Tag Archives: Jerry Garcia

Earth Opera: Americana Lost and Found

The first Earth Opera album / Elektra Record

After the British Invasion led by The Beatles brought forth hundreds of new English bands, American record labels began aggressively looking for homegrown talent in the mid-1960s. Fanning out across the country as if it were a military operation, they looked at geographic pockets where club scenes developed that would support a thriving music scene from which to draw talent and fans. For example, I grew up in Philadelphia, and not too long after the 1967 Monterey Pop festival took place, local bands such as Woody’s Truck Stop, Mandrake Memorial, Sweet Stavin’ Chain, Edison Electric Band, American Dream, High Treason, and Nazz were signed up and had albums on the shelves.

Up north in Boston there was a similar situation, but with a twist. A producer named Alan Lorber came up with a marketing strategy for MGM Records that put the groups under the umbrella term of the “Bosstown Sound” as a counterpoint to the wave of albums branded as the “San Francisco Sound.” Some of the more well-known Boston-based groups included Ultimate Spinach, Beacon Street Union, Orpheus, Eden’s Children, and one that sounded so very different than the rest: Earth Opera.

Peter Rowan was born in 1942 and learned to play guitar at an early age. In 1956 he had a rockabilly band called The Cupids, and eventually switched over to acoustic guitar after hanging around the Boston blues and folk scene. Eventually he fell in love with bluegrass, and through his friend banjoist Bill Keith found himself in Nashville auditioning for Bill Monroe’s band. He recorded 14 tracks with Monroe in October 1966 as a guitarist and vocalist, and together they co-wrote “Walls of Time” which has become a country classic covered by many.

A year later Rowan left Monroe’s band and was back in Boston with a whole bunch of songs that he had written that were anything but bluegrass, more in keeping with the more experimental music of the time period. Reaching out to mandolinist David Grisman, who had played in the Even Dozen Jug Band with John Sebastian and Maria Muldaur when he was attending classes at NYU, they soon connected with Peter Siegel, a mutual friend who was a producer for Elektra Records. Getting them an audition with label head Jac Holzman led to a signing in early 1967, and they returned home to put together a full band.

They added John Nagy on bass and Bill Stevenson, who filled out their sound with piano, organ, harpsichord, and vibes, which outside of a studio was not a common instrument for a rock band. After playing some local gigs, the still nameless group traveled to New York in October to record an album, utilizing Billy Mundi (a session player and member of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention) and Warren Smith on percussion before adding jazz influenced Paul Dillon as their full-time drummer. Earth Opera released in April 1968, and Billboard magazine noted that the songs “soar in lyrical content, more so than others” and added it “should take off in short order.” It never charted, but the group performed at clubs often with their labelmates The Doors, and they ended the year opening for Michael Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and friends’ Super Session at the Fillmore East for two nights in December.

“The Red Sox Are Winning” was the first song on side one of the album and probably the best known, at least in Boston. As you can hear, there are multiple layers of instrumentation and sounds that blend elements of folk, jazz, and chamber orchestra textures to create a very distinctive sound. In the summer of 1968, Paul Williams, who founded Crawdaddy!magazine published an article titled “The Way We Are Today: Earth Opera and Joni Mitchell” that contrasted, in what must have been a crazy drug-fueled night at his typewriter, the debut releases of each. What he writes is long and dense, but here’s just a brief observation:

“Joni Mitchell (Reprise 6293) and Earth Opera (Elektra 74016) are recently released record albums, and it may be important that they are extremely textured, soft and rich albeit specific and even abrasive at places (last cuts on the first sides), comfortable. They fill the air — you can relax and bury your face in what they have to sing. They don’t bring up other problems; they are self-contained, and indeed obscure other matters, smoothing them over in your mind, consciously directing you toward concerns of their own. Earth Opera/Joni Mitchell are an aspect of experience, as well as the product of same; what we are today and soon is shaped by what we hear of them. And we are you and me.”

Despite the lack of chart success the first time around, a second album was released in 1969 titled The Great American Eagle Tragedy. Discogs tags it as both psychedelic and country rock, and much of the lyrical content delivers a strong anti-Vietnam War message. The cover has the US presidential seal with a superimposed death skull and what looks like blood stains. The album made it on the Billboard Top 200 chart, reaching #181, surrounded by Porter Wagoner, the Incredible String Band, and Pacific Gas and Electric. The single “Home to You” also got a Top 60 Pop Spotlight. “Their current album is making a big radio dent and this potent blues rock item has it to put them into a singles disk race and fast. Could go all the way.” It didn’t.

