Monday, April 04, 2011

"Can't you all see how beautiful this is?" GD/NRPS: Saturday, April 24, 1971, Wallace Wade Stadium, Duke University, Durham, NC

I am intimately familiar with this show. It was in that first batch of ____________ [fill in blank: 10, 20, however many] great tapes I got from _____________ [fill in name, e.g., "John Smith" or other best description, e.g., "freak I met in the record store in Santa Barbara to whose Lompoc address I mailed two nice tight boxes of XLIIs from that place in Berkeley, never heard anything back, then received the tapes in a wrinkled paper bag left on the doorstep of my parents' house 250 miles away one day 9 months later")]. Every Deadhead who ever collected tapes has that story.

Anyway, some incredible photographic linkage of the New Riders and the Grateful Dead on this "Joe College Weekend." Truly glorious photographs of Garcia playing pedal steel in the bright spring sunshine (or does it look windy and a little overcast? anyway). Wow. Just take them in. Thank you to photographer Ric Carter for sharing these, and much more besides!

Coupla things to say about this show.

First, note that in the lossless realm, there is still only one source, shnid-2579, "ripped and seed by Mike Lai" and seeded to Lai's own FTP server within or affiliated with the etree.org domain (remember those?) in the first quarter of 2001. People who were early to the lossless thing will recognize that assignation: amazing sounding material, usually seeded with sector boundary errors (SBEs) ... the dreaded "sbefail" tag. But as has been argued to me, that was a strange obsession about glitches that were minor compared to, say, the wow, flutter, pitch, speed, degradation, flaking, sun-baking, splicing, recording-over and other problems with the source cassettes. And we should give this gentleman credit for sharing tremendous amounts of time, money, bandwidth (before it was so plentiful) and, of course, music with so many people. I have no idea if anyone will ever try to research and write histories of this sort of thing in a serious way, but some of these pioneers are at risk of getting glossed over in the record, as if the world jumped from CD to FLAC with no agency moving history.

This source sounds absolutely fantastic, even better than my beloved, crusty old cassette tape. I would also note the name in that source of Michael K. Weise, who wrote the first program (mkwACT) that made it easy to losslessly encode wav files. This was part of a technological revolution that revolutionized music sharing. From that whole thing we have the archive, probably the most amazing collectively fan assembled music resource in the history of the world. (How's that for hyperbole!)

Second, this is a classic Grateful Dead show.  Truckin' is a trainwreck ... Bobby changes keys midway through, and Jerry and Phil are really straining to hit the harmony notes. Cumberland Blues false starts, with Weir explaining that "All this fuckin' around has put our instruments out of tune".

"Hard to Handle" remains my favorite version (yes, 4/28/71 and 8/6/71, I'm talking to you). It's not perfect, but listen to what Mr. Philip Lesh is doing to that bass guitar of his. He is playing that nice '71 bass with the crisp sound, which is audible on all of the officially released 1971 GD material (e.g., the fantastic summer '71 Road Trips.  @ 6:19, pounding out the notes to grab Garcia from where he is soaring and snap him into the one on time and in key. Fantastic.

The whole show is just classic April '71. Pretty good Pigpen, also featuring "Next Time You See Me" and a long, April '71 (need I say more, one week to the day after Princeton and the "Brooklyn Bridge rap"?) Good Lovin'. No far out jams, which is true of the whole month (I think the 4/28 and 4/29 material is egregiously overrated, not least from Cornell Syndrome -- tape circulation with three features: widely spread, good performance, fantastic sounding). "Sing Me Back Home" is a transcendent masterpiece until it sort of thuds at the end.  And who is that playing organ so delicately behind SMBH, Pigpen?

Check it out from archive.org.




One archive.org patron says this:
I was at this show -- it ran about 12 hours, starting with Mountain, then the Dead, and finally the Beach Boys. Either Phil or Jerry told the crowd that they'd never been on the same bill with the Beach Boys although both were huge California bands. Just three days later, on April 27, the Beach Boys joined the Dead onstage at the Fillmore East during the Dead's 5-day run there, and they played 6 or 7 songs together. I guess that makes the show at Duke somewhat historic.
Absolutely. The 4/27/71 GD/Beach Boys thing is a classic. Having read Corry for a few years now, I am guessing there was a record company aspect to that? Anyway, this is a great college gig from a fantastic month of college (and other!) gigs which, while capitalizing on the success of 1970, was probably the inflection point in cementing the Dead's viability as a national touring act for the next, oh, 24 years. This is true not only in terms of popularity, but also professionalism. There were a lot of glitches leading into this tour, as there had been of every GD tour previously. But from this point forward, tours would happen with fewer and fewer problems, much greater predictability.

