Grateful Dead - Electric Factory, Philadelphia 2/15/69
Grateful Dead - Hollywood Palladium 9/9/72
Grateful Dead - Boston Hall 5/7/77
Been listening to hoards of Dead shows over the last two weeks and it’s getting close to the end of the current arc. In this group we’ve got some good shows and maybe a little better, but for the most part this is a group I don’t generally get excited about. When I listen to the Dead from the first two months of 1969, I’m always surprised just how lackadaiscal they could be, as 1968 could be pretty intense and fierce and they were starting to approach that superlative four day stint at the Fillmore West that spawned Live/Dead, a rare box set and a comp. It doesn’t appear to me that during this early period that they ever even hinted at the type of bomb they were about to drop, as if some of these gigs were just practice for the big event. There’s a general tentativeness to the material, particularly (and I find it a little strange) in the Pigpen numbers, which were generally the band’s standards in the early days.
Jumping a few years later to another incredible period for the Dead and yet another show maybe not up to others on the same tour. After all this was only a week and a half after the incredible Veneta gig and the same month that gave us two separate Dicks Picks, so I think it’s safe to say this gig is pretty minor for the era. Most of the first set material never quite comes up to the intensity you expect from Fall 1972, and it’s really only until the massive Set 2 suite with a gigantic Other One that things get interesting, mostly because of just how weird things get. One does wonder what the pharmaceutical of the day was.
It was very recent that another new version of the Boston 5/7/77 show was just released, although I noticed it after this listen. This is a show I’m pretty familiar with, again during one of the group’s really extraordinary periods. This gig sounds like a lead in to the legendary shows on the 8th and 9th and definitely strikes me as quite a bit weaker, although this has a very solid Terrapin Station and another rather involved an unusual suite that detours into ten minutes of The Wheel and the type of long, passionate Wharf Rat I tend to really like. But better was surely to come.
The Who - Civic Center, San Francisco 12/31/71
While the Dead were belting it out at Winterland, the Who’s New Years Eve Show at the Civic Center was probably more impressive given that they were on the heels, after the rather tedious concept of Tommy, of perhaps their greatest album Who’s Next. So the setlist is generally a combo of the last two albums, featuring some tentative early versions of Next and rather solid Tommy pieces. Given the prior Live at Leeds as well, you could easily pin this on the tail end of their greatest live period. It’s a very solid and respectable sounding Who show with the energy and noise you’d expect.