Dark Star 1968

Reich: Well then if we wanted to talk about "Dark Star", could you say anything about where it comes from?
Garcia: You gotta remember that you and I are talking about two different "Dark Stars." You're talking about the "Dark Star" which you have heard formalized on a record, and I'm talking about the "Dark Star" which I have heard in each performance as a completely improvised piece over a long period of time. So I have a long continuum of "Dark Stars" which range in character from each other to real different extremes. "Dark Star" has meant, while I'm playing it, almost as many things as I can sit here and imagine, so all I can do is talk about "Dark Star" as a playing experience.
Reich: Well, yeah, talk about it a little.
Garcia: I can't. It talks about itself.
- A Signpost to New Space, 1972


Dark Star was born in September 1967, while the Dead were staying at Rio Nido. One of their guests was Robert Hunter, who had recently joined up with the Dead as a lyric-writer. (Bear was also visiting, which is how the 9/3/67 show happened to be recorded.) Hunter had been living in the southwest, mailing some lyrics to the Dead; in June '67 Garcia wrote him to say that the band had set Alligator to music, and asking him to come to San Francisco to work with the band. So in July, Hunter returned, and in September he found himself listening to the Dead's rehearsals for their scheduled second-album sessions later that month.
"I was in my cabin. They were rehearsing in the hall, and you could hear from there. I heard the music and just started writing Dark Star lying on my bed. I wrote the first half of it and I went in and handed what I'd written to Jerry. He said, 'Oh, this will fit in just fine,' and he started singing it... [When] I heard the Grateful Dead playing, those were the words it seemed to be saying.... That did it for the time being. Then, a couple of days or weeks later," Garcia said he wanted another verse, so Hunter wrote the next verse sitting in Golden Gate Park.
"I was very impressed with T.S. Eliot around the time I was writing Dark Star," Hunter said, and one line was clearly influenced by a line in 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' - "Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky." "Beyond that, that's just my kind of imagery.... I don't have any idea what the 'transitive nightfall of diamonds' means. It sounded good at the time. It brings up something that you can see." [In some early '68 versions, Garcia sings "the transitional nightfall", which must have come more naturally than singing, "the - e transitive".]
Garcia also said the words and music belonged together. "The reason the music is the way it is, is because those lyrics suggested that to me.... They are saying, 'This universe is truly far out.' That's about it. You could take whatever you will from that suggestion. For me, that suggestion always means, 'Great, let's look around. Let's see how weird it really gets.'"
The Dead had wanted to create songs that were more poetic (Phil's New Potato was so far their only 'poem-song'), and here was a song that invited the listener on a transportational journey. It wasn't yet the jam-song it would become next year, more of a delicate pop song - kind of a cosmic counterpoint to Golden Road. Only now instead of "hey hey, come right away, come and join the party every day", Garcia sang in a darker shade: "Shall we go, you and I - while we can...."

In '67 the Dead were already known as a psychedelic band - probably dating from the Acid Test days (even though most of their music in '66 was pretty standard for the year). Their scary name and looks made them tempting for many young listeners, and the possibility that going to see them might (literally) get you high in some collective acid trip, was even more alluring for the adventurous. On their first album, Garcia already had his nickname of 'Captain Trips', which he disliked. He claimed, "The Grateful Dead has never thought of itself as being a psychedelic band. We've always thought of ourselves as a rock & roll band."
Other times, Garcia insisted that the band simply played dance music. "We still feel that our function is as a dance band... We like to play with dancers....nothing improves your time like having somebody dance. It pulls the whole thing together, and it's also a nice little feedback thing." He described the Dead's long jams as being very useful to play to roomfuls of zonked-out dancers who'd lost all concept of time. "When you're playing for people who are dancing and getting high, you can dance easy to a half-hour tune and you can even wonder why it ended so soon."
But at the same time, Garcia was an open champion of the psychedelic experience. As he said later, "Psychedelics were probably the single most significant experience in my life. Otherwise I think I would be going along believing that this visible reality is all that there is. Psychedelics didn't give me any answers - what I have is a lot of questions. One thing I'm certain of - the mind is an incredible thing, and there are levels of organizations of consciousness that are way beyond what people are fooling with in day-to-day reality."
Another time he explained, "It scared the shit out of me, man. It was like, 'What do you believe?' It removed everything I was certain of. And in its place was a new set of circumstances.... Cosmic is the only word for it. Nothing has happened in my life since then, man. Nothing was as climactic, as complete as that.... I can go back and visit bits and pieces of it, but it's all here, in the foreground of my mind..... I had experiences more real than anything I've experienced in this world." He concluded, "Things happened that I've never recovered from. It was definitely one of those 'before and after' experiences. What would we do without psychedelics? How gray life would be....how limited."
But Garcia was quick to add that acid didn't have a direct effect on the music. "There was a me before psychedelics, and a me after psychedelics; that's the best I can say. I can't say it affected the music specifically; it affected the whole me. The problem of playing music is essentially of muscular development and that is something you have to put in the hours to achieve no matter what. There isn't something that strikes you and suddenly you can play music."

For inspiration, the Dead didn't necessarily have to explore their cosmic existence - they needed only to look around them. At the time San Francisco was full of acid-tripping bands playing ambitious, mind-expanding jams, checking out each other's shows and jamming together. In this communal scene, the Dead's quest for a new music was shared by many other bands, with a sort of musical cross-pollenization bringing all sorts of new influences into the rock world. Part of what set the Dead apart was their diversity, since they'd all come from different musical fields than rock music, so they took ideas from a wide range of music.
I've mentioned how Viola Lee Blues was influenced by the Butterfield Band's East/West, which was a huge jump from Butterfield's usual Chicago blues covers. John Kahn later said, "Jerry told me that when he was first playing in San Francisco, Bloomfield was the one guitarist who really impressed him, because of the way he could endlessly come up with different ways of playing around a melody. I think Jerry would say he was influenced by Bloomfield a little, though Jerry had stronger country influences that shaped his tone." (Michael Bloomfield noted of Garcia in 1968, "He sounds amazingly like he's trying to sound like me, but I don't think he is. I think he came that way himself.")
In 1968 Garcia also mentioned that he listened to a lot of country guitar players to develop his skills. "I got a lot of my ideas from country fiddlers, too. Scotty Stoneman particularly."
He went into more detail: "I get my improvisational approach from Scotty Stoneman, the fiddle player. He's the guy who first set me on fire - where I just stood there and I don't remember breathing. He was just an incredible fiddler. He was a total alcoholic wreck by the time I heard him, playing with the Kentucky Colonels [in 1965]... They did a medium-tempo fiddle tune, and it's going along, and pretty soon Scotty starts taking these longer and longer phrases....and the guys in the band are just watching him! They're barely playing, while he's burning. The place was transfixed. They played this tune for like twenty minutes, which is unheard of in bluegrass. I'd never heard anything like it.... He's like the bluegrass Charlie Parker."
Lesh's background in modern classical, early electronica and avant-garde music came to the fore in '67, as he helped push the band into more challenging pieces, and came up with many of the ideas for recording and mixing the Anthem album. And once Mickey Hart joined that fall, he brought a strong interest in Indian music with its changing rhythms and flexible tempos. Garcia said, "What Indian music seems to have - the combination of tremendous freedom and tremendous discipline - really impressed Mickey, so he started right away studying with Alla Rakha. That influence got the rest of us starting to fool with ideas that were certain lengths."

The Dead were also deeply into jazz, and this music gave them a lot of guidance once they started jamming their songs. Charles Lloyd was a jazz horn-player the Dead admired and played with - in April '67 Garcia mentioned that he wanted the Dead to work with Charles Lloyd's jazz group, but it never happened. Lloyd said, "I think we probably influenced them a bit to start opening up their improvisations. When we were at the Rock Garden [in March '67], we traded sets and they'd all be hanging around in the wings when we played, really listening. Jazz has always been a music of freedom & inspiration & wonder & consolation, and the Dead definitely got something from that."
The Dead were big fans of Miles Davis, Mingus and Coltrane - Lesh was very impressed when Mingus saw their first New York show in June '67. Weir said, "We felt at that time, when we were listening to Coltrane, that we were hardly fit to grovel at his feet. But still, we were trying to get there - our aims were the same."
When Miles Davis met the Dead at the Fillmore West 1970 shows, he talked with Garcia and was surprised to find that "Garcia liked jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been listening to it for a long time. He loved other jazz musicians too, like Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans." Garcia would say that he learned "open playing" from Davis, something he started using more in '69: "I got part of that from Miles, especially the silences. The holes. Nobody plays better holes than Miles, from a musician's point of view. In Indian music they have what you call 'the unstruck', which is the note you don't play. That has as much value as the stuff you do play."
As for Coltrane - "I've been influenced a lot by Coltrane," Garcia said, "but I never copped his licks or sat down, listened to records and tried to play his stuff. I've been impressed with that thing of flow, and of making statements that to my ears sound like paragraphs - he'll play along stylistically with a certain kind of tone...for X amount of time - then he'll change the subject, then play along with this other personality coming out, which really impresses me.... Perceptually, an idea that's been very important to me in playing has been the whole 'odyssey' idea - journeys, voyages, and adventures along the way."

All this would be tied together in the Dead's new song, Dark Star. The band couldn't have predicted how, over the course of 1968, this song would transform into an improvisational odyssey of its own, a psychedelic ship that could take audiences on infinite voyages.
It's hard to imagine what it might have sounded like in its initial incarnation, born out of some nebulous September '67 jam - a peaceful moment among the distorted, rough & tumble jams of the 9/3/67 show. But in Dancing in the Street, Garcia's solo is in the lyrical Dark Star mode (sometimes almost quoting the melody), prefiguring the Stars to be.
There's a huge advance since the last Dancing we have from 3/18/67 - the band has slowed the song down and made room for more interaction in the jam, and Garcia is using much more space in his notes. All over this show we can hear the new strength in their instruments the Dead had found in '67, with Weir and Lesh blending into one hypnotic rhythm and Garcia reaching to a deeper level than he had before.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd67-09-03.sbd.backus.17272.sbeok.shnf

The Dead went to RCA Studios in LA for a couple weeks in September '67 to start recording their second album, with Dave Hassinger again producing as he'd done on their first album. As Garcia said, "We accomplished absolutely nothing." Then they tried going to American Studios in North Hollywood in mid-November '67; then they went to New York to try a couple studios there, until Hassinger quit.
(There is a tape of at least one fall session where they try running 'live' through some of their new material.)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1967-xx-xx.sbd.studio.81259.flac16
The Dead's first album had been recorded in just four days, and they were determined not to do it that way again - Lesh called it "a turd." As Garcia said, "We felt very bad about it. We thought it was unfortunate.... We did it, and that was it. And then we had all the time afterwards, after it was released, to really regret it, because it was mediocre performances of material that we were able to do much better. It was uninspired completely. We'll never go about it that way again."
As soon as the first album was released, Garcia was already saying, "That was an attempt to try and sound like the way we do live - there's not really anything unconventional for us in there. So we're not going to bother doing that anymore... When we go and record, since the first album is doing so nicely, we hope they'll let us have a lot of time in the studio, and next time we'll do a lot more studio stuff."
One hapless New York engineer said, "I'd never seen anything like the Dead before....guitars, drums and family and children and friends and roadies and breastfeeding ladies and people sitting on the floor. It was flowers, peace symbols, beads, bells...pot was everywhere. There was so much pot the accountants upstairs used to get high from the smoke going up through the air conditioning.... Everything took forever to do. I think Dave and I spent 48 hours just on the drum sound, getting the cymbals right.... Normally I could get two albums done in the time it took to get a drum sound for the Dead."
Like many other bands under the influence of the Beatles, they decided they wanted unlimited time to discover new instrumental sounds and experiment with effects never heard before. Garcia said later, "One of the things that we built into our contract (which was unheard of at the time) was unlimited studio time. We knew we'd have to pay for it, but we wanted as much as we wanted. Our strategy was, 'We want to play in the studio. We want to learn how the studio works. We don't want somebody else doing it....' So what we did essentially was we bought ourselves an education, and the way we achieved it was to spend lots and lots of time in the studio fooling around with stuff.... It was a trial-and-error kind of thing."
Hassinger said that one time, "I went into American Recording and they had ordered so many instruments and so much equipment that you literally could not get into the studio! The whole album was that way. It was like pulling teeth until I finally couldn't take it anymore..... We'd been working a long time on that second album, and they had put down some tracks and no one could sing them. Nobody could sing the thing, and at that point they were experimenting too much in my opinion. They didn't know what the hell they were looking for....they were going from one end of the spectrum to the other."
(As a result, the head of Warner Brothers wrote the band's manager: "Lack of preparation, direction and cooperation from the very beginning have made this album the most unreasonable project with which we have ever involved ourselves. Your group has many problems, it would appear, and Hassinger has no futher interest or desire to work with them under conditions similar to this last fiasco. It's apparent that no one in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior. You are now branded an undesirable group in almost every recording studio in Los Angeles....The guys ran through engineers like a steamroller. It all adds up to a lack of professionalism. The Grateful Dead is not one of the top acts in the business as yet. With their attitudes and their inability to take care of business....they will never be truly important." Nonetheless, the label gave the band more studio time in early '68!)

