performances but the setlists were made up on the spot. Each show had a seat-of-the-pants quality that meant things could go wrong, but also that great heights could be reached.

The band's run came to an end with the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995. This summer, the four surviving members of the band -- guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann -- are performing.

Here is a look back at five shows that capture the band at key moments along its long and, yes, strange trip.

Feb. 14, 1969

CAROUSEL BALLROOM, SAN FRANCISCO

Garcia, the lead guitarist with the bushy black (later gray) beard and impish smile, was probably the best-known member of the Grateful Dead. But he was not its leader; that was a role he never wanted.

If the band did have a leader in its early days, it was keyboard player Ron McKernan. Affectionately nicknamed Pigpen for his unkempt look, McKernan also played harmonica and was more comfortable singing lead at first than Garcia or Weir.

Pigpen both did and didn't fit with the Dead. He didn't share the musical adventurism of his bandmates, and he preferred alcohol to LSD. But the blues and R&B tunes he sang served as an anchor to keep the band's more experimental work from spiraling out of the stratosphere.

Pigpen's drinking eventually caught up to him, and he died in 1973 at age 27.

April 8, 1972

WEMBLEY EMPIRE POOL, LONDON

The Europe '72 tour - 22 shows in April and May - is considered by many fans to the Dead's best.

The band was still playing the exploratory jams they became famous for in the 1960s, like the 30-minute version of "Dark Star" that highlighted this show, the second of the tour. But a songwriting partnership of Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter that was just beginning in the late '60s had matured.

Hunter's lyrics pulled from a wide variety of sources, from blues standards to nursery rhymes. He took an old folk tune based on a real-life train wreck and turned it into "Casey Jones." And he wrote the instantly iconic line in "Truckin,'" the band's 1970 chronicle of life on the road, "What a long strange trip it's been."

"His lyrics worked on a much more elevated level than your typical love ballad or rock anthem - they belonged to literature." Kreutzmann wrote in his 2015 autobiography "Deal" - which borrows its title from a Hunter-Garcia song.

​May 8, 1977

CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, NEW YORK

Spring 1977 was another peak for the Dead, and many fans consider this show to be the best they ever played.

In the mid-1980s, tapes of the Cornell show became highly sought after in the Deadhead taping community. The band for years had turned a blind eye to fans making bootleg tapes of their concerts. In 1984, they began to actively encourage it, setting aside a section for tapers at their shows.

David Letterman asked Garcia during a 1982 interview about the philosophy behind giving the music away. "When we're done with it, they can have it," Garcia said.

Oct. 16, 1989

EAST RUTHERFORD, NEW JERSEY

It was a rejuvenated Grateful Dead that took the stage at the Brendan Byrne Arena on this night - Weir's 42nd birthday.

By the early 1980s, Garcia had become addicted to heroin and had put on weight. His bandmates, setting aside their strong inclination toward personal freedom, staged several interventions. They felt the music was suffering, and many fans agreed.

Garcia cleaned up in the mid '80s, but he slipped into a diabetic coma in 1986 and nearly died. Once he recovered, the band recorded their first studio album in seven years. And "Touch of Grey" - a song they'd been playing in concert for five years - became an unexpected hit single in 1987. It was the band's only Top 40 song.

The Dead were riding high for the rest of the decade. Brent Mydland had joined on keyboards in 1979 and added energy to a band of aging hippies. But he died of a drug overdose in July 1990.

The band quickly found a replacement in Vince Welnick, but the pressure of touring, the burden of increased fame and Garcia's return to heroin use conspired to make the band's last five years on the road largely forgettable.

July 9, 1995

SOLDIER FIELD, CHICAGO

You'd be hard pressed to find a Deadhead who thinks that this -- the band's final concert before Garcia's death -- was a good one.

Things had gone sour in the band's world. Several gate-crashing incidents marred their summer tour, and some venues and cities were refusing to host the Dead.

Things weren't much better on stage. Garcia was using again. He would forget not just lyrics but even what song he was playing. Kreutzmann claims that Garcia occasionally nodded off during concerts. "I'd hit my crash cymbals as hard as I could, just to wake him up," the drummer wrote in his autobiography.

The band members have since admitted that by this point, they had stopped listening to each other while they were playing.

The Dead was scheduled to have a few months off after this show, and Garcia sought help. After a short stay at the Betty Ford Clinic, he checked himself into Serenity Knolls, a substance-abuse clinic in northern California, where he died of a heart attack on Aug. 9, 1995, at age 53.

A few months later, the surviving band members decided to retire the name Grateful Dead. The long strange trip was over.

Weir, Lesh, Hart and Kreutzmann have toured periodically in various formations in the 20 years since Garcia's death. They have billed these five concerts in 2015 as the last they will perform together.

The Grateful Dead’s Greatest Year

• By David Browne

David Browne

Bikers, blow and Belushi: As usual when the Grateful Dead took Manhattan, the band’s five-night stand at the Palladium in April 1977 had them all. Hells Angels rode their hogs right into the dressing rooms, brandishing a knife and demanding they play “Truckin.” John Belushi, in his Saturday Night Live heyday, popped into a dressing room to share some weed. Onstage, though, something different took place in those shows. Dating back to their earliest performances a decade before, the Dead could be loose, sharp, undisciplined, sloppy, fierce – sometimes all during the same night. But Deadheads who caught the Palladium shows witnessed a startling sight: a firm and focused Grateful Dead. “We came out really strong,” says percussionist Mickey Hart of those and other shows on the band’s spring ’77 tour. Recalling some of the brand-new songs the group premiered onstage then, he adds, “‘Estimated Prophet,’ ‘Fire on the Mountain’ – it was fresh meat, and we were ready to play those things. It was perfect timing.”

Ask Dead fans and scholars to name certain key years, and you know what you’ll hear. Some point to 1970, when the band cut two enduring masterpieces, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty . Or 1972, when the Dead toured Europe for two months and played some of their finest shows, resulting in another landmark album, Europe ’72 . Singer-guitarist Bob Weir points to the late Eighties, just before the death of keyboardist Brent Mydland: “For me, that was our peak,” Weir says. “We could hear and feel each other thinking, and we could intuit each other’s moves. Jerry , Brent and I reached new plateaus as singers. We packed a punch.”

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Yet few years make Deadheads wax more nostalgic than 1977. Over the course of two tours, an Eastern-rooted swing in the spring and a mostly Western and Midwestern trek in the fall, the Dead played what many consider the tightest, most consistently satisfying shows of their career. “It’s as close to a flawless Grateful Dead tour as I’ve ever heard,” says band archivist David Lemieux. “There were no train wrecks.”

About a dozen concerts from that year have already been released on CDs and downloads, but on June 11th, the biggest batch yet arrived with May 1977 , a 14-disc box featuring five complete shows from that tour. “We had all this new material we were excited about playing,” says Donna Jean Godchaux, who sang with the Dead during this period. “Everyone wanted to say, ‘All right, this is the time to make a statement and not just be a psychedelic weirdo hippie band.'” As a record-company ad that year read, A NEW DEAD ERA IS UPON US – which, as the band would learn, was both a blessing and a curse.

T he dead were coming off a troubled few years. In 1973, beloved founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan had died as a result of a longtime drinking problem. The following year, the Dead’s experiment with their massive, costly Wall of Sound PA collapsed. Their attempt at running their own record label, Grateful Dead Rec­ords, had floundered and left them in the hole when label head Ron Rakow skipped town with the $225,000 he felt was owed to him. Rex Jackson, a member of the Dead’s hardworking, hard-rocking crew, had died in a car accident in September 1976.

The following month, the Dead signed with Clive Davis’ Arista Records, then also the home of rockers like Lou Reed and Patti Smith . At Davis’ suggestion, they agreed to work with a pop-oriented producer: Keith Olsen, who had just produced a huge hit album for Fleetwood Mac . “We were trying to make a real rec­ord for Clive,” says Hart.

Starting in January 1977, the band and Olsen bore down on new material – including the epic “Terrapin Station” suite and Weir’s reggae-influenced “Estimated Prophet” – at Sound City, the funky but first-rate San Fernando Valley studio recently immortalized in Dave Grohl’s Sound City documentary. More so than probably any previous studio collaborator, Olsen put the bandmates through their paces, making them rehearse and replay parts until they nailed them. Normally, the Dead would have bristled, but not this time: “Keith was cracking the whip, but we liked it – it made us sharper,” says Hart. “We became much more disciplined. And Keith was always a little too small to hit. So he got away with a few things.”

Although he got high with Garcia on at least one occasion, Olsen didn’t become fully acclimated to the Dead universe until the later wrap-up sessions in New York, when Belushi came by, did cartwheels in the studio and hung out. “He drank everything he could and took everything and then passed out in front of the console,” Olsen says. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t bother him – let him be.’ This was all still really new to me.” Yet Olsen was also impressed with Garcia’s creativity and nonstop input: “He would have 20 ideas for everyone. He’d say, ‘I got a bunch of ideas,’ and we’d do them all. He really enjoyed the process.”

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But the process was slow. As the recording sessions started to drag throughout the winter of 1977 – and the band faced the possibility of not finishing the record before going on tour – Steve Parish, a member of the crew (and later Garcia’s manager), came up with a novel idea: Nail the studio door shut. “It was a joke,” says Parish. “But we were under the gun, and it kept the guys in there.”

The finished album, Terrapin Station , was the Dead’s most polished, professional effort to date, foreign adjectives that didn’t necessarily thrill everyone in the band. Hart was upset when Olsen overdubbed strings on one of his parts without telling him. With tempered enthusiasm, bassist and co-founder Phil Lesh later called the album “a fairly successful effort” that “varied wildly in terms of material.” At the time, though, the band put on a positive face about its aural makeover. “It actually sounds like a record,” Garcia enthused to Rolling Stone before its release. “People won’t believe it’s us.” Added Weir, “It’s the Dead without all those wrong notes.”

O n May 8th, fans crammed into Cornell University’s Barton Hall, a field house, were a little too pumped that the Dead were in town. “All right, now,” a newly bearded Weir told them about halfway through the show. “We’re gonna play everybody’s favorite fun game: ‘Move back.’ Now, when I tell you to take a step back, everybody take a step back.” Weir had to say it a few times, and bit by bit, the nearly 5,000 fans moved toward the rear of the venue to alleviate the crush at the front of the stage.

For the Dead, Barton Hall was just another stop, and a fairly out-of-the-way one. The only thing Donna Jean Godchaux remembers about it is how cold it was. “A college gig in New York, and it’s snowing, and you just play the gig,” she says. Hart’s future wife, Caryl, attended Cornell at the time but opted to see “Barry Manilow or something” with a boyfriend that night. Just about every Deadhead, though, remembers Barton Hall, whether they attended or not. The show regularly tops fan polls of best Dead performances, and last year a tape of the show was included in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Ironically, the Barton Hall performance has never been officially released, since the master tape is now in the hands of an unknown collector. In the mid-Eighties, recording engineer Betty Cantor-Jackson – who recorded all the shows on the ’77 tour – lost possession of the tapes after they were auctioned off (without her consent) from the storage facility where she was keeping them.

For fans and even band members, debate rages about whether or not the show matches the legend. “That was a really good performance,” says Hart. “Was it the best? That’s not for me to say, really.” Listening to one of the many audience tapes available, there’s no denying its highlights: a rare performance of Bonnie Dobson’s apocalyptic nightmare “Morning Dew,” which the Dead transformed into a huge, cathartic soundscape; fans also heard a new combination introduced onstage in February: “Scarlet Begonias” segueing into “Fire on the Mountain,” which didn’t make the cut on Terrapin Station but would end up on the Dead’s following album, Shakedown Street .

What few debate is how sparkling the Dead sounded that night, and throughout that tour. At the University of Alabama, they played a slow, mournful “High Time” and added dramatic flourishes to Weir’s “Looks Like Rain.” A beautifully burnished “Wharf Rat” in Hartford, Connecticut, showed how they’d matured as a band without losing their shambolic charm. During a particularly strong “Sugaree” in St. Paul, Minnesota, Garcia discharged a wild flurry of notes that dispelled any sense that the Dead were mellow old hippies – one of many demonstrations that all the studio hours they’d logged with Olsen had paid off. “We’re still as confused as we ever were,” Garcia told RS’s Charles M. Young during the Palladium run. “But the old Dead trip was getting to be a burden, so we sacked it and went on to new projects. We’re having fun again.”

Members of the Dead’s legendary road crew still enjoy reminiscing about the musical high points. The secret weapon was keyboardist Keith Godchaux, Donna Jean’s husband, who’d joined the band in 1971. “When you hear the tapes now, you’re totally blown away,” says Bill “Kidd” Candelario, a member of the crew from 1968 to 1995. “He played so quietly, but you’re astounded at what he was playing. He was magical.”

Every so often, the Dead encountered a bump in the road. When they played Buffalo’s War Memorial Auditorium the night after Cornell, the two young local concert promoters – Bob and Harvey Weinstein, later renowned movie producers – offered receipts that seemed “a bit cockeyed,” says tour coordinator John Scher. “I’ve kidded Harvey about it.” But more often than not, the Dead machine rolled along as smoothly as it ever would. When they arrived at the University of Alabama, marking their first-ever visit to a state not known for being friendly to longhairs, the school’s football team helped the Dead crew set up. “If you want to pick a year where everything was working well, that year stands out,” says Parish. “We realized there were losses we had overcome, but we were still tight and had each other and were close. Everyone was healthy and partying full blast, every day.”

I n the predawn hours of June 20th, while the band was back home in Marin County during a break, Hart left a local club show and lost control of his car. He crashed through a guardrail, and only a tree on the side of the road prevented the car from falling into a ravine. Hart emerged with a broken collarbone, smashed ribs and a broken arm. “I opened my eyes [in the hospital] and Jerry was there: ‘You look like shit!'” he says.

Hart recuperated, thanks to almost two months of rehab, but the incident was a sign that there were more troubles ahead. Stuck in an unhappy marriage, Lesh began relying increasingly on alcohol for what he called “the slightly numb, detached feeling”; by the fall, he’d put on 30 pounds thanks to the beers he would start downing for breakfast. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann ‘s second marriage was falling apart, and Weir had, the year before, parted ways with his longtime love, Frankie Weir (they weren’t married, but she took his last name anyway).

Offstage, Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux were an increasingly volatile couple. Donna Jean was, in her words, “no angel,” and was regularly using cocaine and drinking wine. She’d tried heroin once and hated it: “I just threw up for 24 hours. So I couldn’t plant my feet in that patch.” But her husband became increasingly beholden to the drug; Olsen remembers him mostly sleeping on a couch during the Terrapin Station sessions. On the road that year, band and crew often heard the couple’s screaming matches. “There was always backstage drama,” says Candelario.

Garcia, the group’s charismatic but unwilling leader, was besieged on numerous fronts. “It was an emotionally difficult time for him,” says Richard Loren, then the Dead manager. “He was at wit’s end pretty much.” He went through a messy breakup with his girlfriend (and future wife), Deborah Koons, and had to deal with the fallout from Ron Rakow’s expensive departure from the band. Since it was Garcia who had brought Rakow into the fold, the band penalized him for it, cutting his paycheck down to about $50 a week (from about five times that amount). Garcia was also beginning to feel the burden of being an iconic figure who was easy prey for anyone who needed a favor. “He was starting to hide,” says Candelario. “He had guys hounding him to do free shows. They didn’t come by to say, ‘Hi, what’s going on?’ They came to tell him he needed to do a benefit concert or whatever. It was a hustle. He had all those kinds of things pounding on him.”

As with Keith Godchaux, Garcia turned to opiates – in particular, a new, strong Persian style of heroin. At the time, Garcia hid his growing habit from his bandmates; Hart and Godchaux say they didn’t realize until later that he was using. And given the quality of Garcia’s playing and singing in 1977, there was no reason to suspect anything at that point. “I think it made him feel good,” says Loren, “and when he felt good, he played good.”

