During the summer of 1970, the Dead continued to tweak their
concert format. With the addition of the New Riders into the shows, along with
the acoustic sets, the Dead could now provide an entire evening of music on
their own. However, the June 1970 Fillmore West run of the group was
transitional in that the billing followed the traditional Bill Graham three act
format, with the poster listing the Dead, the New Riders, and Southern Comfort.
My father and I went to the Friday show of the set, which meant dealing with
end-of-week traffic that resulted in us getting in a bit after the show had
started. Based on the format of previous Graham-booked Dead shows, we pretty
much expected the Dead’s acoustic set to be folded within their electric set at
the top of the bill. Therefore we were surprised to walk into the Fillmore to
the strains of acoustic guitars and Bob Weir singing “Silver Threads and Golden
Needles.” The acoustic
configuration of the Dead sounded more polished than it had in April, and again
both Hart and Pigpen were absent. The repertoire was pretty familiar, the still
unreleased “Friend of the Devil,” “Me and My Uncle” transferred over from the
electric repertoire, and two tunes from the recently released Workingman’s
Dead: Black Peter and the set closing “New Speedway Boogie,” for which Garcia
switched over to electric guitar. Unlike the previous evening’s acoustic set, a
tape of which recently surfaced, neither
David Nelson nor John Dawson from the New Riders participated in the evening’s
acoustic set,
Following the acoustic Dead set was a great set by
Southern Comfort, a band of seasoned Bay Area blues players that included
drummer-vocalist Bob Jones, organist Steve Funk, guitarist Fred Olson, and a horn
section comprising trumpeter John Wilmeth and saxophonist Rev. Ron Stallings.
The group had recently released their debut album on Columbia, produced jointly
by Nick Gravenites and soon-to-be Garcia sidekick John Kahn. Their big band
blues-rock sound was very much in the style of what Gravenites and guitarist
Michael Bloomfield were dishing out in that era – not too surprising as several
of the Southern Comfort musicians, notably Jones, Wilmeth, Stavro, Olson, and
Stallings, also played in the Bloomfield/Gravenites bands of that era. Sadly,
Southern Comfort proved a relatively short-lived experiment, releasing only the
one, eponymous album in 1970, but they sounded great live.
Next up were the New Riders, playing what may have been
their first Fillmore West run (I have seen the New Riders listed as having
played the evening of 2/7/70, but this is unconfirmed and doubtful). The Riders
had tightened up considerably in the couple of weeks since I had seen them at
Peninsula School, another indicator that David Torbert was a very new recruit
to the band in spring of 1970 (see discussion here). No real surprises in their
set, which was mostly first NRPS album material augmented by tunes like “Truck
Drivin’ Man” and “Six Days on the Road.”
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| Weir and Kreutzmann 8.19.70 Photo: M. Parrish |
The Grateful Dead played a particularly long, expansive
electric set, starting out with their most frequent opener of that era, “Cold
Rain and Snow.” “Easy Wind” brought McKernan to center stage, and provided an
early opportunity for some open-ended jamming, followed inevitably by one of
Weir’s cowboy covers, Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.”
For whatever reason, the Dead rarely played "Dark Star" on
their home turf in 1970 (2/8/70 and possibly 4/11/70 are the only verified Dark Stars
played in northern California that year), but they seemingly loved to trot out
the "Cryptical Envelopment/Other One" suite on home turf. A napkin compilation
shows the Dead playing Dark Star once (possibly twice if they played it on
4/11/70) in Northern California out of 24 shows for which complete set lists
exist. By contrast, they played
the "Cryptical" suite (or sometimes just "The Other One") at 12 of those 24
shows. By contrast, looking at shows in greater Metropolitan NYC (28 total), "Dark Star"
and "Cryptical" were played 11 times each. Needless to say, the long number on
6/5 was again "Cryptical Envelopment" leading into a short drum duel followed by
“The Other One" and back into a long, mellow “Cryptical" Coda, which threatened
to go into "Cosmic Charlie", but eventually wound down, leading directly into the
first hometown version of “Attics of My Life,” which the Dead would shortly be
recording for inclusion on American Beauty. Laced with complex vocal harmonies, “Attics” was always hard
for the Dead to pull off in concert, and this version has its share of shaky
harmonies. Neglected mid-set,
Pigpen was given two showcases in a row, a rollicking, if flub filled, “Hard to
Handle” followed by one of many long, snaky versions of “It’s a Man’s World”
that the Dead played between March and September, 1970, when it mysteriously
vanished from their repertoire for good. As curfew time approached, the main
set wound up with a nice electric version of “Uncle John’s Band.” The encore
consisted of a dynamic twofer of “St. Stephen” charging into “Casey Jones.”
