How Keith Joined

On September 17, 1971, Pigpen went into the hospital, seriously ill and near death. The Dead were faced with a dilemma - just a month later, a midwest tour was to start in Minneapolis. Would they go on without a keyboard player? The decision was made quickly. From September 28, we have our first tape of their rehearsals with Keith Godchaux.
What happened in between?

From the Dead's perspective, Godchaux came out of nowhere. They had several other keyboard players they had been working with, who could have joined:
Ned Lagin had played on American Beauty, and guested with them at the Berkeley shows in August '71, along with several other '71 shows and backstage experiments. But as far as we know, he wasn't considered, or turned them down.
He mentions in his interview with Gans, "That fall I went back to Boston for graduate school. Brandeis gave me a fellowship that included all expenses, plus recording tape and all sorts of stuff to work with in their electronic music studio." Many college students wouldn't think twice between the option of another year at school or joining the Grateful Dead; but Lagin was on his own path. (Ironically, he became unhappy with Brandeis and soon dropped out, to resurface on a later Dead tour...)

Merl Saunders, of course, was playing with Garcia all the time, plus he had done studio overdubs on several songs for the Dead's 1971 live album that summer. But if they asked him, he was not interested. In later interviews, he sounds like he preferred the independence & freedom to work on his own projects.
When he was asked why he hadn't joined the band in 1990, he said, "I've always done my own thing. Before the Dead, I was working with Lionel Hampton, Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis. Why would I want to work in the Dead and just be the way they worked?" He was proud of doing music theater: "During the late '60s, I was doing a Broadway play in New York at the George Abbott Theatre. I was musical director for...Muhammad Ali. So those are the things that if I was with the Grateful Dead, I couldn't do. I played with Miles Davis for about a year. The Lionel Hampton Band. Did a lot of recording with Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne. I wanted to be myself and go the direction I wanted. Although I did record with the Dead. But when they asked me to come in and do their thing — to join them — I didn't really want to join the band. When it's Grateful Dead time you have to do a Grateful Dead thing."
His associations with these other people may have been very brief in real life, but it should be noted he was much prouder of his work with them than any work he could have done with the Dead.
http://www.digitalinterviews.com/digitalinterviews/views/saunders.shtml
http://www.musicbox-online.com/merlint1.html

Howard Wales had also played on several songs on American Beauty, and had jammed with the band back in '69, and had a close personal connection with Garcia - although he hadn't played the Matrix club dates with Garcia for a year. The Dead even planned to play a benefit with him at the Harding Theater on September 3-4, 1971:
http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2011/03/gd19710903-4-harding-theater-sf-ca.html

It's not known whether this benefit actually happened (probably not). But McNally tells the story of Wales auditioning with the Dead around this time. Weir (no doubt rolling his eyes) recalled: "We spurred him towards new heights of weirdness and he spurred us towards new heights of weirdness...much too weird much too quick...everybody backed off, scratched their head and said, 'Well, maybe, uh, next incarnation.'"
Apparently Wales's free-flowing weirdness, which Garcia enjoyed fitting into, was a bit too strong for a band that was now more focused on shorter 'normal' songs. Garcia would soon get the chance to play some more with Wales in the January '72 east-coast tour supporting the Hooteroll release. (I would imagine Lesh might also have liked to play with Wales more - back in '69 he had complained to Constanten: "Phil pointedly remarked how much he preferred Howard Wales's playing when he sat in with the band.")
On the other hand, from Wales' perspective, the Dead might have been a little too big for him. He had apparently stopped playing at the Matrix when too many people started coming to see Garcia! John Kahn remembered, "One night there were a lot of people out there, and Howard realized that that's not what he wanted to do, and he stopped doing it." Garcia also said, "Howard went off...periodically he gets this thing of where he just can't deal with the music world any more, and he just disappears."

Of course there were plenty of other keyboard players around San Francisco who might have auditioned. It was Godchaux, though, who showed up at just the right moment and grabbed the baton.
Keith & Donna Godchaux, who'd married in November 1970 shortly after her first Dead show, were both already Dead fans. Donna had gone to the 10/4/70 Winterland show (drug-free), taken by some deadhead friends, and had quite an experience. As she said in a Relix interview, "The Grateful Dead came on, and it was more than music...I just could not even believe it. I had not taken anything, and I was just blown away." She told Blair Jackson, "I couldn't sleep that night because I was so excited. I kept thinking, 'What did they do? How did they do that?' They weave a spell. There's this whole mystical energy that happens when you see the Grateful Dead and you're ready to receive it. I was ready to receive it, and I got it. So every opportunity, every rumor that we heard that they might be playing, there we were... We'd all go see the Dead together, or at the very least get together and listen to Dead records."
One of these friends of friends turned out to be Keith, who was also in these Dead listening parties. As he said in the Book of the Dead in '72, "I first saw them play with a bunch of my old lady's friends who were real Grateful Dead freaks. I went to a concert with them and saw something I didn't know could be really happening... It was not like a mind-blowing far out, just beautiful far out. Not exactly a choir of angels, but some incredibly holy, pure and beautiful spiritual light. From then on I was super turned-on that such a thing existed. This was about a year and a half ago, when I first met Donna... I knew I was related to them."

As it happened, they were introduced almost simultaneously to the Dead and to each other, and soon married. Getting connected with the Dead took a little longer, but surprisingly, in hindsight neither of them had any doubt it would happen.
Donna: "I had a dream that it was supposed to happen. It was the direction our lives had to go in. The only direction."
Keith: "It had to happen. I knew it had to happen because I had a vision... Flash: go talk to Garcia... I wasn't thinking about playing with them before the flash. I didn't even try to figure out what the flash was...I just followed it, not knowing what was going to happen. I wasn't playing with anyone else before that. Just playing cocktail lounges and clubs."

He played jazz piano & cocktail music in a Walnut Creek club, but was just starting to get into rock & roll. As Donna said, "Keith would practice his rock & roll piano at home, and I was basically supporting the two of us." He'd had no rock experience at all, and apparently listened to little rock music. Though he'd played with small jazz bands before, he was tired of bar gigs: "When other kids my age were going to dances and stuff, I was going to bars and playing... I was completely burned out on that. Then I floated for about six months, and then ended up playing with the Grateful Dead."
He'd played piano in club bands since he was 14: "I spent two years wearing dinner jackets and playing acoustic piano in country club bands and Dixieland groups... I also did piano bar gigs and put trios together to back singers in various places around the Bay Area...[playing] cocktail standards like Misty the way jazz musicians resentfully play a song that's popular - that frustrated space... I just wasn't into it... I was looking for something real to get involved with - which wouldn't necessarily be music." (Getting a job was out of the question: "I could never see working during the day, and nobody would hire me for anything, anyway.")
Considering what he would play later, it's surprising that when his jazz trio went "in the Chick Corea direction," Keith decided "I didn't really have any feeling for that type of music," and instead listened to big-band jazz, Bill Evans, and bebop: "the musicians the guys I was playing with were emulating... After gigs we'd go to somebody's house and listen to jazz until the sun came up. They dug turning me on to bebop and where it came from. So I understood those roots, but I never got taken on that kind of trip with rock and roll - and I never had the sense to take myself on it."
Until he met Donna, who turned him on to rock & roll. He sighed in '76, "I'm just now starting to learn about the type of music I'm playing now... I never played rock and roll before I started playing with the Grateful Dead." (Shades of Constanten!)
The interesting thing is that when he saw the Dead, he thought they needed more energy: "When I'd heard them play a couple of times, they really got me off; I was really high. But there were still a lot of ups and downs. Like [they] didn't quite have the strength to pull the load..."

As far as I know, all the accounts of Keith's joining the Dead come from Donna's story - as told to Blair Jackson for the Golden Road magazine in 1985. The turning point came during a visit to their friends Pete & Carol (who had introduced them and turned them on to the Dead, and so played a hidden part in Dead history).
"One day I came home from work and we went over to Pete's and he said, 'Let's listen to some Grateful Dead.' And Keith said, 'I don't want to listen to it. I want to play it.' And it was like, 'Yeahhh! That's it!' We were just so high and in love! We said to Pete & Carol, 'Hey guys, we're going to play with the Grateful Dead!' And we really believed it. We had no doubt.
We went home, looked in the paper and saw that Garcia's band was playing at the Keystone, so we went down, of course. At the break, Garcia walked by going backstage, so I grabbed him and said, 'Jerry, my husband and I have something very important to talk to you about.' And he said, 'Sure.'
...I didn't realize that everyone does that to him. So Garcia told us to come backstage, but we were both too scared, so we didn't. A few minutes later, Garcia came up and sat next to Keith, and I said, 'Honey, I think Garcia's hinting that he wants to talk to you. He's sitting right next to you.' He looked over at Jerry and looked back at me and dropped his head on the table and said, 'You're going to have to talk to my wife. I can't talk to you right now.' He was just too shy. He was very strong but he couldn't handle that sort of thing. So I said to Jerry, 'Well, Keith's your piano player, so I want your home telephone number so I can call you up and come to the next Grateful Dead practice.' And he believed me! He gave me his number.
The following Sunday the Dead were having a rehearsal and Jerry told us to come on down, so we did. But the band had forgotten to tell Jerry that the rehearsal had been called off, so Jerry was down there by himself. So Keith and Jerry played, and we played him some tapes of songs that I had written and was singing on. Then Jerry called Kreutzmann and got him to come down, and the three of them played some. Then the next day the Dead practiced, and by the end of that day Keith was on the payroll.
They asked me to sing right away, but somewhere in my ignorant wisdom I said I wanted to Keith to do it first, so he did two tours and I stayed home... So Keith and I went into it as green and innocent as we could be. I'd never sung before an audience before, really, and Keith had done only very small gigs."
She also pointed out to Relix that "Keith and I didn't know that Pigpen was sick or anything."
http://www.blairjackson.com/chapter_twelve_additions.htm
http://www.levity.com/gans/Donna.980328.html
http://www.tonibrownband.com/donnajg24-4.html

McNally has but a few details to add:
He notes (from a different Donna interview) that after meeting Jerry, she tried calling the Dead's office a few times with no luck - "she called the office and left several messages, but was ignored. Finally she got him at home." So it may have been a more circuitous path between the first meeting and the rehearsal, but in Donna's memory it was about a week.
He identifies the Dead's rehearsal space as "a warehouse off Francisco Boulevard in San Rafael." (The tapes of Keith's rehearsals are labeled as being from an unknown location in Santa Venetia - but Santa Venetia is basically a neighborhood of San Rafael, so it is likely the same place. Possibly they could have moved to a studio to tape some of the sessions, though.)
And he says that "Keith and Donna played Garcia a song they'd written, Every Song I Sing."
Donna told Blair Jackson, "When Keith and I first got together, we wrote some music that we wanted to be meaningful and spiritual. We wanted to write music to the Lord, because it didn't seem like there was much out there that was spiritual. But when we heard the Grateful Dead...it seemed to have such spiritual ties. It had a quality that was magical, ethereal, spiritual, and that's part of what was so attractive about it."
What's interesting here is that they're playing Garcia THEIR music, in order to convince him of their rightness for the band. And there does seem to have been a spiritual tie - this moment prefigures not just Keith's time with the Dead, but the later Keith & Donna band with Garcia sitting in, and the Garcia Band circa '76 with Keith & Donna, bringing gospel music into the shows. (I think she has mentioned how she, Keith & Jerry would listen to lots of gospel music at home circa '76.) So they hit Garcia with just the right note.