One bright spot cracked open that June, when The Grateful Dead Movie , filmed during the band’s pre-hiatus shows in San Francisco in 1974, made its long-overdue premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre in Manhattan. “Jerry was really proud of that movie,” says Loren. Of Garcia during that period, Hart recalls, “He was in a creative zone, and his health was OK. Yes, there was a lot of pressure. But that didn’t interfere with Grateful Dead music. Music was the only way any of us could deal with pressure.”

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On Labor Day weekend, the Dead returned to the road in a big – almost risky – way. Scher booked the band into Raceway Park, a racetrack in Englishtown, New Jersey. The park normally held about 50,000; the band sold 102,000 tickets – up to that point its biggest nonfestival gig. Until then, everyone assumed the Dead’s on-the-road success was a result of repeat business – the same fans buying tickets to more than one show. But Raceway Park proved that the Dead could pull in huge numbers for just one show. “It said, ‘We’re a big band,'” says Loren. “It put the Dead up there with anybody else who was performing: ‘Yeah, the Allman Brothers are a big band, but they’re not the Grateful Dead.’ The industry stood up and said, ‘Holy mackerel!'”

In the years that followed, the Dead’s audience would only grow larger and more fervent – and the Dead’s excesses would sometimes grow proportionally. The Godchauxs left the group in 1979 (Keith was killed in a car accident the following year). Garcia grappled with hard-drug use on and off between then and his death in 1995, and Lesh sobered up, but only after hitting rock bottom in the early Eighties. But in 1977, it seemed as if the music could hold everything at bay, at least for a while. “We kept getting reborn, and this was one of those birthing processes,” says Hart of that flagship year. “We all played good when we got to that group-mind place. When the music played, everything made sense. When the music stopped, things started getting weird.”

This story is from the July 4th–18th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

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The Grateful Dead: A Guide to Their Essential Live Songs

Photo by: Illustration by Matt Panuska

By Jesse Jarnow

As avatars of San Francisco's ’60s-born counterculture, the Grateful Dead have served as an alternative to American reality for more than a half-century. Performing from 1965 to 1995 with guitarist and songwriter Jerry Garcia, the Dead survive through a vast body of live recordings, originally traded by obsessive fans and now preserved on a long string of official releases. Though the band has an epic narrative (told in Amir Bar-Lev’s rapturous four-hour Long, Strange Trip *  documentary ), *much of the Dead’s story and significance remains purely musical. Part of the group’s staying power is due to the mysterious vastness that exists outside the bounds of their official studio recordings, a live canon shaped by generations of the still-active Deadhead music trading network.

Flourishing in an extralegal sharing economy built around the exchange of concert tapes and psychedelics (the tapes were *never *to be sold), most of the Dead’s live recordings could only be accessed through profoundly anti-corporate means. Rather than killing music, as an infamous British music industry campaign claimed in ’80s, home taping actually propelled the Grateful Dead to stadiums, as the Dead themselves acknowledged.

Profoundly unslick, the Grateful Dead's anti-authoritarian creative tendencies remain palpable in the current era. Self-consciously apolitical and populist to a fault, the Dead built a diverse audience across the political spectrum while continuing to act as a catalyst for young and old seekers, music heads, counterculturalists, and psychonauts. Simultaneously, the Dead produced dancing music, folklore, and lyrics to nourish an extended community that continues to thrive at shows by the band’s surviving members and a national scene of cover bands.

Navigating the Grateful Dead’s shadow discography can be daunting, a tangle of different periods and idiosyncrasies. This list of recommended song versions—chronological, not ranked—serves as an introductory survey of the band’s different periods. Loosely, the 37 entries here chart a path from garage-prog (1966) to lysergic jam suites (1967-1969), alt-Americana (1970), barroom country & western (1971), space-jazz (1972-1975), and epic hippie disco (1976-1978), eventually arriving at the more slowly evolving band of the ’80s and ’90s, whose driving creative force sometimes seemed to be their own inertia.

It’s the latter era that is most prone to cleave even Dead enthusiasts. It represents a divide between the tighter, more critically accepted earlier band and the beloved-by-Deadheads ’80s and ’90s incarnations, when they were beset by addiction, the technologies of the era, questionable aesthetic choices, and an evolving secret musical language that sometimes made more sense in sold-out stadiums of dancing fans. While the Dead got more popular every year in their later decades—and continued to generate jam surprises and bold performances aplenty—new listeners will likely want to start with the band’s earlier epochs. One can see long-running debates even among our contributors encapsulated in entries for beloved songs like “Jack Straw” and the “Scarlet Begonias”/”Fire on the Mountain” combo, with a contingent of heads here deeply digging the chaotic stadium psychedelia of the later band.

The majority of the primary song choices presented below come from the classic years of the ’60s and ’70s; for many songs, Key Later Versions from the ’80s or ’90s highlight further developments for the discerning Dead freak. There, one can hear the band finding new places hidden in the old, mining the mountain range of material they'd generated earlier in their career.

Though the band’s proper albums have earned an undeserved bad reputation, *American Beauty and Workingman's Dead (both released in 1970) especially contain a small handful of songs for which the studio versions remain almost undisputedly definitive. While songs like “Ripple,” “Attics of My Life,” “Box of Rain,” and several others belong on any list of the band’s campfire standards, they’re left off here in the interest of songs that varied more greatly in live performance. Likewise, Europe ’72,  which features elements re-touched in the studio,  *generated a number of great live tunes served perfectly well the version found on that album, including “Ramble on Rose” and “Brown-Eyed Women.” Though the Dead continued introducing new originals up through their last tours, this list focuses on something like a core curriculum of live Dead.

Nearly every selection on this list can and should be argued by anyone with an opinion about live Dead recordings. But these picks are intended to be gateways into different scenic and well-manicured corners of Grateful Dead land for those who haven’t spent much time there, places that might feel welcoming before drumz/space kicks in. From there, the paths are nearly infinite: an enormous live catalog splattered unceremoniously across streaming services (but helpfully listed chronologically at DeadDiscs ), the complete fan-curated collection at archive.org (navigable via DeadLists or Relisten.net ), a riot of Grateful Dead historical and ahistorical blogs, academic conferences, a nightly slate of #couchtour webcasts, or a live music venue near you.

Listen to The Grateful Dead: A Guide to Their Essential Live Songs on Spotify and Apple Music .

July 16, 1966

Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Calif.

Listen on Apple Music

Written by __:__ Grateful Dead

Overly complicated original is highlight of album’s worth of songs scrapped before debut LP. Played in 1966 only.

“You Don’t Have to Ask” has all the elements of a great garage band song. It’s got a groovy bass line, excellent reverby guitar solos, great group harmony vocals, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s combo organ cuts right through everything. It’s a zippy little number, guaranteed to fulfill the Dead’s dance-band obligations. But while it’s catchy, it’s also totally fucking bananas. There are several verses, choruses, parts, sections, a bridge or maybe three, chords you don't expect (maybe they were surprised too), modulation up, (spoiler alert) modulation back down, then something else entirely, all at a breakneck speed for them and wrapped up in under four minutes. It kinda sounds like they (Bob) were still learning the song, but they're all really going for it, even if it was destined to be one of approximately an album's worth of originals dropped from the repertoire before the band signed to Warner Bros. in 1967. If there was a version of the Nuggets compilations that consisted entirely of songs written and played by lunatics totally zonked on acid, this would definitely make the cut. –James McNew

Lore: Deadhead forensics has determined that “You Don’t Have to Ask” was also known as “Otis on a Shakedown Cruise,” an early song title remembered by band members that seemingly didn’t survive on tape; at least until an attentive listener noticed that—seconds before this version starts—a band member can be heard off-mic asking, “Otis?”

Listen: Spotify  | Apple Music

December 1, 1966

The Matrix, San Francisco, Calif.

Written by: Jerry Garcia

Included on the group’s debut LP, a rare original with both words and music by Jerry Garcia and early vehicle for exploratory modal jams.

It’s okay if you don’t like the Grateful Dead—even the Greatest American Band Ever isn’t for everybody. But if you’re an ardent Dead hater, I’d urge you to try just this one track. In a dimension where the Dead flamed out in obscurity, “Cream Puff War” would’ve justified their inevitable rediscovery by proto-punk collectors. Attacked with an urgency they’d never again employ, the song is on the garage-ier end of the psych spectrum, with a delinquent Farfisa and uncharacteristically fierce Garcia vocals. Of course, it’s still the Dead, so it’s a little too fussy for true garage-fuzz, with a pile of chords and sudden swerves into waltz time. Played only during the little-documented fall of 1966 and spring 1967, only a single extended version survives, the band consciously searching for new territory and exploring the modal improv mode they would soon make their own. Shelved soon thereafter, “Cream Puff War” remains an interesting thought experiment in Grateful Dead alternate history. –Rob Mitchum

Venue : The Matrix was a tiny San Francisco club co-owned by Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin, where the Dead played early shows and later experimented with side projects like Mickey and the Hartbeats. In some circles, it’s more famous for live recordings of the Dead’s fellow former Warlocks, the Velvet Underground.

Listen: Archive.org

February 2, 1968

Crystal Ballroom, Portland, Ore.

Written by: Noah Lewis (arr. the Grateful Dead)

*The Dead’s first massive jam, a hopped-up jug band rearrangement built on three volcanic improv sections. * *A dependable mindbender and set centerpiece, whether as an opener or closer, “Viola Lee Blues” outlasted nearly everything else from the band’s 1966 playbook, but disappeared from live shows after 1970. *

Legendary Dead tape collector and vault-master Dick Latvala coined the term “primal Dead” to describe the blustery psychedelia at the core of the band’s legend. And few early performances reveal the group’s unhinged nature as openly as this prison-blues chugger, written by Memphis singer/harmonica player Noah Lewis and originally recorded in 1928 by his trio, Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. Most Dead versions of “Viola Lee Blues” are a variant on its noisy appeal, including the rare excellent studio jam on the band’s 1967 Warner Bros. debut, yet what makes this show-opener special is power, precision, and compactness. The stand-alone opening chord is a universe. The sound of multiple vocalists screaming out the words betrays an on-stage good time rolling. Garcia’s mountainous arpeggios—using a deeply metallic guitar tone—are a study in *Sturm und Drang *naturalism; while the hanging pause on which the players reunite is big-band tightness exemplified. A perfect vehicle when secondary drummer Mickey Hart joined in 1967, here the closing jam’s leap into Kreutzmann/Hart-driven hyperspace is a premonition of future Rhys Chatham/Glenn Branca/Sonic Youth punk-jazz explosions. Strap the fuck in! –Piotr Orlov

Key Earlier Version: September 3, 1967 , Rio Nido Dance Hall, Rio Nido, Calif. Recorded just before Mickey Hart joined the band, the Rio Nido “Viola Lee” is perhaps the best document of the early single-drummer Dead in full flight, with Garcia spinning out endless hypnotic turns.

The Grateful Dead performing circa 1967. Photo via Leni Sinclair/Getty Images.

February 14, 1968

Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, Calif.

Written by: Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Phil Lesh, Robert Hunter

*Non-performing lyricist Robert Hunter’s first contribution to a Dead song became a playful springboard. “Alligator” most often segued into “Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks),” a locomotive blues-fuzz groove almost wholly borrowed from Them’s “Mystic Eyes,” and in this infamous sequence into a blistering six minutes of guitar feedback. *

Just before what sounds like a drum circle busts out, Bob Weir leans into the mic and says, “C’mon everybody! Get up and dance, it won’t ruin ya!” That bit of tape lifted later that year for the band’s pioneering studio/live hybrid,  Anthem of the Sun . Weir’s got the earnestness of a prom chaperon gently chiding a wallflower. And why shouldn’t he? This was an era of raw fun for the Dead, prime Pigpen time, who hoots and hollers through his lead vocal, while Weir implores listeners to “burn down the Fillmore, gas the Avalon,” the two venues competing with the band-run Carousel Ballroom. Heavy competition. After the song relaxes from an early Kreutzmann/Hart drum sesh and the guitar finally returns, it’s sour but  funky . Too good for even the shyest of the shy to not move their butts. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Spotify | Apple Music

Key Later Version : April 29, 1971 , Fillmore East, New York City, N.Y. The final version of the song is a leaner reptile but with perhaps even more bite, the now-solo Kreutzmann drum segment chomping into a thrilling Lesh/Garcia jam.

August 21, 1968

Fillmore West, San Francisco, Calif.

Written by: Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Robert Hunter

Cryptic lyrics, an elliptical psychedelic bounce, scorching guitar, occasionally a live cannon onstage, and always a Deadhead favorite.

For a few years in the late ’60s, “St. Stephen” anchored a suite that also included “Dark Star” and “The Eleven,” together taking up the first two sides of the pivotal *Live/Dead *double LP. Building sets around the rolling peaks of the suite, individually and together the songs showcased the band’s latest compositional ideas and quickly developing musical interplay. At the center was “St. Stephen.” Featuring some of Robert Hunter’s most lava-lamp-ready turns of phrase (“lady finger dipped in moonlight,” anyone?), ”St. Stephen” is alluringly simple: a bouncy psychedelic standby that may or may not have anything to do with the Christian martyr in its title.

At early performances, like this August take at the Fillmore West, it carries the energy of a band falling in love with their own sound, navigating the song’s left turns with aplomb. Bob and Jerry sing the verses together with childlike joy, before things slow down and get foggier, buoyed by spacey glockenspiel. Just a minute later, the whole band bounce back into action with a devilish energy, propelled by one of Jerry’s gnarliest riffs. The darkness shrugs, and the Dead ride on. –Sam Sodomsky

What To Listen For: The Live/Dead -era versions of the song end with several verses of a lysergic Irish-sounding jig, both a musical bridge and dramatic energy build before springing into “The Eleven” (with which it’s often erroneously tracked, as here).

Key Later Version: May 5, 1977 New Haven Coliseum, New Haven, Conn. Revived in slower, elegant form after the band’s 1976 return, “St. Stephen” attained a different kind of grace, sometimes still finding ecstasy (if not quite psychedelic fury) in the middle jam, as on standalone versions like this one, though more often segueing into Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”.

February 13, 1968

Written by: Phil Lesh and Bobby Petersen

One of the band’s most structurally experimental songs sets a poem by band friend Bobby Petersen to music.

“It's a very long thing and it doesn't have a form,” Jerry Garcia told an interviewer about the Dead’s “New Potato Caboose” around the time the band started performing it in the late ’60s. The band had been writing original material since shortly after their 1965 formation, but “New Potato” was an indication of their rapidly expanding ambitions. Written by bassist Phil Lesh from a poem by Bobby Petersen, it highlights the former composition prodigy’s studied chops. What Garcia heard as formlessness, Lesh almost certainly designed—in his own hallucinogenic way—as specific movements, interconnected with an elusive dream logic.

Sung by Bob Weir with Lesh and Garcia joining for the cascading chorus, Weir sells its mystical (and maybe even proto-Sonic Youth) atmosphere with a stoney, detached edge during this Carousel Ballroom performance. Though they would never write another song remotely like it, “New Potato Caboose” foreshadows the territory they were about to conquer. –Sam Sodomsky

What To Listen For : On this classic early bootleg, a Deadhead staple sourced from an experimental radio broadcast on then-freeform KMPX, Garcia’s wild outro solo dissolves into Weir’s “Born Cross-Eyed” and a powerful articulated take of the piece of music Deadheads would label “Spanish Jam.”

Venue: Operated by a consortium of bands including the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Carousel Ballroom failed as a business, and was reopened as the Fillmore West by promoter Bill Graham.

February 28, 1969

Fillmore West, San Francisco, Calf.

Written by: Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter

The band’s endlessly rehearsed double-drummer mindbender central to Live/Dead.