The pedal steel on this song is played by Bill Keith, and throughout the album Velvet Underground’s John Cale contributed viola. While the single didn’t bring them any success, the lyrically powerful, over-ten-minutes-long anti-war song “The American Eagle Tragedy” received a lot of airplay on the FM underground radio format. I’m not going to post it in the column because of its length, but if you’d like to check it out, here’s a YouTube link. The band split up soon after.

Peter Rowan quickly hooked up with an old friend, fiddle player Richard Greene, for Seatrain’s second, self-titled album and then The Marblehead Messenger, both produced by George Martin. The two left in the early 1970s to form Muleskinner with Bill Keith, Clarence White — the former guitarist for both the Kentucky Colonels and The Byrds — bassist John Kahn, and drummer John Guerin, another ex-Byrd. Rowan also worked with his two brothers, putting out three albums. And after Muleskinner he formed Old & In the Way with Greene, Kahn, and Jerry Garcia.

Grisman, who had played the mandolin on the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty album, also was added to the Old & In the Way lineup and Greene left, to be replaced with Vassar Clements. When the band ended, Grisman began recording both solo and group albums with a variety of players, and his friendship and collaboration with Garcia lasted for decades, until the latter’s passing.

John Nagy continued a long career as producer, engineer, and session player working with Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Mimi Farina, Chip Taylor, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, and Grisman. Paul Dillon also worked with Paxton as well as folksinger Paul Siebel. Bill Stevenson backed up John Lee Hooker for a bit and then some of Canada’s best loved musicians including Amos Garrett, Colleen Peterson, and Linda Carvery. He has hosted his own national radio series for CBC. His trio’s album For the Record captured the 2008 East Coast Music Association award for Best Jazz Recording.

While much of Earth Opera’s sound was more progressive and often sounded like chamber music, I put them squarely in that pre-Americana time period where so many bands were bringing together diverse traditional roots music backgrounds and creating and experimenting with new ways of expression. Both of Earth Opera’s albums were reissued on CD in 2003, and are available on streaming sites.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Days Between: A Celebration of Jerry Garcia

My autographed cover of Garcia/Photo by Easy Ed

Jerry Garcia was born on August 1, 1942, and died on August 9, 1995. In what has become an almost institutionalized acknowledgement and commemoration of his life and musical accomplishments, the first nine days of August have become known as The Days Between, with worldwide celebrations, concerts, radio tributes, film screenings, informal gathering of fans, curated playlists on the streaming sites, and shared memories of the people he touched. This is mine.

Very late on a cold night in October 1973 our car was parked with the engine running and the heater blasting. We were on a desolate service road that led to the freight and cargo terminal of the Philadelphia International Airport waiting for a shipment to be delivered from California. At the time my wife and I were 21 and had been married for almost two years, and we both worked together at a local independent record distributor. We had eagerly volunteered to assist our newest client, Grateful Dead Records, who were just days away from the release of the band’s new album, Wake of the Flood.

Jerry’s first known studio sessions as recorded at Stanford’s KZSU radio station in 1962.

With artist Rick Griffin creating an exquisite cover design, it was decided that they would print up posters of the album with the word ‘Here” on the top and ‘Now” on the bottom and have them stuffed into each box of 25 at the Columbia Records pressing plant in New Jersey. When record stores received their orders they could hang the posters in the window. Seemed to be a better marketing concept than the original idea of selling the album directly to fans from ice cream trucks.

Jerry and his first wife a week after their wedding.

It was after midnight when we pulled up to the loading dock and stuffed a dozen or so boxes into the trunk and backseat of our old sky blue English Ford Cortina. Throughout the evening as we were waiting, we alternated between listening to eight tracks and the radio while inhaling pretty much everything we had rolled and brought along, and the rides across the bridge to the plant in Pittman and then back home to Philly remain a bit hazy. But the mission was accomplished and Garcia and Weir stopped by our office in the afternoon of August 4, 1974. I was out that day attending a class at Temple University, but Jerry signed a copy of his latest solo album for me, wrote “Thanks” on it, added a sketch of a flower pot, and left it for me with my wife. It still hangs on my wall and you can see it at the top of this article, the ink slowly fading over time.