Out of all this confusion came a short, delicate recording of Dark Star, released as a single in April '68 while the band were still mixing the Anthem album. The B-side, Born Cross-Eyed, was a weird and confusing blast of trippy noises, off-rhythms and strange vocals - but Dark Star in its initial guise was pretty, poppy, even pastoral. It's very fast and bouncy - the song doesn't sound ominous as it would in later, slower versions, but mysterious and inviting.
The basic parts are there, with Phil's bass and Weir's rhythm pretty much in the lead next to Pigpen's six-note riff - Garcia's guitar takes more of a backseat as decoration, and in fact there isn't even a guitar solo, one verse heading straight into another. But part of the Dead's magic here is how the guitars and bass are intertwined - like they aren't playing separate parts, but are all connected as one instrument. On top of that, there are numerous overdubs and studio effects - Garcia's vocals are doubletracked, there's a prominent tamboura along with the organ, splashing cymbals or gongs, an acoustic guitar popping up at dramatic pauses in the first verse, electric-guitar doubling at the end (what I think of as the 'Dear Prudence' sound), and in a surprise little coda (perhaps influenced by the Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows') a quick bit of banjo from Garcia in the fadeout. And under all this, Robert Hunter, in his only appearance on a Dead record, recites a Joycean 'word salad' under the gongs at the end: "spinning a set the stars through which the tattered tales of axis rolls about the waxen wind of never set to motion in the unbecoming round about the reason hardly matters nor the wise through which the stars were set in spin."

There's an outtake, labeled as being from 11/14/67 American Studios - obviously not all recorded that day, but perhaps the date of that mixdown or an overdub. This is the basic track of the song, minus the vocals and almost all the overdubs I mentioned - we do have a couple Garcia guitars playing off each other in the second verse, and there's also a conga part (buried in the final mix) in place of Pigpen's riff - and also a longer section in-between verses, which they later decided to trim. (You can also hear Garcia shouting near the end, "It drags like that!")
https://archive.org/details/gd1967-11-14.116173.sbd.motb-0174.flac16 (2:50)

The single flopped and promptly disappeared. Garcia said years later: "The single that we recorded at the time was a very poor exposition of the idea that I had in my mind. I wanted it to have a lot more depth, but I had no idea how to make the band play that way. I especially didn't know how to speak to drummers then. I didn't know how to tell them what I wanted. For me, the single of it is a blunder - it didn't work.... I wanted it to have more power. I wanted the bass figure to be more powerful.... As always with Grateful Dead stuff, my version usually just dies somewhere and the Grateful Dead version takes over. I've learned to trust that process. At the time I was panicked a little because I thought, 'Well, what happened to my song? What happened to the thing that I wanted to have happen here?' But as it opened up and we got really risky - when we started to drop the rhythm and just go all over the place - then I realized that the Grateful Dead version was way more interesting both to me as a player and also to me as an audience."

Opening up and "dropping the rhythm" was the key to how the music would develop over the next year. The Dead in '67 were spending hours in rehearsals every day opening up their music, feeling their way to a new style. Over the past couple years they had learned to fit together in a symbiotic way, blending their instruments in a tight mesh of sound, responding to each other with the instinctive quickness of countless hours of practice. As Lesh put it, the band now played "electric chamber music", where they could all play counterpoint to each other rather than staying in traditional roles.
Garcia described the band: "It's a string band fundamentally, even though it's electric.... It's a kind of mutated bluegrass group on a certain level. Bluegrass is a conversational music and I thought it would be nice to have an electric band that was conversational - where the instruments talked to each other. It's a way to organize music."
In 1966, with everyone still learning their instruments, Garcia had been the musical leader in the solos, taking frenetic leads while the others backed him. But they were becoming more a group of equal parts, and were confident enough to leave their R&B roots and give themselves a diet of ambitious jam-songs. They threw themselves into the goal of constantly improving technically - Garcia and Lesh in particular were ceaseless self-improvers, and had visions of untapped horizons of music like nothing they'd played before, free of the usual rock conventions.
Garcia said in 1967: "We're trying to think away from the standard routine of, these members comp, this member leads. We're trying to think of ensemble stuff - not like Dixieland ensemble, but something else which we don't yet know anything about.... The problems we're having with all this, because of all of us still think so musically straight, really, that it's difficult to get used to not hearing the heavy two & four. It's difficult to think rhythmically without having it there all the time, but we're starting to develop that sense better. There's not that feeling of the big rhythm going because we do a lot of tricks within a bar, and the tricks we do are like eliminating the beat entirely and all of us just not playing it. Like we're starting to use the space, rather than the time."
Especially after Mickey Hart joined in September '67, they started working on polyrhythms and odd time signatures like the Eleven, the Seven, the Main Ten, the Other One - practicing until they became so instinctively familiar with the tricky patterns, they could maneuver inside the jam without all playing the 'time', yet could come back to it at any moment. Garcia remembered, "We'd spend hours & hours every day, just playing groups of eleven, to get used to that phrase, then we started working things out in seven, [and so on] - patterns, phrases, and licks that were those lengths, and play them over & over again.... You can't play confidently and fluidly in those times without really knowing what you're doing."
As Hart put it, "We were doing a lot of acid then, so linear progression was distorted. So we would just drop the one.... We would go on the pulse, all of a sudden, the pulse would lead us to a place, and we were completely lost, we didn't know where the original one was, so instead of struggling with the one, [Billy and I] would establish a new one.... And they would catch on to our telepathic one, and they would latch on - when the third person went to it, it became legitimate.... We would be able to fly or float on the pulse, and there was no need to sound the one or recognize it - sometimes the one was known, and we'd let it go untouched - other times we all pounced on it."
Garcia described his role in this: "Rhythmically, our policy is that the one is where you think it is. It's a kind of zen concept, but it really works well for us. It makes it possible to get into a phrase where I can change into little phrase spurts, spitting out little groups of notes....and then turn that into a new pulse. Then I'm inside of a whole irregularly rotating tempo in relation to what the rest of the band is playing, when they're playing the original common time. It produces this ambiguity, but all I have to do is make a statement that says, 'end paragraph, and one...,' and they all know where that is. We all have that kind of privilege - it's partly something we've allowed each other, and partly something we've gained confidence to be able to do just by spending a lot of time playing together."
Here he was talking about the Eleven, but you can already hear this kind of tempo-shifting in '67 New Potatoes and Viola Lees - and it would start to enter Dark Star in later '68, as the Dead started playing spiralling passages in the jam. Their rhythm practices were initially for specific structured jams, but they paid off later when the Dead started playing freeform jams, and were able to follow each other over a constantly changing pulse that any player could push in a new direction. Though Dark Star started out with a tight structure, over the year more freeform parts would slip in as the music became untethered and floated free - but in an instant it could return to the theme, so tightly were the band locked together. Dark Star is a song with a very steady pulse (almost a musical heartbeat), but over time it would become loose enough that all form could disintegrate and any number of counter-melodies could be introduced inside the space.... But that's getting ahead of our story.

It's been said that the Dead intended Dark Star from the first to have an open-ended jam between verses, but this is in hindsight. When they took it on the road in early '68, it was still extremely close to the studio version - Garcia had a guitar solo worked out, but as we'll see, it was a 'composed' solo that was pretty much the same from night to night. I suspect that at the time, the Dark Star>China Cat>Eleven suite was one of the pieces being considered for the Anthem album, so they tried to play it consistently without too much variation - my guess is that listening afterwards, either there wasn't room for everything, or they decided it didn't work the way they wanted, and China Cat and the Eleven needed more work; so they were scrapped, and the Dark Star studio version was set aside as a single.
After Hassinger split in December '67, the Dead were left with various unfinished studio pieces and no prospect of finishing them. But they had the idea that they could record some shows and simply mix the live & studio songs together - of course, the mixing itself would require months more in the studio (Anthem wasn't released til July '68). But as a result of their plan, we have recordings of almost the whole tour from Jan/Feb '68. Dark Star was probably played live in late '67, but the first recording we have is from 1/17/68.

January '68 saw a breakthrough in how the Dead approached their music. A strong jazz element had entered the music, and new tunes like Clementine and the Spanish Jam were directly influenced by jazz tunes; others like Born Cross-Eyed and the Eleven could be seen as a marriage of rock guitars with jazz techniques, soaked in acid. The whole idea of a suite of songs linked together by improvised jams, or dissolving into a period of 'space' or free noise, was foreign to the rock world, but natural in the jazz realm.
The Dead wanted to create an album which would be one long continuous piece, where the songs all blended together - so in this tour, they started to play shows 'symphonically', or as a series of segues in which various songs (mostly jams themselves) could all be jammed together. As late as November '67, the only two songs the Dead had tied together this way were Alligator & Caution - in October they debuted the Other One>Cryptical medley, which was always meant to be played as one unit.
But at the start of '68, they'd fallen in love with the idea of segueing everything. A few early setlists speak for themselves:
1/17 Dark Star>China Cat>The Eleven>New Potato Caboose>Born Cross-Eyed>Spanish Jam
1/20 Clementine>New Potato Caboose>Born Cross-Eyed>Space>Spanish Jam>Caution Jam>Dark Star [>probably more]
1/22 The Other One>New Potato Caboose>Born Cross-Eyed>Feedback>Spanish Jam>Dark Star>China Cat>The Eleven>Caution Jam>Feedback
Of course it wasn't just random wildness - most of the songs were connected in a certain order and stayed that way, so I think the Dead had prearranged some sequences to use on the album. One of these was Dark Star>China Cat>The Eleven. I've posted a bit about China Cat before - at this time it was indivisible from the Eleven, and they weren't separated til the spring. Though it was totally unrelated to Dark Star, musically, the Dead must have liked the effect of slowing things down with the quiet, contemplative ending of Dark Star, and then suddenly charging into China Cat like a locomotive. (I especially like the whistle-blow that Garcia sometimes makes on his guitar!)

Dark Star still closely follows the format of the studio version - fast & peppy & filled with Pigpen's repeated organ riff. He actually fits in well in these early versions, since he's more integrated with the band's sound. One interesting touch is that in the pauses of the verse ("while we can....diamonds...."), Pigpen plays a sort of 'chicka-chicka' on the organ to give it some extra rhythm.
One change is the intro riff - Phil & Jerry played it in unison in the studio, and ever after; but for some reason, on this tour alone, they stagger the riff, with Phil starting it and then Garcia echoing him. Another change is that there's much more guitar playing than in the studio - this isn't a song like Born Cross-Eyed where they have to stick with a rather inflexible structure, but they're able to stretch it out during the solos. However, the solos all follow the same pattern; and at this point, Garcia's bag of riffs is not very large, so pet phrases of his keep getting repeated, and he only hints at themes that would be expanded later.
In the intro, Garcia riffs around for a minute or two on the Dark Star theme. Then in the solo, he'll start with a short series of 'steps' down from the main riff (this is also on the single); then he plays the melody of the verse, over the dropping chords; this leads to what I think of as the 'falling-star' note, which he repeats a few times; then he plays a kind of staccato variation (short, clipped notes) on the Dark Star theme. (Sometimes, these last two sections are reversed.) These were the basic elements of the solo that he'd gradually expand over the next year.

1/17/68 - On our first live Dark Star, the intro is cut - in fact, I have to mention that fully half of the Dark Stars of the year are missing the opening because the tape starts late! Part of this is because they usually started the set with Dark Star, but it's still peculiar, and it's so common I won't mention it again, except where we're missing more than a minute of music. This embryonic Dark Star is about the shortest ever played (about five minutes), very basic with a brief solo.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-01-17.sbd.cotsman.11795.shnf (4:48)

1/20/68 - The Dead meander out of the Spanish Jam into a short Caution jam, then Garcia decides to launch into Dark Star at breakneck speed. At the very start we get an interesting glimpse of the Dead's change in plan: Phil & Jerry play the intro in unison, then remember they do it differently now and stop, then they play it in the new staggered way. Unusually, they groove on the intro riff for quite a while, with Garcia doubling Pigpen's riff for a minute while Pigpen tries to find his place in the rhythm! (Pigpen is lost for a while, but they stick with it till he recovers. Perhaps this reminds us that the riff wasn't Pigpen's fumbling attempt at an idea, it's what the band wanted him to play.) Finally, Garcia plays a short intro solo; unfortunately, the tape cuts in the first verse.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-01-20.sbd.miller.97340.sbeok.flac16 (3:17)

1/22/68 - Once again, the Dark Star comes out of a faltering Spanish Jam. Well-done, this is one of the more introspective versions - Garcia's guitar is rather quiet in the mix, blending in with the other instruments more, and his vocal is very distant, which adds a sense of mystery.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-01-22.sbd.miller.97342.sbeok.flac16 (5:49)
[Actually played 1/26.]

1/23/68 - The bonus tracks on the '68 Road Trips revealed that this was one of the great shows of the tour. This is the best, and longest, Dark Star on this tour (almost eight minutes). The Dead are revved-up and go into it very fast - Phil is high in the mix, and Garcia's really into his playing - the intro is especially long. After the verse, you can hear Garcia go "ahh" as he starts his solo - not going straight into the usual melody, but playing freeform for a bit. He plays around with the rest of the solo, even throwing in a bit of the Eleven.
[Released on the Road Trips 2:2 bonus disc. Actually played 1/27/68.] (7:06)

2/2/68 - Played as the encore, this is a sloppy version, with some extra drums inappropriately crashing in. This is one of the very few Dark Stars that don't segue into anything, but simply stops quietly - Weir is ready to start China Cat, but the others are finished.
[Released on Road Trips 2:2.] (6:45)

2/3/68 - A strong, flowing version, almost perfect except that the solo peters out at the end. The percussion is mixed high enough in this show that you can hear it well, unlike most the shows on this tour. Garcia says, "Leave the lights on, will you," at the end.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-02-03.sbd.miller.97346.sbeok.flac16 (5:26)

2/14/68 - Standard.
https://archive.org/details/gd68-02-14.sbd.kaplan.15640.sbeok.shnf  (5:54)
[Released on Road Trips 2:2]

2/22/68 - This show couldn't be used for the Dick's Picks since the vocals accidentally weren't recorded, but it's still a nice high-energy segment, and it's interesting to hear an instrumental Dark Star>China Cat. The solo has new melodic variations of the Dark Star theme.
www.dead.net/features/tapers-section/february-12-february-18-2007 (6:24)

2/23/68 - The mix is excellent tonight, and so is the Dark Star. Finally, Phil & Jerry realize that changing the intro around wasn't such a good idea, and revert to playing it in unison. The staccato section has been developing through the tour, and now we can hear it turning into one of the most famous Dark Star figures - almost the same notes as the basic Dark Star theme, but rearranged a bit so that it sounds uplifting or triumphant. Of course it doesn't have a name, but to identify it later, I'll call it the 'bright star' theme. (One well-known example would be at 20:30 on the Live/Dead Dark Star, which turns into the 'falling-star' notes.)
Released on Dick's Picks 22. (6:48)

3/16/68 - The Dark Stars we have from March aren't much different from the winter tour, but there is some development in Garcia's playing. His solo is starting to get longer - he noodles for a bit at the start - and then in the 'bright star' section, we see him starting to play more with the dynamics, as he quiets down and then becomes loud again, then tears into the 'falling-star' notes. This is perhaps the first precursor of the emotional journey later Dark Star jams would take.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-03-16.sbd.vernon.9388.sbeok.shnf (7:20)
(Also on So Many Roads box.)