Blair Jackson observes that Keith had also played on a James & the Good Brothers record (a band the Dead were friends with) - Kreutzmann played drums on one track, and the album was recorded by Betty Cantor, so Keith may not have been a complete unknown to Garcia. (On the other hand, Keith is not mentioned in the album credits, so it's a mystery where Jackson got this info.)

In early 1972, the Dead had a little promotional flurry, releasing a few band biographies for the press & fans. These offer a less detailed, but slightly different course of events. The Dead's spring '72 newsletter recounted:
"Pigpen was extremely ill, and unable to travel. Jerry had about this same time met Keith Godchaux, a piano player he and Billy had jammed with at Keystone Korner, a small club in San Francisco. With Pigpen sick, three major United States tours facing them, and the desire to have another good musician to add to their music, Keith was asked to join."

Promo bios of each of the bandmembers released at the same time include this about Keith:
"After jamming with Jerry and Billy at a small club, and getting together with the Dead to work out some tunes, he joined the band in September of 1971."
Keith was also quoted in the Book of the Dead: "We went into this club in San Francisco where Garcia was playing, and just talked to him. A couple of days later I was playing with him and Bill, and it just sort of came together."

While these bios are brief and lacking in detail (Donna's role is not mentioned at all), they were written only a few months later, so they should be taken into account.
The first surprise is to read that Keith had jammed with Jerry & Bill at the Keystone. This seems to have entirely slipped Donna's memory! Is it possible there was a "lost" Jerry & Keith jam at the Keystone sometime in September '71?
(Perhaps someone mixed up the Keystone and the rehearsal space - either way, Jerry & Bill jammed with Keith before the rest of the band did.)
It's also a curious detail that Keith initially got with the Dead "to work out some tunes." This is frustratingly vague - it may mean nothing; or it may mean that the initial intention was not to actually join the Dead.
Keith confirms that no time passed between meeting and playing: "a couple of days later..." This is even briefer than in Donna's account!

This brings up the question of just which was the Keystone show where Keith & Donna met Garcia. He had a couple shows with Saunders in this month:
Tuesday, Aug 31
Thursday, Sept 16
The 16th has been considered the most likely date, since it's closest to Keith's first rehearsals. Note that Pigpen went into the hospital the next day. Donna remembered the Dead rehearsal being scheduled for "the following Sunday," but the Dead canceled and only Jerry came. I have to think that, if it was Sunday the 19th, due to the sudden turmoil of Pigpen's illness, it seems unlikely Jerry & Bill would have jammed with anyone that day. (It also may explain why Donna had a hard time reaching Jerry on the phone that week, though there doesn't seem enough time for multiple phone calls.)
But note: the jerrysite lists the New Riders playing the Friends & Relations Hall in San Francisco on Sept 17-19, which wouldn't preclude daytime rehearsals. And Keith did say he played with Garcia just a couple days after meeting him.
Or, if Donna's memory is right, possibly Sunday the 26th was the first day Keith played with Jerry. This seems superhuman, though - it means his first day with the full Dead would have been the 27th. Our first rehearsal tape comes from the 28th, and it by no means sounds like Keith's second day with the band. In fact, it sounds like he's already settled in. (Not only that, it would mean they lost no time in taping rehearsals with the new guy, in fact starting immediately. Pretty speedy, for the Dead!)

So while it's possible that Keith only started playing with the Dead near the end of the month, I think it's also possible that he'd met Garcia on 8/31, and perhaps even jammed with him & Kreutzmann a time or two at Keystone Korner; and rehearsals may have started earlier than we think. The Dead may have been considering a new keyboard player even before Pigpen succumbed, and if Keith had already been playing with Garcia informally, their next candidate was right in front of them. (We don't know how poor Pigpen's health was in early September, but the Dead may have been aware before 9/17 that he was in decline.)
Or perhaps the Dead initially saw Keith as a temporary stand-in, a Hornsby-like figure until Pigpen could be eased back in. It would've become obvious pretty soon, though, that Keith was born to play with the Dead.
Or, the traditional story could be true: the Dead suddenly discovered after the 17th that they needed a new player; Garcia met one that very week, and they snatched him up immediately; and he learned all their songs in a week or less. Serendipity in action...

A closer listen may reveal more, but for now it sounds to me like there is not one attempt to teach Keith a single new song in these rehearsal tapes, only practiced run-throughs of already-learned songs. Very few songs even stumble or break down. At least when they rolled the tapes, Keith was ready to go on every song. This suggests that at the least, there were more than one or two days of rehearsal before these tapes were made.
Admittedly, Keith was quite familiar with the Dead's music before playing with them; also, some of these songs were as new to the Dead as they were to Keith!
Lesh was quite impressed with Keith: "He was so brilliant at the beginning. That guy had it all, he could play anything... It's like he came forth fully grown. He didn't have to work his way into it."
Lesh wrote in his book that in the first rehearsal, "all through the afternoon we played a whole raft of Grateful Dead tunes, old and new. That whole day, Keith never put a foot (or a finger) wrong. Even though he'd never played any Grateful Dead tunes before...[he] picked up the songs practically the first time through...everything he played fit perfectly in the spaces between [our] parts."
Kreutzmann later told Blair Jackson, "I loved his playing. I remember when we auditioned him. Jerry asked him to come down to our old studio and the two of us threw every curveball we could, but he was right on top of every improvised change. We just danced right along on top. That's when I knew he'd be great for the band. He was so inventive - he played some jazz stuff and free music that was just incredible. He had a heart of music."
Manager Jon McIntire remembered when he first heard about Keith: "I saw Garcia and asked him what it was about, and he shook his head, very amazed, and said, 'Well, this guy came along and said he was our piano player. And he was.'"

Surprisingly to anyone who ever saw him, Keith said in '72 that "what I've contributed to the band as a whole is an added amount of energy which they needed, for my taste... I have a super amount of energy. I'm just a wired-up person and I relate to music super-energetically... The part of their music which I played fit in perfectly, like a part of a puzzle."

It's notable that Keith plays both piano and organ equally during the rehearsals. (Possibly the first instrument he played with Garcia was the organ, though I don't think Keith had any experience with it; at any rate, organ was the Dead's first choice for many of the new songs.) Over the course of the tour, though, he gradually dropped the organ altogether, and played it only rarely thereafter. When he is on piano during these rehearsals, the honky-tonk sound from many fall '71 shows is very clear.

Our tapes come from several days - they're cassette copies with variable mixes and shifty sound quality. (Note that on some tracks Keith can hardly be heard, being too low in the mix.)
http://archive.org/details/gd71-09-29.sbd.cousinit.16891.sbeok.shnf - Keith mostly on organ
http://archive.org/details/gd71-09-30.sbd.cousinit.18109.sbeok.shnf - Keith mostly on piano
http://archive.org/details/gd71-10-01.sbd.rehearsal.cousinit.16896.sbefail.shnf - very little Keith can be heard
http://archive.org/details/gd71-09-xx.sbd.unknown.16897.sbeok.shnf - compilation; Keith mixed up on some tracks
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-09-29.unsurpassed-masters-vol4-vol6.116951.flac16 - bootleg comp; different mixes, sometimes very trebley, but Keith comes out more (for instance Brokedown #2, where he takes over)

The Keith highlight is the first few tracks of 9/30, with Keith in full barrelhouse mode. It's also interesting to hear him on organ on songs like Jack Straw, Tennessee Jed & Truckin' on 9/29. (There's also an oddly assertive moment before Cold Rain & Snow on the compilation, where Keith channels Keith Jarrett for a little solo riffing.)
There are almost no jams here, just straight songs (there is a short, interesting band jam on 10/1, and a rehearsal of the Uncle John's jam on 9/29). I would guess there must have been more rehearsals over the next couple weeks (they had to have tried out some of the 'deep' jams), but no more tapes have come forth. Perhaps the Dead did not bother recording more improvisational jams.

We know Garcia gave Keith a batch of live tapes that had been recorded at the August shows, so Keith would also have been able to listen & practice the songs at home before his 10/19/71 live debut. Not that he did!
From a note on the Dick's Picks 35 "Houseboat Tapes": "In the late summer of 1971, just before Keith Godchaux began rehearsals with the Dead, Garcia handed him a big box of tapes and said, "Here, this is our most recent tour. Learn our music." The irony was that Donna Jean doubts mightily Keith ever bothered to listen to them - he'd never listened to the Dead all that much before he auditioned... In any case, he left the tapes on his parents' houseboat in Alameda, and there they stayed."
In fact, in one interview with Lemieux it was speculated that Keith never even took the reels out of their box. But it makes sense - when you can rehearse with the band each day, there's little need to check out their tapes.