Recorded at the Festival Express, Canada in 1970.

For a fan of the Dead and Garcia in particular, the period between 1970 to 1975 was an amazing and unheralded burst of creative output. In those five years the band released Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, the self-titled two-disc live album also known as Skull and Roses, the three-disc Europe ’72, Wake of The Flood, From the Mars Hotel, and Blues For Allah. In addition, Garcia both performed live and played pedal steel for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, appearing on their debut album; had a separate band along with Merl Saunders that released two albums; made one with Howard Wales; did two solo albums; and debuted his bluegrass band, Old and In The Way. He also appeared as a guest on 18 albums from artists that included Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the many offshoots of Jefferson Airplane, Brewer and Shipley’s “One Toke Over The Line,” Art Garfunkel, It’s a Beautiful Day, David Bromberg, and solo projects from Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Keith and Donna Godchaux.

Early version of NRPS with Jerry Garcia – Cold Jordan (a.k.a. “Better Take Jesus’ Hand”) Canada 1970.

In the first week of August 1974 the Dead were scheduled to perform two nights at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (aka the Civic Center) and those concerts were recorded, preserved, and released as Dick’s Picks Volume 31. In the days leading up to the show the legendary radio promotion man Augie Blume came to town from his home in San Francisco in advance of the band’s arrival, and my wife and I acted as his driver and guide to the city as he set up press and radio interviews for Weir and Garcia, brought fans to his hotel room to share smoke and stories, and generally be the record label’s goodwill ambassador.

April 17, 1972. Tivoli Concert Hall, Copenhagen Denmark.

On the night of the first show we waited for Augie outside the hotel to take him to the venue and accompany him backstage. He walked out with the group and a few dozen other people who piled into a fleet of rental cars, and as he got into our beat-up old car, Garcia noticed and gave us a quick wave. The experience to witness and immerse ourselves from behind the curtain to not just the music but also the familial dynamics of what can best described as a mystical traveling carnival of intensely creative and intelligent artists and endless cast of characters who drew energy from each other, the audience, and an endless infusion of chemical enhancement was an indelible watermark in my life. And I’m most surprised that I can still remember it.

April 17, 1972. Tivoli Concert Hall, Copenhagen Denmark.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Bill Browning and The Grateful Dead: 60 Years of ‘Dark Hollow’

Back in 1958 a young singer-songwriter from West Virginia named Bill Browning recorded for a small regional record label. After one of his tunes – “Borned With The Blues” – was released, the song on the flip side of the record was quickly noticed and re-recorded by two other artists with better distribution: Luke Gordon and Jimmie Skinner. While Browning and His Echo Valley Boys’ version was cut in the rockabilly style, Gordon and Skinner’s versions are heavily influenced by Hank Williams. The song was called “Dark Hollow.”

For a song recorded dozens of times by numerous artists and that has become a staple at bluegrass jams, there is very little known about Bill Browning. He was born in 1931 in Wayne County, West Virginia, and actively recorded for three years on several labels including Island, Alta, Enola, Quality, and Starday. During that time period up until 1960, he also performed on WWVA’s Jamboree radio show, and he played gigs in both his home state and Ohio. Sometime in the early 1970s he moved to Hurricane, a small town in West Virginia, and opened up a recording studio while also running Alta Records, which he did until he passed away from cancer in 1977, just shy of his 46th birthday.

Jimmie Skinner was born in Berea, Kentucky, and his family rode that “hillbilly highway” to Hamilton, Ohio, in the early ’30s. Although his recording career had several false starts and didn’t take off until 1949, he managed to write a song that charted for Ernest Tubb and another for Johnny Cash. Throughout the ’50s, Skinner was based in Cincinnati and recorded for Capitol, Decca, and Mercury, where he took “Dark Hollow” to #7 on the country charts.

Luke Gordon’s family also migrated from Kentucky, but headed east to Falls Church, Virginia. He performed in the Washington, DC, area, often entertaining for the wounded military men at Walter Reed hospital in Bethesda and became well known in the Northern Virginia area. His version of “Dark Hollow” also charted, and in 1966 he created his own record label called World Artist.

