This was Keith's last show and I'm wondering if he even played one note during this show. I'm listening now to a good vault recording and I'm not sure he's even there. He must have been livid. He plays a bit on MAW.

Donna Jean sings her heart out.

1st post 74 greatest story. return of high time (spring '77?) big rr blues, the wheel

time for Keith to go. He was GREAT from 71 thru 74. still good thru spring '77 when he still used different tibre's, 'acoustic piano, moog 3 for estimated, passenger, ocassional Loser(cornell77), Brokedown(st paul 77) Mississippi(boston 77, killer misszipi) by 78 his percussive acompanyment with occasional flourishes were a negative distraction. Brent added a lot to the band his early funky sounds,his B-3 though I too never liked his 'standard' keyboard sound. I also disliked some of the arrangement changes. Late 78,early 79 stella Blue had great Garcia outro guitar that lasted 3 min+ where stella frequently exceeded 11 minutes same for Poor (Black) Peter. with Brent the outro jams were normally shorter with a few notable exceptions

For some reason, I had never listened to this show, despite always feeling that after Keith and Donna left, the band went downhill. Perhaps not solely the reason, perhaps Jerry was already in decline, but swapping out "Jerry's piano player" (part of the JGB band) for Bob's seemed to mark a shift in the balance of ideas and style of the band. Doesn't it seem like Jerry/Phil and Bob/Brent pull the band in different (not opposite) directions?

On the one hand, they play almost every Donna song in the book, and she has a nice night. I know there are lots of (frankly) '80s-era complainers about Donna, but she never messed up a show I was at. She didn't have a great voice (well, no one in the band did, although Jerry and Pig knew how to sing, which is different), but she fit in with the style of the band. Think about what Robert Christgau said about Workingman's: "Of course they don't sing as pretty as CSNY - prettiness would trivialize these songs." I think it was also Christgau who also observed that the lyric interlude in Dark Star was really not "singing" - it was meant to be another, different, instrument. So think of Donna in Playing as another instrument. Brent had a technically prettier voice; just right for the Doobie Brothers.

On the other hand, Keith is largely unhearable except for a couple of songs inthe second set - it would have been nice to turn him up for this one night. And the set list is virtually an anti-Keith list. No China Cat / Rider or any of the 1971/72 Europe songs on which he really shines and made his mark. I understand there were reasons for asking Keith to leave - even from a musical standpoint, with the return of the second drummer, they wanted to go back to a non-percussive keyboard sound. But there must have really been a weird set of hard feelings here to not give him his due on his last night.

A fine show; four stars because five should mean something; it should be set aside for the great shows - 4/28/71; 5/2/70; 6/18/74, 6/7/77 etc. so we have a real standard of reference.

Just listen to that Lazy Lightning > Supplication; Jerry just unleashed... well, lightning. Great high energy second set too.

Remember this show like it was yesterday....well....almost yesterday.
I, too, waited in line all day, with plenty of friends and cosmic energy. Remember a rainbow around the sun in the clouds and the long run to the gate from the parking lot.

Preshow...agree totally with Operator....i was parked on the wall as well...and the energy was CRAZY!

The show itself Rocked out from beginning to end. My favorite Lazy Lightnin of ALL TIME...just wonderful.....and the Shakedown out of the Wheel....great song selection throughout.....

It was just one of those long long crazy crazy nights....which included getting lost on the way home to UCSB...somehow the driver took an exit in the middle of nowhere and i awoke at 4a.m and said...where the #$%& are we? we all had a great laugh!......

I had no idea it was going to be the last time Keith and Donna were leaving the band. I was heart broken, grew up with them and miss them now. I see Donna once in awhile but those were the great shows. Brent added a new sound but.....................heh. First love. Bobby has always sucked and does to this day. Phil may have gotten better see him and his wife Jill around town all the time, hey they are cool. God I miss Jerry!

greatest story ever told absolutely erupts

this show is the stuff of legends

thanks

As you know, this was a benefit show... someone said cancer research, but whatever. We were dropped off the night before outside the gates to the parking lot and slept out there with a mix of Heads and local denizens of very questionable pedigree. Froze our fucking asses off. Next day they opened the gate and we made a mad-ass dash across what seemed like 2 miles of parking lot. We had very clean and very strong sugar cubes... oh my heavens. Everyone was dosing up an hour or so before the downbeat. Imagine our surprise when the unrolled this gigantic movie screen to show "Fun With Dick and Jane..." What the fuck was this? We were on the floor very close to the front, so the screen looked like it was right on top of us. None out of 20,000 had any idea why we were watching this shit. We were looking straight up at the screen, making all the faces very wide at the bottom and teeny tiny at the top... meanwhile we are coming on very very hard, and many others too. The collective head rushing of thousands of people simultaneously coming on manifested in periodic chanting and screaming, which would fully drown out the movie for a few minutes at a time. Then everyone would settle down for another few minutes till the next set of color waves broke over us, and the screaming would start again.