3/26/68 - This show is the first great AUD recording of the Dead. (There had been a couple in '67, which sound quite dire.) One thing it makes clear is how different Garcia sounds in "room recordings" versus the soundboard - he just jumps out and seems to be using the theater echo - as he put it, "I aim notes for the room that I'm in." On audience tapes like this, he almost sounds like a horn-player more than a guitarist. (When his mother went to see the band in March '67, the first thing she asked him was, "How do you get the guitar to sound like a horn like that?")
Once again, the solo starts freely before going into the 'composed' sections. This is the other Dark Star that just ends quietly with no segue, just like 2/2.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-03-26.aud.cotsman.6029.sbeok.shnf (7:14)
[Actually played 3/29/68.]

3/30/68 - Another great Carousel AUD (almost as clear as a soundboard); this is the longest Dark Star yet, at nine minutes. Garcia starts it coming smoothly out of a hot Cryptical reprise, but he seems to have some trouble with equipment static. Garcia is on a roll though, and he improvises for quite a while at the start of his solo, which then follows the same pattern as the 3/16 Star. A beautiful performance, and the last Dark Star>China Cat>Eleven.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-03-30.aud.cotsman.14912.sbeok.shnf (8:45) 

After March, we enter the Black Hole of 1968....a mostly silent gap from April to mid-August in which almost no recordings survive. Dark Star (and the Dead's whole show) would emerge from the other side of this hole sounding very different, but we have few clues about the kind of transitions they went through. If the recordings of 6/14 and 6/19 are any indication, this was a time of wild experimentation, and the August shows would be more sedate and predictable in format (however wildly played).
'67 and early '68 saw most of the group's collective compositions come together in their constant rehearsals. In May '68, one of their last 'collective' songs appeared, St Stephen. (Later in '68, Garcia would become essentially the lead composer in the Dead, bringing in most of the songs for the others to learn, and he would keep that spot for several years.) Now that China Cat was out of the picture, soon St Stephen would follow Dark Star as surely as day follows night - but for now, it floated loose in the set. The early Stephens are different from the August Stephens in that there's much more jamming - they reprise the last verse and end the song with a long jam and a few returns to the Stephen theme before drifting off to another song. It wouldn't be connected to the Eleven for another month or two.

On Disc 4 of the "Mystery Reels", the second show fragment has the longest Dark Star of '68 (sixteen minutes) - but far from being a late-'68 Star, it comes from sometime in the summer, as we can immediately tell by the St Stephen. When you first hear the two Stephens on disc 4, they seem to be really fast and clumsy, Garcia handles most the singing himself, and their structure is quite different from the August '68 Stephens. So we could narrow them down to May-July 68 - but in fact, if you're familiar with the 6/14/68 Stephen, these Stephens are practically note-for-note identical in style and structure to that one. (The earliest Stephen fragment we have, on disc 1, has a similar final chorus before veering off, since they haven't settled on an ending.)
So I'd say these are mid-June '68 shows....not only that, but since a soundboard reel of the 6/14/68 show was discovered, we know the Dead must have recorded that run, and apparently our stray fragments are all that remains from a whole stash of June '68 recordings. Could this Dark Star reel be from a lost Fillmore East show after all?
That said, it's not nearly as intense as 6/14/68. One of the ironies of having the soundboard fragments of these and the Disc 1 Carousel show, is that they don't come close in energy to the AUDs of 5/18 and 6/14. In any case - at this show, Weir asks the audience before Dark Star, "Whoever stole our scratcher, please give it back....we need our scratcher for our next number." (Apparently some honest soul then returns it.)
Pigpen is very quiet in the mix, so he's not distracting. Garcia, on the other hand, is right up-front with a very clear, distinct tone - he almost sounds like he's using a different guitar. He solos at length - in fact they don't even get to the verse for five minutes! Garcia seems a bit withdrawn - this is a very noodley Dark Star, but also a subdued one, since they never really turn on the heat. Weir and Lesh are starting to play differently now, though - they're much looser, able to slide around with little counterpoints - Weir in particular echoes Garcia quite a bit. In the solo, after finishing the verse melody, Garcia plays the 'bright star' theme and finishes it with the quiet falling-star notes - then he starts a new riff on the low strings which he repeats over and over obsessively, then turns into a high arpeggio which the others spin around in a climax, before they return to the staccato Dark Star theme. This is an early version of a technique they'd develop much more later on.
A couple parenthetical notes - one, in earlier Dark Stars, Garcia went from the staccato theme into the second verse, but here he starts using a few rhythmic bass notes (in time with Pigpen) to introduce the verse, which he would do for the rest of the year. Also, this is our first Dark Star>St Stephen.
(We almost get another Dark Star on disc 4 - after the first St Stephen, they start to go into Dark Star, change their minds, and enter Cryptical instead. This Other One medley is still in its early phase, without the extra jamming we'll hear in August.)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-xx-xx.sbd.vernon.9426.sbeok.shnf (16:06)

In August we get Dark Stars from four days in a row. They aren't much slower in pace yet, but they find the band sounding tougher than they did in March. Garcia is playing harder, more sharply, bringing more out of his notes - when he plays the verse melody in the solo, for instance, it's much more dramatic than it used to be - and new melodies are pouring out of him. Lesh is a lot more free in his lines, often playing in duet with Garcia. Pigpen is still carrying on his riff almost non-stop through the song, which is less charming than it used to be because Dark Star is now twice as long, and the rest of the band is clearly in a different zone - and he's also very loud in the mix in these shows. (The percussion is also mixed high, so the cymbals in the verses are much more prominent now.) With Lesh playing like a second guitarist and bobbing off after Garcia, and Pigpen doing so little, Weir is mostly left playing chords (or suggestive bits of chords) to hold down the base - but when Garcia plays a pattern or changes direction, Weir is always right there with him.
Dark Stars for the rest of the year would range from 10-15 minutes. By now they'd settled into a regular format for the song sequences: almost every night it went Dark Star>St Stephen>Eleven>Death Don't Have No Mercy. Something about the changes in mood must have clicked for the Dead, for they stuck with this sequence. By November they would start alternating Lovelight with Death at the end of this medley - so well into '69, when a Dark Star started, you knew the road you were going to take, but didn't know quite where you'd end up.

8/21/68 - The intro is cut by a minute or two, so we enter in the middle of the intro jam. Garcia is playing on a more complex level than a few months ago - rather than riffing around the theme, he's improvising more and inventing new melodies. After the verse he pauses for a while and starts the solo slowly, cautiously placing his notes. Though the solo still has much of the same structure, Garcia has taken it out into jam territory by improvising more in-between the sections - he'll play the verse melody in each solo this year, but now it's surrounded by longer jams. This isn't one of the more dramatic Stars, as he never really commits to a theme or builds up the intensity, but keeps heading back to loose jamming.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-08-21.sbd.cotsman.17355.sbeok.shnf (14:21)
[The multitrack tape is complete in the Vault and due to be released in 2020.]

8/22/68 - Bill Graham introduces them as "clean-cut but morally corrupt." The Archive source is in mono, and unfortunately Pigpen is the loudest player, right up-front with his constant little riff - so this version can be hard to listen to.
The band is meshed together, constantly pushing ahead, notes crashing in a headlong tide. After the verse melody, Garcia plays a series of revolving notes, spilling into each other - then they quiet down before playing an unusual variation on the Dark Star theme, as Garcia lingers in the jam a little longer before the second verse. Afterwards, they go into Cryptical, having played Stephen earlier in the show.
Beware early copies of 8/22/68 - they are actually fakes of 8/24/68 with the songs shuffled around! (Only one complete version of 8/22 is on the Archive.) Overall this show seems to be the runt of this run anyway, with scrappier playing than the other shows.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-08-22.sbd.cotsman.14915.sbeok.shnf (11:19)

8/23/68 - This is one of the longest Dark Stars of the year (15 minutes). Garcia plays a long solo in the intro, with lots of new themes, and after the verse they head straight into a free jam. By now it's difficult to take all the players in at once, but they're able to meet at any point in an instant, and can build up or drop down in volume on a dime. Garcia concentrates on straight melodic riffing, and we hear the first of his little violin-like 'volume swells', which he wouldn't do very frequently this year. At one point Lesh stops playing briefly, so we get a rare duet passage between Garcia & Weir. Garcia gets into a groove playing some repeating notes that circle round each other - as he heads into the 'bright star' theme the others kick up the intensity, so when he hits the falling-star notes, they're pushing him harder and it turns spontaneously into a wailing climax, which he carefully brings back to the Dark Star theme.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-08-23.sbd.sacks.52.sbefail.shnf (15:30)

8/24/68 - This is the shortest version of this run, but perhaps the most lyrical and powerful in its compression. They reach the verse quickly, but even in a 90-second intro, Garcia has passed through several themes and variations, changing his tone in-between phrases. The solo starts with a new song-like melody - after the verse melody there's a section where Garcia's sharply hitting a low string while the others charge up - then they take it down to a quieter section where Lesh is playing a dual-lead with Garcia while Weir drops in little fills. Garcia will find a note and suddenly a melody will blossom out of it - half-songs spill out of his guitar and are left behind. Finally he starts hanging onto one chiming note, and repeats it steadily for half a minute while the band tears back into the chords, an amazing moment. After another jam they return to the 'bright star' riff, but tonight it leads straight into the Dark Star figure and verse.
Released on Two From The Vault. (11:21)

8/28/68 - This tape is either a decent AUD or a terrible SBD, and is not the easiest listen. This short Dark Star closely resembles the ones from last week, but it is not a standout version - the jam is flowing, but it just sort of trickles to the second verse without any highlights. There is one point when they quiet down and Garcia plays some soft chimes, then they bring the volume back up in a burst of loudness.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-08-28.sbd.vernon.10162.sbeok.shnf (10:40)
[The tape is misdated, but is likely from a different date that week.]

9/2/68 - A rowdy show starts with a giddy announcement: "The people that started it all, the Grateful Dead!" The mix is rather grungy, with Weir up-front, Garcia's levels changing now and then, and Pigpen barely audible, but this is easy to listen to, and the Dark Star has continued to grow from just a week before. The intro is the longest yet, five minutes until the verse - they're ready to play right out of the gate. Nice, driving jamming here, which flows almost unconsciously - near the end, we have the first brief appearance of what Jim Powell called the Sputnik jam, an eerie overlapping-note figure which is still undeveloped, but would be a prominent section in many Stars to come. (An early version also appeared on 8/28, but it's hard to hear. As an example of a Sputnik, you can find one full-blown later version at 11:40 in the Live/Dead Dark Star.) Then we have a quiet bright-star theme, played in the staccato way like in early '68, which heads back into the song. Unfortunately, this is our last live Dark Star for a month....
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-09-02.sbd.miller.22095.sbeok.shnf (13:51)

We have a studio version of Dark Star, usually dated Nov or Dec '68. Although a date of 11/6 is said to be confirmed, I think it's doubtful - why would they have such trouble with a stop-and-start rehearsal of St Stephen>The Eleven so late in the year, when they'd been playing it for months? It's clearly before December since Constanten isn't there; but the Dark Star and St Stephen sound like they're from August or later. So I think this comes from the start of the Aoxomoxoa sessions, probably September, when they were spending time jamming around in the studio seeing what came out. (Other studio sessions we have are the 8-13-68 jams on the Aoxomoxoa CD reissue, and the Hartbeats 9-21-68 Clementine jam.)
The session starts with a loose Lovelight, notable for Garcia singing a verse. Then they try out Dark Star - I think not as a rehearsal or to record it, but just as a warmup. They take it at a very slow pace - Pigpen's organ riff is (distressingly) right up front in the mix, and Garcia doubles his riff for a while (just like on 1/20/68), which is unusual to hear. (Pigpen keeps changing his organ sound, with no improvement.) Garcia sounds very relaxed, and nobody's stretching themselves here - this Dark Star stays pretty laid-back, with no fireworks. Near the end of the jam, there is an early Sputnik, which is interesting because we can clearly hear Garcia & Pigpen playing it in unison, while the others join in this time, hinting at what it would later sound like after Constanten joined. This heads into the bright-star figure, and they quickly wrap up Dark Star.
Afterwards, they move on to some exasperating attempts to get down St Stephen and the Eleven - the transition is especially troublesome.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-11-06.StudioRehearsals.GEMS.82393.flac16 (11:49)
[Note: I was mistaken - this is likely to be the right date, and it is a rehearsal with Tom Constanten, not Pigpen.]