How the song morphed into a bluegrass standard isn’t clear, although it appears that both Mac Wiseman as well as Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys featuring Larry Sparks started playing it around the same time, in the mid- to late ’60s.

There’s some interesting theories on how the song finally came to the Grateful Dead, with some folks giving Bob Weir credit and others pointing to Jerry Garcia, which seems to make more sense to me. In 1963 Jerry met his first wife, Sara Ruppenthal, and as a duo they played folk and bluegrass at local clubs around Palo Alto. The following year he started up the Black Mountain Boys, a bluegrass band with him playing banjo, Eric Thompson on guitar, future NRPS member David Nelson on mandolin and the Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter doing bass. There’s a great long recording of them here. Garcia was so into bluegrass that he traveled to Bill Monroe’s annual festival with the hope of auditioning for him but lost his nerve.

In March of 1967, Garcia had gone electric and was down in Los Angeles. Visiting the Ash Grove, a famed local club of the time, he introduced a set of Clarence and Roland White’s band and it included this version of “Dark Hollow,” which is close to the style that the Dead eventually recorded acoustically around 1970 and released on the Bear’s Choice album in 1973.

Folks who keep track of such things note that the Dead performed the song over 30 times over a 10-year period, with at least a few electric versions. In 1973, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, and John Khan were in Muleskinner, a bluegrass band with Bill Keith and Clarence White, releasing one album that featured “Dark Hollow.” When the three left and formed Old and In The Way along with Garcia and Vassar Clements, the song was again included in their repertoire.

The list of bands who have continued performing this American folk song is extensive and includes the following: J.D. Crowe and The New South, Larry Sparks and The Lonesome Ramblers, Kentucky Colonels, Seldom Scene, Country Gazette, David Bromberg, Tony Rice, String Cheese Incident, Bill Monroe, Del McCoury, Dwight Yoakum, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and a few dozen more.

We’ll close this one out with not one … not two … but three different versions from the Dead and friends. The first is from 1970 with Jerry playing pedal steel guitar, followed by an acoustic version from the October 1980 Radio City Music Hall series, and the last features just Jerry and Bob with Joan Baez at a benefit concert in 1987.

Happy 60th and hats off to Bill Browning.

New Riders of The Purple Sage: Americana Lost and Found

Halloween 1970 in Novato, California. From left to right: David Nelson, Jerry Garcia, Marmaduke, Mickey Hart, and Dave Talbert. Photo by Mary Ann Mayer.

John Collins Dawson IV,nicknamed both Marmaduke and McDuke, was only 64 when he died peacefully in Mexico eight years ago. Growing weary of life on the road as a professional musician, he retired in 1997 and had moved to San Miguel de Allende with his wife. Dawson, a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, was doing weekly gigs at The Underground in Menlo Park in May of 1969 when an old friend of his was tinkering around with a pedal steel guitar and asked if he could sit in with him.

“I first met Jerry Garcia at the house of my guitar teacher, who was my best friend’s mother,” Dawson told Instant Armadillo News. “It was during the folk music days in Palo Alto, sometime, I guess, before I left for my first semester at Millbrook School in New York, in September of 1959. After that, I would run into him often when I went into Dana Morgan’s shop in Palo Alto. He rented a space there to give guitar lessons, and whenever he wasn’t teaching, he’d be in the front of the place, picking his guitar (or banjo or mandolin), and holding forth.”

After two months of playing as a duo, they decided to expand the group and play straight country-western. They recruited David Nelson for lead guitar. Nelson was an old friend who had played in The Wildwood Boys, a bluegrass band with Garcia. Mickey Hart from the Dead sat behind the drums, bass was handled first by Alembic Studios engineer/producer Bob Matthews, followed by Phil Lesh. They called themselves New Riders of The Purple Sage.

“So there we had it: a full, five-piece band,” Dawson recalled. “And the neat thing was, the Dead would only have to buy two more plane tickets and we could go on the road with them, as an opening act. It would give Jerry, Phil, and Mickey a chance to warm up before theirset and it would give our music and my songs a national audience. After doing more gigs than I can remember locally that summer, we did the two extra ticket thing and went on the road with The Grateful Dead in the fall of 1969.”