So Pigpen stayed at home until December, while Keith went out and surprised Dead audiences. (Some were thrilled, others dismayed.) This was the second time Pigpen had been replaced by another player; but he probably took it in stride, as he had more serious things to worry about. He was still eager to rejoin the Dead, though, and went back on tour perhaps sooner than was wise. Lesh later felt guilty about this: "It would have been better for him if we'd just canceled the tour and let him recover all his strength at his own pace... It was agreed that Pig would rejoin the band when he felt up to it. Without realizing it, we put a lot of pressure on him to hurry up and get better."
That was the band's pattern, though, as the future would reveal - they wouldn't cancel a tour no matter who was dead or dying. (And though no one knew it, Pigpen was likely beyond recovery by that point anyway.) Though he didn't necessarily live for the road, Pigpen's identity was bound up with the band, and he lashed himself to their mast as long as he could, whatever the cost to himself.
He would not be alone. The years on tour wouldn't be kind to Keith either - indeed, the damage Dead keyboardists inflicted on themselves would become well-known - but Keith started out feeling cosmically optimistic. "The Dead's music is absolutely 100% positive influence. When I met them, I knew these were people I could trust with my head. They would never do anything which would affect me negatively... They are righteous people."

Dead Sources

All has not been quiet on the blogging front! Preparations have been going on behind the scenes, and I have started a new site to go along with this one:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/

I've often lamented how many newspaper or magazine articles about the Dead from the early days are now quite inaccessible or hard to find. Aside from their value as source material on the band's history, it's often interesting to see how the band was perceived by the media at the time, or how a show was described by reviewers who were there. But very few of these pieces have been reprinted - the Grateful Dead have no "Press Reports" book like some other bands have.

So the idea behind Dead Sources is to collect & transcribe as many important articles from roughly the first ten years of the Dead as I can find. There are many different kinds of pieces - news reports, show reviews, album reviews, some interviews, a letter or two, even a few ads or promo materials. My main rule is that each piece be interesting & informative in some way. (On the other hand, things like generic journalistic recaps of the band's history, or brief upcoming show announcements, I'll try to avoid.)

The Dead.net archive has been invaluable, but of course is very incomplete. And in terms of finding, searching, reading or quoting an article, a typed text is much more accessible & useful than an image scan (though it's another step away from "the source").
When taken from a scan, the articles are very faithfully transcribed. (Some glaring typos are fixed, but some I leave in.)
I also gladly include pieces that are already up elsewhere on the Web, with links to the original locations. My principle is that duplication is far better than watching an article disappear when its website changes or goes down. And there are some sources from, say, underground or college newspapers that have been put online, but are little-known or not easily found in any case.

I've also added many of my own comments to the articles, pointing out things that struck me, or some obvious errors.

It is a site in progress - so far I've gone mostly chronologically, up through 1971. There are many more pieces to include, and numerous articles or reviews I'd still like to find.
So, if you collect such things, or have found old articles somewhere online that I've overlooked, please let me know or leave a comment!

Marty Weinberg

*
PROLOGUE

Tape collector Harvey Lubar got to meet Marty Weinberg in late 1972. By that time, Weinberg was already famed for his tapes – he was “known as the Legendary Marty, and his tapes as Marty Tapes.” In fact, Lubar used his collection of Weinberg’s tapes to start the Hell’s Honkies Tape Club, one of the first Dead tape exchanges, through which he met other tapers like Jerry Moore & Les Kippel. Finally, he was able to meet Weinberg himself:

“Mark [Barkan] had spoken to Marty and gotten an invitation for us to visit. Marty had seen every show that the Dead ever performed in NYC and told Mark flat out that the two Pavilion shows [in July ‘69] were, without a doubt, the best shows he’d ever seen. Getting to see Marty was no small feat, and for the week preceding our visit, it was all we could talk about!…
Several things stand out from that one-time meeting with Marty: first was the fact that the man played his music LOUD. Mark and I were approximately 12 feet from the speakers, and although we were sitting on the floor next to each other we couldn’t communicate. Of course, when you were listening to some of the greatest Grateful Dead tapes ever, there wasn’t much to say.
He started by playing an absolutely perfect quality tape of the San Diego acoustic sets. Unlike everybody else’s copy, muddy in one channel, Marty’s was simply perfect. He played for us a perfect soundboard tape of a show listed as Hollywod Bowl 1969 with Saint Stephen>drums>Other One>Cosmic Charlie, and also a Carousel Ballroom tape from 1968 with a 25-minute Dancing in the Street. His audience tape of 7/11/70 sounded like a front-of-board DAT tape made today.
The reels went on and on; Marty had an unbelievable collection, although most of his tapes have since vanished. Soon after the meeting, Marty moved. We never did get any tapes from him.”
(Taping Compendium p.24)


1969

Weinberg had been taping the Dead’s NYC shows since mid-1969.
“I’m fairly sure I saw them…at one free concert in Tompkins Square Park [6/1/67]; but the memory is extremely fuzzy... The first show that I saw that I absolutely 100% recall, was in June [‘69] at the Fillmore. I saw the Saturday night late show, which was a great show.”
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-06-21.sbd-late.bove.2195.sbeok.shnf

“There were two other acts; I don’t remember who the first act was [it was the Buddy Miles Express], but the other act was the Savoy Brown Blues Band. Those guys were into the British glam, blues-rocker, grit kind of thing, but they were actually very cool…
The great thing was that at the Saturday night show, Phil announced, ‘Now we can tell you guys. Bill made sure we’re not allowed to do this until now, but we are going to play tomorrow in Central Park.’" [Bill Graham forbid bands from advertising other shows in the area when they played the Fillmores.]

"They played the next day in Central Park [6/22/69], and that was a great show. That was the first recording I ever made, which was terrible, by the way. I made the recording on a cheap Sony cassette recorder… The show was at the band shell in Central Park. It started at noon and it was a beautiful Sunday. I remember seeing them the night before and thinking, ‘These guys are just amazing. I want to record this show because the album doesn’t have anything of this on it, and I really want to keep this.’ [Up til then Anthem of the Sun was the most recent Dead album; but Aoxomoxoa was released on 6/20. The Dead played hardly anything from either album at either show.] So I got this little mono Sony cassette recorder that had a built-in microphone. It was terrible.”

http://archive.org/details/gd69-06-22.aud.hanno.8836.sbefail.shnf (This is possibly Weinberg’s tape – it’s actually decent, clear quality, other than the noisy crowd and the cut Dark Star. Note that the tape is stopped between songs, in common with most of Weinberg’s tapes.)

(According to deadlists, Weinberg taped the 6/21 early show – a typically murky Fillmore East AUD:
http://archive.org/details/gd1969-06-21.aud-early.cotsman.8995.sbeok.shnf
It’s possible, but it conflicts with his memory. He says he attended the late show, and he did not yet have the Uher deck. The taper speaks a bit before the encore (“back by popular demand”) and, though debatable, I don’t think he sounds like Weinberg. There were other tapers in NYC at the time – for instance our September ’69 tapes may come from three or four separate tapers.)

Interestingly, Weinberg says of the Central Park show, “The Airplane was there, and there was another band. I don’t know why the Airplane was there, because they weren’t at the Fillmore; I guess they were in the city somewhere else. And there was someone else there as well; it might have been Quicksilver.”
I believe Weinberg is remembering the 5/5/68 Central Park show, and that may have been the first show he saw. It seems strange that if he’d seen the Dead in June ’67, he wouldn’t have caught them for another two years. Also, the Airplane were not at the 6/22/69 show, but they did play with the Dead on 5/5/68, along with the Butterfield Blues Band. (The Airplane had played the Fillmore on 5/4/68, and announced the free park show there.)

In 1969, Weinberg was 15 or 16 years old, and was in high school. “Nobody else was taping. My friends just thought it was weird that I’d brought this tape recorder. ‘Why bother to take this tape recorder, just enjoy.’ And I’m screwing around with this tape machine and they’re saying, ‘Come on.’ I just said, ‘OK, I’m going to get this right.’ And it was a horrible recording, it was terrible…
My motive was very direct: ‘I’d like to remember this music because it’s so fleeting – how would I know that this wasn’t it?…I might not see these guys again for a long while.’ Those were the days when the Dead were not playing in New York every month. It was a big deal, because I think it was the first time they played in New York that year…” [Actually, the Dead had played two Fillmore East shows back in February; but since they were on a Tuesday & Wednesday, school nights, Weinberg must have missed those!]

He then went to the NY State Pavilion shows on July 11 & 12. “They were great shows, not because they were the best musically, but they were really fun places… They played two nights, and it was a very special feeling, a very tripped-out scene in the audience. It was very much the Be-In feel. Everyone loved the Dead, but everyone also loved being there. It was a very enjoyable feeling… It was an open place, it was outside, and it was in a very weird, surreal, space-age kind of place.”
Audience tapes were made of the two shows, but I’m not sure if they are Weinberg’s. (The 7/11 AUD circulates only as a patch in Alligator>drums on the SBD tape; the 7/12 AUD is the first half of the show.)
http://archive.org/details/gd69-07-11.sbd.hanno.4644.sbeok.shnf
http://archive.org/details/gd69-07-12.sbd-aud.hanno.4645.sbeok.shnf

(Robert Christgau also praised the Fillmore East & State Pavilion shows in a notable article for the New York Times: http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/news/grateful-69.php )

Disappointed with his initial attempt at taping, Weinberg soon set about getting better equipment, and bought a Uher 4000L mono reel-to-reel, with an AKG D190E microphone. (There’s a photo of his tapedeck in the Taping Compendium, p.22; you can see how small it is.)
“I practiced for hours on end carrying it so that no one would notice… Sneaking it in was a challenge. The Fillmore was where I did a lot of my recording in the early days, and they were looking out for anything & everything. Bottles and cans were the main target, but also recording equipment was not permitted. I saw people trying to get into the Fillmore that would try to bring a little cassette recorder. They were bounced. ‘Don’t bring that in here. Dump that in your car or leave it somewhere, but you aren’t bringing that in here.’ They were very serious at the Fillmore. So I had to work out this technique of carrying this huge thing in, and it was not easy…”
His technique was to dangle the tapedeck behind his back, under his coat. “I got in for years like that. And never was I caught.”

