Any Deadhead worth her salt knows the Harpur College gig from May 2, 1970. It's a monster, one of the Dead's best, and long-circulating from FM tapes; it has blown a lot of minds.
I don't remember hearing much about the New Riders set from this night's Evening With the Grateful Dead, so I thought I'd check it out.
Performance: NRPS "meh", but Bobby Ace is real good
Sometimes, things aren't much noted because they aren't really noteworthy. I'd say that's the case here: this is easily the weakest of the sets played this night.
Arrangements need work. Nelson needs more volume and/or confidence. Marmaduke's grating singing gets in the way of enjoying his great songwriting. Garcia and the rest of the band sound fine, but this is only really their second night out and they can't quite unstick the cobwebs wisping over their ears and through their fingers.
I really like the Bobby Ace interregnum. Bobby was coming into his own as a guitarist, singer and stage presence at this time, and this is the perfect feature for the beautiful young man, in well-worn boots, jeans and collarless shirt, with the long pony tail and the handsome persona. The songs are simply wonderful. See my little sketch of the Bobby Ace repertoire here. "Sawmill" is a great little Garciaverse rarity. Country legend Mel Tillis wrote the tune and first released it in 1959 (deaddisc), and the Riders' idol Buck Owens covered it, but it was Tillis's 1973 version that hit #3 on the charts (wiki). This is a great tune! "The Race Is On" also hit #3 on the country charts, for George Jones in 1965. The Dead played it a bunch in 1973, and in the 1980s revived it whenever they'd play on Kentucky Derby Day (e.g., 5/3/86, 5/6/89, 5/5/90), always a vernal treat for Bay Area fans. Merle Haggard got all the way to #1 in August of '68 with "Mama Tried", soon also picked up by the Dead. I prefer the NRPS arrangement, as I do with MAMU. These songs just sound great with steel.
Context: On Campus, May 1970
Still, the context is super interesting. "Harpur College", known to Deadheads the world over for the monster show played on this night. But this was An Evening With the Grateful Dead, and I don't recall seeing much discussion of the evening's middle set by the Dead's white country cousinage, the New Riders of the Purple Sage. This particular zoo got rolling on Friday, May 1st at little Alfred College in upstate New York and steamed into Binghamton for a Saturday show which is an indispensable part of the GD Legend on the East Coast, its economic lifeblood for fifty years. A large generation of baby-boom (and post) northeast corridorians and other city dwellers bought tickets at the time and now buy beautiful, multimodal nostalgia, delivered to the couch, street, car and garden. The Dead were a San Francisco band cashing New York checks. "Harpur College" - every Deadhead, at least, knows those two words. See the Wolinsky review for some flavor.
More broadly, say "college campus" and "Spring 1970", and I am all ears, because this was a really weird time in American history, worth recalling as we consider our current polarization. The Dead played colleges on both sides of the May 4th Kent State shootings. You remember those, "four dead in Ohio" as CSNY put it, and this:
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| John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, May 4, 1970, Kent State University. |
On May 4, 1970 members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine Kent State students. The impact of the shootings was dramatic. The event triggered a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities to close. H. R. Haldeman, a top aide to President Richard Nixon, suggests the shootings had a direct impact on national politics. In The Ends of Power, Haldeman (1978) states that the shootings at Kent State began the slide into Watergate, eventually destroying the Nixon administration. Beyond the direct effects of the May 4th, the shootings have certainly come to symbolize the deep political and social divisions that so sharply divided the country during the Vietnam War era. (Lewis and Hensley, ND).Here's the Dead's itinerary, in the thick of things:
- 5/1: Alfred College
- 5/2: Harpur College
- 5/3: Wesleyan
- 5/4: NRPS free show in the Central Park bandshell!
- 5/5: no show
- 5/6: MIT (free in Kresge Plaza)
- 5/7: MIT (DuPont Gym)
- 5/8: SUNY Delhi
- 5/9: NRPS free show in Boston, then gig at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- 5/10: Atlanta
Listening notes below the fold.