“The Eleven” is the Grateful Dead at their most joyous, all ascending scales, bursts of melody, shouted lyrics, and tricky meters designed to sound as if everything is on the verge of falling apart. Its essence is right there in the title: the song is in 11/8 time, meaning that three bars of 3/4 are punctuated with a quick 2/4 bash before the cycle starts again. The 11/8 frame turns out to be ideal for Garcia and Lesh, who solo in tandem on the best versions of the song. “The Eleven” was shorter, faster, and gnarlier in 1968, and the soloing—the best of which always happens before the brief verses begin—was more clipped. By the week in late February where they recorded the material that wound up on the epochal Live/Dead , Garcia and Lesh were working like two halves of the same musical mind. A Wednesday show at the Avalon Ballroom produced the *Live/Dead *version, but the Friday night show of that same week, one of four in a row at the Fillmore West, turned out to be the finest single moment for “The Eleven.” Garcia and Lesh are like two dogs barking and nipping at each other while running full-speed across a field, never breaking stride, taking turns being in front. Eventually, the tight three-chord structure would bore Garcia, who felt he’d wrung every idea he could out of the song. The Dead dropped it from setlists forever in 1970. But during this precise moment in February 1969 there are more ideas than they know what to do with. –Mark Richardson

What to Listen For: The overlapping three-part vocal is hard-to-sing overload, featuring some of Robert Hunter’s finest lysergic playfulness in Garcia’s trippy countdown part: “Eight-sided whispering hallelujah hatrack, seven-faced marble eye transitory dream doll…”

What Else to Listen For : The drums, man! Ideally on headphones.

The Grateful Dead circa 1968. Photo via Malcolm Lubliner/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

March 1, 1969

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

The Dead’s first and most psychedelic folk song has more in common with the Incredible String Band than Phish, used as a prelude to the jam centerpiece, “Dark Star.”

The peak old-folkie days of the Dead wouldn’t come until the early ’70s, but “Mountains of the Moon” was foreshadowed that era. Debuted in late ’68, the minimal ballad spent the first half of ’69 as the gentle prelude to its deeper astronomical partner, “Dark Star”; the last few notes of the February 27, 1969 version can be heard during the introductory fade-in to Live/Dead . On Aoxomoxoa , some heavy-handed harpsichord emphasizes the faux-Elizabethan melody and faerie-land lyrics, but live, a stripped-down lineup of Bobby on a 12-string, Garcia finger-picking, Lesh burbling, and Tom “T.C.” Constanten on organ made for a haunting lull in their primal phase. –Rob Mitchum

What to Listen For: Serving as a spell to put the band and audience in the ruminative frame of mind for the journey to come, Garcia essentially continues his closing “Mountains of the Moon” solo into the “Dark Star” intro, even while switching from acoustic to electric guitar.

Listen:   Spotify  | Apple Music

Watch: January 18, 1969 Playboy After Dark, Los Angeles, Calif. To see a possibly-dosed Hugh Hefner swaying along to “Mountains of the Moon” with his arm around a Bunny, check out the Dead’s surreal appearance on Playboy After Dark .

May 2, 1970

Harpur College, Binghamton, N.Y.

Written by: Jerry Garcia, John Dawson, and Robert Hunter

Hail Satan!

1970 was a championship season for the devil. The Beatles broke up. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin raised the curtains in the 27 Club. The Kent State massacres compounded the 6,173 body bags airlifted back from Vietnam. And the Grateful Dead unshackled “Friend of the Devil,” the best song ever written about a cuckolded bigamist fleeing from a sheriff’s posse and 20 hellhounds, only to get stuck up by Satan for his final $20.

Apologies to ’Pac and Snoop, but this is the most immortal outlaw anthem about attempting to return to your house out in the hills right next to Chino. Written by Robert Hunter with John Dawson of stoner C&W Dead spin-off New Riders of the Purple Sage with Garcia adding the bridge, the acoustic riffs ramble like an undiscovered escape route. Robert Hunter’s lyrics shine a searchlight on a Western anti-hero—Butch Cassidy bargaining with Lucifer—sleepless, ragged, and fatal. But Garcia sings with a weary sweetness on this staple acoustic set. A bouquet in hand, six-shooter behind his back; the poetic conman with insidious alliances, he seduces with his wounded decency, at least until he disappears into a cloud of sulfur. –Jeff Weiss

Key Later Version: June 27, 1976   Auditorium Theater, Chicago, Ill. Following the band’s touring hiatus, Garcia was inspired to revive the song in a slower arrangement after hearing a recording of a live Loggins & Messina cover.

August 30, 1970

KQED Studios, San Francisco, Calif.

Garcia and Hunter’s immortal farewell ballad and cosmic love song with Crosby, Stills & Nash-inspired harmonies.

The massive amount of high quality archival audio makes the Grateful Dead’s video output seem minuscule by comparison. Add crummy camerawork and dated psychedelic FX, and you often don’t have too much to look at. Not so for this simple and beautiful take of “ Brokedown Palace ” on local California TV, which keeps the fancy tech to a minimum. But on the chorus, marked by some of the Dead’s most beautiful earthy three-part harmonizing, Weir and Garcia’s profiles overlap on screen. It’s their own Mamas and Papas or Fleetwood Mac moment: two crooners, a heartthrob and a scruff, in total rhapsody. Sometimes, there seemed to be a disconnect between the band’s solemn sound and the way they made the audience feel. In 1970, the year Garcia and Hunter churned out two albums of instant hippie standards, it paid off, with the Dead in perfect harmony, both creatively and vocally. Everyone onstage and off is blissed out. How nice it is to share. –Matthew Schnipper

What to Listen For: Not shown on camera, the high part of the band’s three-part harmony is bassist Phil Lesh.

Key Later Version: May 11, 1977  St. Paul Civic Center, St. Paul, Minn. Like almost everything else in May 1977, “Brokedown Palace” sounded perfect, Donna Jean Godchaux’s harmony replacing Lesh’s, who mostly stopped singing in the late ‘70s after straining his vocal cords.

September 19, 1970

Fillmore East, New York City, N.Y.

Written by: Joseph Scott and Deadric Malone

*A frequent show closer from 1969-1972 and a showcase for Pigpen’s greasy raps and unfurling blues-psych boogies. From 1969-1971, especially, the Dead spent more time jamming “Love Light” than even “Dark Star,” playing it more often and usually for a longer duration as a populist get-the-heads-dancing rave-up to conclude their most far-out sets. *

Defying the peak of primal Dead, the gutbucket blues of “Turn on Your Love Light” dominated set lists during the Dead’s most psychedelic era. Usually upwards of 20 minutes (and sometimes over 40), the band vamped between innuendo-filled raps by frontman Pigpen aimed at pairing off members of the audience. While conducting the band’s deft on-the-fly arrangements, Pig would spike the Bobby “Blue” Bland original’s sweetness into something more libidinal and fetishistic. “Well she’s got box back nitties/Great big noble thighs/Working undercover with her boar hog eye,” Pig sang, a bit of mojo jive that one scholar has spent ample time decoding .

By September 1970, the Summer of Love had given way to the Autumn of Fuck. Doing some crowd work, Pig whips the audience into a frenzy, perhaps creating the sort of “weird atmosphere” that led one feminist reviewer to feel alienated by the “hippie stag party” later that fall. After the band strikes the final beat, Pigpen screams “Fuck!”—issued as both punctuation and command. This “Love Light” scores 5 fucks—one for each time the word is uttered by the band. –Ariella Stok

Watch: August 16, 1969 Max Yasgur’s Farm, Bethel, N.Y. At Woodstock, as the Dead begin a 36 minute “Love Light”, a still-unidentified rando takes over the mic, soon led away when Merry Prankster Ken Babbs distracts him with a joint.

April 8, 1972

Wembley Pool, London, UK

Written by: Grateful Dead and Robert Hunter

The band’s definitive psychedelic jam epic, with wondrous versions in nearly every era it appeared.

In April of 1972, the Dead commenced a major European tour, almost two months long and a definitive musical turning point. Elongated fast ’n’ furious blues jams and Wild West saloon swagger were dosed with jazzier, subtler improvisations, the Dead’s musical shorthand cribbed from the simultaneous soloing of Dixieland music. Introduced to listeners via a short and far-out 7" in early 1968 and the standard side-long take of *Live/Dead *in 1969, the April 8th, 1972 version is not a “Dark Star” of gaping existential canyons jagged with feedback. The exuberance of the band listening to itself in this half-hour house of mirrors can be heard as Garcia’s Alligator Stratocaster quickly descends from the song’s head, Lesh offering bubbly harmonic counterpoint; accents of cymbals and short drum rolls make Weir’s offbeat rhythmic attacks more potent and clear space for Keith Godchaux to pound out leads on his piano. A collective breath is taken after the first and only verse, until Kreutzmann’s kick drum cajoles the rest of the Dead, including Pigpen behind the organ, to percolate a melody, pause for a brief freak-out, and wrap up the song with sunburst triumph. –Buzz Poole

What to Listen For : The charging major key jam that erupts near the end of this version also features a fiery debate about what will follow, eventually sliding perfectly into Weir’s “Sugar Magnolia” and a version of Pigpen’s “Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks)” filled with crackling heat lightning.

Key Later Version: October 31, 1991  Oakland Coliseum, Oakland, Calif. At the unexpected and emotionally charged five-show wake for promoter Bill Graham, the Dead’s staunchest supporter, “Dark Star” became a time machine when novelist Ken Kesey delivered a Halloween eulogy and the band flashed back to the Acid Tests, eight musicians so locked in that you can imagine walking between all the notes.

Dark Star Canon (Excerpt):

2/28/69 Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA [ Live/Dead, dude. ]

2/13/70 Fillmore East, New York City, NY [ Taper favorite .]

8/27/72 Old Renaissance Fairgrounds, Veneta, OR [ Transdimensional meltdown .]

10/28/72 Cleveland Public Hall, Cleveland, OH [ Hyperreal, with so-called bass-led Philo Stomp .]

10/26/89 Miami Arena, Miami, FL [ MIDI tour-de-force with bummer Garcia vocals. ]

April 26, 1972

Jahrhunderthalle, Frankfurt, West Germany

Written by: Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann

*A high-wire version of one of the band’s premier jam vehicles in nearly every era. After dropping “Cryptical Envelopment” in 1971 (minus a brief ’80s revival), “The Other One” became the jam center of many second sets, its triplet-based gallop providing a tension-laden motif for high energy improvisation, perfect for segues, creating a jam canon second only to “Dark Star”. *

Released in 1995 as Hundred Year Hall , the Grateful Dead’s April 26, 1972, show in Frankfurt is a tour de force display of pretty much everything the Dead were capable of at this juncture, from earthy Pigpen-led R&B to country-fried workouts to daring improvisation. The latter is best exemplified by the sprawling, 36-minute wonder that is this night's reading of “The Other One.” Originally bookended by Jerry Garcia’s “Cryptical Envelopment,” by 1972 the song had been both pared down and expanded, providing the Dead with a vehicle for their most untethered—and sometimes most aggressive—jams. Coming out of a rollicking “Truckin,’” the Frankfurt “Other One” bursts into action with Bill Kreutzmann's relentless “tiger paws” rhythm and Phil Lesh's rumbling bass, leading directly into a kaleidoscopic roller coaster ride. Jerry Garcia darts madly around with fleet-fingered, often feedback- and wah-drenched guitar work as pianist Keith Godchaux pounds out Cecil Taylor-isms. Even the usually jam-averse Pigpen gets into the act with a stabbing organ part. Before the Dead finally slip into a gorgeous “Comes a Time,” Bob Weir bellows the now-famed lyrics about their deceased mentor, Beat icon Neal Cassady—and there's no question that his gonzo spirit was at the wheel during this performance. –Tyler Wilcox

Key Earlier Version: February 27, 1969 Fillmore West, San Francisco, Calif. Sounding fairly goofed up as they introduce the last portion of the evening’s early set, the band dazzles with a complete version of the “That’s It For the Other One” suite, with Garcia’s spiraling “Cryptical Envelopment” intro and outro.

Key Later Version: February 5, 1978 UniDome, Cedar Falls, Iowa. A reliable source of headiness for much of the Dead's career, “The Other One” was especially good in the late ’70s, as on this explosive 1978 rendition.

August 27, 1972

Old Renaissance Fairgrounds, Veneta, Ore.

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter/traditional, arranged by Grateful Dead

*Grateful Dead-brand sunshine in a can links baroque psychedelia to a folk song the Dead arguably made an American classic. During the ’70s, “China > Rider” was a first-set standard, usually the place where the band would initialize their improvisational chops on any given night. In the ’80s and ’90s, it moved to the second set opener slot, a guaranteed crowd favorite to settle fans back in. *

To get the absolute purest dose of what the Dead sounded like, lick your finger and stick it in the middle of any rendition of this classic pairing. For one, the duo nicely charts the main axis of Dead songwriting, with effervescent psychedelia blending into an electrified rearrangement of a traditional American folk song. But more important is the zone between the two songs, so humbly notated with a “>”, where the magic truly blooms. For several glorious minutes, the band exists in a quantum state between the two compositions, navigating that space with an uncanny group-mind. In August of 1972, the Dead played a benefit in sweltering heat for the Kesey family creamery outside Eugene, Oregon. Like most things with the Grateful Dead, what should be a calamity is instead transcendent, with “China > Rider” (the “>” is silent) one of several sublime performances. *–*Rob Mitchum

Key Slightly Later Version : June 26, 1974 Providence Civic Center, Providence, R.I. In 1973 and 1974, the “China > Rider” transition included a theme based on Simon & Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy”, and this version includes both a rare intro jam and a turn through the descending melody that Deadheads call “Mind Left Body,” after its resemblance to a Paul Kantner song.

A fragile goodbye doubles as a perfectly titled lift-off for some of the band’s most lilting and delicate jams.

Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead's friend and occasional tour mate (not to mention Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s on-again-off-again lover), died of an accidental heroin overdose in October 1970 at the age of 27. A few months later, the Dead unveiled “Bird Song,” Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia’s touching farewell tribute to the singer. Not so much an elegy as a reminder to—as one of Joplin’s signature tunes puts it—get it while you can, “Bird Song”’s studio incarnation appeared on Garcia’s first self-titled solo LP. But the song really took flight onstage with the Dead in 1972, especially during a show at Veneta, Oregon’s Renaissance Fairgrounds, legendary among tape traders for decades before being officially released in 2013. Following a bittersweet, gently psychedelic verse and chorus, the band slides into a long, meditative modal jam, Garcia’s guitar sounding simultaneously mournful and ecstatic as it soars into the upper register, his cohorts circling patiently below. Bill Kreutzmann, handling drumming duties alone, gives the song a restless, jazzy lope. A sublime ensemble performance, made only slightly less sublime in the Sunshine Daydream concert doc , which features an undulating, naked fan perched directly behind Garcia, getting the sunburn of his life. –Tyler Wilcox

What to Listen For: The way Kreutzmann launches the band back into the jam with a fluttering drum fill.

Key Later Version: October 1980 Radio City Music Hall, New York City, N.Y. The Dead introduced an unplugged—but no less exploratory—“Bird Song” in 1980, a high-flying highlight of the band’s Reckoning live LP.

The Grateful Dead performing circa 1970. Photo via Robert Altman/Getty Images.

November 18, 1972

Hofheinz Pavilion, Houston, Tex.

Written by: Bob Weir and Robert Hunter

*The Dead’s archetypal meta-anthem, with every version from 1972 through 1974 diving into deep, heady, and swinging space-jazz. Part of Bob Weir’s first major batch of original songwriting and included with an abnormally good studio jam on 1972’s Ace, “Playing in the Band” was played as a standalone first set closer in the early ’70s, migrating to the second half of the show in later years where it was often split apart by one or several songs inserted between the song’s beginning and final chorus. *

1972 was the year of “Playing in the Band,” played more often than any other song and site of some of the band’s deepest explorations. Bob Weir swaggers his way through the meta lyrics of the three-minute pop form, which then melts on a downbeat directly into the outer reaches of a jam that comes as close as the Dead ever achieved to what jazzheads refer to as fire music . Swelling insistently through several movements, the rhythm section pilots—Billy Kreutzmann approaching Elvin Jones-like intensity and Phil Lesh constructing architectural leads only to explode them with double-stopped, low-frequency bass bombs. Interlaced throughout, Garcia’s strobing guitar creates a zoetrope-like effect of white-hot intensity. When it’s time for re-entry, Donna Jean Godchaux wails as though birthing the chorus’s reprise from her very loins, and one is overtaken in ecstasy by the feeling of having emerged triumphant following a journey into the unknown. –Ariella Stok

Key Later Version: November 6, 1979 , The Spectrum, Philadelphia, Pa. Keyboardist Brent Mydland had joined the band earlier that year and already his deep rapport with Garcia is on display, while the arrival of new synths provides a whole new sonic space-time-continuum for this “Playing” to tear asunder.

