Thank you Charlie! Been waiting awhile to hear this (over 30 years!), and it does not disappoint. Not only is the sound quality phenomenal, but the performance isn’t as bad as some of those other reviews would have you believe.

This was just my second Dead show out of about 20 during the Jerry years. Dylan w/ Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers opened. There were a few notable things that I remember about this show. The first was that Dylan and Petty were not very good at all. A good number in the crowd were there to see them, but the sound in the old concrete bowl stadium was horrible, and lots of us who were there for the Dead just carried on our conversations as if they were background music at a party. A lot of those folks were kind of pissed over the distraction of conversations carrying on during the show, and I can't really blame them.

After Dylan and Petty finished their uninspired set, the Dead came on, and the sound was completely different. It was like going from listening to music through a single-speaker AM radio to Dolby surround sound in a big movie theater! Man, were the Dead ever good at tuning their sound system to the venue!!

But even though the sound was great, the show was really just ok. Dylan joining the band for a couple songs in the first set was pretty much of a fail, and the band just sounded off. Not bad, but not their best.

In the second set, Jerry left the stage for Desolation Row, and it is actually not half bad without him. Phil's bass really fills the void nicely. I remember wondering what was going on, worrying for Jerry just a little, and was relieved to see him back on stage during Space to finish the set. But it was just a week later that he went into a diabetic coma. He was clearly not feeling well.

Another thing that I remember was meeting some tapers out in the parking lot before the show. They were parked next to us and appeared to have real nice recording equipment. I asked if they could send me a tape. They didn't really say yes, but gave me their address in NY. I slipped a joint into the package with a couple blank cassette tapes, and a week later got them back in my mailbox. They sounded great, and I still have them :-)

The notes say otherwise.

But that's him. Couldn't be anybody else. Maybe the author of the notes is confusing this show with the RFK show?

Garcia is indeed absent from Desolation Row, however.