Things were never easy for tapers, and there’s no telling how many shows we’ve lost because the would-be tapers got caught. “No one wanted to allow it to happen, they just didn’t like it. It was as simple as that. You had to be very, very, very careful. And I never had a problem, but remember, I was stealthier… I never had any issues with bringing in equipment, maybe because I really thought it out a lot more than most people. The entire time I did it, it was more than just a frivolous act; it was a focused thing to do. From the microphones, to the equipment, to the way I did it, was all very focused. I gave it a lot of thought… I think a lot of people just recorded because it was fun, and they weren’t as careful, and so they got caught.”

And so, his taping continued. “I believe I taped a show in September ’69; I taped the show at the Café au Go Go. That was the first place I brought the machine. There were two shows there and I brought the machine to one of the shows. I could have brought a Revox in; they couldn’t care less what I brought in there. Café au Go Go was the size of two living rooms… I don’t think it was a great show…
When you left the Café au Go Go, you walked out through the back and you hung with the band for a few minutes. They would all be sitting there hanging out… TC was still with the band, and Pig wasn’t doing much on stage, just singing a little. The rest of the guys seemed to be in pretty good spirits. During the show, I remember them saying to…people who were sitting in the front row, ‘You guys made a really big mistake…’ [Jerry said,] ‘You’re not going to hear anything.’ Right in front of the stage, the sound was pretty bad. And I was smart enough to sit towards the rear in the corner. But I made some recordings there, and I seem to remember going to see them one of the nights at the Fillmore as well… I recorded one of those shows.”

There are a few incomplete audience tapes from that run:
9/26/69 Fillmore East early show (44 minutes)
9/27/69 Fillmore East early show (46 minutes)
9/29/69 Café au Go Go early show (42 minutes)
9/30/69 Café au Go Go early show (32 minutes)
http://archive.org/details/gd69-09-26.aud.hanno.14856.sbeok.shnf
http://archive.org/details/gd69-09-27.aud.hanno.14857.sbeok.shnf
http://archive.org/details/gd69-09-29.aud.early.hollister.79.sbeok.shnf
http://archive.org/details/gd69-09-30.aud.early.hollister.80.sbeok.shnf
It’s not known which, if any of these are Weinberg’s. They vary a lot in quality – the 9/27 Fillmore show sounds much better than the 9/26 tape, sounding bright & clear while 9/26 is very muddy, so they’re probably from two different tapers. 9/30 is not Weinberg’s, since it is in stereo (far better sound than the 9/29 show or most other ’69 AUDs, though also having low vocals) – so there seem to be at least three tapers involved. Ironically with this set of tapes, the better the music, the lower the quality!
It is a shame that Weinberg at this point was not trying to tape every show as he would the next year, or that the tapers here did not capture more complete shows (or copy them if they did). With multiple tapers at these shows, it’s sad how much of the music this week apparently didn’t get taped at all! (Particularly since this run falls in one of the Dead’s SBD gaps.)
Also note how, as with the 6/21 show, only the early shows were taped for some godforsaken reason. Apparently it took a while for New Yorkers to catch on…

Weinberg worked on improving his tapes. “I didn’t like the fact that I had the audience noise, I had to work on that; but I was pretty pleased. The first couple of recordings were done at 3 ¾ [speed] because I thought I could get an hour a side…but I didn’t like the quality… They were just a little muddier and didn’t have the crispness on the high end. The 7 ½s really were crisp…there was a tremendous difference in frequency response & signal-to-noise ratio when going at 7 ½… I said, ‘I’ve really got to get good quality, screw it. I missed a little here & there [in extra reel flips], but if I’m going to do this, the quality’s got to be really good.’” So he switched to taping at 7 ½ speed in 1970, on 5-inch reels.
“It was also a matter of getting the best seats. In the end, I found that the very best seats were stage left, about six rows back – on Jerry’s side. His amplifiers were in front, so I got him a little better. I had to be near the stage; you don’t want to be in the center because you didn’t get enough of the PA and you didn’t get much of the vocals, which gave it an out-of-balance sound.”

It’s been said that one of Weinberg’s characteristics as a taper was “a heavy hand on the pause button.” His habit was to stop the tape between songs, cutting out all the dead air & stage banter – many songs tend to be missing the first few notes as he restarted the tape. This was a common practice among tapers at the time, as they tried to save tape & save battery-power. (Weinberg also might not have wanted to waste tape on tuning or crowd noise.) This is one way to distinguish his tapes from other tapers who left their reels running.


1970

The Dead returned to the Fillmore East in January 1970, but no audience tapes are known. Weinberg saw the February shows there with the Allmans, though; he particularly remembered the 2/14 show that John Zacherle introduced.
There are good audience tapes of the 2/11 late and 2/13 early shows, but we don’t know if they’re Weinberg’s.
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-02-11.late-set2.aud.smith.99152.sbeok.flac16 (This one may be Weinberg’s – note the tape pauses between songs. It was also found on a Buddy Miller reel that included part of 6/24/70.)
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-02-13.early.aud.unknown.holmes-Oleynick.109535.sbeok.flac16 (This is probably a different taper – note that the tape is left running between songs, and that it’s just the early show again.)

Weinberg went to the Dead’s first Capitol Theater shows in Port Chester in March. He remembers them as “wonderful; the acoustic sets were great… The Capitol Theater was a great, great place.”
The Port Chester audience was different from the Fillmore audience. “Everything was laid back. The Dead were well-known; they were not famous, but they had a cult audience in the East that would go to the shows. It wasn’t a rabid audience… There was a troupe of people that went to see every show. You knew them by sight.”
However, Weinberg’s friends were not as dedicated to going to Dead shows as he was: “I was there all by myself, I wasn’t there with any of my friends. They were like, ‘Fuck, you’re going to four shows?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, we’re not going to pay money to go to four shows. It’s all the way up there in suburbia.’” (For later Port Chester shows, he managed to bring company.)
He says he taped these; unfortunately, no audience tapes survive of the two shows on 3/20 (except for part of Ken Lee’s tape, used to patch the late show).
The great stereo tape of the 3/21 shows is Ken Lee’s. There is an alternate AUD of the 3/21 late show that’s just recently surfaced, which could be Weinberg’s.
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-03-21.late.aud.coolsonics.altsource.118670.flac16

It was easier to tape at the Capitol Theater than the Fillmore, since the crew there did not check so vigilantly for tape recorders. (And as we now know, one of the security crew there was taping the shows himself!) “I could be a little looser with holding the mic, because they weren’t as paranoid in there. Getting in, I still had to be cool, because they were looking for anything. But once I was in the theater, I could hold the mic; and actually, at one of the shows, I had it in my hat…and that came out pretty well. At the Fillmore, I had to be very careful holding the mic…not looking like I’m holding a mic, so it was always in my hand. The angles weren’t always perfect, so you get a little phasing.” Whereas at the Capitol Theater, “I was really able to position myself perfectly.”

No audience tapes are known for the 5/15/70 Fillmore shows. “I went to one of them, and I’m sure any show I went to I recorded, but they weren’t fabulous shows. I don’t have any great memory of those shows as being particularly wonderful.”
In contrast, the 6/24/70 Capitol Theater shows “were definitely great shows.” (We don’t have Weinberg’s tape of the early 6/24 show, but another taper captured it in good stereo; that show is lesser-known than the famous late show and used to be misdated as 3/20. And in the case of the late show, Ken Lee’s tape has become the standard.)

Weinberg then went to the July 9-12 run at the Fillmore East – tapes survive of the last three nights. “The last show there was one of the great shows of all time, and I couldn’t record it because I had an issue and I couldn’t work it out. [Otherwise] I taped every night I was there… Those were great shows, those were just wonderful.”
It’s too bad no tapes of the 7/9 show survive – fortunately, someone else managed to tape the 7/12 show (which is our “7/11” tape, the show ending with the huge Viola Lee Blues). Another taper also managed to catch 7/11 (our “7/12” tape), though sadly none of these recordings are very good quality.

Weinberg was unaware of other tapers at these shows. “I never saw anyone else taping in ’69 and ’70… I didn’t notice, at least. They could have been as quiet as I was… At the later Fillmore shows in ’71, yes… I saw a bunch of people regularly being told, ‘What you got there? Get out of here.’”
Fortunately, other people like Jack Toner did manage to tape some of the Fillmore shows independently. Nonetheless, if it wasn’t for the Fillmore crew secretly taping the SBDs, our record of the Fillmore ’70 shows would be very poor.

Weinberg then taped the September 17-20 run at the Fillmore East, though only portions of his tapes now survive. (He also says, “There’s nothing of the shows that I particularly remember as being extraordinary.” He remembers Pigpen in the 9/19 Lovelight: “Pigpen was totally drunk. He was cursing and going crazy, he went out into the audience…the band was trying to hold him back. He was talking to people and he was trying to pick up this woman…”)

Weinberg has fond memories of the November 5-8 run at the Capitol Theater. “In many ways, those shows were the best… The audience was very sophisticated. At those shows…there wasn’t a lot of clapping at weird times. It was an older audience, and the people listened… I was sitting in the first few rows of the theater with a lot of people who were true believers, who went to a lot of shows, and who really understood the better shows… You had a group of people in the first twenty rows that knew a good show, who were not going to scream and cheer for every song. This was a fairly selective audience. When the Dead played some flat songs, the people didn’t go berserk.”
The last show on 11/8 particularly stood out for Weinberg. He passed up a note for Jerry requesting Morning Dew, and of course it was the first song of the electric set. “It was a very magical show.”

The Dead played quite a few shows in New York in the following weeks: the Action House on November 9-10, the Rock Palace on November 11-14, the Fillmore East on the 16th, and up in Rochester on the 20th.
We do not have Weinberg’s tapes for any of these shows. (There are AUD tapes of the 9th, 11th, and 20th, done by other tapers.) He did not go to the Action House shows, or the Rochester show, but did make it to the Hell’s Angels benefit at the Anderson Theater on Nov 23. (No tape is known.)
He also went to the Rock Palace shows, but didn’t remember much about those: “The Rock Palace was a small, sleazy place… Did they play four nights there?… I recorded the nights I was there… I do remember those were the shows that Jack Casady and Jorma were at… I disliked [Papa John Creach] a lot, he was terrible. But Jack and Jorma were there, that I do remember. And they were not particularly good.”
It’s lamentable that if Weinberg taped the Rock Palace shows, the tapes don’t survive. (Our tape of 11/11 is terrible.) He apparently remembers the 11/11 show, though Jack & Jorma may have shown up on other nights as well.