July 27, 1973

Watkins Glen Motor Speedway, Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Written by: Grateful Dead

Well, duh. But not as duh as you maybe think.

Oh, of course the Dead almost always jammed, but it was less often that they produced a piece of improvisation from a standing start. It certainly happened occasionally, but never in front of a larger audience than at the Watkins Glen Motor Speedway in July 1973, which itself held the title of largest concert in rock history until Rock in Rio unseated it in 2001. Sharing a bill with the Band and the Allman Brothers in front of an estimated 500,000 people, the three groups played unannounced public warm-ups in front of the assembling crowd the day before the ticketed event, with the Dead deciding (naturally) to play two warm-up sets. One second they’re tuning, and then a cymbal swell drops them into a fluid musical conversation that hints at songs they haven’t even written yet. Mostly it’s just an easy-going dialog between the quintet where one can hear the the chillest iteration of the band’s single-drummer 1971-1973 peak, Bill Kreutzmann’s free dance holding together star-splatter by Garcia, Lesh, and the gang. –Jesse Jarnow

Key Avant-Dead Jam: September 11, 1974 Alexandra Palace, London, UK. A number of 1974 performances featured duet performances by Phil Lesh and proto-noise piece *Seastones *composer Ned Lagin, some of which segued from Lagin’s “moment forms” into the Dead’s set as the band joined in, including this magical improvisation from London’s Alexandra Palace that flows from modular synth eruptions towards the friendly skies of “Eyes of the World.”

Key Later Version: October 26, 1989 Miami Arena, Miami, Fla. By the ’80s, the Dead’s free jamming mostly isolated itself in the guise of their second set “Drumz/Space” segments, the primary forum for the band’s remaining avant-garde leanings and musique concrete -like MIDI explorations, as on this post-“Dark Star” exploration from 1989.

November 21, 1973

Denver Coliseum, Denver, Colo.

Written by: Bob Weir/Bob Weir and Eric Anderson/Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow

*Perhaps Bob Weir’s most ambitious composition, sad autumnal folk bursts open into elemental Garcia leads. Played 46 times in 1973 and 1974, Weir dropped the gentler first two segments of the piece when they returned in 1976 with second drummer Mickey Hart, though “Let It Grow” remained consistently in rotation through the remainder of the band’s career, a late first set home for improv. *

First played as a complete piece in September of 1973, Bob Weir’s “Weather Report Suite” was a coming of age for the band’s rhythm guitarist and youngest member. First fiddling with the baroque chords of the “Prelude” during earlier jams, the full composition was perhaps Weir’s earthy answer to Jerry Garcia’s “Eyes of the World” for the *Wake of the Flood *era. In Denver on November 21, 1973, the “Suite” is both fragile and reassuring to start, each instrument falling into place. With subtle interplay between Lesh’s unique lead bass, Garcia’s shimmering slide, and Keith Godchaux’s Fender Rhodes setting up a call and three-part-harmony response, it all moves towards the breaking storm of “Let It Grow.” There, Kreutzmann’s light and lean drums lead tempo shifts in a dynamic and subtle jazz jam, opening up to the wild beyond. –Cori Taratoot

Key Later Version: June 24, 1985 River Bend Music Theater, Cincinnati, Ohio. The entire band launches full-throttle into a furious, tight and edgy version, with Garcia finding raging solos in every open space.

December 19, 1973

Curtis Hixon Convention Hall, Tampa, Fla.

*Gang harmonies and bright syncopation made for a song whose original incarnation lasted barely a year. Inspired by Abbey Road-era Beatles, “Here Comes Sunshine” was one of over a half-dozen Garcia/Hunter songs debuted February 8, 1973 at Stanford University, some (but not all) destined for that year’s self-released Wake of the Flood . *

Dick Latvala began collecting Dead tapes while working as a zookeeper in Hawaii in the late 1970s, swapping bundles of weed—which he packed into reel-to-reel boxes and cavalierly dispatched through the U.S. Mail—for more and better music. Latvala, who went on to become the Dead’s official tape archivist, picked this show for the inaugural installment of Dick’s Picks , the series of official releases of live shows he curated for the band. He’s said that this particular iteration of “Here Comes Sunshine”—a cheerful song about the 1948 flooding of the Columbia River basin, in Vanport, Oregon—inspired that release, which in turn appropriately finally opened the band’s archival floodgates. As a blind introduction to the Dead’s strange musical alchemy—the ways in which, on certain nights, all five players seemed to operate as a single, glinting organism—it remains unimpeachable. –Amanda Petrusich

The Grateful Dead circa 1970. Photo via Chris Walter/Getty Images.

*An aching, luminous Garcia ballad, home to some of his most soulful singing and guitar playing. Most often, “Stella Blue” was performed as an epilogue to the band's furthest out jam segment of a given night, a tender affirmation of spirit following the symbolic (and actual) psychedelic journey the second set represented to many in their audience. *

Even to the most frenzied and infatuated fan, Jerry Garcia can remain an inscrutable frontman. But “Stella Blue”—which, in this version, drifts out of an arch and dissonant feedback jam, ethereal and spooky, like a genie emerging from the neck of a bottle—betrays a specific fragility. This is arguably Garcia at his most human. Stella Blue is a minor character in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire , but the song’s lyrics, written by Robert Hunter, feel more personal; they recount a grim existential spiral, in which feelings of hopelessness become increasingly difficult to beat back. Some heads prefer the later, two-drummer versions, but there’s something about the starkness of this one that feels especially moving. “In the end, there’s still that song,” Garcia promises. For a moment, he sounds nearly buoyant. –Amanda Petrusich

Key Later Version: July 13, 1984 Greek Theater, Berkeley, Calif. Though the band doesn’t sound as if they’re on the same page until Garcia starts singing, the song’s quiet moments (especially its first three minutes) are mid-’80s Garcia vocals at their soulful and imperfect best.

June 18, 1974

Freedom Hall, Louisville, Ky.

A just-exactly-perfect almost-breezy jam for a summer’s day.

“Eyes of the World” first appeared live in 1973, as the Dead began to introduce some more jazz-inflected architecture to their open-ended jams—a fruition, in part, of some ear-opening exposure on earlier shared bills with Bitches Brew -era Miles Davis. “Eyes” had a catchy main guitar riff (weirdly similar, I’ve noticed, to the one in Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”), a beguiling “lazy gait,” crypto-cosmic lyrics, and—in its first couple years, anyway—a long, raging coda that went through a series of key changes and funky signatures. There are many splendid examples of this coda from 1973 and 1974. But I always go back to 6/18/74. Despite some shrill vocals and Schroeder-y piano, this version has an uncharacteristically crisp beginning (they were more precise when they had only one drummer), and great interstitial Garcia solos. The song’s long, flowering run-out seems almost composed, as their best improvisations tended to do—an impression strengthened a few years ago when a pianist named Holly Bowling performed the Louisville “Eyes” note for note. –Nick Paumgarten

Key Later Version: September 3, 1977 Raceway Park, Englishtown, N.J. After 1975, the Dead scrapped the coda, and over the course of the next decade, the renditions got faster and cokier, almost to the point of parody—an acquired taste. Along the way, though, there’s 9/3/77. The tempo is just right, and Garcia’s leads catch fire.

Key Much Later Version: March 29, 1990 Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, N.Y. Fans of later Dead are fond of the of this version featuring Branford Marsalis on saxophone, capturing the sextet and guest in full arena-Dixieland toot.

September 18, 1974

Parc des Expositions, Dijon, France

Written by: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Robert Hunter

*Perhaps the Dead’s most identifiable song, a boogie with an occasional backdoor into the cosmos. A rare autobiographical group composition, “Truckin’” was designed to be a modular Road Song, with Robert Hunter supplying new verses as the band had further adventures—he even wrote some on request in the late ‘70s but the band never sang them. *

The Grateful Dead are all about The Road, and “Truckin’” is one of the all-time great Road songs. It got some burn on FM radio in the ’70s and positioned the Dead in a cultural moment connected to R. Crumb and CB Radio. It also gave the group its defining lyric: Without “Truckin’,” headline writers wouldn’t have words to describe all of our long and strange trips. Live, it was a supremely flexible song and one of their most-played, fitting neatly into acoustic sets but also stretching into long inspired jams. Bill Kreutzmann’s shuffling groove is key, chugging and choogling forward with a steady-state insistence not unlike the motorik beat of krautrock. Sometimes Garcia solos in Chuck Berry mode, but in 1974 he was taking it to slightly weirder places. In front of a few hundred people in Dijon, France, their smallest crowd in years, this version finds the song at its jazziest, with mind-bending guitar interplay. –Mark Richardson

Key Later Version: October 18, 1978   Winterland, San Francisco, Calif.  A rare late-‘70s Phil Lesh vocal spot, “Truckin’”’s ambling country-fried vibe hardened into an edgier post-gas crisis model, led by Bob Weir’s police whistle and a jam peak that turns the “Other One” riff inside out.

October 18, 1974

Winterland, San Francisco, Calif.

Written by: Bonnie Dobson and Tim Rose

Ballad about nuclear holocaust transmogrified into showstopping existential soul-folk by Garcia.

This folk song about two lone survivors of a nuclear apocalypse entered the rotation in 1967 but really became a Garcia set-piece and gut-puncher once the band slowed it down in the early ‘70s. As the Dead’s premier revelatory ballad, coming after the chaos of a jam or space, it almost always laid ‘em flat, despite its oblique lyrics and simple chord progression. As time went on, Garcia often seemed to pour more into it than pretty much anything else. The song has two crescendos, each building from delicate quiet to cathartic guitar-god keening and fanning. At Winterland, on October 18, 1974, during the band’s last stand before an 18-month touring hiatus, they performed a titanic version that made it sound like they were quitting for real, at the peak of their powers. –Nick Paumgarten

Key Later Version: October 12, 1984 Augusta Civic Center, Augusta, Maine. A powerhouse song even when Garcia was in dire health, it somehow suited his husky voice and haunted aspects, as it does on this ragged but glorious heart-tugger from a special evening.

October 19, 1974

A campfire standard with a few tricky chord changes and an ineffable melody lifted from a Greek folk song.

The studio recording of “Uncle John's Band,” from 1970’s classic Workingman’s Dead , is a pleasant slice of Americana, centered around acoustic rhythm guitars and vocal harmonies inspired by Crosby, Stills & Nash. While it ultimately became a peaceful call to worship for legions of Deadheads, its lyrical origins are more of a countercultural call to decamp. In this breezy performance from Winterland ‘74—during the “retirement” run filmed for the Grateful Dead Movie *—*the Latin swing sets itself cleverly against easy hippie fare like “are you kind?” and “ain't no time to hate.” But this is a folk song with teeth. As the song’s jam shifts into a minor key and a fierce 7/4 time signature, Garcia explores both dark and light, running arpeggios up and down the scale, using the jam as a springboard for some of his most explosive playing. “Uncle John's Band” is a time-honored “greatest hit” for a reason: its invitation to drop out and turn on is evergreen. And hard-learned warnings like “when life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door,” are as true today as ever. –Gabe Tesoriero

Key Proto Version: November 8, 1969   Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Calif. Before “Uncle John's Band”’s late 1969 debut as a singalong, Garcia played the over-fuzzed melody at the heart of a few jams, and it's hard not to hear it as a pivot point between the band's wilder psychedelic leanings and the oncoming folk boom.

Key Later Version: October 9, 1989 Hampton Coliseum, Hampton, Va. From one of two shows billed as “Formerly the Warlocks,” this smoking “Uncle John’s Band” is way up , Jerry bringing the MIDI-fired pyrotechnics, and two separate B-section jams.

June 22, 1976

Tower Theater, Upper Darby, Pa.

Haiku-like verses and a delicate vibe on the line of hippie-reggae and something more elusive.

A product of the band’s extended woodshed period at Bob Weir’s home studio in 1975, “Crazy Fingers”’s quiet reflects the band’s scaled-back approach for their touring hiatus. Debuting as a set-opener during the second of their four appearances that year, I prefer the June 22, 1976 version from just after they returned to the road. The crowd audibly responds as Jerry gently starts to sing, which is, honestly, part of the thrill of listening to live Dead; it’s almost always at least somewhat interactive. Since post-Garcia Dead fans must rely on recordings, every whistle, scream, and even side conversation from an audience-made tape can help bring a set to life. Unlike anything else Garcia and Hunter wrote in its lyrical minimalism, the haiku-like verses are set to a tune that’s a touch dub-like. With a more pronounced island vibe on the *Blues For Allah *studio version, the delicate jam offered a variety of possibilities, here spiraling inventively upward and eventually back down to “Comes a Time”. Like many great Dead songs, it’s a little dark, a lot introspective, and yet still delicate and somehow optimistic. –Mariel Cruz

What to Listen For: A fragile vibe to begin with, “Crazy Fingers” could vary widely, at its best blooming into intricate and quiet improvisations as singular in the band’s catalog as the lyrics.

Listen: Archive.org __ __

Key Proto Version: “Distorto” , February 28, 1975, Ace’s, Mill Valley, Calif. Developed in the studio during the sessions that eventually yielded Blues For Allah , where the band allowed themselves the freedom to let jams develop, “Crazy Fingers” began life as a piece of music called “Distorto”.

June 29, 1976

Auditorium Theater, Chicago, IL

Written by: Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Robert Hunter

Written without beginning or ending as part of a side-long suite improvised in the studio, “The Wheel” was often heard rolling out of the drumz/space segments.

“The Wheel,” a Hunter/Garcia composition written spontaneously during the sessions for Garcia’s seminal 1972 LP Garcia , didn’t see its live debut with the Dead until June of 1976. Driven by the rolling thunder of the drummers, Phil Lesh’s loping bass line, and Jerry’s delicate, haunting guitar work, “The Wheel”—often in its slot coming out of Space—has served as a vehicle for some high-wire experimentation over the years. In this performance from Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre on June 29, Garcia's voice and guitar work positively sparkle. Recalling the bright pedal steel jangle of the excellent studio version, the guitar line builds and spirals upward. Between the plaintive, meditative chants of the verses, Garcia again takes off. In the song’s traditional exploratory outro, Jerry teases a phrase from “The Other One”, galloping into a syncopated double-time jam with hair on fire. Lyrically, “The Wheel” is a call to follow the muse, the shared sense of experience that is the Dead “trip” itself. Musically, it’s breathtaking, as the best Grateful Dead can be. –Gabe Tesoriero

Listen: Archive.org 

Key Later Version: March 24, 1990  Knickerbocker Arena, Albany, N.Y. Brightly colored by Brent Mydland’s phrasing this version of “The Wheel” drives and pulsates, gathering steam and packing a real wallop in just four minutes and change.

September 28, 1976

Onondaga County War Memorial, Syracuse, N.Y.

Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter at their most vulnerable and Garcia’s soloing at its most lyrical.

The placement of this beautiful, vulnerable, introspective Garcia song (coming out of a wooly-ass jam at the end of a kinda-too-long “Samson and Delilah” and segueing into “Drums”) is a little weird, I guess. The whole band's playing is sparse and gentle, like everyone's choosing each lonely note they play with deep thought and restraint. Even Phil is barely playing, relatively speaking. Jerry and Donna Jean’s voices sound a little wounded, huddled together on a wobbly perch just above the group. There’s a modest yet lovely guitar break that flutters upward into last verse and a staggering--and surprisingly brief—solo at the end over simple repeated F#m & G chorus tag. It’s filled with anger and yearning, despair and resentment, and a lifetime of pain helping to squeeze out each wiry note. It threatens to unfurl into a litany of emotion, but... then hi-hats, and before you know it Mickey is doing paradiddles on what sounds like a Tasmanian log. Feels like Garcia is changing the subject. Revealing, if you overthink it (like I'm doing); beautiful and blue if you just float along. –James McNew

What to Listen For: That last guitar solo!

