1968 March 3 - Haight Street

GRATEFUL DEAD

Sunday, March 3, 1968

Haight Street Free Concert

Audience Recording

Anyone following this blog might have seen this one coming. It wouldn't be long before I needed to turn focus to 1968, and since I've proven an affection for AUD tapes, coming to 03/03/68 first makes an almost impossible task of picking a good 1968 show (we'd be sitting in front of my tapes and CDs for an entire evening while I proved completely incapable of picking just one show), all the more easy.

The picture of the Dead playing this concert is one of those historic 1960's Revolution shots that ends up giving many thousands of words to the era. This very listenable digitization of this recording came into circulation in 2002, and it rings every bell when it comes to Dead shows.

A concert event of mythic proportion that nearly no one ever heard on tape.

A golden nugget from a period of time in the Dead's evolution (Jan-Feb '68) where most serious tapers have/had every note in circulation on tape. This was like God himself throwing a towel out to the crowd, or casually letting a poem written on the back of a napkin flutter down to us from heaven (Pick your favorite metaphor. I couldn't).

It's a field recording from an event in cultural history. This makes the musical archeologist in me swoon.

And the last bell rung is a hallmark in Dead taping - the tape runs out as the band is set to go off into the meat of the set which we may never hear (apparently we missed an Other One and Dancin' at the very least). Oh the PAIN!

Psychedelic Blender Rock

In Viola Lee Blues, somewhere two or three hundred light-years into the jam, there is a fabulous out there/in there moment where the band is spiraling and soaring and Jerry locks into a haunting one note slow repetition that feels like some beacon message from an outer planet satellite. A bit later, they somehow find a higher speed on the blender and proceed to whip you so mightily that the vessel in which you're spinning dissolves and you blend into the chaos of primal feedback. You can feel the focused attention of the crowd through this. It is powerful stuff.

03/03/68 etree source info
03/03/68 AUD download