There is a fragment of an AUD said to come from the Fillmore 11/16 show (part of a Good Lovin’ with Jorma), though it’s not on the Archive. We don’t know if Weinberg was at this show (it was not advertised or announced ahead of time, so he may not have known about it – but fortunately we have a SBD tape).
One snippet of a fall 1970 show survives from his tapes, though it’s not circulating. The setlist includes: Till the Morning Comes, China>Rider, Mama Tried & Good Lovin’. It could possibly be from a Rock Palace show; but until we can hear it, not much can be said.
(An unidentified Good Lovin’ was also found on his 7/11/70 master reel, but no one knew where it came from and it hasn’t appeared online.)

There were a bunch of other tapers around that year starting to discover the Dead & make their own tapes, people like Les Kippel, R.T. Carlyle, and Ed Perlstein, all of whom started taping at the Fillmore or Capitol in 1970. Their first attempts (like Weinberg’s) tended to come out very badly due to cheap poor-quality equipment, recording more audience noise than music, so the songs could barely be made out. And like Weinberg, all were unaware of each other at first – as Kippel said, “I didn’t have any tapes at the time; I didn’t know anyone taping shows… It was lonely, very lonely.”
With NYC apparently crawling with tapers, it’s a good question why we don’t have even more AUDs from ’69-71 than we have. There may be a few reasons. A taper might be caught & unable to record the show he went to. Or the tape might turn out unlistenable & not worth keeping or trading. Back then most tapers weren’t likely to know anyone to trade to anyway, since there was no trading scene yet, and no way to spread the tape except to friends. Or, sometimes later the SBD tape of the show might emerge, casting the AUD tape out of circulation. (This happened with some Fillmore East shows.) There’s also the matter of scheduling or interest – not every taper can hit every show, if the Dead were playing several nights in town; and not everyone would want to.
Due to the later behavior of Dead tapers, it’s hard to believe that if someone was going to tape one Dead show, he wouldn’t keep going & try to tape as many as he could. But that wasn’t the pattern back then – that hardcore interest in taping seems not to have been established yet. As we’ve seen, it was rare for a taper to record more than one show in any given run. (The same was true in San Francisco.) As far as we know, Weinberg was unique in trying to tape so many repeated Dead shows that early.


1971

Weinberg went to the Capitol Theater run on February 18-24, 1971, and taped at least some of those shows. These were the ESP experiment shows: “They kept saying the guy’s name – there was some person he was supposed to be communicating with, and at the beginning of the show, they would say something about it… They had all this black & white [images] on the light show; you’re talking to this guy, and you’re supposed to communicate to him. He was far away.” [The idea was that the audience would mentally transmit the images on the screen to the guy in the lab; though the idea may not have gotten across!]
“Those were pretty good shows, but they were not the same as the shows in November… I remember Jerry coming out the second night and saying, ‘I don’t think Mickey is going to be here tonight; it’s pretty weird.’ And people were asking, ‘What’s pretty weird? Where’s Mickey?’… He sounded strange, kind of mystified.”
(This doesn’t seem to be on any SBD tape; though there is a moment on the 2/21 tape where someone asks, “Where’s Mickey Hart?” and Weir replies, “Seeing as you asked, Mickey’s under the weather… He hasn’t been feeling well for the past few nights; as you may have noticed, he hasn’t been here.”)
One of Weinberg’s AUDs is on the Archive:
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-02-23.aud.weinberg.moore.berger.98406.flac16 (Part of the second set – very incomplete, songs cut & missing big chunks – serious speed fluctuations, bass distortion. You can tell the original recording had pretty decent sound, though; perhaps an average AUD for the time.)

Some of Weinberg’s recordings from this run aren’t circulating. He also taped the first set of 2/23; the NRPS & GD shows on 2/21 (part of which is said to suffer from distortion); and part of 2/24 (which is said to be excellent). Given the existence of superior SBDs, it’s not likely his tapes will ever be sought out.

Hart’s departure marked a big change for Weinberg.
“I consider that the beginning of the end of the era. From that point on, they were different. Not having that additional piece of rhythm section changed things a lot. They were a lot less powerful as a band. It was something very definitely missing once he wasn’t there. By ’72, I’d given up. I’d stopped recording. For me, it was not the same, thinking, ‘When is Mickey going to come back?’ It was a mystery; I didn’t read anything about it.”
Hart’s absence clearly bothered Weinberg – in fact, later in his 7/31 tape, you can hear him call to the band, “What happened to Mickey Hart?”
“That was a real turning point. Afterwards, they were a lot tighter, but less frivolous… Less experimental, less willing to go out there, to get out on a limb. They were much more repeatable after that for the shows that I saw, which was for a couple of years…
[Earlier,] there were nights where they stunk and nights where they were great. When they were great, they were just unbelievable. ‘Where did this music come from?’ That’s why I had to get a tape machine, because I felt that there was something special going on. If I didn’t record, I would lose – it would never be on record, and I never thought that anyone else would record this… The reason for recording was solely for myself: ‘I want to be able to listen to this sometime in the future, and if I don’t record it, my memory is going to die quickly. And I’ve got to have this.’ Other than Live/Dead, which was a great record, I assumed that they weren’t going to produce any more [live albums]. Later on, they obviously had Europe ’72 and other things, but at the time, there was Live/Dead and that was it.”

Unknown to Weinberg, in early ’71 the Dead were taping another live album, including all the shows he went to. In fact our SBD record from 1971 is quite good; whereas back in ’69-70 most of Weinberg’s shows had not been recorded by the band. So this makes his ’71 tapes somewhat less unique or valuable now that all the band’s SBDs are out there…
In early April ’71 he went to the Manhattan Center shows, bringing his trusty Uher, and did not have a good time.
“Those were terrible. You know why those were terrible? Because they were in this big place with no seating; clearly they were doing it for the money. It was a large ampitheater – a flat floor. It would have been great if there were about a quarter as many people. They let a lot of people in there…it was very crowded, and as shows go, it wasn’t great. They advertised it as a Dance Marathon because all the Dead shows in New York up until that time (except for the Pavilion shows) were inside in theaters: sit down in a seat, and when people wanted to get into dancing and moving around, you did it at your seat and that was about it. You weren’t allowed to go into the aisles because there were fire laws.”
But at the Dance Marathon, it was too packed to dance! “There were moments that were pretty good, but you couldn’t really enjoy it. You were standing, squeezed against all these people, which was no fun. And the shows had to be fun for me. Seeing the Dead was not just simply listening to music, it was enjoying myself…and part of that was being comfortable… I could be standing for two hours too, but here it was like sardines.”
Weinberg also noticed that the audience was changing from the past year. “They had clearly gotten a good deal more popular. There were a lot more people there who weren’t the early people. It was more of a scene… So these shows were just filled with people; near the stage was packed.”

“I think I recorded one of the shows.” He actually recorded a couple of them, on the 5th and 6th.
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-04-05.partial.aud.berger.100052.flac16 (partial; cuts in Sugar Magnolia – surprisingly clear, almost SBD-like, with little audience noise)
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-04-06.aud.berger.100040.flac16 (partial; goes up to Good Lovin’ – a more average AUD; sounds very distant)
There’s also a poor AUD of 4/4 from a different taper – distant and echoey, with a loud & rowdy audience – http://archive.org/details/gd71-04-04.aud.cotsman.10358.sbeok.shnf (This taper, unlike Weinberg, didn’t stop the tape between songs.)

Naturally, Weinberg also went to the Dead’s last Fillmore East run on April 25-29. (I’m not sure if he was at the first couple shows.) “They were really special shows… Even for the Dead, my feeling by early ’71 was that things had gone pretty far downhill. Things were very different, but the shows were good.
I remember the Beach Boys show [4/27], Jerry coming out and saying…‘We have another California band back here, and it’s the Beach Boys.’” [Weinberg remembers well – Jerry says, “We got another famous California group here, it’s the Beach Boys.”]
And I thought, ‘It’s a stinking joke. It’s got to be a joke.’ And I remember Mike Love or somebody coming out, saying, ‘We’re very grateful for the Grateful Dead,’ and I thought, ‘Oh God, give me a break…’ [Indeed, that is said after Good Vibrations.]
This is the rock & roll symphony orchestra, cause there were like 92 guys with guitars onstage... [Weir at one point during a long tuning break also says, “We’re tuning up the rock & roll philharmonic, it takes a couple seconds.”]
I learned later…that Dylan was at the show backstage, and they were trying to convince him to get onstage with the Dead. And he said, ‘I don’t know; I don’t know.’ That was the period when he didn’t want to show his face in public, he wasn’t doing a lot of public things. I remember that they flashed a little sign on the stage, ‘Bob Dylan.’ Everyone cheered a little bit, but no sign of Bob Dylan, so it was like a joke. Who knew?…
I remember that at one of those shows Tom Constanten showed up [4/28]. I liked him a lot. He was one of the more intellectual players in the band, a freak’s freak. I remember him in Dark Star, and that was very good…
I kept thinking, ‘Is Mickey going to show up?’ The one drummer thing just wasn’t the right thing. It was a constant source of discussion with my friends – it isn’t the Grateful Dead with one drummer!…
The last night at the Fillmore [4/29] was a great night, that was one of the great shows as well. That was a real party, because there were a lot of us, and it was more of a true-believer type of atmosphere. It was a lot of fun…it was a big party.” Everyone knew that would be the Dead’s last time playing the Fillmore East – “we knew it was the end…[so] let’s have a great time for the last time.”