Key Slightly Later Version: May 9, 1977   War Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, N.Y. Debuted in 1971, “Comes a Time” was included on Garcia’s 1976 solo album Reflections and soon resurfaced in the Dead’s live sets. Each with a towering final solo, each of the five versions from May 1977 might be celebrated as a national holiday, but especially Buffalo.

May 7, 1977

Boston Garden, Mass.

Garcia and Hunter’s mysterious folk epic, parable-driven balladry building to a series of near-orchestral peaks. With a few exceptions, “Terrapin Station”’s far-out destination was usually “Drumz” > “Space,” a position of gravitas in the Dead’s setlists, except for a period in the mid-‘80s when Weir sometimes used it to set up his good-time calypso cover, “Man Smart, Woman Smarter”.

Halfway through the ‘70s, prog was all but dead: King Crimson had disbanded, Yes had gone off the deep end, and Genesis lost their most forward-thinking member. But then, in 1977, the Grateful Dead debuted “Terrapin Station.” The title track to their glossy ‘77 album and the final epic from Garcia and Hunter, “Terrapin” was a completely different beast from even the lengthiest of compositions that preceded it.

Melodic and precise where “Dark Star” was jazzy and open-ended, “Terrapin Station” was a powerful addition to the band’s set during arguably their finest year. Written and recorded as a larger suite, the live versions only included its first few sections, growing luminous on the band’s spring tour. At their Boston show during their legendary run in May ‘77, they performed a careful, confident rendition, propelled by Jerry’s emotive vocals and solos. The band was at their most well-rehearsed here, and “Terrapin” glides with an otherworldly energy, making it a momentous second set opener. Its masterful series of crescendos is maybe the decade’s best proof that the Dead’s gifts for tight songwriting and sprawling musicality were not mutually exclusive. –Sam Sodomsky

What to Listen For: The moment the song upshifts from what could be a traditional folk ballad into a grander composition.

Key Proto Version: March 18, 1977 Winterland, San Francisco, Calif. The earlier sections are still finding their form, but a one-night-only performance of “At a Siding,” minus the vocals on the album version, provides an appropriately mystical destination suggested by the lyrics.

Key Later Version : March 15, 1990 Capitol Centre, Landover, Md. On Phil Lesh’s 50th birthday, on a tour many latter day fans hold next to legendary outings like Europe ‘72 , the band work the final refrain until it balloons into a world of its own.

Boston Garden, Boston, Mass.

*One of the final songs from Garcia and Hunter’s initial burst of Americana, debuted in late 1972, “Half-Step” took a few years to develop its rushing flow. The song’s spirited tempo and carefree farewells to Southern skies placed it squarely in both first and second set-opener positions as a crowd favorite. *

Told from the perspective of a cheating gambler embracing a life on the run, “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo” remained intact stylistically and structurally from its 1972 debut through the band’s last tour in 1995. The song found Robert Hunter continuing to portray American dreamers with lyrics both ambiguous and specific, including a line about losing one’s boots that seems to echo Garcia’s own life-altering brush with death in a 1960 car crash, in which he was literally blown from his shoes.

In a near-perfect Boston performance on May 7, 1977, Garcia’s voice is sweet and strong. Keith Godchaux brings the Dixieland piano as Bob Weir expertly places his rhythm arpeggios snugly alongside Garcia’s crisp and clear leads. The drummers press hard as Garcia fans power chords in the lead-up to the song’s refrain, the sound of a band riding the rapids together. Pulling back into a three-part harmony, a crescendo dissolves into a version of Johnny Cash’s “Big River” for the ages. –Cori Taratoot

Key Later Version: April 2, 1990 The Omni, Atlanta, Ga. On a transcendent spring night with the band in top form, Garcia soothes and brightens, finding the Band’s “The Weight” and a loving Southern audience in the closing chords.

The Grateful Dead performing with the Wall of Sound at the Iowa State Fair circa 1974. Photo via Kirk West/Getty Images.

May 8, 1977

Barton Hall, Ithaca, N.Y.

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter/Mickey Hart and Robert Hunter

A canonical studio-perfect take with its own underground legend, and a whole family tree of beautiful relatives.

The “Scarlet Begonias”>“Fire on the Mountain” pairing was introduced in 1977 and soon became a popular mainstay as a second-set opener. “Scarlet,” a lysergic Hunter-Garcia ode to a girl, had been around for several years, and to many old hands was at its freshest in 1974, as a stand-alone first-set morsel of syncopated polyphony: peak Kreutzmann, every instrument ricocheting off the rest. “Fire,” introduced in 1977 by the drummer Mickey Hart, with an uncharacteristically foundational bass line and a taste of calypso, became a springboard for knee-bending Garcia solos. In the early '80s, the song gained muscle with the addition of keyboardist Brent Mydland's B3. The transition between the two was typically an excursive delight with whiffs of Coltrane and Ives.

Choosing the best is nigh impossible, in light of all the variables; the crispest “Scarlet” may have been followed by a less-than-transcendent transition or a draggy “Fire.” I and a team of fellow nerds have spent weeks re-listening, and are no closer to a consensus. The most widely canonized version is from Barton Hall, 5/8/77, a surprise actual top 10 hit when it was finally released this year for its 40th anniversary. Overrated, in my book, but it’s as good a starter kit as any: fewer flaws. They played “Scarlet” > “Fire” well and often that month. Each rendition seems to have its partisans. Its propulsive, joyful vigor was perhaps the most consistent manifestation of a band on a hot streak. –Nick Paumgarten

Key Later Version: November 30, 1980  Fox Theater, Atlanta, Ga. Big sound, sly swagger, regal solos, a complex and careening transition, and a more than respectable “Fire.” 

Key Earlier “Scarlet Begonias”: June 16, 1974 Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, Iowa. An ace example of the standalone cowbell-less “Scarlet” with a puzzlebox jam that contains infinite futures.

May 22, 1977

Hollywood Sportatorium, Hollywood, Fla.

Easygoing standard for both the Dead and the ‘70s & ‘80s incarnations of the Jerry Garcia Band for Jerry to get loose in C.

“Sugaree,” a platform for soulful Garcia vocals and guitar, is an exercise in contrast, soaring above the emotionally trying narrative of intimate entanglements. When debating about the best versions of “Sugaree” there is always talk of Garcia’s solos, but that implies that the rest of the band lays back. It’s the telepathic double drumming of Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart that makes this an essential “Sugaree” on an East Coast tour where all 10 versions of the song feature their own enormous charms. Here, Phil Lesh’s lopey bass climbs around the drummers’ pounding rhythms like a winding vine; Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, and Garcia are effervescent buds blooming. The song eases into a lullaby rocking before one final emphatic reminder “Just don’t tell ‘em you know me,” sung by Garcia, his voice at its most empathetic. –Buzz Poole

What to Listen For: Uncharacteristically uncomplicated lyrics by Robert Hunter, invested with great meaning and intent by Garcia.

Key Later Version : June 5, 1993 Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, N.J. At over 14 rollicking minutes this “Sugaree” proves that up until the very end the Dead could still produce surprises that wowed even the most jaded head. The whole band is in fine form, and the slight nasal frailty of Garcia’s voice only enhances the lyrical drama.

Epic redemption from Garcia and Hunter, capable of stunning quiet in enormous venues.

Despite the fluffy flower-power image of the Grateful Dead, much of the band’s actual catalog is made up of action-packed outlaw tunes of the type usually associated with Waylon Jennings or Johnny Cash. Drinking, gambling, gunfights, bastard children, and freight trains are favored subjects, often all in the same song. The slow, stormy Garcia/Hunter hobo tune, “Wharf Rat,” first played in ’71, is from that hard-edged tradition, but it stands out for being a character study rather than a chase scene. A hypnotically curling minor key groove gives way to an even quieter vocal bridge that edges as close as the Grateful Dead gets to gospel. Until, that is, Garcia and co. unleashing a holy squall of redemptive sound and the powerful refrain, “*I’ll get up and fly away!” * If that sounds like church to you, say your prayers to 5/22/77, when the band truly maximizes the extreme dynamics of the song. –Will Welch

What to Listen For: In just over nine minutes, the Dead go from the quietest quiet to the loudest loud and back again, always with plenty of open space for full Phil Lesh bass maneuvers.

Lore: Recognizing a fellow alcoholic in “Wharf Rat”’s August West, a group of Deadheads founded the Wharf Rats in 1984, a group that gathered under yellow balloons at Dead setbreaks, and who remain a fixture at post-Garcia incarnations and even shows by cover bands.

June 9, 1977

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead/Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Robert Hunter

Two parts of psychedelic prog followed by an extended three-chord bliss-out.

Written during the year the band spent off the road in 1975, “Help on the Way”/“Slipknot!”/“Franklin’s Tower” moves between the peak Dead prog of the suite’s first two parts to the unambiguous major key release one of the Dead’s all-time three-chord jam wonders. Though they nailed a memorably sparkling version at its debut in’75 (building up under Bill Graham's member-by-member introduction) and pushed the instrumental “Slipknot!” to the far reaches during various excursions in’76, the final version from the band's legendary spring ’77 touring season was perhaps the truest map of the suite's tricky paths, space valleys, and infinitely ascending boogie. The penultimate take before shelving the trio (though not “Franklin's Tower”) until the early '80s, Garcia occupies Robert Hunter's existential plea for love on "Help on the Way", extending the elliptical mood right up to the edge of confusion during the ensuing “Slipknot!”. During “Franklin's Tower”, especially on a fan-made mix blending an audience recording with a soundboard, as the band jam through chorus after chorus for the hometown dancers, one can almost feel the balcony shake at Winterland, the former ice skating rink that was the Dead's local venue in San Francisco for most of the '70s. –Jesse Jarnow

What to Listen For: Usually played to open sets, “Help on the Way” and “Slipknot” were as tricky and composed as the Dead got, their execution a virtuosic feat by itself.

Key Later Version: October 8, 1989 Hampton Coliseum, Hampton, Va. During one of two bust-out filled shows billed as “Formerly the Warlocks”, the band picked up “Help on the Way”/“Slipknot!”/“Franklin’s Tower” for the first time in a half-decade and reasserted their older, weirder selves.

Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir performing with the Grateful Dead circa 1976. Photo via Larry Hulst/Gettu Images.

December 29, 1977

Bob Weir’s first great song, cinematic Americana debuted in 1971 that took on a variety of moods over the years.

Among Robert Hunter’s most unflinching takes on American frontier ethics, early readings of “Jack Straw” were psychedelic country—Garcia and Keith Godchaux in full Bakersfield mode, Weir’s tenor quavering—but jam-free. In later periods, subtlety could be at a premium, but the instrumental build and interplay could be fierce, with opportunities for Phil Lesh to drop resonating bass bombs. Perhaps the perfect, most balanced “Straw” took place somewhere in 1977, when narration, performance and jam all crackled. This opener to a magically under-rated New Year’s stand burns from the get-go, sacrificing nothing. The drummers’ gallop pushes the music, while Garcia’s lead lines play the part of a majestic dramaturg, even accenting his “one small point of pride” line with gusto. It is Cormac McCarthy-meets-Ansel Adams stuff, and when the twin-guitar power-chords drop into the tale’s denouement—another ballad of the Grateful dead, no less, the folktale from which the band drew their name—the energy is blazing. –Piotr Orlov

Key Later Version: January 11, 1979 Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, N.Y. “Used to play for acid, now we play for Clive,” Bob Weir sings, referencing their new record company boss, Clive Davis, just before a crackling jam where Garcia’s lysergic-bluegrass guitar burns hot and Phil provides the bombs. ____

Watch: August 27, 1972 Old Renaissance Fairgrounds, Veneta, Ore. A perfectly executed take of the song’s lean early incarnation, with airy one-drummer dynamics and wide-open three-part vocals from Weir, Garcia, and Lesh.

February 3, 1978

Dane County Coliseum, Madison, WI

Written by: Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow

Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow’s classic meta-boogie

Of all the Dead’s post-Europe ‘72 live war-horses, few were born as eminently ready for the limelight as Weir’s Blues For Allah gem. (Even its 8/13/75 debut is often praised as perfect.) Yet in late ‘77/early ’78, the band did futz with the song’s arrangement, making all future “Music” jams two-part affairs. Between the end of the lyrics, and the repetitive closing drive on the central melody, there appeared a waltzing build of an interlude, called, by some, “on the bubble”; and when the two parts clicked, end-of-first-set nirvana was sure to occur. Which is exactly what transpired in the familiar confines of the Dane County Coliseum. The reading of the song is fun and taut — Phil chugging, Garcia picking (and cooing a wonderful harmony), Donna Jean and Bob in great voice — but the fireworks alight around 3:12. The first great “on the bubble”! Garcia floats heavenwards, the drummers and Lesh close behind, Weir and Keith soon locking into the rising. The crescendo back into the “Music” theme is flawless, before the Captain leads a stomping boogie towards set-break. So well arranged, it’s hard to call it a “jam.” –Piotr Orlov

December 26, 1979

Oakland Auditorium, Oakland, Calif.

*Grateful Dead-style paranoid space-dub weirdness via Bob Weir, a building block for elongated second set jam suites. *

Debuted during the well-oiled year of 1977, Bob Weir and lyricist John Perry Barlow’s “Estimated Prophet” captured late ’70s hippie paranoia in the form a of a slinky 7/8 reggae groove. A lope spacious enough for the band’s drummers, it became a platform for the endless avuncular chattering of Jerry Garcia’s Mu-tron-drenched lead guitar, and a reliable entrance to the type of moody, heady psychedelia that was all too often missing from the Dead’s new material in later years. Though one of the few effective homes for Keith Godchaux’s Polymoog synth, it wasn't until Brent Mydland replaced him in 1979 that the song really opened up. On opening night of Mydland’s first New Year’s run, the band pushed almost the 20-minute mark. Garcia’s mid-song solo is dripping and dubby, though the jam itself doesn’t really take off until about 14 minutes in, when Garcia jumps out of 7-time and into the free territories, Weir steps in for co-noodle duty, Phil Lesh drops into a thrilling bassline reminiscent of the Dead’s long-shelved “Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks)” and Mydland’s keyboards bounce so precisely they sound like modular synth. –Jesse Jarnow

Key Later Version: September 22, 1993  Madison Square Garden, New York, N.Y. Free jazz saxophone hero David Murray duets with Bob Weir's scat singing and Vince Welnick's plinking keyboards before the main event, howling in a buzzing jet-plane dogfight with Garcia's MIDI-ready guitar in front of a sold-out arena.

December 31, 1984

San Francisco Civic Center, San Francisco, Calif.

*__The Dead delve into disco-funk darkness with plenty of room for (wait for it) Jerry’s guitar. __First song, first set (or second)—translation: it’s party time. *

“Disco Dead,” sneered some of the faithful at the title cut from the Dead’s 1978 album. Somehow, fans found the idea of boogying to an endless groove untenable when it involved wearing something other than tie-dye. Meanwhile, the Dead’s loose double-drumming never quite fit even with the counterculture-weaned DJs at the birth of disco. But time has shown the lasting potency of both approaches, while the tapes let us hear the sparks when they connect. “Shakedown Street” was the Dead’s most overt funk move yet, aided and abetted on album by producer Lowell George of Little Feat (speaking of white-boy longhairs who liked to get down). Per usual, years of playing around with the groove, not to mention that sneaky descending three-note riff, both tightened and liquefied the music. Leading off with it on New Year’s Eve amounted to a mission statement. So did Garcia fanning out solos, with and without his pedals (check the lovely single-note flurries around 11:00), like he was born to boogie-oogie-oogie, too. –Michaelangelo Matos

What to Listen For: At 7:30, Jerry and his wah-wah pedal decide to have a little conversation.

Key Later Version: September 22, 1991 Boston Garden, Mass. The Grateful Dead plus touring pianist Bruce Hornsby and the arena energy of the east coast, a more intense fanbase than their more laidback California home.

