The Dead are dead, Long Live the Dead

On this First Day of Spring, I figured we could digress a bit from the Top 99.1 to pay tribute to one of the great bands of my young adulthood. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and a small host of other musicians created the Grateful Dead in 1965 and sustained it for the next thirty years. They made original music and covered the works of others from Buddy Holly to The Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones. They inspired a culture like no other band in their time, one that persists even to this day.

 



The group had relatively few Top-40 hits and was famous for its concert performances in several ways. According to the Guiness Book of World Records, they did the most concert performances of any band before or since. They permitted free taping of their shows, so long as no profits were made from the sale and distribution of the tapes. Legendary for their alcohol and drug use, their concert quality was variable, often depending on their "pharmacology," sometimes being fixed -- or broken -- during halftime, resulting in concerts that had one good set and one bad set.

But the 1987 New Year's show at Oakland Coliseum Arena was something special among their 2,500-odd concert performances. For that fall the band had one of its rare Top-40 hits: "Touch of Grey" from their "In the Dark" CD, and their record label put a little something extra behind the show. The technical quality was about the best in the business. Their pharmacology was "managed," resulting in two stellar sets. They played a 25-minute encore that was in some ways more a third set than an encore.

And the concert was carried live on WWDC (DC-101) out of Washington, DC. To record the show, I used my late grandfather's (then still quite new) reversible reel-to-reel tape deck and a pair of brand new top-quality tapes. I set up a rooftop antenna for the occasion. I didn't drink at all through the midnight hour -- the show started at 1 AM on the east coast. I saved my champagne et al until the "third set" had begun, around 4:40 AM local time. The atmosphere was cold and beautiful that night, the lights stayed on, and I went to bed with a big smile, knowing I had just caught the Dead Show of a lifetime.

I also recorded the program on an audio cassette, although that recording was used up in my car radios and is no longer extant. In 1989 I converted the reel-to-reel recording to VHS Hi-Fi, making two copies for safekeeping. In 2013 I digitized it along with the HFS Top 99.1 collection.

So what has this got to do with Einstein's Legacy? The Grateful Dead was not love-at-first-sight for me, raised as I was on the British Invasion and Acid Rock that followed the all-too-short musical life of Buddy Holly. It took me a while to wrap my head around The Dead and their syncopations and improvisations. And that's where WHFS came in. WHFS introduced me to many of these songs. Weasel, David, Damian, Cerphe, Bob Here, and Hall each had their own piece to contribute to my musical appreciation of the Grateful Dead. They explained the group and the music to me so that by 1985 I was deadhead enough to take a day of vacation from work and go party with the band and its faithful at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD. To this day that concert is among my favorite memories of young adulthood, together with this recording and the near-all-nighter I pulled to make it.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have over the years. If you enjoy this program, please post a comment with your nickname ... think if it as signing a guest book. Thanks!

--jkw

19880101 1-First Set.mp3
19880101 2-Second Set.mp3
19880101 3-Encore.mp3