It’s hard to believe that it was 50 years ago today that I first heard the Grateful Dead in my hometown of Palo Alto (well, really in Stanford if you want to get technical). Although I had seen Jerry Garcia played in and around town with Merl Saunders and the New Riders a few times, the Dead had not played in town since the Midpeninsula Free University Be-In in 1967, and a temporary ban on rock concerts at Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater had kept them from the most obvious appropriately sized venue in the area. Thus it was a welcome surprise when the Dead announced that they would open their winter 1973 tour at Stanford University’s basketball stadium, Maples Pavilion. The stadium, named after principal donor Roscoe Maples, had opened in 1969, but this only the fourth time the 7500-capacity venue had been used for a concert after evening shows were banned from Frost in fall of 1970.
The show was memorable musically, but its artistic aesthetics were leavened with a number of physical challenges. The Wall of Sound made its official debut at the Cow Palace the following March, but the Maples show was the debut of the prototype of that system, which replaced the Dead’s traditional wall of amplifiers with stacks of hard truckers speakers and McIntosh amplifiers, creating a towering edifice behind the band for the first time. As has been famously recounted in several Dead histories, and recounted by sound man Dan Healy himself in a 1982 Interview with David Gans (published in Conversations with the Dead), the debut of the new system did not go as planned: “ We spent maybe $20,000 on amps, crossovers and stuff, started the show, and in the first two seconds of the song wiped out every brand-new tweeter. Smoked every single one. “Oh, okay, we learned about that!" you know? We went through all these changes to put these protection devices, and they never worked! They blow long after the speaker’s gone.”
It was further into the opener, “Promised Land,” than two seconds into the song, and you can’t hear it on the edited soundboard tape, but the loud pop and screech as the speakers gave up the ghost was a signal to the audience that all was not going well. The band carried on regardless.
Meanwhile, down on the floor of the pavilion, the carefully arranged rows of folding chairs created both obstacles and hazards to the audience, who were used to stand and flow organically like a giant amoeba since the early days at the Fillmore and Avalon. In relatively short order, the chairs were disassembled and stacked against the stands on the side of the pavilion, and things proceeded as usual for a general-admission Dead show. Speaking of the stands, my friends and I had (wisely, given the circumstances) positioned ourselves about midway back in the stands, away from the folding chair debacle.
A unique feature of Maples Pavilion was its sprung floor, created by matrices of crossed wood under the playing floor that was designed by architect John Warnecke to prevent player injuries. In practice, the floor created greater risks of injuries for players, and it was removed during a $30M retrofit of the stadium in 2004. In the meantime, the combination of the sprung floor, a sea of dancing deadheads, and the towering speaker columns created another hazard, as the towers started to visibly sway back and forwards. Fortunately, the arc of movement of the towers was not sufficient to cause them to fall, but at the peak of their flexure I was glad to be in the stands and not on the floor.
The physical challenges of the gig aside, the Maples show marked the debut of a raft of new material that would comprise the bulk of the Hunter-Garcia material on the band’s next two studio albums. Although both “Stella Blue” and “Half Step Mississippi Uptown Toodeloo” had been road-tested during the last half of 1972, an impressive seven compositions made their debut at the Stanford show. After Weir’s opener, the band moved right into “Row Jimmy,” which managed to blend the wistful balladry of “Stella Blue” with the choral cadences of tunes like “Tennessee Jed” and “Ramble on Rose.”
After solid versions of “Black-Throated Wind,” “Deal” and “Me and My Uncle” Weir apologized for the problems with the new sound system, commenting “This is sort of get the bugs out night – that’s why we’re here.” And “If it irritates you, tonight’s going to get you crazy. Lesh then asked “Is there anyone back there who can’t hear?” As the conversation dropped into mayhem, Garcia slid into “Sugaree.” After another relatively new Weir piece “Looks Like Rain,” the second Garcia-Hunter tune, the uncharacteristically raunchy “Loose Lucy” was rolled out, its mid-tempo boogie accented by a lumbering, repetitive guitar and bass figure.
Deep into the first set, the third new tune appeared, the sparkling “Here Comes Sunshine.” After the sometimes bleak pictures painted in most of the 1971-72 Hunter lyrics, the song’s breezy optimism, shared with “Eyes of the World and “They Love Each Other,” literally brought a warmer, sunnier face to the band that was also embodied in most of their performances during 1973.Lyrically and melodically, “Here Comes Sunshine” remains one of the gems of the Garcia-Hunter songbook, although Garcia flubbed some of the lyrics in its maiden outing. The generous first set concluded with a 19 minute version of “Playing in the Band.”
The second set was preceded by a plea by Wavy Gravy for funding to help rebuild the recently demolished Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, after which the band opened with a strong “China Cat/I Know you Rider.” After “Jack Straw,” the next new tune was rolled out, “They Love Each Other.” Previously Hunter had veered away from love songs, other than melancholy remembrances of lost love like “Wharf Rat” and “Stella Blue,” but “TLEO” is a full-blown celebration of a couple’s palpable love for one another, coupled with a sprightly melody from Garcia. I confess to always preferring the up-tempo 1973 incarnation of the song with the bridge to the simplified, slower version that emerged on Reflections and in subsequent live performances.
If there is any complaint to be made about the Dead’s stellar run of performances overseas captured in the Europe 72 box set, it would be the repetitive choice of the tunes used to anchor the extended segments of the second sets, which mostly alternated between “Dark Star” and Truckin’ leading into “The Other One.” Although the extended segment of the Stanford second set started with “Truckin,” it led smoothly into the next of the band’s debuts, “Eyes of the World.” “Eyes,” with its jazzy chords and relatively sprightly tempo, was to become a second set mainstay during the rest of the band’s performing history, and a crowd favorite. Eyes wove its way into the debut of another of Hunter’s melancholy story songs, the sadly elegant “China Doll.” Later in the band’s career, the conclusion of the second set medley would usually herald the end of the show, but the Dead still had quite a bit of gas in their tank at this show. A trio of short tunes, Big River, “Ramble On Rose” and “Box of Rain” preceded the evening’s final debut, the quixotic “Wave That Flag.” Although this snappy tune persisted in the Dead’s repertoire through most of the year, its off-the-cuff lyrics were ultimately deemed not ready for prime time, and the song re-emerged Phoenix-like, as “US Blues” at the first Dead shows of 1974 at Winterland.
With all of the new songs rolled out, the Dead returned to familiar territory to wrap up the marathon show with “Sugar Magnolia.” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Around and Around” and an encore of “Casey Jones.”
Technical challenges and bouncing floors aside, the Dead put on a strong performance at home to prepare for their winter swing through the Midwest that would commence a week later in Madison, Wisconsin. Although Garcia, and later Weir, were regular visitors to mid-Peninsula clubs in the rest of the 1970s, the Dead would not return to their old stomping grounds until they began an annual tradition of shows back at Stanford, this time at Frost Amphitheater, in October, 1982.