December 15, 1986

Oakland Coliseum Arena, Oakland, Calif.

With perfectly wry lyrics, the Dead’s only top 10 single was still a source of musical conversation when played live.

Most Dead songs underwent their greatest gestational shifts in performance, but count on the biggest outlier of their career to have evolved differently. Robert Hunter had written “Touch of Grey” in 1980 as, in Garcia’s words, “a sort of dry, satirical piece with an intimate feel” and Garcia decided to rework the melody and a couple of the lines;. “‘We will get by’ said something to me, so I set it to play big,” he said after the song came out. “My version still has the ironic bite of the lyrics, but what comes across is a more celebratory quality.” Debuted by the Dead in 1982, the song’s lyrics changed slightly but parameters remained tight for most of the Dead’s history. But that rousing chorus and chiming melody made it that most improbable of Dead artifacts: a natural hit single. Opening the first Dead show after Jerry’s debilitating coma in 1986, its jolly defiance set the tone for what, improbably, would be the Dead’s biggest year to date. Nearly 20 years after the Summer of Love, the Dead’s first bona fide mainstream radio hit inspired a new generation to hit the road, even as it dodged the sneers of an older cohort that dismissed them as “Touchheads.” –Michaelangelo Matos

What to Listen For: The crowd going ape-shit the first time Garcia hits “I will survive” at this and any version after.

Key Proto Version __:__ Robert Hunter solo, October 26, 1982 The Landmark, Kingston, N.Y. Both caustic and optimistic solo, songwriter Robert Hunter’s early version finds its own (almost) equally charming setting for the lyrics.

July 9, 1995

Soldier Field, Chicago, Ill.

*One of Jerry Garcia’s last original songs, debuted in 1992, a powerful late career statement. * Part of a final songwriting burst with Robert Hunter, “So Many Roads” was one of several introspective songs that were powerful highlights during the Dead’s uneven last years, including “The Days Between” and “Lazy River Road”. ____

The Grateful Dead’s final show is, inevitably, a rough listen, mostly owing to Jerry Garcia’s audibly declining health – at this point he had just a month to live. Even with Teleprompter assistance, he fumbles over lyrics he had sung hundreds of times. He’s clearly struggling with some of the guitar work, including an utterly botched solo on “Unbroken Chain.” But even in this defiled state, Garcia could dig deep and rise to the occasion. World-weary and allusion-heavy, the band never completed a studio recording of “So Many Roads.” At Soldier Field, Garcia finds moments of quiet grace in the thicket of the latter-day Dead’s clatter, delivering sparkling solos, finally leaning into an extended emotional closing chorus over appropriately “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”-esque backing vocals. And then, as if to break the spell in the most inappropriate fashion possible, the Grateful Dead transition into keyboardist Vince Welnick’s godawful “Samba in the Rain.” Nevertheless, it sounded as if Garcia had, for a little while, eased his soul. –Tyler Wilcox

Key Earlier Version: October 1, 1994 Boston Garden, Mass. Even the most hardened '90s skeptics will almost surely by gobsmacked by Garcia's final vocal eruptions, hitting a reserve he never quite possessed even in his youth.

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Dead & Company Setlist at Sphere at The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, NV, USA

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• Iko Iko ( Sugar Boy and His Cane Cutters  cover) ( with ‘Man Smart, Woman Smarter’ snippet ) Play Video
• Shakedown Street ( Grateful Dead  cover) ( > ) Play Video
• The Music Never Stopped ( Grateful Dead  cover) Play Video
• Big Railroad Blues ( Cannon’s Jug Stompers  cover) ( Residency debut ) Play Video
• Row Jimmy ( Grateful Dead  cover) Play Video
• Sugaree ( Jerry Garcia  cover) Play Video
• One More Saturday Night ( Bob Weir  song) Play Video
• Greatest Story Ever Told ( Bob Weir  song) Play Video
• Mr. Charlie ( Grateful Dead  cover) Play Video
• Estimated Prophet ( Grateful Dead  cover) ( > ) Play Video
• Eyes of the World ( Grateful Dead  cover) ( > ) Play Video
• Drums ( Grateful Dead  cover) ( > ) Play Video
• Space ( Grateful Dead  cover) ( > ) Play Video
• Uncle John's Band ( Grateful Dead  cover) Play Video
• Cumberland Blues ( Grateful Dead  cover) Play Video
• Hell in a Bucket ( Grateful Dead  cover) Play Video
• Morning Dew ( Bonnie Dobson  cover) Play Video
• Song played from tape Old News Broadcast of the Grateful Dead Play Video
• Sugar Magnolia ( Grateful Dead  cover) Play Video

Edits and Comments

27 activities (last edit by drummertqp , 7 Jul 2024, 21:20 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Big Railroad Blues by Cannon’s Jug Stompers
• Cumberland Blues by Grateful Dead
• Drums by Grateful Dead
• Estimated Prophet by Grateful Dead
• Eyes of the World by Grateful Dead
• Greatest Story Ever Told by Bob Weir
• Hell in a Bucket by Grateful Dead
• Iko Iko by Sugar Boy and His Cane Cutters
• Morning Dew by Bonnie Dobson
• Mr. Charlie by Grateful Dead
• One More Saturday Night by Bob Weir
• Row Jimmy by Grateful Dead
• Shakedown Street by Grateful Dead
• Space by Grateful Dead
• Sugar Magnolia by Grateful Dead
• Sugaree by Jerry Garcia
• The Music Never Stopped by Grateful Dead
• Uncle John's Band by Grateful Dead

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• Jul 04 2024 Sphere at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, NV, USA Start time: 7:35 PM 7:35 PM
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Dead & Company 2021 Tour Recap: Highlights, Stats, & Top Shows

Dead & Company , the Grateful Dead spinoff band featuring John Mayer (lead guitar/vocals), Oteil Burbridge (bass/vocals), and Jeff Chimenti (keyboards/vocals) alongside Grateful Dead alumni Bill Kreutzmann (drums), Mickey Hart (drums), and Bob Weir (rhythm guitar/vocals), recently completed their first tour since the COVID pandemic shut down the live music industry in March 2020.

The loosely-branded What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been tour was the longest in the band’s six-year history, lasting 31 shows split into three legs spanning from August 16th through Halloween . The shows continued the band’s established practice of playing two sets of material from the Grateful Dead’s repertoire, focusing heavily on original songs co-written by late guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia and the late lyricist Robert Hunter and Weir’s co-writes with the late John Barlow .

Because it was Dead & Company’s first tour since the pandemic arrived in early 2020, new protocols required that attendees were vaccinated or at least tested negative for COVID shortly before the event. However, early in the tour, there were enough no-shows by vaccinated-but-hesitant or unvaccinated ticketholders that people were actually giving top-priced tickets away on show days. By mid-October proof of vaccination became standard for ticketholders to gain entry while the number of no-shows lessened, with significant numbers of ticketless folks doing the one-finger shuffle outside all four Colorado shows and three of the four California shows.

Now that it’s over and we’ve more or less recovered, here’s a show-by-show recap, with our favorites listed at the end in the Top Shows section. We threw in some song statistics and a few other random details along the way too, so kick back, relax, and enjoy.

SUMMER TOUR, LEG 1 – AUGUST 16th – 28th

NORTH CAROLINA AND VIRGINIA

After 576 days without a Dead & Company show, the wait was finally over and the first show since January 2020 would finally happen, but not before one final setback from a thunderstorm that delayed the doors at the Coastal Credit Union Amphitheatre (aka Walnut Creek) and the start of the show. No matter. The band wordlessly took the stage to a deafening roar and kicked off a shortened six-song first set with the most meaningful version of “Touch Of Grey” in a long, long, long time.

The band was tight, rehearsed, and clearly happy to be back as well, as the second set’s pre-“Drums” ran eight songs, lasted over an hour, and included “Playing In The Band”, “Truckin’”, and the tour’s sole version of “Spoonful”. On the far side of “Space”, the band delivered the show’s highlight, a stunning debut of the blues dirge “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, a yes-they-went-there moment if there ever was one, and the set ran so long that the venue’s curfew prevented an encore. Welcome. Back.

After a day off the tour resumed at the Jiffy Lube Amphitheatre in Bristow, VA outside Washington, D.C. After Mayer delivered strong versions of “Cold Rain & Snow”, “Mr. Charlie”, and “Dire Wolf” in the first set, he’d also get the nod to start the second with the Garcia/Hunter classic “Here Comes Sunshine”. This would be the first of several stellar versions of the song he’d deliver on the tour and take to a new level; in 2021 Mayer found his way to the heart of this song in the way that he’s previously done with “Althea”, “Deal”, and “Brown Eyed Women”. Not long after that, the first of only two uninterrupted versions of the classic pairing of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On The Mountain” on the entire tour would be another highlight.

NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA

The tour’s third date was Dead & Company’s first post-lockdown show in a stadium, and seeing the band walk onstage at New York’s Citi Field made us feel like things were sort of getting back to normal. While the fact that the song had been overheard being played at soundcheck took the surprise factor away for some, the band opened the show with their debut of “Let The Good Times Roll”, a staple of Grateful Dead shows from 1988 onwards. Not only does this one fit the vibe like it always did, but the “everyone sing a verse” lyrics also allow monitors and PA levels to be adjusted as needed.

The second set kicked off with “Eyes Of The World” for the only time on the tour, and the “Drums” section would feature the debut of Voices Of The Rainforest , recordings sourced in Papua, New Guinea by Hart that included video footage to go along with them. The tour’s sole version of the elusive “Spanish Jam” followed “Space”, and aside from “Althea” and the encore of “The Weight”, the second set’s song list could have come from a Grateful Dead’s 1974 “Wall Of Sound” show.

We’ll talk more about the tour’s next four shows in Philadelphia, Bethel, Darien Lake, and Saratoga Springs in the Top Shows section at the end of the recap. And directly after them, the opening leg of the summer tour ended on a Saturday night at Hershey Stadium , which was the first night of Grateful Dead music at the venue since the OG band’s 1985 rain-soaked classic . Intentionally or not, Dead & Company’s show paid immediate homage to the peak of that 1985 night by starting with “The Music Never Stopped”, before deftly weaving Weir’s 90s-era Dead tune “Easy Answers” into it, a tricky tune that Dead & Company handle far more deftly than their predecessors. Later, the second set’s highlights came from another kaleidoscopic “Here Comes Sunshine” from Mayer, Weir’s second reading of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, and the tour’s sole performance of “Quinn The Eskimo” as the encore.

SUMMER TOUR, LEG 2 – SEPTEMBER 2nd — 18th

MASSACHUSETTS AND CONNECTICUT

These three New England shows clearly meant a little something extra to Wilton, CT native and Berklee College Of Music student John Mayer, who’d posted a photo of the Wilton exit on I-84 and also say as much on the day of the first show. The band would also take the opportunity to actively treat this trio of shows as a distinct group by starting and ending the three-show run (two nights at XFinity Centre   Amphitheatre  [aka Great Woods] in Mansfield, MA, and one at Hartford’s Xfinity Theatre ) by starting and finishing the run with the two halves of “Playing In The Band”, and the band would also split the tour’s first appearances of “Dark Star” over the two Great Woods shows as well. The aforementioned show-opening version of “Playing” combined seamlessly with “The Wheel” to last a combined 30 (!) minutes, while the second set kicked off with one of Mayer’s best versions of “Deal” on the tour, complete with him simultaneously fanning his guitar while repeatedly jumping up and down like a pogo stick.

After Friday’s Great Woods show (which we’ll talk more about in the Top Shows section at the end) and a day off on Saturday, the band made its way down I-84 to Hartford and picked right up where they’d left off, with a first set so stacked that the songs could have actually comprised a 1980 second set by the Grateful Dead if “Drums” and “Space” were added, and included “Shakedown Street”, “Samson & Delilah”, and “Franklin’s Tower”. The second set’s highlights came from the tour’s first versions of “St. Stephen”, “William Tell Bridge”, and especially “The Eleven”, and Hartford also scored the tour’s sole version of “Werewolves Of London” as the encore. All three nights of the New England run were strong individually, but collectively the shows wove themselves together into a distinct trio.

OHIO AND MICHIGAN

Next up was a drive west on I-80 to Ohio and the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls just south of Cleveland. As the band took the stage Mayer quickly won the “best-dressed band member” award by sporting a black satin shirt that would have passed Studio 54 ’s dress code, and he’d also deliver the tour’s sole version of “Next Time You See Me” early in the show before a strong pairing of “Cassidy” and “Bird Song” closed the first set. The second set truly caught fire with the version of “Eyes Of The World” preceding “Drums”, and the show’s peak occurred via an absolutely gorgeous transition from the end of “Standing On The Moon” into the extended final verse of “Viola Lee Blues” along with a lengthy, standout version of “Not Fade Away” to close the set.

Three days later the next stop was DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, MI (aka Pine Knob), whose first set featured a rare mid-set placement of “New Speedway Boogie” just before the tour’s first version of The Beatles ’ “Dear Prudence”. The second set’s highlight came early via Burbridge’s gorgeous vocal take on the Garcia/Hunter ballad “Comes A Time”, complete with an equally gorgeous closing solo by Mayer. If you were there you got lucky, because it was the only one on the tour.

Later highlights came from the “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” pairing that led into “Drums”, and the relaxed-but-welcome tour premiere of “I Need A Miracle” following “Space”. The following day found the band moving fast down I-75 to the Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati for a show on Mickey Hart’s 78th birthday, but we’ll talk about that one in detail later, in the Top Shows section.

MISSOURI, INDIANA, AND ILLINOIS

The summer tour remained in the Midwest for its last week, with shows at the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre in St. Louis, MO (aka Riverport) and the Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center in Noblesville, IN (aka Deer Creek) that we’ll go over in detail in the Top Shows section at the end. From there, the summer leg closed with a pair of weekend shows within the friendly confines of 107-year-old Wrigley Field in Chicago. However, before the first show on Friday night , Mother Nature dropped a thunderstorm that caused two delays and worked heavily against the band.

The first set started late, was marred by equipment issues, and was then cut short after four songs. It was followed by a second set whose rushed pre-“Drums” did at least contain the sole “Dancing In The Streets” of the tour, but fortunately, the closing run of songs after “Space” was much stronger, with “Morning Dew” as the night’s highlight. The “Ripple” encore made for a nice finish, but overall, this was a rare off-night.

This wasn’t lost on the band, who’d make it up for it the following night . The first set started with a trio of second-set songs (“Althea”, “Uncle John’s Band”, and “He’s Gone”) and also contained the tour’s sole version of “Little Red Rooster”. But even better was the sprawling, generous second set that ran nearly two hours and contained, in Deadhead shorthand, “China” > “Rider”, “Estimated” > “Eyes” and “Help” > “Slip” > “Frank”. Yes, all of those in the same set plus “Milestones” and “Days Between” too, and after a double encore of “Brokedown Palace” and “Touch Of Grey” the band headed home for a two-week break before the fall leg commenced.

SONG STATS AND FUN FACTS

MOST AND LEAST PLAYED SONGS

Over the course of 31 shows the band played 119 different songs, aside from the “Drums” and “Space” segments each night during second sets. There was actually a 13-way tie for first place in the “most played song” category, with the following songs getting eight airings each: “Dark Star”, “Althea”, “The Other One”, “Deal”, “Playing In The Band”, “Uncle John’s Band”, “China Cat Sunflower”, “I Know You Rider”, “Bertha”, “Scarlet Begonias”, “Fire On The Mountain”, “Not Fade Away”, and “Franklin’s Tower”.

Right behind all those there was a 7-way tie for second place, with the following songs getting seven plays each: “Help On The Way”, “Slipknot”, “Let The Good Times Roll”, “Casey Jones”, “Jack Straw”, “Shakedown Street”, “New Speedway Boogie”, and “They Love Each Other”. On the other end of the statistics, 23 songs were only played once, with 14 shows getting one of them, the Raleigh, Bethel, and St. Louis shows each getting two, and the Dallas show getting three.