As this studio session might show, Garcia and Lesh were getting impatient with the band's progress - they were starting to feel that Weir and Pigpen were holding the others back, and without them the Dead could advance even farther into uncharted weirdness.
Rock Scully recalled, "Bobby wasn't progressing - he was still playing the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar, and Jerry was trying to get him to loosen up.... I don't think that Pigpen, without being high on LSD, could quite understand the direction the music was taking. And their music did change a lot in that period. Jerry spent a lot of time trying to describe and explain where he thought the music was going, and so did Phil."
At the time, Scully told them, "It seems like the music is being carried to a certain level, then staying there.... You guys tire of music that has much more potential, many more possibilities, too soon....it never gets any better. [You play] too fast for the material, because the material is complex and groovy and much further out than most music is these days."
Garcia was blunt: "You guys know that the gigs haven't been any fun, it hasn't been good playing it, it's because we're at different levels of playing, we're thinking different thoughts and we just aren't playing together."
So in late September, Mickey & the Hartbeats came into being - a loose group of Garcia, Lesh, Hart, and any other San Francisco musicians who felt like jamming with them. In early October they started a series of shows at the Matrix (we have recordings of a few nights, but not all). The purpose was to explore various instrumental themes and the outer limits of improvisation (and, whenever Elvin Bishop showed up, the well-trod road of the blues). Sometimes familiar Dead themes would appear, sounding very skeletal and stretched-out - lacking the intensity and direction of Dead shows, but full of invention. Dark Star was played several times.

10/8/68 - Dark Star is taken at a slower pace here - without Weir's chords, it becomes basically an instrumental duet between Garcia & Lesh (the verses are never sung). This version is not very Dark Star-like - they stay away from the usual themes and noodle around on new riffs. This goes into the first Cosmic Charlie, which is a very fun and exciting version.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-10-08.sbd.belaff.17691.sbeok.shnf (11:40)

10/10/68 - The Dark Star this night is much better than on 10/8, very mellow and relaxing, with Garcia finding some interesting parts to play. In the nature of improvisation, some of the best things he plays tonight don't appear in the Dead's versions. He touches on the Dark Star theme with Lesh a few times, and then drifts into further bouts of jamming - since they aren't tethered to the song structure, they can quickly change direction. Tonight, they go into an Eleven jam.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-10-10.sbd.miller-ladner.4513.sbeok.shnf (13:05)

10/30/68 - Two Dark Stars are played tonight, the first with Lesh and the second with Jack Casady. The first version is perhaps the best of these Matrix Stars, and the most similar to a typical Dead version since it sometimes comes back to the usual structure. It's very inventive, with Lesh right on top of Garcia whenever he makes a turn, and they head into Death Letter Blues, a unique Garcia blues cover of a Son House song.
The second version is somewhat different from the other Dark Star jams since this time Garcia is playing with Jack Casady. There is a Sputnik riff, and a forceful entry back into the Dark Star theme, but mostly this jam courses in uncharted waters. Casady is very familiar with the tune, and his style is quite close to Lesh's (there's a dispute in the Archive reviews over who's on bass here), but I find his playing to be 'heavier' and more forceful than Lesh. He and Garcia jammed together a number of times and they're quite at home with each other (they even talked about starting their own Cream-type group). This Dark Star seems like it could go on endlessly - it has that 'lonesome' late-night tiny-club feel, and you can imagine them playing in a dark corner while a few people at the tables slump over their coffees....
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-10-30.sbd.sacks.1205.sbeok.shnf (17:30, 19:24) 
[Note: I was mistaken - Jack Casady does not play on this tape! It's Phil. The second Dark Star is from another Hartbeats show that got included in the 10/30 reels.]

Meanwhile, the Dead's regular shows continued....

10/12/68 - Garcia assures the audience as the show starts, "Everybody just cool it, everything's gonna be all right, we're gonna play here until we drop." Pigpen was not at these Avalon shows, and his absence makes quite a difference - without his riff, the Dark Star is slower-paced, more meditative. It's a long one at 15 minutes, with a long intro that gracefully unfolds - and it's also beautifully recorded. (On the other hand, Mickey Hart's scratcher is mixed very loudly at this show, swooping across the channels, which can be distracting.)
Garcia's guitar has just the right amount of echo, making his notes ring - sometimes it shades over into little bursts of feedback, which still seem perfectly placed. His style is becoming more varied each month - he keeps throwing in unexpected twists and graceful little riffs all over the frets, and is starting to use more 'noise' and overtones in the jam. Lesh pushes him at every point, playing fascinating lines of his own - they're so close as they ebb and swell in the jam, it's hard to believe it's all improvised. The verse melody has an especially dramatic entrance, as Garcia builds up to it with insistent repeated notes. Later he quietly enters the bright-star theme and lifts it up into the falling-star notes - afterwards we have a very nice, spooky Sputnik jam, done much more fully than a month ago, which heads back into the Dark Star theme.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-10-12.sbd.miller.86759.sbeok.flac16 (15:30)

10/13/68 - The 12th is one of the most famed shows of the year, but the Dark Star from its often overlooked sibling show on the 13th is equally amazing. At least a minute of the start is cut, but right away we can tell this is another hot, dense Star, with the band almost building to a climax even before the verse. The intro is full of anticipation, and Garcia jumps into the jam right away - this is a more exuberant Star than the night before. Lesh is especially bouncy tonight; and Weir is mixed louder, so we can hear his interaction with Lesh - tonight they're so tightly bonded they sometimes seem to be pushing Garcia to the side, and in turn he pushes right back. The start of the jam is remarkable - with Garcia and Lesh bouncing notes off each other and Weir following right after them, the three of them sound like they're spinning in circles. The bright-star theme is more energized tonight, with Weir playing jagged chords and Lesh doing a counter-melody. The Sputnik jam is explored by the group, and once again heads back to the Dark Star theme.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-10-13.sbd.miller.86761.sbeok.flac16 (13:33)

10/20/68 - The Dead seem to be in a hurry in this short show, rushing through their setlist (perhaps other bands were waiting to go on), but this quickie Dark Star is still very nice with an amazing climax. Pigpen is back (in fact, Dark Star doesn't start the set as usual but comes after a couple of his numbers) - but his riff is unobtrusive in the mix. It's more effective this way, when it's faintly heard at the edge of things.
After a moody intro, there are heavy gong crashes in the verse, and the jam picks up speed as Garcia's melodic phrases come flooding in. Garcia has the same piercing tone as at the Avalon, twisting his notes, barely pausing in-between phrases, and jumping from one register to another. At the end of the short jam, Garcia plays a Sputnik which is already more developed than it was the week before, with gongs and feedback, and keeps it going as Lesh plays a simple but stunning riff, into a fast, triumphant bright-star theme that goes straight into the verse.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-10-20.sbd.miller.9071.shnf (10:05)
[Released in the 30 Trips box.]

11/1/68 - An announcer tells the audience, "This is the Dead's last set." We don't have the first set, where apparently they played a Viola Lee (and a big chunk of the second set has gone AWOL) - I think if the full show survived, it would be considered one of the great '68 shows. Anyway, the mix levels are being set at the start, and it takes a couple minutes to balance out. Pigpen still plays his riff throughout, but again he's quiet in the mix.
By now Dark Star has noticeably slowed down since August, though this version still seems rather brief. The opening solo is short but wide-ranging. In the jam, Garcia and Lesh are intertwined - with Weir mixed low, it sounds like a Matrix-style duet. Garcia swoops up the frets, teasing little riffs, and finally edges into the climactic bright-star theme over Lesh's chords, which abruptly drops back into the Dark Star theme. This Dark Star goes into an explosive Cryptical (I guess Stephen>Eleven had been in the first set), starting a long medley in which unfortunately the recording goes haywire.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-11-01.sbd.kaplan.17080.sbeok.shnf (11:30)

11/22/68 - This is a very echoey AUD recording, but Garcia pierces right through like a thousand bells; Pigpen is very quiet. (Also, Bill Kreutzmann wasn't at this show, being sick, so Mickey Hart is the only drummer.) Only three weeks since our last version, we see Dark Star jumping by leaps & bounds into the '69 style - time flies by and contracts, and the jam seems to swim and dissolve too rapidly to take in - sometimes it almost seems like it's going to burst into a Live/Dead passage. There's a dramatic point near the beginning of the jam when Garcia switches to an even more piercing higher tone, and the drums unexpectedly come banging in, leading into a passage of swirling feedback and an almost Hendrix-style Garcia solo. This drops into a wild Sputnik, which quiets down for a little spacy feedback (sounding almost like a '72 space), which then goes right back to Sputnik and a very fast, ringing bright-star theme; then they bring the energy down for the Dark Star theme. The audience holds its breath - this is one of the finest Stars of '68.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-11-22.aud.cotsman.10088.sbeok.shnf (11:50)

This was the last Dark Star in which Pigpen played. For an entire year, while the band made a huge jump in the jams, he'd played the exact same keyboard part without any changes. Garcia said, "We just didn't want him playing keyboard, because he just didn't know what to do on the kind of material we were writing. It seemed like we were heading someplace in a big way and Pigpen just wasn't open to it."
But a change was around the corner. On Nov. 22, Lesh's old schoolmate Tom Constanten got out of the air force; and on the very next day, he flew to Ohio and played at the Dead's next show. He would probably have joined the Dead in their Anthem days had he not been stuck in the military, but he'd kept in touch and was looking forward to playing with them. "I'd heard the albums, I knew the changes, and knew I could land on my feet in improvisatory situations," he said.
But as much as he added in the studio, Constanten wasn't very assertive in a live setting, and seemed tentative in his first couple months with the Dead - as he explained, "I wanted to be able to stay out of their way." They didn't leave much room in their playing for him - nor did he get much chance to practice, being left to fend for himself behind the wall of guitar notes. And on top of this, he is all but inaudible on most of the tapes - in December '68, it's often impossible to tell what he's doing since he simply can't be heard! Constanten might not have minded though - when he could hear himself, he was struggling to get used to his own sound.
"I didn't like the Vox sound at all.... The Dead's guitars were these strands of gold and filament, but the Vox was like a hunk of chrome. I had terribly mixed emotions about everything I was playing because the sound didn't please me." He switched to a Hammond organ and would keep trying to find a place for himself in the music.

12/7/68 - This is the most psychedelic Dark Star of the year. At least a minute is cut from the start, but we can soon hear a difference in Garcia's approach in the intro - his notes are bending and sliding in very trippy fashion, melding into Lesh's lines, and he repeats a high chime before the verse, as if calling the spirits. (Constanten is pretty much inaudible.) After the verse, Garcia drifts gradually into the jam, placing notes carefully, and even doing a short volume-swelling piece. His playing is changing, not as loud and dramatic but more subtle. After the verse melody, his notes trickle away as Lesh rumbles, and they find a new Dark Star variation, which Garcia intensifies and distorts - then it ebbs away as Garcia circles around one note, and falls into a Lesh-dominated Sputnik. For the first time, the Sputnik gives way to metallic chimes from Garcia's guitar - then he strikes shimmering harmonics from the strings (similar to the revolving plucked-notes section in the Cryptical reprise). Lesh starts up the Dark Star theme again, and they quickly go back to the verse. You can hear the audience clapping as Garcia sings!
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-12-07.sbd.miller.88674.sbeok.flac16 (13:24)

12/29/68 - We come to our last Star of the year - unfortunately this is a brief, rushed Star at one of those festival sets where there was a long lineup of acts. Though Dark Star usually starts a set, here it comes after the opening Lovelight. The band introduces it - Lesh: "We once put this song out on a single - that's interesting." Garcia: "One of our obscure singles." Weir: "For you ethno-musicologists."
Constanten is completely inaudible. But Garcia is powerful and compressed, with a particularly howling tone. His soloing in the jam is very original, taking unexpected directions and using new sounds. There's a mild Sputnik near the end of the jam, but otherwise they stay away from the usual themes, striking out for new paths. The Dark Star theme isn't far away though; they rush back to the verse and it's all over very quickly.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-12-29.sbd.miller.80197.sbeok.flac16 (10:26)

Before we leave '68, I should note that Disc 2 of the "Mystery Reels" has an isolated four-minute fragment of the end of a Dark Star, which is impossible to date. There's no Pigpen or Constanten; it has a muscular '69 sound, and they play it slower than most '68 Stars and head back into the verse in an odd way, without the usual themes, so this sounds like it's from '69 sometime.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd68-xx-xx.sbd.vernon.9426.sbeok.shnf
[Note: This has been identified as 4/17/69.]

On 12/31/68 they played a Dark Star>St Stephen>Eleven>Lovelight suite, and taped it in the first live 16-track recording. Unfortunately the tape seems to have turned out distorted, so they taped over it at the January '69 Avalon shows. (And, when some of those recordings were screwed up too, they taped over a few of those 16-tracks at the Fillmore the next month.)
They had decided to record a live album in late '68 - with the Aoxomoxoa sessions going nowhere fast as they overdubbed and re-recorded and redubbed and remixed, a live release was an obvious, quick and easy solution to get the record company off their backs for a while. They'd never been able to match the excitement of their live show in the studio (despite trying on the first two albums), but with a live album they could show the world what they really sounded like.
When asked way back in April '67 about capturing the Dead's live sound, Garcia noted, "You can't do it in a studio." But he theorized: "If you recorded us live, like at the Fillmore, maybe after two or three months....we'd start to get good cuts, good enough for an album in terms of how clean they were and how much we liked the performance on them. It would be such an expensive undertaking, and long...."
Recording shows for the Anthem album in early '68 had given them experience in mixing and selecting live material, and proved to be far less long & expensive than studio work - so by the end of the year they felt ready to put out a show on its own. They were well aware of the difference between 'flat' soundboard recordings and the huge echo of the guitars bouncing around the theater, so on the Anthem tour they'd set up 'roomsound' mikes to capture the full sound (I think on Live/Dead they added echo as well).
Garcia said in December '68, "What would be nicest would be to take one complete show with no editing and just say here it is, man.... And on the chance that the perfect night might happen sometime, we record." (Weir added, "And invariably the really good, perfect performances are never on tape. Which is, of course, the way it should be.")