In early 1970 Dave Torbert took over on bass, and when Mickey Hart decided to take a sabbatical from touring with the Dead, they enlisted former Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden, who eventually also became their manager. It was that lineup, with Garcia still on pedal steel and banjo, that was signed to Columbia Records, and their self-titled debut was released in August 1971. Every single song on the album was written by John Dawson.

According to the Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1998), the album “blended country rock with hippie idealism, yet emerged as a worthy companion to the parent act’s lauded American Beauty.” When Dawson passed away, Rob Bleetstein, archivist for the band, wrote in an email to the LA Times that “Dawson’s songwriting brought an incredible vision of classic Americana to light with songs like ‘Glendale Train’ and ‘Last Lonely Eagle.’”

In addition to the songs he wrote for the New Riders, Dawson co-wrote the Dead’s “Friend of The Devil” with Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter. And he also contributed in some manner … guitar, maybe vocals … to at least three Dead albums: Aoxomoxoa, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

Garcia left the band in November 1971, and was replaced by Buddy Cage, who came from Ian and Sylvia’s Great Speckled Bird. The lineup stayed intact for Powerglide, The Adventures of Panama Red, Gypsy Cowboy, and Home, Home On The Road. Torbert exited the group in 1974 for Bob Weir’s Kingfish, and Dryden stayed for another three years. Dawson, Nelson, and Cage carried on with a number of bassists and drummers up until 1982, ultimately releasing 11 albums. When it came to touring, they were road warriors.

For the next 15 years, until he left for Mexico, Dawson teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Rusty Gauthier, and, along with a number of supporting musicians, they continued to tour and released one album, Midnight Moonlight, on Relix Records. In 2006 David Nelson and Buddy Cage re-formed NRPS to take the music of John Dawson “back to the ears of adoring crowds.” Dawson not only blessed the endeavor but “was excited to know his music is being heard live again by a new generation of fans.”

I got a chance to see the original band on their first tour with the Dead, and several times in the early ’70s. They’ve always been one of my favorite bands and I never quite understood why they haven’t been acknowledged as one of the pioneers in this thing we call Americana. Solid songwriting, great musicianship, and they carried on the sound of Bakersfield-style country, not unlike the Flying Burrito Brothers. But in 2002 they were given a lifetime achievement award by High Times magazine, so I guess there’s that.

For a complete history of the band, check this out. John Dawson’s personal memories, which include some of the quotes I used above, is here.

Update: In 2012 Buddy Cage was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and has been battling blood cancer and a heart condition. Though he managed to stay on the road playing, he passed away on February 4, 2020.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

The Americana-ization of Bob Weir

Bob Weir met Jerry Garcia at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in Palo Alto, early in 1963. Before the Beatles came along and influenced them into forming an electric rock band, the pair’s group was known as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Bringing in elements of country, folk, bluegrass, and blues, they plugged in, added some folks, became the Grateful Dead and … y’all know the rest.

When I first saw the Dead, it was in a small college gymnasium. The New Riders of the Purple Sage, with Jerry Garcia sitting in on pedal steel, opened the show, and much of the material that the Dead performed that night came from Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Five years later, I watched Old and In the Way take the stage with Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, and John Kahn. They delivered a stellar set of traditional bluegrass.

As the Dead greatly expanded their music vocabulary through the years, my personal interest in them went from attending dozens and dozens of their concerts throughout the ’70s, to finally drifting away. Honestly, I just got bored with the scene rather than the music. Nonetheless, it’s always surprised me that so many fans of traditional music — as well as writers, reviewers, and even publications such as (the previous incarnation of) No Depression — never seemed to be able to draw the distinction between their jam band rock-ola experience and the fact that the Dead’s origins were grounded in American roots music.

To put it bluntly, I believe the Grateful Dead were doing Americana music long before a bunch of people came together in the late 1990s and actually decided to call it Americana.

Which brings me to Bob Weir.

In August, it was announced that in support of his new solo album Blue Mountain, Weir would be in Nashville during the Americana Music Festival and Conference to take part in a workshop where he’ll play songs from the album. Producer Josh Kaufman will be on hand and Buddy Miller will moderate a Q&A. Here’s a little of what to expect:

Whether it was hocus, pocus, magic, or an outstanding lobbying effort from his record label, publicist, and management team, the week after that event was scheduled came big news that Weir will receive the Lifetime Achievement: Performer award at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on September 21. Whatever the circumstances surrounding Weir being selected, this recognition is more than well-deserved.