Third, just a little piece of arcania, but I absolutely love it. At least twice a fantastically blissed out young lady, 17 year-old Barbara Harlan, who was wandering topless onstage, gets ahold of a microphone and makes herself heard. I cannot believe it, but I can't remember in which track she makes her first appearance. I am listening now and will try to edit post once I have it. But the second one is at @ 1:09 of track 14, "Sing Me Back Home." Here our blissed-out friend poses the titular question, with a real (and appropriate-seeming) sense of urgency. Can't you all see how beautiful this is?

Fourth, alas no, I can't see it directly, though my mind's eye sure can! But I'd note that another archive.org patron says there is video of this show. Since video at Duke has come up in a few threads on various blogs, and I can't remember if this one has been mentioned, I thought I'd just make note, also as a pretext to discuss a show I like and link up those fantastic photographs.

23 comments:

  1. These are amazing photos. UNC had a big event in the football stadium each spring called "Jubilee," (Carter's Allman Brothers photos are from there), but by the early 70s it simply got too large and rock festival like and the University shut it down. I suspect "Joe College Weekend" was a similar thing attempted at Duke. It looks like the opposite result, however--you can see the empty stadium over Garcia's head at one point.

    Wallace Wade Stadium is small, its football capacity is about 42,000. It's also open, so the bands must have been audible all over campus, perhaps partially accounting for the low attendance. Mountain, god bless 'em, was probably audible in Chapel Hill.

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  2. The Dead/Beach Boys connection was actually through Bill Graham's Millard Agency. Keith Badman's Beach Boys chronology mentions that the Boys signed with the Millard Agency in early '71. BGP (via Millard) must have helped arrange the GD booking at Duke as well.

    While I think the bands were just doing it for fun, Graham would have been the first to encourage the Beach Boys to "drop in" at the Fillmore East, since he wanted them to reflect in the Grateful Dead's underground cool. My, that was a long time ago.

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  3. Those are nice photos. Very surprised to see a review of a Dead show on JGMF!

    We had some discussion of the connection between this show and the 4/27/71 Beach Boys appearance in the comments here:
    http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/10/march-26-1967-avalon-ballroom-san.html

    The Archive reviewer who mentions the film of Duke says there's a brief clip of it in a set of home movies, "mostly of hotel rooms, airports, doing nitrous on the bus," etc. Sounds like a roadie's work, not another Duke-student-made film.
    I haven't seen this film mentioned elsewhere - though the Taper's Compendium lists a "very haphazard" 60-minute super-8 B&W home movie compilation thought to be from '72.

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  5. Thanks for linking to my photos. It's always a pleasure to share.
    Stuff from 1996 Furthur Festival coming over the next couple of weeks. Hope you guys will drop by. Posting page additions to Twitter @CartersXRd

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    1. Thanks ric..for contributing to HISTORY!! Love the shots of Jerry on his Emmons D-10 PSG

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  6. I have unseen photos from that day as well. Any suggestions on what to do with them?

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  7. The lineup was MC Uncle Dirty, NRPS with Garcia on peddle steel, Grateful Dead 2 sets, Butterfield Blues Band, The Beach Boys, who said they had waited 4 years to play with the Dead, and Mountain closed the show. A Beautiful day enhanced with Brown Dot!!!

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  8. Wow, Uncle Dirty...set the wayback machine. I assume he did his sort-of-hit-that-couldn't-be-played-on-the-radio, "I Do My Bawling In The Bathroom?"

    [you youngsters may google this if you like, I am not making it up]

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  9. Hi.My name is Barbara Harlan.I was the blissed out girl(17).I believe I was around the stage for a long time according to my voice being heard.I was speaking into the mic on stage,topless.I looked a bit like Janis Joplin,maybe that is why they tolerated me.I think Pigpen has that medic band on his arm because he went to the medic tent with me.Does anyone have photos of the situation?

