John A

As the story goes, the tunnel was painted during the 2 months The Dead were in Europe for the '72 tour, so the first time they saw the that rainbow was coming home from the San Fransisco Airport when they returned stateside. It got the moniker the Rainbow Tunnel thereafter, and was renamed the Robin Williams tunnel a few years ago after he checked out. I was conflicted at first about the new name but I've grown to like it. I've gone through it 1000s of times communing from Marin to SF....without ever drawing the parallel to the Estimated lyric. Hell, chance dictates I've probably heard Estimated while in that tunnel!

Steely Dan's song Kid Charlemagne, from their 1976 LP The Royal Scam, is about none other than Owsley "Bear" Stanley and his famed underground chemistry. There's an in depth essay here: http://www.yachtrock.com/captains-blog/2016/10/4/the-story-of-the-lyrics-of-steely-dans-kid-charlemagne It's a great song and tells quite the story...

And speaking of The Boys and beer, we of course know that Phil's suds of choice was Heineken. To the point where he's referred to the early 80s as "the Heineken years", and to the point where he has sung, "I started out on Heineken, but I soon hit the harder stuff" in Tom Thumb's Blues.

Recent CDC buffoonary: when they said mask are no longer needed outdoors when not in crowds, they cited a stat that "less than 10% of transmission occurs outdoors." Ok, so that's technically correct, but it's like saying "less than 10,000 people a year get bitten by sharks" when the actual number is 100. So yeah, that's true, the correct number is less than 10,000. As for Covid transmission, the best scientific estimate is about 0.1% occurs outdoors. Well sure, that's less than 10%, but please quote actual statistics! People are confused enough already.

Sounds like that would be Steve Parish. I''d buy it, assuming he didn't think it would hamper the music.

Do folks know that the main Franklin's Tower riff was partially inspired by the chorus in Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side" which had come out 3 years earlier? If you think about it it's easy to hear.

The Dead absolutely just got worse. Fortunately it didn't happen on a consistent trajectory until, and I'm going to throw out a generalized moment here, the Oakland Halloween run in 1991.

How come so many of these 5-8-77 level DSO shows are in the JK era? I thought the conventional wisdom is they get better with every tour. 🤪 More seriously: I am a DSO lightweight compared to most on this forum, but I think the band is at a whole 'nother level since Skip came on board. And that's beside any JK/Jeff debates. I loved JK, but the dimensions that Jeff adds can't be overlooked. To suggest that the 5-8-77 DSO show is prior to the Skip era doesn't add up for me. It's almost like saying the 5-8-77 Dead show was in the Brent era. (And in fairness, some of the suggestions in this thread are 60s era shows with the current line up.)

I'm guessing the naked hippie on the scaffolding behind the stage at Veneta '72 shares that same sentiment. 😆 As for greatest show ever, there are perhaps a dozen each from '72, '73, and '74 that eclipse 5-8-77, and a few others from '77 as well. And that's coming from an Ithacan.

We made great spaced omni Schoeps FOBs of Carson. Played the shit out of those Phil notes to open the Help on the Way. Fun times but hot as hell. Over 100 degrees I think.

I'd like to circle back to this Bentley business - wild. I never knew that! Signed, The Happily Vaccinated

Jerry belts out an "I'd rather be with you" in that Standing On The Moon at Irvine '89 that resonates to this day. As an interesting aside to that Irvine run, I spoke on a cell phone for the first time driving into the parking lot - in those days it was technically a "car phone". A friend had borrowed her aunt's car, and said aunt had given her permission to use the installed phone. I called a buddy back in Ithaca to give him a blow by blow of our entrance to the lot. Wild memory!

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/grateful-deads-wall-of-sound-lives-again-in-some-dudes-basement-11618161994 It's behind a paywall but if you have WSJ access it's a wild read. There's also more here: https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/music/grateful-dead-wall-sound-scale-model

That's some wacky shit. In California, it's a feeding frenzy for us 50-64 year olds to get jabbed in the 2 week slot from 4/1 through 4/15 before the state opens up eligibility for everyone over 16. Fortunately my wife is good and and nabbed me an appointment - ironically on 3/31, a day before I was technically eligible. Sometimes you gotta get one over on the man.

Was at those '88 Byrne shows. Excellent run. The 4 song sequence to open 4/1 was a stunner! Jerry's vocal delivery on the Dew 3/30 is otherworldly.

Extremely rare China -> Rider to open the show, and hard to beat the jam section: Dark Star -> Truckin' -> Morning Dew Jerry must have been a bit feisty that evening, as he introduced Looks Like Rain: "Now here's a real pretty song that Bobby wrote." Ha!

I believe the BCT was the last truly small venue the Dead played (Spring '86). I'd have loved to seen the Fall '84 shows there (1st official taper section shows), which were some of the best of that year, not to mention the epic August '72 run. Here's some trivia, and it's a show I did attend: the first show ever billed as "Phil & Friends" was at the BCT. It was acoustic, with Jerry, Bobby, Phil (on a huge hollow body guitar), and Vince. 9-24-94. It was a benefit for the Berkeley High School music program. There was a very rare, for that era, Duprees Diamond Blues, that Jerry so thoroughly flubbed in a way that only he can. 😀

Sarah Fulcher! Poor woman got hung out to dry. Jerry and Merl never rehearsed with her and just told her to improvise and do her thing. She made it work! She brought Like A Road to Garcia. Big points right there. Jerry got under the hood of that one.

All you needed is to have The Maker follow that up and it wouldn't been a done deal on the Jesus freaks suspicion. Then follow that up with Loose Lucy to really confuse 'em. Congratulations, man! That is if bringing another redneck into the world is a congratulatory offense. 🤪 🥂

Good system with which to whittle away the time during the days of shelter at home. I hope my wife doesn't ask what happened to her white towels. 😀

21-22 from the floor in the NCAA Final. Check out this clip - the man worked the glass like Garcia works his fret board. My question is why did it take Memphis State until Walton was about 15-16 to abandon their zone defense❓ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAnC4cBXAuY

Agreed. Mid to late first set. I want Jerry to be a tad lathered up before diving into that gem. Not to mention giving Healy some time to make sure the sound is just exactly perfect. Remember upon the return of Bird Song in the early 80s it would appear 2nd or 3rd song? Just like Row Jimmy, Jerry needs a wait a bit for that one. Which of course is exactly what happened. As a tangential subject, the way first sets morphed into oft only 3 Jerry songs was a very unfortunate development. 😟

Meanwhile, 4 SEC games are now off for this weekend. And then there's that scene in Notre Dame on the field after they knocked off Clemson. Yowsa.

My daughter, shortly after going back to UC Berkeley this Fall (for 100% remote instruction), got COVID. Fortunately we told her that she wasn't coming home for weekends, as college campuses were fueling the hot spots in September. So we weren't exposed. She had very mild symptoms for just a couple days, except she lost her sense of taste/smell. She only started to get it back about 3 weeks later. What kind of illness barely touches you with any ill effects but takes out your olfactory completely for weeks? When you think about whatever neurological factors may be at play there, it should be fuel concern about what this virus is potentially doing to people. Much of which is still unknown.

Nuggets indeed. One of my favorites. In fact I once posted a write-up I did a few years back in this forum... http://www.dsoforums.net/forum/topic/19215-berkeley-community-theater-11-2-84