This brings us to the end of 1968 and the dawn of the Live/Dead era. I can't leave you hanging there though, so I'll mention some of the changes Dark Star went through in January '69 before Live/Dead was recorded.
Garcia: "You can't play the way the Grateful Dead plays without working at it. It's not something that just happened to us. It didn't happen overnight, either. There was a long, slow process that brought that into being."
Dark Stars continued to be very diverse - they all follow the same structure established in late '68, but each one is handled differently. The tempo was slowed down considerably, which gave Dark Star a heavier, more reflective feel - with more room for Weir and Lesh to play in, it became more like a classical chamber piece. Late '68 Stars tended to be very dense, as the music rushed by - now musical thoughts are extended longer. Constanten is sometimes too quiet to be heard well, but when he's there, he contributes a delicate baroque-gothic mood unique to early '69. He still plays Pigpen's riff in the first few bars (it would stay there until summer '69), but then leaves it for freestyle accompaniment. (As for the drummers, I don't hear much of that scratcher, but I do hear congas which I don't recall from '68 - maybe it's Pigpen?)
Garcia pursues his new echo-drenched style - he doesn't rely so much on the constant stream of run-on notes that characterized '68, but uses more space in his playing. His technique has expanded, and he draws from a wider palette of shifting tones - the Sputnik jam, for instance, has been built up until now it can pass through several phases of fingerstyle chiming. Garcia thinks 'outside the notes' more, and uses more extraneous sounds like feedback - sometimes he enters these pure abstract sheets of sound.
The dynamics in the jams are more pronounced, and they can drop from a very loud passage to a quiet one, and shift back again. They frequently dig into tense, explosive passages, as Garcia hangs onto one note for life as Lesh & Weir churn up and burst beneath him. But they can also use pauses, as they hover in dramatic silence for a bit. Sometimes there will be long periods where Garcia doesn't play while the others groove on the theme, then he screams back in - a jazzy technique.
January '69 Stars are about the same length as in late '68, generally about 12-15 minutes. The breakthrough comes in the Philadelphia shows of February 14-15, when suddenly Dark Star breaks the 20-minute barrier....
But that is a story for another day. A lot more could be said about Dark Star, but I'll have to leave it at that.

Special thanks to Blair Jackson for the interviews he's collected - his books are invaluable.

The Dead's Acoustic Sets 1969-1970

"We're gonna take a break from all this sweat & steam & uproar & tumult and we're gonna break out our acoustic guitars and regale you with some wooden music."
- Bob Weir, 4/9/70

The Dead had their origins in acoustic music - back in '61 Phil Lesh was impressed enough by Garcia as a folk-singer to get him his own radio show - and Garcia, Weir, and Pigpen first started playing together in the Mother McCree's jug-band in '64, after Garcia had tired of the local bluegrass circuit. If it hadn't been for their love of the Beatles and the Stones, perhaps they would have become a merry band of old-time traditionalists like the New Lost City Ramblers. But once they dove into rock & roll, there was no looking back - within a couple years they had shed their R&B influences, turned into a big, hairy, noisy psychedelic band, and dedicated themselves to acid-soaked weirdness. Early fans would have been puzzled to hear that Garcia had once been a banjo-player and folk connoisseur whose biggest ambition was to join Bill Monroe's band....
But once Garcia's old friend Robert Hunter started writing songs for the band with his own brand of weirdness, acoustic guitars would soon turn up in the Dead's music.

The first acoustic song the Dead introduced was Mountains of the Moon, in December '68. It was soon followed in January by a slew of new Aoxomoxoa songs - Cosmic Charlie, Doin' That Rag - and, more central to our topic, Dupree's Diamond Blues. Dupree's is actually a spin-off from the old blues song Betty & Dupree, which the Dead had been doing in '66 - one version can be heard in their 12/1/66 show (which also has a number of other songs that would be revived in '69).
http://www.archive.org/details/gd66-12-01.sbd.sirmick.26968.sbeok.shnf
Dupree's Diamond Blues was first played on Jan 24 (with Pigpen on harmonica) in electric guise. But starting on Feb 11, it became paired with Mountains of the Moon as an acoustic song, and all of its appearances in the rest of '69 would be acoustic. (I've talked more about the Dupree's/Mountains pairing in my Mountains of the Moon post.)

Garcia soon became unhappy with this experimental batch of Aoxomoxoa songs, and Cosmic Charlie was the only one that would make it past the summer of 1969. As he said later, "All those Aoxomoxoa songs, a lot of them are cumbersome to perform, overwritten.... A lot of tunes on there are just packed with lyrics, or packed with musical changes that aren't worth it....there isn't a graceful way to perform them."
Although Garcia liked the album and was happy with the way it sounded (especially after he remixed it in '71), he admitted, "We spent too much money and too much time on that record; we were trying to accomplish too much and I was being really stupid about a lot of it, because it was some new tunes that I had written, that I hadn't really bothered to teach anyone in the band and I was trying to record them from the ground up and everybody was coming in and doing overdubs... We didn't go about it as a group at all.... It was when Hunter and I were being more or less obscure...in terms of the lyrics being very far out. Too far out, really, for most people."
The Dead in general were also getting restless with the limited number of songs they had in their set - aside from the few new songs, their shows were much the same as they had been in summer '68. The band wanted to break out of the tight format of their shows over the past few months, and shake up the setlist a bit - but what they didn't have yet were more new songs - those wouldn't come til June - so in April they started digging up a lot of the old songs that they hadn't done, sometimes in years. I went into more details in my China>Rider post, but to summarize, these are the debut performance dates of the '69 revivals:
3/15/69 - Hard to Handle (they hadn't done this before)
4/5/69 - China Cat Sunflower, It's A Sin
4/6/69 - Viola Lee Blues, Beat It On Down the Line, It's All Over Now Baby Blue
4/12/69 - He Was A Friend Of Mine (last played 12/7/68)
4/15/69 - Sitting on Top of the World (and Hurts Me Too, last played 12/21/68)
4/23/69 - Not Fade Away (almost! - actually wouldn't be fully played until 12/21/69.)
4/26/69 - Silver Threads & Golden Needles, New Minglewood Blues
4/27/69 - Me & My Uncle
5/7/69 - Good Lovin', Smokestack Lightning
5/31/69 - Cold Rain & Snow, Green Grass of Home (a new one)
[And a couple more covers were added in June, Mama Tried on 6/21 and Big Boss Man on 6/27.]
So without having to write any new songs, the Dead went searching in their past repertoire and added about a dozen oldies to their setlists that spring, almost all of them 'traditional' tunes or covers. The shift to more country songs was just around the corner....

In early '69 Hunter and Garcia were living together, working on songs - as Hunter described it, "I'd be sitting upstairs banging on my typewriter, picking up my guitar, and singing something.... Jerry would be downstairs practicing guitar, working things out. You could hear fine through the floors there, and by the time I'd come down with a sheet and slap it down in front of him, Jerry already knew how it should go!" Garcia wanted a change in direction from his strange & complicated Aoxomoxoa efforts - so he and Hunter found themselves writing in a new vein of more straightforward, country-influenced songs.
In June '69 Garcia did a studio test, solo acoustic demos of three new songs - Dire Wolf, Casey Jones, and High Time. This only surfaced last year, and it's quite interesting:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-01-01.studio.smith.91324.sbeok.flac16

At the Dead's shows, Dire Wolf was first played on June 7 - High Time on June 21 - and Casey Jones on June 22. Casey Jones was very different in its early form - since the arrangement was still unsettled, the early versions have the Dead jamming into the song. But Dire Wolf is more relevant to our topic, since the Dead played it acoustically in its first performances.

This was quite a burst of songwriting for Garcia - but though Hunter could pour out the words, Garcia was not a prolific composer. As he said in 1973, "Sometimes I can just crank 'em out and other times ....nothing. Like I could have a spurt in which I'd write four new songs in one week, and in the next six months I wouldn't be able to put two words together. It's that kind of thing."
A song written for Pigpen, Easy Wind, debuted on Aug 20 - but it was fall before more new Garcia songs emerged. Cumberland Blues (the Dead's closest approach to bluegrass) was first played Nov 8. A home demo from around this time shows them playing with the Uncle John's instrumental, as well as the first version of a song John Dawson co-wrote, Friend of the Devil:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-06-xx.aud.tzuriel.10510.sbeok.shnf
Dec 4 saw two debuts - Black Peter, and the completed Uncle John's Band to end the show. Garcia apologized before they sang Uncle John: "Seems we blew most of the set just trying to remember how to play - and so we're going to blow this part of the set remembering how to sing a song we barely know."
Two more songs came out at the end of December - Mason's Children was first played on Dec 19, and New Speedway Boogie on Dec 20.
Friend of the Devil didn't show up in a Dead show until March 20, 1970, when it was played in the acoustic set. The April 3 acoustic set saw the debut of Candyman - and on May 24, they brought out a rough first version of Attics of My Life, another song that would alternate between acoustic & electric versions that year.
Garcia had another writing spurt that summer, and our first To Lay Me Down comes from the July 30 acoustic show. Then the Aug 18 acoustic set has a whole bounty of new songs - Truckin', Ripple, Brokedown Palace, and Pigpen's rare Operator.

In turning away from psychedelia and doing more country-influenced songs, the Dead were not being innovative - actually in 1968, country-rock was becoming quite the trend, with Dylan, the Band, and the Byrds just the most famous examples - even the Stones were flirting with country! But one specific influence on the Dead may have been the Flying Burrito Brothers with Gram Parsons - they played with the Dead at the Avalon from April 4-6, '69 (Bear's recordings of these shows have recently been released). Garcia would especially have taken note of their pedal-steel player, Sneaky Pete Kleinow.... "Pedal steel was an instrument that was on my mind since back in the days when I was a banjo player. I didn't think that I wanted to get that serious about it because I knew it was extremely difficult and that I'd have to spend a lot of time to actually get into it."
In fact, Garcia had owned a pedal steel back in the 710 Ashbury St. days in 1967. In a spring '67 interview, he announced that he was also getting an electric banjo: "My banjo is in the process of being electrified... I haven't used it yet cause it's not finished... I don't know how I'm going to use it, but I'm going to use it. I also have another instrument, pedal steel guitar. I've been working on it about a month, and I should be using it with the band within about six weeks. This is just an effort to broaden the scope a little, experiment a little. We're ready to experiment." 
But as it turned out, he changed his mind and soon sold the pedal steel - apparently he was never able to tune it. (And the electric banjo never appeared.) It would be another couple years before the Dead's scope broadened enough to experiment with pedal steel. Perhaps hearing Sneaky Pete Kleinow in April '69 reminded Garcia that the Dead could now include pedal-steel material... 
http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/03/april-4-6-1969-avalon-ballroom-san.html  
Garcia was a fan of the first Flying Burrito Brothers album - though years later when David Gans asked Weir if the Burritos influenced the Dead's embrace of country music, Weir recalled: "Not really; we'd been into that stuff since the beginning (Buck Owens, George Jones...) and it was just gonna come out sooner or later. Jerry and I had a bunch of country and gospel tunes we had worked up on days off on the road for fun, and when the Burritos came out, I think we were already doing these tunes..." 

On April 13, 1969, while the Dead were in Denver, Garcia bought his own pedal steel guitar. "I played with the pedals a little bit, I dug the tuning, and I said, 'Oh, I see!' Suddenly I finally started to understand a little of the sense of it... I said, 'I want to buy this fucking thing, but can you send it to me in tune? I'll never remember this tuning.'"
A recent article explores the link between the Flying Burrito Brothers and Garcia's immediate dive into the pedal steel:
http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2017/06/jerry-garcia-sneaky-pete-kleinow-and.html
"Jerry Garcia bought his Zane Beck Double 10 pedal steel guitar [at] Guitar City in Lakewood, CO. The proprietor was one Don Edwards... Edwards' store was famous as a pedal steel guitar emporium. According to Peter Grant, one of the steel guitar teachers in the store was no less than Rusty Young [of Poco]. Grant recalls that Young gave Garcia some advice about which steel guitar to buy."
Garcia spoke at length about his pedal-steel purchase in this interview from McNally's book Jerry on Jerry:
https://relix.com/articles/detail/jerry_garcia_puts_his_mettle_to_the_pedal_an_excerpt_from_jerry_on_jerry/

He may have practiced it over the next couple weeks of the tour, for on the April 26 show in Chicago, the pedal steel turned up onstage and Garcia played it in a revival of Silver Threads & Golden Needles (a country song the Dead hadn't played since 1966). He doesn't sound too shabby.
https://archive.org/details/gd1969-04-26.sbd.miller.97393.sbeok.flac16

Once the Dead were back home, Garcia took the pedal steel back to the bands' rehearsal hall, and started teaching himself how to play. "I could understand enough about the pedal steel to play along with simple stuff....so I went down there and set up my pedal steel in the corner and slowly proceeded to try and learn how to play it. I had a pretty good idea in my head of what I wanted it to sound like, but I didn't have any chops down. Pretty soon it started to sound pretty good, and a couple of other friends sort of fell into the scene."

One friend was Peter Grant, who had played pedal steel on Doin' That Rag on the Aoxomoxoa album. Grant recalls: "Before the Grateful Dead or even the Warlocks, Jerry and I were driving in his Corvair up from Palo Alto to Berkeley to see the Kentucky Colonels play. 'Together Again' came on the radio (by Buck Owens), with that memorable solo by Tom Brumley. [First released in Feb '64.] We both listened in reverent awe, and said, 'Man, we gotta learn pedal steel.' Between the two of us, I was the first to get a steel and start playing, and that's how I ended up playing on Aoxomoxoa. When Jerry came back from a tour [in '69] with a brand-new ZB Custom double-10 pedal steel, he absolutely immersed himself in the instrument. I remember going over to his house to see it. He had me playing guitar as soon as I walked in the door, and singing every song I knew, so he could boink around and play backups and solos. Later that day, I showed him some things that I had discovered on the steel, including parts of 'Together Again'. He got good real fast and had a wonderfully unique style."