He also started to notice other tapers. “At those shows, I remember seeing a couple of people getting busted…two stupid guys with cassette recorders being ushered out. Two separate times, as I recall, but it wasn’t the same guys.” He feels their tapes wouldn’t have been up to snuff anyway: “Even the very best cassette recordings will not give you what you can get in a reel-to-reel machine.”
Soundboards for most of these shows appeared very early on, within a year or two, so AUDs of this run were never in demand. Weinberg taped at least 4/27 but it doesn’t circulate – his recording of 4/29 does:
http://archive.org/details/gd71-04-29.weinberg.warner.26568.sbeok.flacf (most of the show – clear but distant-sounding, average quality)

Weinberg also says, “I remember seeing them at Princeton University, but that was probably beforehand.” That must have been the 4/17 show – no Weinberg tape is known, but there is a fantastic stereo AUD made by someone else, that recently surfaced:
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-04-17.aud.boswell-smith.motb-0136.107075.flac16

Spring 1971 was, I think, when Dead bootleg records first started to appear. (For instance, the Mammary Productions bootleg of 10/4/70, and the Ain’t It Crazy LP from the April Fillmore run.)
In April '71, Weinberg released a bootleg LP of his own. “I wanted to share this music. I could have copied to cassette, but not everyone had cassette players at the time. Everyone had a record player. So I said, ‘I’m going to choose the four best things…’ I had maybe a total of 35 minutes, two sides. And I chose four things that were absolutely the Dead. I listened to a million hours of stuff, and I came up with four things… [Morning Dew, the Other One, El Paso, and Not Fade Away.] I found a place in the city that would do small-scale pressings… I produced 500 records; they cost me about $1-1.30 apiece. It was mono, no labels of any kind, white on white… My plan was to sell half, and give away half to my friends.” He sold the record at shows for $3 (til they ran out) – apparently he sold the last ones at the Gaelic Park show in August – and it was even played on a couple FM radio stations. (This was back when some FM stations would play such things!)

Somehow, Weinberg found himself up at Yale in July, when the Dead played there. “I did see them at the Yale Bowl… That was a show I recorded; in fact, I remember that it was Jerry’s birthday.”
http://archive.org/details/gd71-07-31.winberg.weiner.5678.gdADT05.sbefail.shnf
The band is loud (even distorted at times), but the clappers & screamers are much louder than the band, making much of this a painful listen.
This tape is unusual because Weinberg narrates a bit before & after the show. (I think the July ’70 Fillmore tapes are the only other example of this). He has a lot of trouble figuring out the right date at the start, comments that “there’s only one drummer,” and tells a friend he came prepared: “I have six hours’ worth [of reels] in my pack, and I doubt they’ll play six hours.” Then at the end of the show, he figures they won’t do an encore: “I haven’t seen them do an encore since last September in fact, so I kind of doubt they’ll do one… Correction, I do remember them doing an encore, at Fillmore the last night, but that was an extraordinary set of circumstances…”
Part of Weinberg’s tape was used to patch a flip in the Dark Star SBD on the Road Trips release. It sounded quite good in context – of course, there weren’t people screaming in that section!

The Dead returned to New York in August for another outdoor show. “The Gaelic Park show was kind of neat. That was also a big place, it was an open field; it was right next to the subway tracks… It might have been 3-4,000 people there. And that was a pretty good show, as I remember.”
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-08-26.aud.weinberg.berger.100292.sbeok.flac16 (Mostly complete; a few cuts/songs missing – very good AUD quality, loud vocals; the crowd is noisy but not quite so obtrusive as on 7/31.)

Recently, a couple recordings from fall 1971 finally surfaced...even one from Texas!
In November '71, Weinberg & friends drove from NYC to the Atlanta & San Antonio shows on 11/11 and 11/12. "We were able to get tickets [to Atlanta], but I don't remember how... We just drove there, we left early in the morning and we got there in the evening. It was like a million-mile drive, leave at dawn, didn't think of motels or anything, just drive there and go to the show." [Actually, the drive was a mere 900 miles…]
At the Atlanta show, he particularly remembered not liking One More Saturday Night, or Keith Godchaux! "I remember thinking, I don't like this direction of songs... I thought they were becoming too pop. The sound was more polished, less psychedelic. They still played crazy stuff, but it just wasn't the same. But the same or not, here I was driving a thousand miles to see them."

Nonetheless, they continued on to the San Antonio show – another thousand miles away:
"Here we are in Atlanta and we find out where they're playing tomorrow night. We talked to a roadie, somebody in the crew, 'Oh, we're playing in San Antonio tomorrow night.' And we thought to ourselves, 'Let's go there, I have a map in the car...' We figured, what the hell. We had no tickets or anything, we just figured we'd work it out. We drove all the way to San Antonio, we beat the band there. They were late, cause they were flying, and their equipment was late...
We get there pretty early, looking pretty gruesome - we were road guys eating junk. And we got to the theater, we walked in, and they said, 'You guys are with the band, right?' And we said, 'Yeah, of course.' There was nobody else there. The theater held maybe a couple thousand people, but my guess is there were no more than 300 people that night, it was tiny... I recorded that...
It was a fun show. I remember that at the very beginning, Bob came out and he said, 'Listen, everybody upstairs, why don't you come on down here? Don't get lonely up there.' He said for everyone to just come down to the front of the theater... [Pretty close: actually it’s Lesh after Truckin’ who invites the people in the balcony to come down.]
It was a pretty good show, and I remember that the next night they were going to be somewhere in Texas. [Fort Worth on 11/14] We said, 'Do we want to just stay with them and keep going to these shows?' 'No, we've got to get back.' And actually, we had a wild time coming back. The car blew up in Nashville and we ended up sleeping in the car for two days."

No AUD tape is known of the first show he hit (Atlanta 11/11), which is just as well – as reviews make clear, it was a terrible show, and both audience & band had a lousy time. (The Dead were professionals enough that this doesn't come through so clearly on the SBD tape.) With not one psychedelic jam played, it would be no wonder if Weinberg felt disillusioned. Nonetheless, he was still dedicated enough to head on to Texas for the next show.
The audience quietly listens through the Other One, which is nice to hear. (The new live album had come out a couple months earlier.) It definitely wasn’t just a crowd of rowdy cowboys out to see a rock show - there was enough of a contingent of San Antonio deadheads to make up a small audience.

You know a taper's dedicated when he'll drive a couple thousand miles (and back) just to tape a show! At any rate, his recording turned out well – it’s an average AUD for the time, pretty listenable. (I have to admit the SBD is far preferable for this show. The AUD is muffled & distant in comparison - Keith in particular is much more audible on the SBD, whereas on the AUD he's kind of buried in the murk.)
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-11-12.120716.d190e.weinberg-moore-berger.flac16 (partial; second set)

The Dead returned to NYC for a run at the Felt Forum from December 4-7, and another uncirculated Weinberg recording has surfaced from 12/4.
It's the only known audience tape from the run, surprisingly. (Actually, there are hardly any AUD tapes from late ’71 in general – probably because people were just taping the radio broadcasts at home instead. For instance, on 12/5 Weinberg “had somebody record that for me.”) I don’t know if he went to the last couple shows of the run.
It's an excellent recording - the sound is comparable to the SBD, a very enjoyable listen.
Unfortunately, it's also severely incomplete, with songs missing, many big cuts in the songs, and ends abruptly in Mexicali Blues.
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-12-04.120948.d190e.weinberg-moore-berger.flac16

Weinberg also has an interesting backstage story to tell – for it turns out that Lesh had heard his bootleg LP.
"A friend of mine…took a copy of the record and brought it out west... Phil was particularly impressed with it. I remember after the first show [12/4] going up to the stage and saying to Phil, 'Did you like the recording?' He said, 'Oh, you're that guy? Why don't you come back tomorrow night and we'll talk…' He wrote my name down, and the next night [12/5] I showed up and I had a backstage pass waiting for me. Before the show, I went back there; it was a very big New York scene there...
I saw Bob with my friend Peter... My friend sold him a Gretsch Tennessean, which was a hollow body electric. It was a really beautiful guitar, and he sold it to Bobby... That's where I corrected him on his El Paso singing... I told him he was singing the song wrong. All those years he sang the wrong words... I knew the song pretty well, the original Marty Robbins version, but he just didn't listen... At the end of the song he was singing, 'Greater my true love in arms that I'll die for...' And that's not the words; the words are, 'Cradled by two loving arms that I'll die for...' He said, 'Man, thanks a lot. You're right.' And there he sang it right at the Felt Forum."
[Weinberg is correct. You can hear Weir sing "greater my true love" on 12/4, and "cradled by two loving arms" on 12/5.]

"I'm talking to Phil, and Pigpen shows up with two black hookers, and they were a head taller than he was. Pigpen wasn't that big of a guy. And they were all over him: 'Look at my fine women.' He came in with his arms around these two women with his hands around their boobs; it was just a priceless image...
Phil asked me how I recorded [the LP]. I told him I was in the audience for these things, and he asked me lots of questions about what I did with my tapes... Then he told me a little bit about how they had this dream of being able to do this, of having something they'd performed the night before be available the next day... And he congratulated me on the taste I used. His words were, 'Very good taste in the selection of music for that.'"

It seems surprising that Lesh would be so welcoming about a bootleg record, but the Dead were wobbly on the subject at that point. So you get an instance like 8/6/71, where Weir suggests the tapers move back for better sound, versus 12/31/71, where the band busts a taper in the audience accusing him of being a bootlegger. Lesh in particular was probably the most supportive in the band of tapers, as there are several stories of him listening to AUD tapes that people played for him. (At least when he was in a good mood.)
In ’72-74 when more & more tapers kept showing up, there seems to have been a steady crackdown on taping; but by then Weinberg was not a steady taper.


AND AFTER…

“I recorded some of the Academy of Music shows in early ’72. There was a Hell’s Angels show with Bo Diddley, which was pretty crummy. Bo Diddley was terrible, he was atrocious. But I recorded those shows, and those shows were pretty good… [The sound was bad because] it wasn’t a great theater. I think those may be the last shows that I recorded.”
We have a bunch of AUD recordings from this run, but all are anonymous, and few are pleasurable listening. (My Academy of Music post has more details.)