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  10. Hi Barbara, thank you for posting! What a fabulous little slice of life.

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    1. Thanks,JGMF.Just another Saturday in the Chapel Hill/Duke days of the early 70's.

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  11. A very brief bit of the Duke video can be spotted online - it's in the "Backstage Pass" video, from about 7:25-7:40:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmHRcC6PJGk

    The crowd's really jumping. Who knows, maybe Barbara is one of the girls by the side of the stage?

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    1. Thanks,Light Into Ashes.I think I was there earlier because Pigpen has that band on his arm.I think he got that with me.You can hear me talking at the very beginning of Good Loving, so I must have been there during the break already.When I paged my brother,you can hear me page my parents,too.They would have been so proud.Probably the highest day of my life.

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    2. I just hope I made Pigpen smile & laugh.

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  12. Right around 3:55 of https://archive.org/details/gd1971-04-24.143959.sbd.boswell.smith.miller.clugston.flac2496/Gd71-04-24S2t01GoodLovin.flac: "I see Bruce [inaudible]." I had thought she said Barlow, but it sounds like something else.

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    1. Hi,I was paging my brother,Bruce Berlow.How funny.I think I paged my parents,too.What patient guys,The Grateful Dead.

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  13. Your paper bag story made me think of something from 20 years ago. Mail trades were still huge, I was doing FTP downloading via dialup in those days (huge thanks and respect to the old TOL site!), but that took too long, tied up the phone, selection was limited, etc. I came across some trading website that had a list of people looking to trade, with ebay-like ratings on their tape quality and reliability and such. I found a guy in there who apparently lived just a few streets over from me who I did not know but had a HUGE list. Even weirder he had a horrible negative review about stiffing a guy on a 100 disc cd spindle trade, written by a quesadilla vendor named Ernie who I had met at a music festival a couple months before who gave my dead car battery a jump at the end of the weekend. It was horrible irony, I personally knew the guy who lived in another state and had gotten stiffed on all these shows I wanted, while the guy who apparently had them lived only a mile from me but had all kinds of warnings of being unreliable and stiffing people on trades.

    I do miss the mystique of surprise packages in the mail and how special it was when you FINALLY got such and such date, but I sure do enjoy pressing the wifi button on my phone at work, going to the LMA, and having the option to wirelessly sift through 8 sources for a single date and sample each one to see which is best for me and not lugging around a backpack full of tapes and cds. That was always my job when younger and would get together with friends in an environment where music was needed (that's everywhere in my world, I guess thats why I got the job). I still suspect my posture was affected from those years of carrying backpacks with radios, spare batteries, and 10 lbs of tapes.

    Sorry, that little story has nothing to do with the topic here. But I still wonder who that trader with thie big collection who lived around the corner was. It was like someone saying your soul mate lives in your neighborhood, but the only clue as to who she is was that she may or may not have a Grateful Dead sticker on her car. I never tried writing to meet up with him, the warnings about him ripping people off turned me off.

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  14. Oh, I also meant to say that I would also love to see someone write up something about that early evolution to digital and internet trading. That transitional era from mp3 websites like "GdLive" to the people who set up ftp sites with shn files. I recall one guy who was an attorney in New York whose office had killer bandwidth so his firm was essentially being used to seed out all these new digital sources. Can't even remember his name now, though he actually wound up also mailing me some stuff so I must have had his contact info at some point.

    I think there may have been some writing about this period in that excellent college thesis that gal wrote quite a long time ago on the history of tape traders. I think I had saved a copy of that? I certainly know it's buried/lost, and last time I tried looking for it online a few years back it wasn't available anymore.

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  15. Yeah! You are certainly write that we have lost some things like anticipation, truly appreciating something high quality from the sea of hiss, wow and warble, etc.

    On the history of that transition, I agree! I think we at least need an oral history of the FTP era, TMNSP (and my little wing of it, misSHN in the Rain), etc. gdlive! Then there were the binaries, which I never really figured out. Seektables, sector boundaries, etc. Good times!

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  16. The stadium was scaled for $90,000 gross, so a little over 20,000 capacity. The Dead got $10,000 guarantee but only 7,000 were there, they need 12,500+ to get more

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