Another friend encouraging Garcia in this direction was John Dawson, who'd known Garcia since his early-'60s folkie days, but was more interested in straight country than rock music.
"When I heard that Jerry had bought a pedal steel, I boldly invited myself over to his house to hear what it sounded like. I brought my guitar along and I played him a couple of my songs and he literally sat there and dove into the pedal steel guitar.... We had a nice evening and that was really the beginning of the whole New Riders thing....
"At first, Jerry didn't have the slightest idea what the real steel players were up to. What he played was just his idea of what they were doing and what sounded good to him... He didn't read any books: he just sat down and played it. He was checking it out: 'Let's see, this goes here. If I do this, this happens. What if I do this?'...
"At that time I had a gig at this coffeehouse [May '69]....and I invited Jerry to come down and join me. It was just the two of us - me on guitar and Jerry on pedal steel. I would play my own songs and I was also doing covers - stuff like I Shall Be Released and Mama Tried.... [The Dead put the Haggard song in their own set the next month.] Once the word got out that it was me and Garcia there....we got some pretty big crowds that summer.... It got to be a nice little scene. After a while we decided to make a little band out of this."
On guitar, they recruited another of Garcia's old friends, David Nelson, who had played in bluegrass bands with Garcia in the early '60s. (In fact, Dawson, Nelson, and pedal-steel player Peter Grant had all appeared on Aoxomoxoa.) And with Phil Lesh on bass and Mickey Hart on drums, they started playing separate gigs as the New Riders of the Purple Sage in June & July '69.
One surviving example of a 1969 New Riders show comes from 9/18/69. It appears early NRPS was largely a showcase for Garcia's pedal-steel playing, as he goes into solo after solo. It's also unique for his harmony vocals (much sloppier than in the Dead), which he probably later stopped doing in NRPS sets because he usually has to pause on the pedal steel in order to sing.
http://archive.org/details/NRPS1969-09-18

At this point the New Riders were playing separately from the Dead, but there was one memorable show where the two bands combined - 6/11/69, at the California Hall in San Francisco. It was billed as "Bobby Ace and His Cards From the Bottom of the Deck" - Weir, Garcia, Lesh, Hart, and Constanten with John Dawson, David Nelson, and also Peter Grant (on pedal steel and/or banjo). As far as I know the show wasn't taped, but the setlist is tantalizing - lots of Everly Brothers!
Let It Be Me ; Silver Threads And Golden Needles ; Mama Tried ; Cathy's Clown ; Me And My Uncle ; Slewfoot: Dire Wolf ; Games People Play ; The Race Is On ; Green Green Grass Of Home ; Tiger By The Tail ; I've Just Seen A Face ; All I Have To Do Is Dream ; Wabash Cannonball ; Railroading The Great Divide
(A few comments on the songs' origins are here.)

Meanwhile, Garcia wasn't content to let his pedal-steel light shine under the New Riders bushel, but decided to freak out Dead audiences by opening Dead shows with some country songs!
The first example was on 5/31/69, when they introduced Green Grass of Home. Weir had a fatal attraction to maudlin country weepies (and would write one of his own, Looks Like Rain), and he was taken enough by this tune to play it again at the 6/6/69 show with Elvin Bishop, and far too many times thereafter.... Though Garcia's on electric guitar here, he does a remarkable simulation of a pedal steel.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-05-31.sbd.oleynick.76.sbeok.shnf
On 6/7/69, they opened the show with an acoustic Garcia trio: the first Dire Wolf, Dupree's, and Mountains of the Moon.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-06-07.sbd.kaplan.9074.sbeok.shnf
6/20/69 is a lost show, but a newspaper review said that it opened with Dire Wolf (Weir on vocals and Garcia on pedal steel), and closed with an "acoustic spiritual" encore, probably Cold Jordan.
6/21/69 has many notable tunes - they open with Green Grass, after which Garcia says, "There will be a brief pause while we allow you to consider these new developments." Later on Garcia switches to pedal-steel in the first Slewfoot, a rowdy song they dive into straight out of the Cryptical reprise - an early example of a genre-bending Dead segue, and Garcia's first known pedal-steel playing in a Dead show. (Oddly, this was the first time Garcia had brought out the pedal steel in a Dead show since 4/26.)
Weir opens the second show with the thankfully rare Old House - later on he sings an acoustic Dire Wolf, having taken over the vocals from Garcia! The show also features one of the last acoustic Dupree's, and the first High Time and Mama Tried, making for a very country-soaked show. (Showing how far the Dead had come in a few months - Aoxomoxoa was released the previous day.) The show closes with an unusual Lovelight -16 minutes in, Garcia plays an acoustic guitar solo for about a minute!
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-06-21.early-late.aud-sbd.cotsman.16334.sbeok.shnf
The next day, 6/22/69, Garcia brushed up his pedal-steel skills again for Silver Threads & Golden Needles - the Dead had done this song in early '66, and it had surprisingly popped up again on 4/26 as a pedal-steel showpiece.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-06-22.aud.hanno.8836.sbefail.shnf
On 6/27/69, they opened with Slewfoot, and closed the main set by jumping into Green Grass of Home from a shortened Eleven, another mind-twisting medley. (Peter Grant is said to play banjo on Slewfoot as well, but he's barely audible.) Weir sings Dire Wolf again with Garcia on pedal-steel, an unusual way to hear the song - and the last acoustic Dupree's is played - and Mama Tried>High Time is quickly becoming a fixture in the set. (This Mama Tried is interesting since it's quieter than the Dead would later do it, with Weir still on acoustic. Casey Jones, which had debuted on 6/22, still has its opening jam, which it would keep through August - and Big Boss Man has its first, tentative performance since '66 at this show.)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-06-27.sbd.samaritano.20547.sbeok.shnf
The next Santa Rosa show, 6/28/69, features both John Dawson and Peter Grant as guests. Another pedal-steel Slewfoot and Silver Threads start the show; after the slow-paced Mama Tried, Weir announces that Peter Grant has been "playing banjo back there"; then John Dawson comes out and sings Me & My Uncle with Weir, something they'd do in later New Riders shows as well. Then, surprisingly, Peter Grant plays pedal steel on Doin' That Rag (as he did on the album), while Garcia stays on guitar.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-06-28.sbd.cole.3300.sbeok.shnf
7/3/69 starts with the pedal-steel Green Grass and Slewfoot. It's worth noting that what we have of this show has only a couple original songs, all the rest covers - and 6/28 also had only two originals! Quite a transformation since the Live/Dead days a few months earlier.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1969-07-03.sbd.miller.92771.sbeok.flac16
7/4/69 has another Slewfoot and Silver Threads - Weir indulges himself with the infrequently-played ballad Let Me In, and sings his last Dire Wolf.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-07-04.sbd.sirmick.remaster.29294.shnf
7/11/69, aside from the usual Silver Threads, also has Garcia playing pedal-steel on Hard to Handle, an interesting experiment! The show starts with the last Dupree's (done electric), and Garcia returns to singing Dire Wolf - a song he was very fond of later in fall '69, often asking the audience to sing along, and sometimes singing it twice in a row! He never did that with Dupree's....
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-07-11.sbd.hanno.4644.sbeok.shnf
7/12/69 opens with Green Grass and Slewfoot, and then has the last Mountains of the Moon.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-07-12.sbd-aud.hanno.4645.sbeok.shnf
8/2/69 has Garcia's last pedal-steel appearance of this tour, on Slewfoot and another of the sentimental ballads Weir was so fond of, Seasons of My Heart.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-08-02.sbd.miller.30651.sbeok.flacf

After this, the pedal-steel & several of these country covers were dropped from their shows. I was at first puzzled as to why they'd all of a sudden stop - but then I noticed that at the end of August, the New Riders were opening for the Dead for the first time, at the Family Dog. So with Garcia already on pedal-steel through the New Riders set, there was no longer any need for him to surprise the audience with it in the Dead's set!
But at the end of 12/31/69, when the weird '70s beckoned and they didn't want to end the show, they did a surprising electric-style medley of Weir's country covers: Seasons, The Race Is On, Silver Threads, and Slewfoot. (And a rare Big Boy Pete, too.) This is the only Slewfoot Garcia plays on regular guitar....
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1969-12-31.sbd.miller.95420.sbeok.flac16

Some of you who have been patiently reading all this while may be wondering, "all this and still no acoustic sets?" But worry no longer - on 12/19/69 the Dead's first acoustic set appeared by accident, when Phil didn't turn up in time for the show.
Garcia announces to the audience, "Phil's stuck somewhere - he's on his way, he's gonna be here in some short time and we'll be able to play loud and all that. Meantime me and Bobby Ace here are gonna regale you with some old favorites." Weir adds, "We have yet to figure out what we're gonna do."
They do Monkey & the Engineer, Little Sadie, Long Black Limousine, and I've Been All Around This World. (Limousine is a neat Everly Brothers-style song. They start doing Wake Up Little Susie after Limousine, but decide not to.) Finally Phil shows up and they blast the house with the first Mason's Children.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-12-19.sbd.hanno.9183.sbeok.shnf

12/26/69 follows a similar course, when Garcia tells the audience, "Bill is somewhere over Omaha right now on a plane....they assure us he's gonna be here in a matter of moments.... Bobby and I are going to regale you with some old standards....while we're waiting around. (to Weir) Okay, what are we gonna do?"
They do the same songs: Monkey & the Engineer, Little Sadie, Long Black Limousine, Been All Around This World, Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet, Black Peter, and Uncle John's Band. (Master's Bouquet is positively Victorian.)
The set starts off with just Garcia & Weir; Lesh starts quietly playing bass in Black Peter. Kreutzmann arrives on stage right before Uncle John's Band, and it sounds like Garcia & Weir ask him to play; Weir also asks Hart to play congas, so the last song is a full-band performance, though very ramshackle.
http://www.archive.org/details/gd69-12-26.sbd.murphy.1821.sbeok.shnf

We would never get to hear Tom Constanten in an acoustic show. His last show with the Dead was on 1/30/70 in New Orleans. They'd been growing dissatisfied with him (Weir complained, "he wasn't really a rock & roll musician, and the whole group when we were playing with him sounded more like an experimental group than a rock & roll band") - but his exit was probably hastened by their drug bust that night! Almost by cosmic coincidence, another accidental acoustic set followed the next day, 1/31, when Phil's bass amp blew.
Weir explains, "We got a busted amplifier here - so you guys can hang out and chatter amongst yourselves and feel free to wander around and make friends....while we try to work it out." As frantic repair efforts take place, Garcia & Weir decide it's time for some acoustic songs. Phil's amp keeps sputtering sporadically through the acoustic set as he tries to join in, but eventually he gives up. They only have one acoustic guitar, so Weir plays a few songs with Garcia accompanying on electric (a nice blend), then Garcia plays a few by himself. Pigpen comes out for one song, and they close with an unusual Cumberland Blues, played with one guitar and handclaps.
Long Black Limousine, Seasons Of My Heart, Saw Mill, Old Old House, The Race Is On, Black Peter, Little Sadie, All Around This World, Katie Mae, Cumberland Blues
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-01-31.sbd.cotsman.7045.sbefail.shnf

The Fillmore West shows in February '70 saw the pedal-steel brought out again, for some reason - and two shows start with the usual country tunes:
Seasons of My Heart & The Race Is On on 2/5;
Green Grass, Saw Mill, & Seasons on 2/7 (Sawmill is a fun song, quite the contrast to Weir's other slow ballads.)
Garcia snickers to the audience on 2/7, "And you thought you were going to hear rock & roll..."
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-02-05.sbd.hanno.9184.sbefail.shnf
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-02-07.sbd.bean.3912.sbeok.shnf

In the 2/13/70 late show, for the first time, they have a planned acoustic set in the middle of the show. The earlier impromptu acoustic sets apparently showed them the possibilities, since they were fans of contrast - so through the end of April, the new format for a Dead show was electric / acoustic / electric, without set breaks. So they would introduce the acoustic segments - as Garcia said on 2/28/70, "We're gonna take everybody back about sixty billion notches, man, and play some acoustic guitars for a little spell, if it's all the same to you." Or Weir on 4/3/70: "We're gonna take a brief pause here and set up the stage so we can sit down and play some acoustic guitars and play some nice quiet music for all you people."
In February & March, the acoustic sets are pretty much just Garcia & Weir (though Pigpen might come out for a song, or play a little organ). In April, light drums & bass are added to the sets. The early acoustic setlists are fairly short and repetitive (typically about six or seven songs), but songs were gradually added over the months until the Dead were ready for longer, separate full-fledged acoustic sets in May, with help from the New Riders and a more electric 'country-rock' feel.

One influence on the acoustic sets was the new album they were making - in February after the Fillmore run, they went into the studio and recorded Workingman's Dead in ten days. It was clearly a huge change from their earlier psychedelic albums, in song-style and studio-time - but the Dead already regarded Aoxomoxoa as ancient history. Garcia explained, "We were out of our pretentious thing. We weren't feeling so much like an experimental music group, but were feeling more like a good old band." (Hence, Constanten's departure before they made the album.)
Of course, it also helped that the band was also deeply in debt to Warner Brothers, so for the first time they were feeling motivated not only to spend less time recording, but to try to record something commercial. Garcia said, "I was thinking, when we go into the studio next time, let's try a real close-to-the-bone approach, like the way they record country & western records - a few instruments, relatively simple and easy-to-perform songs. It was quite conscious, an effort to say, 'Let's not spend a year. Let's do it all in three weeks and get it the hell out of the way. And that way, if the record does at all well, we will be able to pay off some of what we owe to the record company.' So that worked very well. And it was a chance to expose a side of us that we hadn't exposed very much."