2021 DEBUTS

Dead & Company only added three new songs to the repertoire in 2021, but they were all winners. The Reverend Gary Davis  blues dirge “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” debuted on the tour’s opening night ( Raleigh 8/16 ), and Sam Cooke ’s 1964 party anthem “Let The Good Times Roll” opened up the tour’s third show ( New York 8/20 ). Both these songs remained in regular rotation for the entire tour, but the version of The Rolling Stones ’ “The Last Time” would sadly be a one-off, making its sole appearance at Darien Lake on August 25th as a dedication to Stones drummer Charlie Watts , who had passed away the day before.

ALTHEA’S HOT SPACES

In 2019 “Terrapin Station” was the song whose location in Dead & Company shows would constantly bounce around, but in 2021 Mayer’s signature song “Althea” moved into this welcome role. Over its 8 appearances, it kicked off the second set twice ( Cuyahoga Falls 9/7 and Los Angeles 10/31 ) and appeared in the body of the second set’s pre-“Drums” twice ( Atlanta 10/12 and Phoenix 10/25 ), but it also opened a first set ( Chicago 9/18 ), led directly into “Drums” ( Hershey 8/28 ), came out of “Space” ( New York, 8/20 ), and served as the encore ( Red Rocks 10/19 ).

SCARLET > FIRE AND FRIENDS

Another thing Dead & Company setlist architect Matt Busch did to keep people guessing in 2021 was add one or more songs into the middle of the “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire On The Mountain” pairing, one of Deadheads’ most beloved song combinations since March 1977. This pairing was played 8 times in 2021, all in second sets, but only 2 were “traditional” and flowed directly into one another (Bristow 8/18 and Los Angeles 10/31 ). During the other six airings, the following songs flowed between them: “Help On The Way” and “Slipknot” (Saratoga Springs 8/27), “Viola Lee Blues” ( Clarkston 9/7 ), “Deal” ( Chicago 9/17 ), “Uncle John’s Band” ( Charlotte 10/11 ), “Estimated Prophet” and “Eyes Of The World” ( Red Rocks 10/19 ), and “Touch Of Grey” ( Phoenix 10/25 ).

THE STORYTELLERS SPEAK

Another welcome change in 2021 was that the tour’s livestreams on Nugs.net now had hosts to fill the “Dead Air” before the first set and during intermission. They were familiar faces, too: Gary Lambert and David Gans , two longtime torchbearers of the Deadhead community who host Tales From The Golden Road , the weekly call-in show on Sirius XM’s Grateful Dead channel.

Not only was it fun to watch them recap sets and manufacture on-the-fly conversation to fill the final minutes before the band took the stage for the second set each night, they were also joined by guests of prominent stature from all eras of the Grateful Dead universe, and these are less than half of the names: GD family members ( Trixie Garcia ), OG GD extended family members ( Ken Babbs , Rosie McGee ), those who make official GD music releases happen ( David Lemieux , David Glasser , Mark Pinkus ), a podcast host ( Jesse Jarnow ), a Nugs founder ( Brad Serling ), and a musician or two ( Don Was , Branford Marsalis , Denise Parent , Jeff Mattson , and some random guy named John Mayer).

YOU SHOULD BE MADE TO WEAR EARPHONES

When Dead & Company took the stage in Darien Lake on August 25th , there was a surprising sight on stage right: John Mayer was wearing headphones during the show, though aside from that he played and sang normally. And as soon as it got to intermission, Dead Air host Gary Lambert texted Mayer to ask about them, and Mayer texted him right back so Gary could get the word out: the headphones were to protect his hearing against (further) tinnitus and hearing loss, but they also help him to hear the band more fully, as he has the band’s front-of-house engineer mix piped in, so he’s hearing the very same mix by front-of-house engineer Derek Featherstone that Deadheads do. Want a pair for yourself? Go here .

FALL TOUR – OCTOBER 11th — OCTOBER 31st

NORTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, AND TEXAS

Originally, the fall leg of the tour was supposed to start with a pair of shows in Florida, in West Palm Beach on October 6th and Tampa on October 7th. However, on September 28th the band canceled these shows and issued refunds, citing “routing and logistics” as the reason and not elaborating further.

A week earlier the band had also added two dates at the 9,000-capacity Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. This was a surprising move for a band who draws over four times that number just up the road at Folsom Field in Boulder on a summer Saturday , but they’d pull this off by booking the shows on a Tuesday and Wednesday night in late October.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Tarheel State of North Carolina hosted their second kickoff show of the tour at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte on October 11th. The opening “Let The Good Times Roll” was now clearly a band favorite, and it would be the only song of the night that wasn’t a Grateful Dead original. It was followed by an early-show surprise of “Cassidy” in the second slot, and the set’s highlight was the expansive “Bird Song” closer.

Related: Grateful Dead Studio Albums Ranked Worst To Best

The second set neatly incorporated half of the Grateful Dead’s classic 1970 Workingman’s Dead LP, starting with “Uncle John’s Band” between “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire On The Mountain” before “Drums”, and finishing with a post-“Space” segment of “New Speedway Boogie”, “Black Peter”, and “Casey Jones”. The following day the band traveled to Atlanta’s Cellairis Amphitheatre (aka Lakewood), which seems to have become a charmed venue for the band. Dead & Company’s two previous shows there in 2017 and 2019 were each among that year’s best, and since it happened again at Lakewood in 2021 we’ll talk about that one in more detail in the Top Shows section at the end.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Bobby Weir (@bobweir)

Well before Dead & Company arrived in Texas for a pair of shows in Dallas and Houston, the state created one of the year’s biggest political controversies by passing Senate Bill 8, a nefariously crafted abortion restriction bill that’s outrageous enough that it could be overturned by the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. Weir had already made his public pronouncement on the issue by posting photos of his and his wife’s attendance at the San Francisco edition of a national Women’s Rights march that took place on October 2nd, and the band’s first set at Dallas’ Dos Equis Pavilion would say much more.

After opening with the sole “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” of the tour, the rest of the set featured songs about beloved female characters in the Grateful Dead’s universe: “Bertha”, “Queen Jane Approximately” (the only one of the tour), “Brown Eyed Women”, “Peggy-O”, and “Sugaree”. After the dust settled from all that, the second set kicked off with the only “Deep Ellum Blues” of the tour as a friendly callout to the notorious Dallas nightlife district that spawned the song. Later on, the extended version of “The Other One” just before “Drums” would be the highlight of the show, and the band closed the night with one final, gentler political plea via their “Liberty” encore.

The band headed 210 miles south on I-45 the following day for a show at the Cynthia Woods Pavilion outside Houston, with the band competing against the Friday Night Lights of Texas high school football. Two of the first set’s big plays came from the hoped-for songs with local references (“El Paso” and “Jack Straw”), and the second set’s touchdowns came from yet another classic with a local reference (“Truckin’”), versions of “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” whose jams took some slight darker turns, and one of the tour’s two versions of Miles Davis’ classic “Milestones”. Lastly, there was a classic sliver of sibling-style banter onstage after the “Black Muddy River” encore, an hour or so before Weir turned 74 and Mayer turned 44 on October 16th:

Burbridge: “An early ‘Happy Birthday’ to John and Bob!”

Hart: “The birthday boys…How cute.”

On paper, this was as good as things could get for Dead & Company and Deadheads in 2021, with two shows at the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, just west of Denver. But just before the first show started, as the temperature was dropping to a bone-chilling 34 degrees, there was a stunning announcement.

Drummer Bill Kreutzmann had contracted a non-Covid 19-related illness and would not play , and Wolf Bros and Ratdog drummer Jay Lane would fill in for him. And when we say stunning, we mean it: Kreutzmann himself couldn’t recall ever missing a show in his entire career, which is fair, because a look through Deadbase revealed he had missed only one, on 11/22/68 .

Rallying, defiant versions of “Not Fade Away” and “New Speedway Boogie” started the show and the “Eyes Of The World” in the second set would be the show’s powerful highlight, but at the conclusion of “Casey Jones”, the cold conditions and equipment issues forced Mickey Hart offstage for the rest of the night, leaving new guy Lane out there on his own for the closer and first-ever “Althea” encore. No pressure, man. It was a beautiful but cold setting and it was definitely a Dead & Company show, but the drummers’ circumstances made for an uncommon night onstage.

The second Red Rocks show on October 20th took place under a full moon, with slightly higher temperatures ranging from the low 50s into the 40s during the show. Lane would fill in for Kreutzmann for a second straight night, and the first set featured a nice run of 70s-era songs highlighted by “The Wheel” and “Black-Throated Wind”, while the 80s were represented by what was possibly the most relaxed version of “Hell In A Bucket” ever. And while the second set was solid throughout and highlighted by “Terrapin Station”, two quick moments after “Space” stood out: during the closing jam of “All Along The Watchtower” Lane unleashed a powerful blast of drumming that rippled right through the entire band, and then got in a second one with the same effect during the climax of “Standing On The Moon” two songs later.

While Lane has played with Weir for decades and was already familiar with a sizable chunk of the Grateful Dead’s catalog, these were breakthrough moments for him with Dead & Company, right after being airdropped into this madness. Two days later, the tour resumed just 25 miles down the road at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in Greenwood Village with another pair of shows , and Lane continued filling in for Kreutzmann at both of them. Lane’s surges would prove a good omen for the Fiddler’s Green run, and his new-guy energy would help those shows become two of the tour’s best. We’ll talk more about them in the Top Shows section at the end.

ARIZONA AND CALIFORNIA

The weather warmed up considerably once the band moved on from Colorado to Arizona, but even more importantly, Kreutzmann was back on his drummer’s throne for the Monday evening show at Phoenix’s Ak-Chin Pavilion . Not only were Kreutzmann and the band in fine form all evening, the setlist would make fans of the Grateful Dead’s “dirty 80’s” era very happy: aside from the encore, every song could have been from a 1984 Dead show. In particular, we loved Burbridge’s “China Doll” and the “Let It Grow” from the first set, and the second set trio of “Scarlet Begonias”, “Touch Of Grey”, and “Fire On The Mountain”, a sequence the Grateful Dead would only do twice, on July 3rd, 1984  and July 13th, 1984 .

Next up was a drive west on I-8 to the North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, CA, just outside San Diego. Local boy (and World’s Tallest Deadhead) Bill Walton turned up, and beaming visage and outstretched arms were consistently broadcast on the video screens to the delight of the crowd, while the first set’s highlights came from another great “Cumberland Blues” and the “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” closer. However, the Chula Vista show would be set apart by its second set song choices, which included five songs from the Grateful Dead’s 60’s era and a looser, slightly rawer vibe to go with them: “St. Stephen”, “The Eleven”, “New Speedway Boogie”, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”, and “Good Lovin”.

The tour concluded with a drive up I-5 for three sold-out shows at the iconic Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, with many folks taking advantage of Halloween weekend by dressing for the occasion on all three nights. (Skeletons were far and away the most common costume, followed by a respectable number of people dressed as The Dude from The Big Lebowski .)

Both sets on opening night were bookended by a Weir/Barlow classic: the first set started and finished with “Playing In The Band”, with highlights between them coming from “Deal”, “All Along The Watchtower”, and “High Time”. Not to be outdone, the second set kicked off with “Sugar Magnolia” and finished with its coda, “Sunshine Daydream”, with highlights in between coming from a dense “Slipknot!” and a lengthy “Estimated Prophet”. There was a somber note to this set, however, as right before the band started “Sugar Magnolia” Weir quickly said the song was “for Rob”. This rare onstage dedication was for Rob Lawson , Weir’s longtime driver and confidant who was in his final days and who would pass away on November 1st, the day after the tour ended.

Hollywood Bowl’s middle night on Saturday was rolling smoothly along after a first set highlighted by “It Hurts Me Too” and “Tennessee Jed”, and a second set that started with an agreeable run of “Jack Straw”, “Sugaree”, and the classic pairing of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider”. However, before the band could start a fifth song Kreutzmann would leave the stage, and most of the band followed while Hart handled the “Drums” segment largely on his own. It turned out the band had prepared for this possibility and had kept Lane on hand, as he took Kreutzmann’s place for the remainder of the show, which had a heavier, more serious vibe during “Throwing Stones” and “Days Between” before the more upbeat, celebratory vibes of set closer “One More Saturday Night” and encore “U.S. Blues”.

The following morning on Halloween, Kreutzmann took a light tone on a social media post and apologized if he’d “spooked” anyone with his absence, while disclosing that he’d come back too soon from his illness and Lane would fill in for him one last time for that evening’s Halloween tour closer , and we’ll talk a little more about that one in the Top Shows section below.

TOP 8 SHOWS, PLUS 4 HONORABLE MENTIONS

The What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been tour lasted 31 shows and 77 days, and it more than lived up to its name, as you’ve read here and/or experienced firsthand. Over that time there were some shows that stood out from the others, and we kept track of them along the way. Since this Dead & Company tour was longer we expanded the customary Top 5 to a Top 8, and to 4 Honorable Mentions instead of the usual 3. So with a resounding Rhythm Devils drum roll and without further ado, here are 2021’s top Dead & Company shows, in chronological order.

TOP 8 SHOWS

August 21st – Philadelphia, PA

Just before the band took the stage for the fourth show of the tour, word came down that tonight’s show would have no intermission due to severe incoming storms and would instead consist of one solitary set that had to end by 10 p.m. But the Philly crowd took it all in stride and pushed the band the way they always have, and after a pair of rainbows formed over the stadium during the third song, “Jack Straw”, the band was off to the races for the rest of the night, with the pre-“Drums” highlights coming from Chimenti’s lengthy, fiery Hammond B3 organ solo in “Franklin’s Tower”, and a 35-minute journey through “Terrapin Station” and “The Other One”. However, the faster-tempo-than-usual “Morning Dew” that closed the set would not just be the peak of this show. Instead, Mayer’s closing solo ensured this song was the peak moment of the entire tour, and it will remain one of his signature moments with Dead & Company.

August 23rd – Bethel, NY

One of the trademarks of any band led by Bob Weir is that there’s an avoidance of nostalgia or simply recreating past glories. Weir’s focus is all about creating something new each night, so after a solid first set featuring four 80s-era Weir/Barlow classics, Weir stepped to his microphone at the beginning of the second set and delivered the biggest surprise of the tour.

Since the stage they were on that was adjacent to the site of the August 1969 Woodstock Music & Arts Festival and the Grateful Dead’s utterly disastrous five-song set there (thunderstorms caused life-threatening technical issues), Weir announced a “do-over” of that set, 52 years later. And to the crowd’s disbelief and joy, they’d run through “St. Stephen”, “Mama Tried”, “Dark Star”, “High Time” and “Turn On Your Lovelight”, and it would go a lot better this time. To finish the night off, “Ripple” would be the perfect encore at this proving ground of hippies with the best of intentions trying to make a huge rock festival work before anyone had truly figured out how exactly to do it.

August 27th – Saratoga Springs, NY

The 20-minute “Bird Song” that closed the first set of this show featured a jam with a heavy metal level of intensity, with David Gans and Gary Lambert later declaring it one of the best performances of the song by anyone in its 50-year history. The second set would stand up to it, too, with the front half featuring a sequence of “Scarlet Begonias”, “Help On The Way” and “Slipknot!” that recalled the Grateful Dead’s exploratory 1976 approach to each of these songs, and the show’s peak would be the definitive-D&C-version-so-far of “Cumberland Blues” out of “Space”, followed by Weir delivering the tour’s best version of “Days Between”. On its fifth try, the venerable Saratoga Performing Arts Center finally hosted a Dead & Company show that channeled the intensity of the Grateful Dead’s legendary 80s-era shows there.

September 11th – Cincinnati, OH

For the first time in Dead & Company’s six-year history, a show took place on a band member’s birthday, and the band would celebrate drummer Mickey Hart’s 78th trip around the sun by leading the crowd through a version of “Happy Birthday To You” before the second set, which was inspired and seamless. Highlights came from its opener of “The Other One” that would conclude over an hour later after journeys through “Uncle John’s Band”, the “Help On The Way” > “Slipknot!” > “Franklin’s Tower” trio and another top-notch “Cumberland Blues” coming out of “Space”. The first set stood out too, thanks to a well-chosen run of five early-70’s Grateful Dead originals: “Tennessee Jed”, “Here Comes Sunshine”, “Loose Lucy”, “Mr. Charlie”, and “Looks Like Rain”.