This show was notable for me as the only 1970 Dead show that I was able to hear
all the way to the end although, as fate would have it, I missed its beginning.
Two months later, the Dead announced an early week August run
back at the Fillmore West (this time a full “Evening with the Dead with no
support other than the NRPS), and I convinced my brother, home from college for
the summer, to go up with me for the Wednesday, 8/19/70, show. Contrary to the
report in Deadlists, there was no opening bluegrass group unless they played
well before the 8 PM start time. By August, the Dead’s acoustic sets had become
more arranged and complex, with an acoustic piano onstage and an extended
segment featuring Dawson and Nelson from the New Riders. The band was recording
American Beauty concurrently with the Fillmore run, and thus it was no surprise
that the show featured a good chunk of material from that album, along with a
good selection of traditional folk and blues tunes.
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| Acoustic Dead 8.19.70 Photo: M. Parrish |
Weir kicked things off with “Monkey and the Engineer,” a
tune he learned (along with “Beat It On Down the Line”) from Oakland one man
band Jesse Fuller. Garcia came back with the traditional “How Long Blues”
augmented by some gospel tinged piano. The keyboardist was not clearly visible
from my vantage point (or in the photos), but my thesis is that some of the
piano was played by Ned Lagin (who was visiting the Dead from back east that
summer and played on American Beauty), and the rest was played by
Pigpen. "Friend of the Devil" was composed by John Dawson, Jerry Garcia, and
Robert Hunter in late 1969, and became a hallmark of the Dead’s acoustic sets
from late February. Friend of the Devil had entered the acoustic dead
repertoire early on, but was much more polished in its incarnation that
evening, thanks in part to the addition of the piano part. Weir, whose
compositions on American Beauty consisted of "Sugar Magnolia" and a co-writing
credit on “Truckin,” dipped back into the public domain for the bluegrass
chestnut “Dark Hollow.”
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| 8.19.70: Acoustic Dead - Kreutzmann, Nelson, Garcia, Weir Photo: M. Parrish |
Another Garcia-Hunter ballad, “Candyman” had shown up in
March, and formed the first part of a three song medley of American Beauty tunes, rounded out by the combo of “Brokedown Palace” and “Ripple,” merged the way
they are on the album. These two songs made their live debut that weekend, and
"Ripple" flowed effortlessly out of "Brokedown Palace." Curiously, this pairing was
apparently abandoned as an in-concert vehicle following the August Fillmore
run. Best known as an electric
tune, “Truckin” had debuted in the Dead’s repertoire as an acoustic shuffle the
night before, and was performed that way in concert through September, first
emerging as an electric piece at the 10/4/70 Winterland gig. The acoustic
version was predictably more concise than the expansive versions that emerged
in later years, but was a good vehicle for what was essentially a story song.
The brisk workout on another traditional tune, “Cocaine
Blues” was sung energetically by Garcia, and ornamented by some very fine
mandolin work from David Nelson. Nelson was also instrumental in driving along
Garcia’s version of another bluegrass standard, “Rosalie McFall.” Next Garcia
switched to electric for a couple of tunes, “Wake Up Little Suzie” and “New
Speedway Boogie,” which also featured piano work that I believe is too nimble
to be attributed to Pigpen.
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| Gospel Quartet 8.19.70 Photo: M. Parrish |
To close out the extended acoustic set, Nelson returned, along
with John Dawson, to fill out a bluegrass gospel quartet for a couple of
sweetly sung sacred tunes, “Cold Jordan” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
These shows and the September runs at the Fillmore East were
arguably the pinnacle of the Dead’s acoustic sets. They had experimented with
entire unplugged shows in San Diego on August 5 and at the Family Dog back in
March, but the decision was ultimately made, possibly for logistical reasons,
to scale back the frequency of the acoustic opening sets as the year
progressed, and they were gone entirely by year’s end, replaced by the familiar
format of one or two long electric sets.
After a short break, the New Riders were given a nice long
set, comprising some new Dawson material including “I Don’t Know You,” “Last
Lonely Eagle,” and “Dirty Business,” which was a showcase for some
spectacularly outside Garcia steel playing. By this time, Dawson was sporting a beard, and had traded his Guild acoustic for a Fender Telecaster.
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| Garcia and Lesh 8.19.70 Photo: M. Parrish |