As far as I can find, there’s never been any acknowledgment of the Dead’s contribution to the genre from the AMA. Its members have earned some accolades from the association — Jerry Garcia was given the President’s Award in 2008, and Dead lyricist Robert Hunter got the Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting in 2013 — but the band itself has never actually been named. Feels to me like there’s an opportunity there in the future to do the Dead right.

While it’s impossible to separate the man from the Dead, there is a documentary by Mike Fleiss titled The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir, which is a great starting point. Available on Netflix for the past year, it offers a detailed oral history with great archival footage and music. But it was the intimate and loving look at Weir’s life today as both husband and father that filled my heart … a true lifetime achievement on its own.

https://youtu.be/HRuaRcqvnzc

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression:: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Driving That Train, High On Rogaine … Dead Ahead

If you haven’t already heard, a reasonable facsimile of the Grateful Dead are reuniting “one last time” for three shows in Chicago’s Soldier Field over the Fourth of July weekend, to celebrate their 50th anniversary. It’s a dream come true for thousands and thousands of Deadheads. Tickets sold out in a heartbeat when they went on sale in February. When I perused StubHub today, you could still at least get in the door each day, if you wanted an obstructed view seat for a mere $500 starting point, with a general admission floor ticket selling for $13,385. The big enchilada that was listed a week ago, and is now gone: a three-day pass, for $114,000. Not a typo.

One last time? Ha. Just this past week, the band added two more dates in California. In rock and roll lingo, words like “final,” “last,” “farewell,” and “goodbye” are mere approximations of reality. They tend to bop ’til they drop. And, while the number of dearly departed band members far exceeds those that are still alive – with the addition of “Dead for a Day” Trey Anastasio and “Almost Dead” Bruce Hornsby to fill in the missing pieces – it’s likely to be an excellent celebration of music and culture. Despite aging like the rest of us baby boomers, surviving members Phil Lesh (age 74), Bob Weir (67), Mickey Hart (71), and Bill Kreutzmann (68) are far from geriatric and will definitely kick ass (albeit a saggy one).

I first saw the Dead on April 10, 1971, at East Hall, on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. I remember a few things from that night – I drank a lot of apple cider, which was passed around at the foot of the stage in gallon jugs. I also remember seeing Jerry Garcia play pedal steel guitar for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who opened that concert, and Pigpen on organ, harp, and vocals before he left us less than two years later. It was a magical night. I screamed, hollered, and danced for hours. It launched my ten-year fixation on the band.

That fixation ended one night at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, as I watched the sun do a slow-mo fade into the San Francisco Bay. I decided to bail out while they were at the peak; the scene had eclipsed the music.

Through both the miracle of technology and a large group of fans and fanatics committed to saving every single note that the Dead has ever played, with the touch of a mouse I can not only scan the set list and read the recollections from my fellow concert attendees, but I can also stream the show in the comfort of my home. It’s up on the Internet Archive website, along with thousands of other shows they’ve played over the years. That site is hardly exclusive to the Dead, although they are probably one of the bands most extensively represented.

We used to just call that bootlegging. Today, it’s an opportunity to catalog and digitally preserve another piece of fading American history.

Since most of us won’t be refinancing our homes to buy a ticket and travel to Chicago or California, there will likely be opportunities to stream, download, and/or view those concerts, too. And it looks like there will be a documentary of the event released in 2016.

The ‘Core Four’ members of the band sent out this press release:

Millions of stories have been told about the Grateful Dead over the years. With our 50th Anniversary coming up, we thought it might just be time to tell one ourselves and Amir Bar-Lev is the perfect guy to help us do it. Needless to say, we are humbled to be collaborating with Martin Scorsese. From The Last Waltz to George Harrison: Living In The Material World, from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones, he has made some of the greatest music documentaries ever with some of our favorite artists and we are honored to have him involved. The 50th will be another monumental milestone to celebrate with our fans and we cannot wait to share this film with them.

If you’re filled with excitement and can’t wait, I found a treat for y’all on the ‘Tube. And, should you be one of the lucky ones this summer to catch a show, don’t forget the sunscreen, watch what you drink, and beware of the orange Metamucil. Fare thee well.

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.