The Dead's acoustic roots and fondness for country certainly hadn't been exposed before (and their Crosby Stills & Nash-influenced singing was a shock to all). Garcia and John Dawson both had an interest in the Bakersfield-country sound - as Dawson said, they were "getting off on how they used electric guitars to make this real sparse but beautiful sound. Their harmonies were crisp and clean and the songs made good sense. If you were a guitar player and you wanted to play country, you had to listen to Don Rich (Buck Owens' guitarist). Everybody did, including Jerry, of course. We'd all listen to that Carnegie Hall record that Buck Owens did and try to figure out how Rich made those sounds." (Garcia himself had also switched to a Stratocaster guitar: "It was that clarity that I was looking for - that crispness that you associate with country & western guitar players.")
Garcia added, "We're part of that California-Bakersfield school of country & western rock & roll - Buck Owens, Merle Haggard. We used to go see those bands and think, 'Gee, those guys are great.' Don Rich was one of my favorites. I learned a lot from him. So we took kind of the Buck Owens approach on Workingman's Dead. Some of the songs in there are direct tributes to that style of music, although they're not real obvious."

Another possible inspiration for the acoustic sets was the band Pentangle. Garcia praised them in later years: "The combination of drums, electric bass, and acoustic guitars is a really nice sound. In the ‘60s, there was a great-sounding band called Pentangle with those two good English fingerpickers, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. They had a tasty jazz drummer who played brushes, an excellent acoustic bass player, and a lady who sang in a sort of madrigal, English voice. It was a lovely band that sounded great onstage. We played a lot of shows with them, and I thought that combination of two acoustic guitars and a standard rhythm section had a lot of possibilities."
Pentangle had only opened for the Dead at one Fillmore West run in winter '69, but evidently left an impression on Garcia. (Musically the two bands have very little in common, though. Even the Everly Brothers had more of a direct influence on the Dead's acoustic sets.) 
http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/03/fillmore-west-february-27-march-2-1969.html 

In the middle of April, the Dead had a run of all-acoustic shows at the Family Dog along with the New Riders - they were billed as "Mickey Hart & His Heartbeats / Bobby Ace & His Cards From The Bottom Of The Deck". Setlists were kept, but unfortunately no tapes circulated. On the last two nights, Pigpen gets several solo songs in a row!
Recently, a tape of the 4/18 show surfaced, returned to the Vault by Mountain Girl. It's possible Garcia kept these shows for his own listening, to hear how they sounded. Most likely the purpose of these shows was as a test run for the expanded full-length acoustic sets starting in May - the show we have sounds rather low-key and tentative. Here for the first time, John Dawson joins on a couple songs, and Garcia plays electric for a few.
4/17
Don't Ease Me In ; Long Black Limousine ; Monkey And The Engineer ; Deep Elem Blues ; Candyman > Cumberland Blues ; Me And My Uncle ; Mama Tried ; Cathy's Clown ; Wake Up Little Susie ; New Speedway Boogie ; Friend Of The Devil ; Black Peter ; Uncle John's Band
4/18
I Know You Rider ; Don't Ease Me In ; Silver Threads And Golden Needles ; Friend Of The Devil ; Deep Elem Blues ; Wake Up Little Susie ; Candyman ; Cumberland Blues ; New Speedway Boogie ; Me And My Uncle ; Mama Tried ; Katie Mae ; The Rub ; Roberta ; Bring My My Shotgun ; The Mighty Flood ; Black Snake
4/19
I Know You Rider ; Friend Of The Devil ; Candyman ; Sawmill ; Deep Elem Blues ; The Rub ; Katie Mae ; Roberta ; Big Breasa ; She's Mine ; Cumberland Blues ; Wake Up Little Susie ; Mama Tried ; Me And My Uncle ; The Race Is On ; Uncle John's Band
http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2013/11/april-17-19-1970-family-dog-on-great.html

On 5/1/70, the Dead started their first eastern tour with the New Riders. (Their shows earlier in the year had been with a varied bunch of opening acts.) The shows were called "An Evening With the Grateful Dead" and typically ran for quite a while, arranged as an acoustic set / NRPS set / electric set. Many people in the audience, not familiar with the New Riders and seeing most of the Dead onstage with them, probably figured it was more Grateful Dead music!
Jerry said in a May '70 interview: "We're going through some transitions. Our music is not what it was: it's continually changing. What we've been doing in the States lately is having like 'an evening with the Grateful Dead.' We start off with acoustic music with Bobby and I playing guitars, light drums and very quiet electric bass. Pigpen plays the organ. Then we have a band we've been travelling with, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, where I play pedal steel, not guitar, Mickey plays drums, and three of our friends from the coast, musicians that we've known for a long time, are fronting the band. So we start off with acoustic music and then the New Riders of the Purple Sage -- it's like very snappy electric country-rock; it's kinda hard to describe -- and then we come on with the electric Dead, so it keeps us all really interesting, and it's six hours of this whole development thing. By the end of the night it's very high."

So starting in May, the acoustic sets generally became longer, and David Nelson & John Dawson usually joined the Dead for a few songs. They also added some gospel numbers to end the sets. Nelson typically plays acoustic guitar in Cumberland or New Speedway (while Garcia plays electric), and in the gospel songs, Nelson plays mandolin and Dawson sings.
Some changes came in the summer - Nelson added mandolin to Rosalie McFall, and gradually other songs as well, until he was playing it in quite a few songs. The Dead were working on the American Beauty album from August to October - a lot of new songs (covers and originals) got added to the acoustic set in August, so these later sets have a much more varied feel, with multiple instruments and that American Beauty vibe. Pigpen plays piano in the Fillmore sets, which adds a nice texture - piano generally wasn't heard in Dead shows until the Keith days.
One thing to note is that each acoustic set apparently had just one drummer. Bill & Mickey would alternate drumming for the acoustic sets, seemingly at random. For instance, Mickey was the acoustic drummer on 4/10, 4/18, 5/15, 7/14/70 & possibly one of the July '70 Fillmore East dates - and Bill on 6/5, 7/4, 8/17 & 8/19/70. (Other dates have yet to be investigated.)
Guests in the acoustic sets were quite rare, compared to electric sets - David Crosby plays guitar in two songs on 7/14/70 (not that anyone can tell it's him), and David Grisman plays a second mandolin on 9/20/70.

Special mention should be made of 8/5/70, despite low vocals, since it was a rare all-acoustic show with Dawson & Nelson. I believe our tape of 8/5/70 is actually from a Bay Area club show, not from San Diego - there's no evidence that they even played in San Diego on that date. (There's also a short set of a few songs from 7/30/70 that's actually a Dead acoustic mini-set ending a New Riders show at the Matrix.)
In July & August, the Dead played several all-acoustic shows at various clubs, but our 8/5/70 tape is the only one that's survived. More details are here:
http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2011/03/hartbeats-july-1970.html

A couple songs in the September Fillmore East run are uniquely played. Deadlists suggests that the hard-to-hear 9/17/70 Box of Rain includes pedal steel & fiddle - it doesn't, but it does have David Nelson playing electric guitar, as on the album, while Garcia plays piano. Garcia also plays piano in the 9/20/70 To Lay Me Down.
Garcia talked about these shows later on: "We were in the Fillmore East for a stretch, and Dave Grisman and Dave Nelson were both there, so I had them both come out. See, Grisman does twin parts...on 'Ripple,' a double mandolin part. So, Grisman just taught Nelson the second part. We had the actual full thing, twin mandolins and everything, and we were able to do 'Ripple' with the original instrumentation on the record. And also 'Box of Rain.' We were able to do 'Box of Rain' with the original instrumentation on the record. Me playing piano, Dave Nelson playing guitar. That was really fun." 
Garcia also mentioned that they did "kind of a re-creation" of American Beauty: "We played the acoustic instruments, and I even used different guitars on different songs - something I never do onstage." This brings up the possibility that in earlier acoustic sets, when he brought out an electric guitar (for Cumberland or New Speedway) it might not have been the Gibson SG that he played in the electric sets. There's a picture of the 5/15/70 acoustic set in which Garcia has a Stratocaster propped up behind him - he may have preferred it in those songs for its country-twang sound; "the metallic clang...that crispness," as he put it.

In October they stopped playing the acoustic sets - for the rest of the year they seem to have played just electric sets, though the New Riders were still touring with them. The exception is the Capitol Theater run in November - perhaps the Dead felt that was a special audience. It may also have been due to the venue - Garcia said at the time that the Fillmore and the Capitol were the only "groovy" theaters in the country, partly due to their excellent PA systems.
It's hard to say why the Dead stopped doing acoustic sets; I haven't seen a good reason - perhaps they felt it was getting old & time for a change. I don't think bigger venues have to do with it - '72 is when they started getting into really big places - but aside from some bigger shows, they were still playing the Capitol Theater & Fillmores & college theaters in 1971, with the New Riders still opening; so in theory the acoustic sets could have continued into '71. Possibly they just decided the acoustic sets didn't sound right, and wanted to simplify the shows.
They seem to have streamlined their sets in general heading into 1971, Garcia's "regular shoot-em-up saloon band" phase. In late '70 sometimes they did two electric sets, sometimes one long set (maybe it depended on the venue). 1971, though it still has some one-set shows early in the year, is when they really settled on the first-set/second-set format that would become invariable (it's the last year for a long time you'd get Dark Stars in the first set!).
Garcia later suggested that the technology in 1970 wasn't ready for acoustic sets: "That was one of the reasons we didn’t do it for so long - we used to try it with microphones, and it really didn’t work. It’s much easier now that they have made vast improvements in amplified acoustic instruments. The audience liked it a lot." (In 1980 Garcia & Weir would use acoustic-electric guitars, which sounded quite different.)

There are a few remaining acoustic tapes from late 1970; I don't think any of them are on the Archive.
There's Weir's "Garage Tape 1970", a 15-minute tape of a KSAN session from an unknown date:
The Race Is On, Silver Threads & Golden Needles, Let Me In, Dark Hollow - Weir, vocals & acoustic guitar; Garcia, pedal steel guitar; John Cipollina, slide guitar; Pete Sears, piano
11/21/70 Boston radio - a short acoustic set:
El Paso, Big River, I Know You Rider, instrumental, Dark Hollow, Anji, Let Me In - Garcia & Weir; Duane Allman on Anji
12/27/70 Pasadena radio - a short acoustic/gospel set:
Silver Threads & Golden Needles, Cold Jordan, I Hear A Voice Callin', Swing Low Sweet Chariot - Garcia, Weir, Dawson, Nelson

From 1969 to 1972, Garcia went into studios frequently with the pedal-steel, adding tracks to other people's albums (as well as the New Riders debut, and his own first solo album) - the song Teach Your Children being the most famous example. Some of his most significant work is on David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name, and Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire. Garcia felt, "I really think the nicest thing I did during that period was on Crosby’s solo album… I particularly like the pedal steel on ‘Laughing.’ That was some of the prettiest and most successful of what I was trying to get at at that time."
Kantner recalled, "Jerry was doing a lot of pedal steel for people around that time, experimenting, and so we let him be on it; he was overjoyed. So he went in and just experimented with sounds, seeing what kind of sounds he could get out of it, running it through various pedals and echoes and delays. We gave him a free hand, which made him happy. Before that he'd pretty much just been doing country licks on the steel, and this gave him the opportunity to get a little weirder, which he always appreciated."
But Garcia still felt unhappy with his playing: "It's so difficult, man, and my playing is so mediocre I can't begin to tell you how embarrassed I am about my playing on the damn thing, really it's lamentable."
He explained, "I haven't got it down... I'm going after a sound I hear in my head that the steel has come closest to. But I have no technique on the steel. I've got a little right-hand technique from playing the banjo, and I've listened to records. But my intonation with the bar is still really screwed up. I have to do it by ear....I'm really a novice at it, but I'm not really trying to become a steel player. I'm trying to duplicate something that's in my head."

In fall '71 Garcia stopped playing with the New Riders, who replaced him with Buddy Cage, a steel player they'd found on the Festival Express tour. Garcia said, "The New Riders are actually too good for me to be playing steel with. What they need is a regular, good guy who's been playing since he was three." His last show with them was 10/30/71, partway through the tour.
https://archive.org/details/nrps1971-10-30.shnf 
(There are a couple later recordings where Weir and Garcia appear with the New Riders, though - the 12/9/71 Scotty's Music Store jam, and 3/18/73 Felt Forum.)
John Dawson added, "Basically, Jerry got to be too busy. But also, it was sort of understood that he was helping get what I wanted going. He dug what I was doing and he dug the fact that my trip let him do something different, because he was always looking to do different things. It gave him a chance to warm up and also to relax a little bit before he had to concentrate on the Grateful Dead's set. At some point he said, 'I don't think I can do this too much longer; I think you guys should get someone else.' But he knew at that point that we'd already met Cage.... When we changed from Garcia to Cage, the pedal steel playing got better. Garcia wasn't a steel player... We were after a more traditional kind of thing."
Garcia also later mentioned difficulties in playing shows with two instruments. Rock Scully recalled, "Jerry realized that playing pedal steel was screwing with his electric guitar playing. The instruments were so different from each other that his guitar playing was suffering." Garcia said, "It kind of became an either/or situation: I found it very hard to play half the night with a pedal steel and a bar in my left hand and then switch to straight overhand guitar. The difference between a solid finger configuration and a moving arm, wrist, and fingers was too great. It was painful to the muscles. It got to where I couldn't play either of them very well, and I realized it just wouldn't work. I don't consider myself a pedal steel player."