The Dead played in the area a number of times in ’72 and ’73. Weinberg went to some of those shows, but was no longer taping. (For instance, he went to the Roosevelt Stadium shows on 7/18 and 9/19/72, but the AUD tapes were done by other tapers.) “I didn’t go to any of the other shows in New Jersey… After ’72, they played at Nassau Coliseum, but I didn’t see any of those shows.”
His feeling about the band then was that “I didn’t like the newer music as much… It wasn’t as experimental, you didn’t have the same surprise… They became much more night-for-night predictable… They got professional.” So his interest waned.

Weinberg may seem overly dismissive of the ’72-era band, but this was a trajectory that other early fans followed as well. (These were a minority, compared to all the new folks who jumped onboard!) The band changed so rapidly in those years, they left behind some early fans who didn’t like the new sounds, or were surprised by the difference from the last time they’d heard the band. When you’d been reared on the shows of ’69 & ’70, anything after that was bound to sound like a comedown!
For instance, Harvey Lubar saw them in December ’71: “I was really shocked and disappointed that the Dead’s setlists and playing style had changed so dramatically in only a few years. I thought we were going to be hearing Viola Lee Blues, Alligator>Caution, and the rest of the stuff we had been listening to. Instead we got Bertha, Jack Straw, and Sugaree.” (Taping Compendium p.21)
Or Robert Goetz, in October ’71: “As far as I was concerned, it had been downhill since Mickey left, and the first time I heard the band with Godchaux I about puked…It was becoming depressingly clear that ’69-70 would never happen again.” (p.440)
http://archive.org/post/357320/11-15-69-expectations-and-more-out-of-the-closet

Weinberg’s last Dead shows were “in Boston at the Music Hall in December ’73. And those were good shows… Come to think of it, I had my equipment with me and I recorded those… That could have been the last show I ever went to; I don’t remember seeing them again after that.”
There are good-quality audience tapes of the whole run – the average AUDs sounded far better by late ’73 than they did two years earlier. I don’t know if any of these are Weinberg’s, but probably not – many people were taping shows by that time, and it’s uncertain whether he was still trading.

By that time he’d come into contact with other dedicated collectors like Jerry Moore, Les Kippel & Harvey Lubar. Weinberg seems to have been more of an individualist who taped for private listening (and who by that time was drifting out of the taping scene entirely), and was apparently not too keen on sharing tapes with the Hell’s Honkies Tape Club. He’s made clear that “he originally had made the recordings for the enjoyment of himself and some friends,” and aside from the LP was not aiming for a wider circle. In fact, it’s unclear how many tapes he made that never got traded at all.
“My scenes with those guys weren’t all that positive. I didn’t have anything against them personally, they were okay guys. But to me, their attitudes were very different. They were much more dogmatic, they were very serious… They were insane about wanting all of these recordings. Their level of enjoyment and appreciation was different than mine. So I was a little uncomfortable with them... They had a level of intensity that I did not have.”
Perhaps it’s telling that these tapers established & nurtured a growing trading scene, while Weinberg vanished for nearly 30 years. He left behind an impressive collection of tapes, though, documenting some of the best Dead shows ever played.

“I think it’s great that all of this stuff is continuing to come out, and eventually it’s all going to be easy to get to.”

(Many thanks to Michael Getz, who interviewed Weinberg for the Deadhead’s Taping Addendum in 2001. All Marty’s quotes come from that interview.)

* * * * *

APPENDIX

THE 1970 TAPES

Going through the years to see what Weinberg tapes circulate, I was surprised to see how few tapes his “legendary” reputation currently rests on. There are actually fewer known Weinberg tapes out there than you’d think.
There are several reasons for this. One, many of his tapes came out “anonymously” (like most audience tapes), so we don’t know if they’re his or not. Several AUD tapes have been attributed to him which he did not make. Also, many of his tapes became legendary when they came out, but have since been replaced by better or more complete-sounding copies. (Ken Lee’s alternate AUDs from Port Chester, for instance, trounce all other tapers’ efforts – 11/8/70 excepted.) The widespread availability of SBDs for some shows has largely wiped out the older AUD copies (as with some Fillmore East shows). Also, many of his tapes have gone missing or never really circulated, and the surviving original reels are only a part of what used to exist. A few more have surfaced recently, but there’s not much more to be revealed…

A lot of the Weinberg tapes on the Archive come from Jerry Moore’s reels, many of which were transferred back in ‘99. But what’s left is often fragmentary – the copies Moore got were missing many pieces. Also, older copies now tend to sound better than the original master reels, which have deteriorated. For instance, Noah Weiner wrote that the 7/31/71 reels “were in very delicate condition at the time of the transfer (summer 2001). The set two reel was degraded so much in sound quality (a tremendous loss of high end frequencies) that it proved better to use an old cassette copy… Also, [some songs] had been recorded over on the master reel.”

Weinberg seems to have stopped trading back in ’73, and rarely listened to his own tapes in later years. Back around 1990, one friend told him, “’Marty, there’s a whole scene that you’ve missed. The taping world, you don’t know what’s going on, but it’s pretty big… You should really check this out. Some of your stuff is out there being circulated…’ And I said, “So what? That’s very nice…’ And that was it…I really didn’t give it any further thought.”

One consequence of Weinberg’s loss of interest in the Dead was that he stopped taking care of his reels, and they fell into the hands of roommates who had other things they wanted to tape.
When rediscovered, he thought, “Maybe I have some further treasures sitting in these 50 or 60 reels here.” But when Michael Parrish transferred the reels in 2001, few treasures were found; in fact, many of the famous shows had been lost or erased. Many reels were blank or mislabeled – they “consisted of album cuts, compilations of other live tapes, or simply recorded conversations… Many reels were clogged with dust and unlabeled, others were in cardboard tape boxes with or without labels. Even the boxes with labels often did not contain the music indicated on the box… For every gem from the Fillmore or the Capitol, I probably found two reels that either consisted of music recorded much later, or of extended conversational ‘party pieces’…
“Much of the music that already circulates from Marty’s masters was not present… Some of the earlier shows appear to have been taped over…pieces of the 1970 music were audible at the ends of the sides of the February ’71 masters, including part of an audience recording of the 5/15/70 early show. Also, portions of some of the most familiar Weinberg recordings…had been taped over by other studio music.” (For instance, one supposed 11/8/70 master reel turned out to be Paul McCartney & Wings; and part of 7/31/71 was taped over with Derek & the Dominoes!)
One result of this process was that many of Weinberg’s 1971 tapes survived mostly intact, while nothing before June 1970 was found. As we’ve seen, no circulating tape before 6/24/70 is known for sure to be his.

PORT CHESTER, JUNE 1970
The situation for 6/24/70 is confusing, since we have several different sources. Aside from Ken Lee’s tape, the Archive files of 6/24 are in some disarray & confusingly labeled. Here’s the layout:

http://archive.org/details/gd1970-06-24.late-partial.aud.moore.berger.98880.flac16 (partial fragment; end of late electric set)
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-06-24.aud.unknown.gadsden-reynolds.100223.flac16 (incomplete with many cuts; pieces of late acoustic, NRPS, electric sets)
These copies are from two different sources, neither close to complete; for completists only. The Moore copy sounds much more muffled; but despite it being low-quality, this one is Weinberg’s tape. The Gadsen copy is afflicted with many cuts; this taper is unknown. The Ken Lee recording sounds far better than either! (It’s slightly surprising that a fuller copy of Weinberg’s tape isn’t on the Archive, but this is an instance where Lee’s tape was so superior, other late-show recordings became irrelevant.)

http://archive.org/details/gd1970-06-24.aud.cooper.coopernicus.32710.flac16 (The early electric show, plus 3 songs from the late acoustic show. This was a stereo tape said to be made by J. Cooper – strange we don’t have more from this source, as it sounds almost as good as Lee’s tape, and fortuitously fills in the set missing from Lee. )
http://archive.org/details/gd_nrps70-06-24.aud.pcrp5.23062.sbeok.flacf (Ken Lee’s tape: the early acoustic show, both NRPS sets, & the complete late electric show. Does not include the early electric & late acoustic. The other Lee files with the late show are all missing the last encore.)

http://archive.org/details/gd1970-06-24.aud.lai.7467.sbefail.shnf (An absurd mishmash: the late acoustic, very incomplete, & part of the late NRPS set – then the 7/10/70 show, in terrible quality from Weinberg’s recording (this used to be mislabeled “6/24 early”) – then the 6/24/70 late electric, from Lee’s tape. The late acoustic/NRPS portion seems to be from the unknown taper, not Weinberg, since it does not have his usual pauses between the NRPS songs – this is the same as the first half of the Gadsden copy.)

A strange case! We have four different tapers this night, and not one complete copy for any of them on the Archive. Lee is the most complete, fortunately; and we’re lucky to have a stereo recording of the early electric set that’s missing from Lee’s tapes. However, much of the late acoustic set is still missing from the Archive! (Though two different partial recordings of it are here.)
Early Acoustic – Lee
Early Electric – Cooper
Late Acoustic – 6 songs from Cooper & Unknown
Late Electric – Lee, plus fragments from Weinberg & Unknown

FILLMORE EAST, JULY 1970
There were at least three tapers during this run, none of whom made a good-sounding tape! We have Weinberg’s recording of 7/10 and part of his 7/11 – 7/11 and 7/12 also circulate from someone else’s recordings.
(Note that, for whatever reason, the dates of 7/11 and 7/12 were switched on all tapes; so the “7/12” tapes are actually the 7/11 show.)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-07-10.aud.cotsman.17351.sbeok.shnf - the complete electric set; Weinberg narrates a bit before the NFA encore. (This tape used to be misdated as the 6/24 early show, but Weinberg clearly states it’s the “scenic Fillmore auditorium in the heart of the scenic East Village.”)

http://archive.org/details/gd1970-07-12.Weinberg.MAR.108156.flac16 - most of New Riders set, first part of Dead set; incomplete (cuts in Man’s World). Weinberg states before the Dead’s set that it’s “Saturday night, July 11.”