When the thing finally ended, we were frying, way out where we would normally be out near the drum solo. We were HOWLING for the music to start. Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden took the stage and tried to talk some sense into us about something serious, but no one was having any of it. Fonda was appealing to our more reasonable selves, which were nowhere near the building at that time. Super-crusty-toothless-biker-ass-drug-suckers at the foot of the stage (mere feet from us) were screaming at her "GRATEFUL!!! FUCKING!!!!DEAD!!!!!!" and she was very clearly rattled. Then Hayden took the mic and tried his luck; he actually tried to tell us to quiet down and listen for a minute... ha ha you can guess how well that went over.

The place was boiling over. I was already seeing shit that I had never seen before and have never seen since, and the band had not played a single note.

FINALLY they got going, and as for me, I thought it absolutely smoked. I've had this on cassette for years and I feel that the recording brings credibility to the recollection. Hot stuff right out of the box with the GSET opener. There were the normal boo boos, clam, and flubs, but it's the Dead, that's just the deal. To digress into a short rant, there was the typical case of Weir throwing cold water on a KILLER Garcia solo at the end of GSET as usual, by not hearing the obvious musical cue to jump back into the vocal. Being a musician, this stuff always bugged me. Poor Jerry... Christ almighty, how hard does the man have to telegraph a crescendo? He's holding this high chord, strumming the shit out of it, and here come the one-beat, and... no vocal, just a big voltage drop while Jerry has to pretend that he meant to continue another 12 or 16 bars. No matter, they played very hard, and Garcia was really fearless.

Some all-time stuff: FOTD, even with its funky beginning... GREAT guitar solo, especially that last high note. And Lazy Lightning... whew... more cooking Jerry stuff.

"From the Heart of Me" was... well sort of bizarre. No one knew quite what it meant at the time. In retrospect, very sad; almost pathetic. Donna looked like she was going to cry when she clammed some (OK, many) of those notes and forgot lyrics.

Second set charged out of the gate. Nice Might as well. Bertha, despite some insecure and inconsistent tempo, still yielded some unbearably beautiful moments. This is still my favorite Bertha guitar solo of all time, even though it doesn't rock all the way through... Jerry backs off, hunts around like a pig sniffing out truffles, and then he really hits paydirt. Never mind that he spaces out and sings the chorus twice in a row. We all love that shit, right?

All the rest... great. Terrapin... ah yes, very powerful. I'[ll spare us all the blow by blow recap of every interesting moment. One of my very favorite shows.

I have read reviews of this show from people who felt it was forgettable, or at least nothing special... I dunno. To each his or her own. There's a lot of different kinds of Dead out there. As far as era, year, tour, band arrangement, and equipment /guitar tone... this was always my favorite.

I didn't know it at the time, until later before Brent's first show that this was their last as I hand held my microphones over my head Donna was clearly checking me out as I recorded while she was singing "From the Heart of Me",(not her best performance; kind of sad in retrospect), but like others, since a board came out I recorded over it.
This is an early example of Garcia starting to really stretch out and improvise on the end of "Terrapin Station", as well as a great "Lazy Lightin'"->"Supplication" amongst other things, as the other folks have said! This was a Cancer Research benefit called the "Rock for Life" with Jane Fonda and Tom Haydn introducing the band and one of her lesser known pictures playing beforehand "Fun with Dick & Jane".

Augy
San Diego

Ah, yes, Children, I was there at Keith and Donna's last show with friends Larry and Doug in tow. We didn't know it was Keith and Donna's last show. So apropos they led off with Greatest, Y'know?

Were all-access guests of the band that night. The circumstances led us to adopt the approach of not commenting on this performance because we were incapable of rendering an incorporate opinion.

This is the first time I have been personally able to muster the courage to listen to this show. I must have certainly been out of it because I did not especially enjoy this show while I was there. I must have been too into the disco, y'know, at that tat-a-tat time!

An' Time certainly changes things, if not surely our memories. Yet this is another great sleeper show in the annals of great Grateful Dead Lore.

Guaranteed. This is a great sleeper show.

Too bad I was Rip

Van Winkle,

Of course,

At that time,

But,

Now I am not

Rip

Rip Van Winkle.

RIP Rip Van Winkle.

Long Live Grateful Dead

This night.

Where was I?

MAW>Miracle>Bertha>Good Loving, Heart of Me, RR Blues>Terrapin>Playin>Drumz>Space>Wheel>Shakedown>

Playin>Sug Mag. !!!

Astounding, life-changing performance. This show played loud enough will re-arrange your corpuscles and straighten your spine.

Guaranteed.

A Great, Great, Grateful Day and Night.

Unbelievably thankful!