That wasn't the last chapter in Garcia's pedal-steel story. In early '72, he played it in Weir's new song Looks Like Rain for its first performances in the Academy of Music run & a couple shows in Europe - it's odd that they brought it to Europe just to be used in one song! In fact they dropped Looks Like Rain after only three performances - 4/14/72 was the last pedal-steel version. (Perhaps someone in the band thought the song wasn't working too well.)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1972-03-23.sbd.miller.100000.sbeok.flac16
Garcia also played pedal steel in the 11/23/72 show with Doug Sahm & Friends. After that, though, he gave it up (aside from briefly pulling it out in the 1987 tour with Bob Dylan, for a few performances of I'll Be Your Baby Tonight and Tomorrow Is A Long Time). "It's a hard instrument to play. I would love to play the pedal steel if I had another lifetime in which to play it."
But in this lifetime, he was busy enough playing with Howard Wales and Merl Saunders on top of the Dead's shows - as he said, "I'm a total junkie when it comes to playing. I just have to play. And when we're off the road I get itchy... If I had another life to live...I could dig playing with Howard for a long time, or Merl.... If I had more of me to go out and play those gigs, I'd do it immediately."
And in early '73, he started yet another musical trip, rediscovering his bluegrass roots by playing banjo in Old & In The Way. "It was like playing in the bluegrass band I'd always wanted to play in. It was such a great band and I was flattered to be in such fast company. I was only sorry my banjo chops were never what they had been when I was playing continually, though they were smoothing out near the end."

Also in 1973, songs from the Dead's acoustic sets were released for the first time. Bear went back to the Fillmore East Feb '70 tapes to pick some Pigpen and acoustic pieces for History of the Grateful Dead - they needed a final album in a hurry to finish their Warner Brothers contract, and decided to find some old material that hadn't been represented on record before. It was basically a typical early acoustic set; however, the Dead disliked the record. By 1973, it probably sounded prehistoric to them (though not quite as ancient as the '66 shows that were illicitly released in '71 as Historic Dead & Vintage Dead, much to the band's disgust).

Many years later, one more surprise acoustic set came out of the blue on 11/17/78, before their regular Chicago show. This short set was a last-minute billing as Bob Weir & Friends at Loyola University (without the Godchauxs), and saw them playing to a very small crowd - it's more spontaneous than the later 1980 acoustic shows, and has a number of unusual song choices that come out of nowhere. As Weir says, "We're gonna do yet another old country blues, seeing as that's all we can remember...."
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1978-11-17.sbd.dodd.audiohead22.remaster-7687.90110.sbefail.flac16

In 1980, of course, they played a number of acoustic sets in smaller theaters ("the result of about three afternoons of rehearsal," Garcia said), and recorded them for Reckoning. I'll leave it to someone else to write about these (and later) acoustic shows, though.

Here is a listing of the 1970 acoustic sets, which I've made as complete as possible -

2/13/70 late:
Monkey & The Engineer, Little Sadie, Wake Up Little Susie, Black Peter, Uncle John's Band, Katie Mae

2/14/70 late:
Monkey And The Engineer; Dark Hollow; I've Been All Around This World; Wake Up Little Susie; Black Peter; Uncle John's Band; Katie Mae

2/23/70:
Monkey And The Engineer, Little Sadie, Me And My Uncle, Black Peter, Seasons Of My Heart, Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-02-23.sbd.vernon.10375.sbeok.shnf

2/28/70:
Monkey And The Engineer, Little Sadie, Black Peter
(monitor problems cut the set short)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-02-28.sbd.cotsman.9377.sbeok.shnf

3/8/70:
Monkey And The Engineer, I've Been All Around This World, Me And My Uncle, Black Peter, Katie Mae > Impromptu Blues
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-03-08.sbd.9195.sbeok.shnf

3/20/70:
Deep Elem Blues, Friend Of The Devil (first), Don't Ease Me In, Black Peter, Uncle John's Band, Katie Mae
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-03-20.sbd.smith.99182.sbeok.flac16

3/21/70:
Friend Of The Devil, Deep Elem Blues, Don't Ease Me In, Black Peter, Wake Up Little Susie, Uncle John's Band, Katie Mae
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-03-21.late.aud.lee.pcrp.21779.shnf

4/3/70:
Friend Of The Devil, Deep Elem Blues, Candyman (first), Wake Up Little Susie, Black Peter, Uncle John's Band, Katie Mae
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-04-03.sbd.cotsman.4283.sbefail.shnf

4/9/70:
Friend of the Devil, Deep Elem Blues, Candyman, Black Peter, Uncle John's Band, Katie Mae
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-04-09.sbd.hanno.6157.sbeok.shnf

4/10/70 (no tape):
Friend Of The Devil; Deep Elem Blues; Candyman; Wake Up Little Susie; Black Peter; Uncle John's Band

4/11/70 (no tape):
Don't Ease Me In; New Speedway Boogie; Friend Of The Devil; Me And My Uncle; Deep Elem Blues; Candyman; Black Peter; Uncle John's Band

4/24/70:
I Know You Rider, Monkey & The Engineer, Friend Of The Devil, Me & My Uncle, Candyman, Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-04-24.aud.hanno.19531.sbeok.shnf

5/1/70 (first separate acoustic set):
Deep Elem Blues, I Know You Rider, Monkey and the Engineer, Candyman, Me And My Uncle, Mama Tried, Cumberland Blues, The Race Is On, Wake Up Little Susie, New Speedway Boogie, Cold Jordan, Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-05-01.sbd.miller.95683.sbeok.flac16

5/2/70:
Don't Ease Me In; I Know You Rider; Friend Of The Devil; Dire Wolf; Beat It On Down The Line; Black Peter, Candyman, Cumberland Blues; Deep Elem Blues; Cold Jordan; Uncle John's Band
(Dick's Picks)

5/7/70:
Don't Ease Me In, I Know You Rider, Friend Of The Devil, Me & My Uncle, Deep Elem Blues, Candyman, Cumberland Blues, New Speedway Boogie, Black Peter, Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-05-07.aud.weiner-gdADT04.5439.sbefail.shnf

5/3/70 (partial set w/ guest harmonica player):
Deep Elem Blues, Friend Of The Devil, Silver Threads, Black Peter
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-05-09.sbd.cotsman.9770.sbeok.shnf

5/14/70:
Don't Ease Me In, Friend Of The Devil, Deep Elem, Silver Threads, Candyman
(monitor problems & broken string, so the set's cut short)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-05-14.sbd.warner-evans.28716.sbeok.flac16

5/15/70 early:
Don't Ease Me In; I Know You Rider; The Rub; Friend Of The Devil; Long Black Limousine; Candyman; Cumberland Blues; New Speedway Boogie; Cold Jordan
+ late:
The Ballad Of Casey Jones, Silver Threads, Black Peter, Friend Of The Devil, Uncle John's Band, Candyman, She's Mine, Katie Mae, I Hear A Voice Callin' (+ show encore: Cold Jordan)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-05-15.early-late.sbd.97.sbeok.shnf

6/4/70:
Deep Elem Blues, Candyman, Silver Threads And Golden Needle, Friend Of The Devil, Black Peter, Cumberland Blues, Wake Up Little Susie, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Uncle John's Band
https://archive.org/details/gd1970-06-04.119921.sbd.acou.unk.miogi.flac16

6/5/70:
Dire Wolf, I Know You Rider, Silver Threads, Friend Of The Devil, Me & My Uncle, Black Peter, New Speedway Boogie
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-06-05.sbd.hanno.7589.sbefail.shnf

6/6/70:
Don't Ease Me In, The Frozen Logger (a couple verses), Friend Of The Devil, Candyman, Deep Elem Blues, Cumberland Blues, Wake Up Little Susie, New Speedway Boogie
https://archive.org/details/gd1970-06-06.132157.miller.sbd.flac16 (just the first four songs)

6/7/70:
Don't Ease Me In, Silver Threads, Friend Of The Devil, Candyman, Cold Jordan, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Cumberland Blues, Me & My Uncle, New Speedway Boogie
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-06-07.sbd.hollister.98.sbeok.shnf

6/24/70 early:
Dire Wolf; Don't Ease Me In; Attics of My Life; Friend Of The Devil; Let Me In; Candyman; Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd_nrps70-06-24.aud.pcrp5.23062.sbeok.flacf

6/24/70 late:
Big Railroad Blues; Deep Elem Blues; Monkey And The Engineer; The Rub; Silver Threads And Golden Needle; Friend Of The Devil; Candyman; Cumberland Blues; Cold Jordan (+ show encore Swing Low Sweet Chariot)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-06-24.aud.lai.7467.sbefail.shnf (incomplete - only 6 songs)

7/4/70:
Don't Ease Me In is in the Festival Express film - along with an electric New Speedway Boogie (and good shots of Pigpen on harmonica).
Also played in the acoustic set: Candyman, Dire Wolf, Uncle John's Band
http://www.dead.net/features/june-29-july-5-2009 
There is also some interesting train footage: Garcia plays Cold Jordan along with Sylvia Tyson - the scene with Danko/Joplin/Garcia/Weir playing Ain't No More Cane is remarkable - and there's a bit of Delaney Bramlett singing Goin' Down the Road, which Garcia would adopt for the Dead a few months later.

7/9/70 (no tape):
possibly Friend of the Devil; Silver Threads And Golden Needle; Cumberland Blues; Dire Wolf; Swing Low Sweet Chariot
(We also don't have an acoustic set from 7/10/70, which is odd since Marty Weinberg taped that show, but that reel seems to have gone missing.)

7/11/70:
Dire Wolf, The Rub, How Long Blues, Dark Hollow, Friend Of The Devil, Candyman, Katie Mae, Bring Me My Shotgun > She's Mine, Rosalie McFall, Tell It To Me, Wake Up Little Susie, Cumberland Blueshttp://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-07-12.aud.unknown.sirmick.24663.sbefail.shnf (date switched from 7/12 - "Cumberland Blues" is missing from online copies.)

7/12/70:
The Monkey & The Engineer, Don't Ease Me In, I've Been All Around This World, Dark Hollow, Black Peter, El Paso, New Speedway Boogie, So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad), Rosalie McFall, A Voice From On High, Cold Jordan, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-07-11.aud.cotsman.9379.sbefail.shnf (date switched from 7/11)

7/14/70:
Don't Ease Me In, Friend Of The Devil, Dire Wolf, Dark Hollow, Candyman, Black Peter, How Long Blues, Deep Elem Blues, Cumberland Blues, New Speedway Boogie
(David Crosby guest on last two songs)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-07-14.sbd.cotsman.17815.sbeok.shnf

7/30/70 (short Dead acoustic set in NRPS show):
To Lay Me Down (first), Dire Wolf, Candyman, Rosalie McFall, I Hear A Voice Callin', Swing Low Sweet Chariot
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-07-30.sbd.cotsman.17077.sbeok.shnf

8/5/70 (all-acoustic show):
Candyman, El Paso, Rosalie McFall, Cocaine Blues, Drink Up And Go Home, I Hear A Voice Callin', Cold Jordan, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Deep Elem Blues, Dark Hollow, Friend Of The Devil, Mama Tried, To Lay Me Down, Dire Wolf, The Ballad Of Casey Jones
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-08-05.sbd.jupile.17271.sbeok.shnf

8/17/70:
Truckin', Cumberland Blues, New Speedway Boogie, Dire Wolf, Candyman, Swing Low Sweet Chariot (These songs were mentioned in reviews; no tape survives.)
(partial tape): Let Me In; Attics Of My Life; Friend Of The Devil
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-08-17.aud.cotsman.12073.sbeok.shnf
This tape is a fake - it actually comes from 6/24/70.

8/18/70:
Truckin'*, Dire Wolf, Friend Of The Devil, Dark Hollow, Ripple*, Brokedown Palace*, Operator*, Rosalie McFall, New Speedway Boogie, Cold Jordan, Swing Low Sweet Chariot
* - first available recordings. (Also note that Pigpen plays piano on several songs in these two Fillmore West shows, and also in the September Fillmore East shows.)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-08-18.aud.yerys.1346.sbeok.shnf

8/19/70:
Monkey & The Engineer, How Long Blues, Friend Of The Devil, Dark Hollow, Candyman, Ripple, Brokedown Palace, Truckin', Cocaine Blues, Rosalie McFall, Wake Up Little Susie, New Speedway Boogie, Cold Jordan, Swing Low Sweet Chariot
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-08-19.aud.taback.cdjones.81775.sbeok.flac16

9/17/70:
Truckin', Monkey And The Engineer, Dark Hollow, Friend Of The Devil, Ripple, Brokedown Palace, Box Of Rain (first), Rosalie McFall, Cold Jordan, Swing Low Sweet Chariot
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-09-17.aud.warner.16090.sbeok.shnf

9/18/70:
Truckin', Black Peter (set aborted)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-09-18.sbd-aud.cotsman.17893.sbeok.shnf

9/19/70:
Don't Ease Me In; Candyman; Silver Threads And Golden Needle; Friend Of The Devil; Deep Elem Blues; The Rub; Rosalie McFall; Cumberland Blues; New Speedway Boogie; To Lay Me Down; Cold Jordan; Swing Low Sweet Chariot
(Only the last two songs are available on the Archive - the rest circulated on tape, but is missing online.)
https://archive.org/details/gd1970-09-19.150347.acoustic.aud.flac16

9/20/70:
Uncle John's Band, Deep Elem Blues, Friend Of The Devil, Big Railroad Blues, Dark Hollow, Ripple, To Lay Me Down, Truckin', Rosalie McFall, Cumberland Blues, New Speedway Boogie, Brokedown Palace
(David Grisman adds an extra mandolin to several songs)
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-09-20.aud.remaster.sirmick.27583.sbeok.shnf

11/6/70:
Candyman, Uncle John's Band, Attics of My Life, Drums and Phil (soundcheck).
Don't Ease Me In, Deep Elem Blues, Dark Hollow, Friend Of The Devil, The Rub, Black Peter, El Paso, Brokedown Palace, Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-11-06.aud.warner.17183.sbeok.shnf

11/7/70:
Deep Elem Blues, Monkey and the Engineer, Big Railroad Blues, Operator, El Paso, How Long Blues, Ripple, Brokedown Palace, Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd70-11-07.aud.warner.10306.sbeok.shnf

11/8/70:
Dire Wolf, I Know You Rider, Dark Hollow, Rosalie McFall, El Paso, Operator, Ripple, Friend Of The Devil, Wake Up Little Susie, Uncle John's Band
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1970-11-08.aud.weiner.28609.sbeok.shnf