September 15th – Noblesville, IN

The venue we still call Deer Creek once again served as the location for a night of magical Grateful Dead music. The first set peaked with Weir’s dramatic reading of the tour’s sole version of Bob Dylan ’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, and the second set got off to an unconventional start with Mayer leading the band through a stand-alone version of “Sugaree”.

But from there, the band would head straight to 1969 and stay there for the rest of the set, and if you allow “Space” to be considered the equivalent to “Feedback”, they’d play the entire Live Dead  double album, slightly out of sequence and with the additions of “Drums” and “Casey Jones”. Once again, while it remains rare for Dead & Company to make clear and conscious nods to big, specific happenings from the Grateful Dead’s past, when it does happen the results tend to be pretty big as well.

October 12th – Atlanta, GA

For the third time in three Dead & Company shows at Lakewood, the show made our best-of-tour list. This one started with the best first set of the tour, which kicked off with 19 minutes of “Shakedown Street” and was later bolstered by the band’s then-and-there decision to try out the original, faster 1973 arrangement of “They Love Each Other” without ever having rehearsed it. It worked. But the second set eclipsed it, with an opener of “Playing In The Band” that segued into the first “Crazy Fingers” in two years.

After Mayer delivered his signature song “Althea”, the version of “China Cat Sunflower” > ”I Know You Rider” that followed lasted for an eye-popping 28 minutes, nearly three times the 10:35 duration of the Grateful Dead’s benchmark version from Europe ‘72 . Hart’s segment on The Beam at the conclusion of “Drums” was also the tour’s best, and with all of this it’s unsurprising that the band ran so late with their set that the gorgeous set-closing reprise of “Playing In The Band” would be the final number of the night. But by then, an encore wasn’t really necessary.

October 22nd – Denver, CO

After a first set that drew from six different eras of the Grateful Dead’s live repertoire, the second set kicked off with a stand-alone “Sugaree”. Once again it was a seemingly odd choice, just like it was in Deer Creek , but once again it would precede a continuous psychedelic blast that would last for the remainder of the set. This time, every song (including “Sugaree”) could have come from a Grateful Dead show from 1971, and the set’s centerpiece that was the highlight of the fall leg of the tour: a 45-minute excursion of “Dark Star” > “The Other One” > “Drums” > “Space” > “Dark Star” > “The Other One”.

Sets containing both of these open-ended classics were extremely rare after 1971 with the Grateful Dead, and it’s only happened a couple times before with Dead & Company, but this is the first instance we know of where either band played both songs and split them both in half in the same set. The band knew they’d nailed it all too, and they remained dialed-in for the “Wharf Rat” and “Sugar Magnolia” closers. Oh, and we almost forgot: Weir’s delivery of the “headlight” verse in “I Know You Rider” was the best one we can remember.

October 31st – Los Angeles, CA

Jay Lane had to sit in for Kreutzmann again on this night, but not for the first time; the band used the last night of the tour to stack the setlist and go for broke. The first set was highlighted by the opening “Samson & Delilah” and second-set-intensity versions of “Uncle John’s Band” and set-closer “Terrapin Station”. The second set closed out the tour with a list of favorites and stone-cold classics dished out with no-tomorrow energy, including opener “Althea”, a “Dark Star” > “El Paso” suite, and another strong “Eyes Of The World”. Following “Space”, the band dealt out the first uninterrupted “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire On The Mountain” since the tour’s second show in Bristow back in August, and then follow it with a substantial “Morning Dew” to close the set. Enough classics for you? The only drawback was “Werewolves Of London” being cut from the encore because of the venue curfew, but by this point one could just blame it on the Dew and smile.

4 HONORABLE MENTIONS:

August 25th – Darien Lake, NY

This day started on a somber note for pretty much everyone who’s ever liked rock ‘n’ roll, as the sad news came from London that Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts had passed away the day before at the age of 80. The news wasn’t lost on the band, who debuted their version of the Stones’ classic “The Last Time” as the Grateful Dead’s Steal Your Face skull logo broadcast on the venue screens with the Rolling Stones’ tongue logo in place of the lightning bolt.

The overall vibe of the show also contained several nods to the time when the Rolling Stones were young men and the Grateful Dead were even younger: “Viola Lee Blues” and “Cold Rain and Snow” date back to the Dead’s earliest days when the Stones were a big influence, but they also didn’t shy away from playing “New Speedway Boogie”, the song that memorialized the one time the bands tried to play together, with disastrous results, at Altamont Speedway in December of 1969. All in all, it was the celebration of the backbeat of one of rock’s greatest bands while also acknowledging that same band’s dark and dangerous side. And, just being able to hear “Truckin’” in Buffalo again was a joyous little celebration all by itself. This show had the dark and the light in spades.

September 3rd – Mansfield, MA

Connecticut native and Berklee College of Music student John Mayer was excited and nostalgic about the trio of shows that took place in New England over Labor Day weekend (two at Great Woods in Massachusetts and one at Xfinity in Connecticut), and the second night of Great Woods would just barely outpace the other two in a strong weekend of shows. The first set featured no fewer than four songs with Mayer on lead vocals (“Cold Rain & Snow”, “Dire Wolf”, and “Sugaree” on his own, plus shared vocals with Weir on “Mississippi Half-Step”), followed by a second set that allowed numerous opportunities for Mayer to run wild as a player, including the big second set jam that started with “Truckin’” and ended over an hour later with “Morning Dew”. To wrap it up, Mayer would team up with Weir to belt out a perfectly-timed “U.S. Blues” encore to send everyone back out into the Massachusetts night.

September 13th – St. Louis, MO

The timing of this show ended up coinciding pretty closely with the announcement of the Grateful Dead’s Listen To The River box set, featuring seven complete shows played in St. Louis from 1971 to 1973. And setlist assembler Matt Busch made sure to take note of the location with “Big River” and “Black-Throated Wind” and their direct references to St. Louis making the first set, and St. Louis native Chuck Berry ’s signature song “Johnny B. Goode” would get its sole airing of the tour as the encore. In between, the second set had a decidedly late-1978 vibe to it, with a “Bertha” > “Good Lovin” opener, and a mid-set “Shakedown Street” before “Terrapin Station” begat “Drums”, with “Wharf Rat and “Sugar Magnolia” serving as the two post-“Space” set closers.

October 23rd – Denver, CO

Numerous shows on the tour were consistently strong from start to finish, but this final of the four shows in Colorado (and the fourth with Lane filling in for Kreutzmann) had that little something extra the whole way through that sets it apart. The first set nestled five classic 1970’s Garcia/Hunter songs (“Shakedown Street”, “Ship Of Fools”, “Brown-Eyed Women”, “Crazy Fingers”, and “Here Comes Sunshine”) in between two of the late Jerry Garcia’s most reliable Grateful Dead covers in “Iko Iko” and “Going Down The Road Feeling Bad”. Following that, the second set’s otherness came from the unusual turns in the jams in the opening “Truckin’” and the all-three-verse version of “Viola Lee Blues” that followed, with late-show highlights coming in the from of “Cumberland Blues” and a mesmerizing “Stella Blue”.

Dead & Company’s next shows take place from January 7th–10th and January 13th–16th, 2022 at the annual Playing In The Sand event in Cancun, Mexico. Get more information here .

Trump injured, rushed from stage after shooter fired at Pennsylvania rally

BUTLER, Pa. — Former President Donald Trump was rushed off the stage with blood on the side of his head and his ear after shots were fired just minutes into his rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Trump's campaign said he was safe in the aftermath of the attack. The former president said in a post on Truth Social about two and a half hours later that a bullet "pierced the upper part of my right ear."

"I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin," Trump wrote on the social media platform. "Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening."

One spectator from the rally is dead, and two were critically injured, according to Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi. The shooter is dead, he said.

Trump thanked law enforcement in his online statement and extended condolences to the families of the people killed and injured.

"It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country," he wrote.

The shots were fired from outside of the U.S. Secret Service security perimeter for the rally, according to three senior U.S. law enforcement officials.

The suspected shooter fired from an elevated position outside of the rally, Guglielmi said in the Secret Service statement. He added that Secret Service personnel "neutralized the shooter."

Trump was about six minutes into his speech when he reached for the side of his face as popping sounds rang out. He then crouched down as Secret Service agents rushed the stage and surrounded him. He was quickly escorted into a vehicle, walking off the stage with agents on all sides.

Trump pumped his fists in the air as he was escorted off of the stage. The crowd cheered as the former president raised his arms.

Reporters on the scene saw smoke and heard what they initially thought were fireworks before everyone ducked and law enforcement encircled Trump.

Screams from the audience rang out as the scene unfolded.

Follow live updates on the Trump rally shooting

A doctor attending the event told NBC News that he saw a man suffer a gunshot wound to the head and helped carry him from the site of the rally. Speaking in a parking lot near the event, a mother and son who were attending the rally told NBC News that they saw people in the crowd who were injured and carried away.

People remained at the scene for 10 to 15 minutes after Trump was taken away, after which they were then told it was an active crime scene and all attendees were escorted out.

The Secret Service has requested that the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office help with the investigation into the shots fired, according to two senior U.S. law enforcement officials.

The FBI said in a statement that personnel are on the scene, and they will work jointly with the Secret Service.

There is currently no sign that the attack has any link to a foreign actor, according to a U.S. official.

Trump's spokesperson Steven Cheung said that the former president "thanks law enforcement and first responders for their quick action during this heinous act."

"He is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility," Cheung said. "More details will follow."

Biden, political world react

President Joe Biden called the attack “sick” and thanked law enforcement during remarks delivered on camera.

“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick. It’s sick,” Biden said. “It’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. We cannot allow for this to be happening.”

“Everybody must condemn it,” Biden added.

The president also said he hopes to speak to Trump later on Saturday.

When asked by a reporter whether Biden believed that the attack on Trump was an assassination attempt, the president responded that he didn't "know enough" to say at the time.

"I have an opinion, but I don't have any facts," Biden said, adding that he wanted to gather all of the facts first.

Biden, who is in Delaware for the weekend, also said in a statement that he is praying for Trump. The president said he has been briefed on the shooting.

"I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information," Biden's statement said. "Jill and I are grateful to the Secret Service for getting him to safety. There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it."

Vice President Kamala Harris has also been briefed, she said in a statement.

"Doug and I are relieved that he is not seriously injured," Harris said. "We are praying for him, his family, and all those who have been injured and impacted by this senseless shooting."

She added that "violence such as this has no place in our nation," urging everyone to "condemn this abhorrent act."

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said in a statement posted to X that he has been briefed by law enforcement. He condemned the attack as a "horrific act of political violence at a peaceful campaign rally," saying that it "has no place in this country and should be unanimously and forcefully condemned."

In the minutes after the incident unfolded, politicians began posting on social media that they were praying for Trump, including vice presidential contenders Sen. JD Vance , R-Ohio; Sen. Marco Rubio , R-Fla.; and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum .

Donald Trump Jr., one of the president's children, wrote in a post to X that his father will "never stop fighting to Save America." His message was accompanied with a photo of Trump pumping his fist with blood on his face.

Democrats, too, released statements expressing horror at the attack.

"I am horrified by what happened at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania and relieved that former President Trump is safe," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a post to X . "Political violence has no place in our country."

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, condemned the attack in a post on X.

"Violence targeted at any political party or political leader is absolutely unacceptable," said Shapiro. "It has no place in Pennsylvania or the United States."

Shapiro added that he has been briefed on the situation and that state police were on the scene, working with federal and local partners.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged Americans to pray for Trump.

“Now is the time for every American who loves our country to step back from the division, renounce all violence, and unite in prayer for President Trump and his family,” Kennedy said .  

Former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot by a gunman in 2011, released a statement condemning political violence.

“Political violence is terrifying. I know,” she said. “I’m holding former president Trump, and all those affected by today’s indefensible act of violence in my heart. Political violence is un-American and is never acceptable — never.”

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., who was shot and injured in 2017 when a gunman opened fire on Republicans during a baseball practice, condemned Democratic rhetoric leading up to the attack.

"For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America," he said in a post on X. "Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop."

Trump’s campaign is in a “complete communications lockdown,” according to a message sent to staff by James Blair, the political director for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

"Everything is OK,” Blair wrote. “We have no details to share at this time but will follow up soon with more information.”

A Biden campaign official told NBC News that their campaign is also "pausing all outbound communications and working to pull down our television ads as quickly as possible.”

The Republican National Convention, where Trump is set to officially become the GOP presidential nominee, is set to begin on Monday.

This is a breaking new story and will continue to be updated.

Dasha Burns and Jake Traylor are reporting from Butler, Pa.; Megan Lebowitz from Washington, D.C.

Dasha Burns is a correspondent for NBC News.

Jake Traylor is a 2024 NBC News campaign embed.

Megan Lebowitz is a politics reporter for NBC News.

Chloe Atkins reports for the NBC News Investigative Unit, based in New York. She frequently covers crime and courts, as well as the intersection of reproductive health, politics and policy.

Tom Winter is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Jonathan Dienst is chief justice contributor for NBC News and chief investigative reporter for WNBC-TV in New York.

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Bill makes his long awaited return to San Francisco’s legendary venue, The Warfield Theater, home of so many epic Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band shows. From returns to new beginnings — this…

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Haute hack: luann de lesseps uses this $65 chanel deodorant in place of perfume.

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For Luann de Lesseps, life is still a cabaret.

The “RHONY” OG’s star has continued to rise following her time on Bravo, whether she’s performing for thousands at festivals or in the company of fellow celebrities at her “Marry F Kill” cabaret tour .

But through it all, the 59-year-old entertainer — who recently partnered with Olivier Midy — is staying fresh thanks to on-the-road must-haves like Chanel No. 5 Deodorant ($65), which she spritzes on in place of perfume.

Chanel No. 5 Deodorant

“You can spray it in your hair [and] over your body. I love Chanel No. 5, so that’s one thing I can’t live without,” she tells Page Six Style of the product, which features the same iconic fragrance for a fraction of the price of No. 5 perfume.

It’s not the only item she’s keeping in tow on tour; de Lesseps also counts Vita Liberata Body Blur ($39) as a pre-performance essential, telling us it “gives you a tan, but [also] evens out your skin.”

Vita Liberata Body Blur

The Countess also counts on an “easy” skincare routine courtesy of Olivier Midy’s Le Système Midy ($420), a three-step regimen that includes an oil-to-milk face wash, anti-aging essence and face oil.

“I love the tightening aspect of it, especially for stage and for life in general. We’re fighting gravity over here!” she says.

And while money can’t buy you class, it can buy you a bottle of “amazing” Philip B. Lightweight Deep Conditioner ($20+) — the Bravo OG’s favorite stuff for “soft and silky” hair.

Phillip B. Lightweight Deep Conditioner

After all, while the star might be known for her glamorous onstage style, she likes to keep her primping process streamlined to only the essentials.

“I love performing … what I hate is getting ready,” she tells us, joking, “I’m like a dog that’s in the bath; just let me out of here get me on the stage already.”

She brings the same philosophy to first dates, ditching the Jovani sparkles and full-faced glam from her romance-inspired tour for “enticing” lipstick — Maybelline makes some of her favorites — and a classic LBD.

“I like to look less made-up for guys,” says the star, whose top dating advice boils down to making the first move.

“I think sometimes women are afraid to take chances and be forward,” she says. “What’s wrong with the girl making the move? I feel like women should be less timid in that area … Get what you want.”

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Why Trust Page Six Style Shopping

This article was written by  Hannah Southwick , Commerce Writer/Reporter for Page Six Style. Hannah spies deals on actually affordable celebrity-worn styles , puts  Hollywood’s favorite labels  to the test and finds the  beauty products  that keep stars red carpet-ready. She consults stylists and industry pros — including celebs themselves — for firsthand product recommendations, trend predictions and more. In addition to writing for Page Six since 2020, her work has been featured in USA Today and Parade.