The other tapers:
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-07-12.aud.mysteryreel.cloverman.smith.GEMS.108002.flac16 (The best copy of the whole show – much better than the SirMick file. Weinberg’s tape may be slightly less muddy, but it’s not much of an upgrade; they’re of comparable quality.)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-07-11.aud.cotsman.9379.sbefail.shnf (Weinberg did not tape the last night. This taper was Kenny Schachat – he also stopped & started the tape between songs; you may be able to hear him chattering here & there. Deadlists also says another recording used to circulate, possibly by R.T. Carlyle, which apparently sounded even worse.)

FILLMORE EAST, SEPTEMBER 1970
Both Weinberg and Jack Toner taped 9/17 – since there’s no SBD for this night, fortunately the electric set is in listenable quality. (Toner's AUD seems brighter than Weinberg's, but they’re similar in sound). Oddly, the second set on tape is very short, and it's strange that neither taper captured more of it, if any more was played.
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-09-17.partial.aud.weinberg.33826.flac16 (Weinberg, electric set only)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-09-17.aud.remaster.sirmick.27591.sbeok.shnf (Toner’s tape, complete)

(We also have Toner's AUD tape of 9/18, which is definitely the best-sounding of this run, with a more up-front band & less intrusive audience. If only the other nights sounded the same! As far as I know, no Weinberg recording of this night circulates.
http://archive.org/details/gd70-09-18.sbd-aud.cotsman.17893.sbeok.shnf )

Weinberg and Toner both taped 9/19, and their tapes sound awful. The SBD is glorious (though fragmentary), but both AUD tapes are truly terrible. (Toner’s is actually a better recording, since Weinberg’s tape sounds very muffled, but Toner unfortunately sat among a horde of clappers who constantly drown out the music.) As far as most listeners go, this is almost unlistenable & for historical completists only.
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-09-19.119722.akg.weinberg.moore-berger.flac16 (incomplete electric set; cuts after Stephen)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-09-19.aud-toner-weinberg.warner.25473.sbeok.flacf (This combines Weinberg’s & Toner’s tapes, so you can compare.)

And finally, we have a piece of Weinberg's 9/20 AUD, which actually sounds decent. Most people will prefer the SBD of course, but Caution might be an easier listen on the AUD.
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-09-20.aud.weinberg.bunjes.81728.flac16 (partial; end of electric set)

PORT CHESTER, NOVEMBER 1970
Our 11/5/70 is exclusively from Ken Lee. (No Weinberg tape known.)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-05.aud.warner.17182.sbeok.shnf

We also have 11/6/70 complete from Lee’s tape, but parts of Weinberg’s reels have appeared. Surprisingly, the quality is pretty close to Lee, though I think Lee’s tape is better; so Weinberg isn’t an upgrade as some claim.
http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-06.d3new.hanno.19922.sbeok.shnf (part of the second set, patched with Lee’s tape)
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-11-06.aud.weinberg.moore-berger.119818.flac16 (mangled, incomplete portion from end of show)
For comparison, Lee’s tape - http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-06.aud.warner.17183.sbeok.shnf
(Weinberg says he taped a soundcheck at the Capitol Theater, but the 11/6 acoustic soundcheck we have is from Lee’s recording.)

Lee, Weinberg, and Jack Toner all taped 11/7. Lee’s tape is not only the most complete but the best-sounding; Toner’s & Weinberg’s tapes sound similar.
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-11-07.aud.weinberg.moore.berger.98264.flac16 (Weinberg, partial - short fragment of the last set)
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-11-07.aud.toner.berger.100330.flac16 (Toner, incomplete selection)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-07.aud.warner.10306.sbeok.shnf (mostly Lee, with patches from the other two)

Both Lee and Weinberg taped all of 11/8/70. This is Weinberg’s best recording – it’s similar to & often better than Lee’s tape, which has more crowd noise & echo.
There are a wide variety of copies to choose from, that mix & match the source tapes. Some important portions are missing from Weinberg’s tape – the start of Morning Dew, the middle of Dancing in the Street – so these always get patched from Lee’s tape.
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-11-08.aud.weinberg.moore-berger.119787.flac16 (from Moore’s copy - incomplete, cuts in Dancing)
http://archive.org/details/gd1970-11-08.aud-weinberg.cousinit.18639.shnf (a lesser transfer, but it includes the whole show, with some Lee patches)

Notice the bad bass saturation that afflicts Good Lovin’ on Weinberg’s tape. Lee is clearly preferable for the end of the show. These are a couple alternate copies that combine the two tapes:
http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-08.aud.owens.23474.sbeok.shnf (acoustic set & end of the show from Lee’s tape)
http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-08.aud.warner.17184.sbeok.shnf (acoustic set & end of the show from Weinberg’s tape)


FALSE LABELS & UNIDENTIFIED TAPES

http://archive.org/details/gd69-11-08.weinberg.warner.26331.sbeok.flacf - The notes claim this was taped by Weinberg, but this is very unlikely. (It’s a continent away from his usual taping grounds!) Actually, it does come from his collection, since he got a number of other early California tapes in trades as well. Harvey Lubar notes, “By 1971, Marty was trading with people from all over the United States. To this day I have no idea who they were…”
It would be nice to know who the original taper was, though. Pretty bad sound, but only this 15-minute fragment survives.

http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-10.aud.hanno.8837.sbefail.shnf
http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-10.aud.cotsman.17032.sbeok.shnf
These two are identical in sound (pretty wretched). This Action House “show” is actually a fake; these songs are not from this date. This tape apparently comes from a Marty Weinberg compilation reel - the Not Fade Away is from his 9/20/70 AUD, and the Other One is from 2/23/71. (Both of those are on the Archive.)
I think this is from the bootleg LP compilation, so it may help settle what dates Weinberg chose for his record. (Morning Dew was from 11/8/70, but the other dates are unknown as far as I know.)

http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-09.aud.hanno.7591.sbeok.shnf - Not his; he did not go to the Action House shows, so this is of unknown origin. (One wonders what happened to the rest of the show, since this is just a half-hour selection.)

http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-11.aud.sirmick.31154.sbeok.flacf - A Rock Palace show in very poor quality; Weinberg was apparently there taping, but this is not his tape. This was done by Mike Tannenbaum.

http://archive.org/details/gd70-11-20.aud.cotsman.9001.sbeok.shnf - Deadlists reports this good stereo tape was made by Weinberg, but he wasn’t there; it was actually done by student Bob Stone, who did a great job.

The Dead vs. Led Zeppelin

The Grateful Dead met Led Zeppelin once – in January 1969, Zeppelin were playing at the Fillmore West, and they went to Herb Greene's photo studio in San Francisco for a photo session. The Dead were visiting the studio at the same time for their own session. Pigpen had a pistol, which he started firing at the ceiling.
Tom Constanten wrote in his book, “Pigpen made Led Zeppelin awfully nervous with his six-shooter once at a photo session, drawing a bead on weather vanes and cupolas visible from Herb Greene’s San Francisco loft. Didn’t hit anything, but he looked so mean…it had to crack you up if you knew him.” Weir explained, “He was just fuckin’ around. He wasn’t trying to get on anyone’s nerves, he wasn’t trying to scare anybody.” Nonetheless, Led Zeppelin fled the studio - as Weir said, they left so fast, “we didn't even see them leave. 'Hey, what happened to those guys?'” [McNally 285]

Herb Greene has written about the incident:
“The session was rolling along when I got a phone call. It was Rock Scully, telling me, "we got a new band member [Tom Constanten], so we need a picture right now – we're downstairs!"... I told him that I was kinda in the middle of something, but they came up anyway... Pigpen was wearing a little .22 revolver, in a holster, and he pulled it out and started firing it off into the theater seats. I guess I was almost done with the session when all this happened, because it was pretty disruptive, ha ha! Actually, it freaked Zeppelin out. They exclaimed, "these westerners and their guns!" In fact, Led Zeppelin got so distracted, that they quickly left and didn't pay me…
In retrospect, when the Dead called, I maybe thought OK, this is great, hands across the seas, we'll have a party, but that didn't happen. The Dead didn't want to hang out, they were just there to get a photograph. There was no interaction at all between them, no curiosity. Garcia didn't want to talk to Page, and I don't think Led Zeppelin even knew whom the Grateful Dead were.”
http://www.herbgreenefoto.com/gallery-splash/57949-led-zepplin

The Dead didn’t know who Zeppelin were, either. Jimmy Page was known from the Yardbirds, but the rest were unknowns in America. Zeppelin had only been together a few months, and this was their first American tour, so the Fillmore audiences didn’t know what to expect apart from more Yardbirds-type music. Zeppelin’s approach at that point was not so different from other noisy blues-rock bands like, say, Ten Years After or the Jeff Beck Group, very similar predecessors. (Vanilla Fudge, a popular loud band at the time, were also an important influence on Zeppelin’s sound.)
But Led Zeppelin had an immediate seismic impact on audiences, who went wild over them. Somewhat amazingly for a new unknown band whose first album was only released that week, most of their run at the Fillmore West was actually taped! So we have most of their sets from the January 9-12 run. (In contrast, not a single known audience member bothered taping the Dead at the Fillmore West in early '69.)
Much like what had happened with Cream, these first San Francisco shows would be an important point in the band’s history. The shows were the longest Zeppelin had played, as the audiences encouraged them to stretch out. Plant in particular was digging California, and told the audience on the 11th, “We’ve decided that we’re gonna come and live here, cause you’re so nice!”

Jimmy Page remembered, “We got to San Francisco and…we really started to play from that point on. We were playing all right before, but from that point it was really gelling more. The rest of the boys had gotten more accustomed to the American audiences… They felt they could relax more on stage. Right there is when it started happening. From then on we could see that there was some sort of reaction to us, but still, nobody ever expected it to get into a really big thing… We got standing ovations for each set for the four nights at the Fillmore West. It was really unbelievable.”
John Paul Jones called the Fillmore shows “the first milestone. I remember when we started the show there were just a lot of people standing there thinking, ‘Who the hell are you?’ We turned a very indifferent crowd into a lot of warm and receptive people.”
Page later said, “It was in San Francisco when we knew we’d really broken through… After the San Francisco gig it was just – bang!” He compared Zeppelin to the other San Francisco bands: “We were aware of dynamics at a time when everyone was into that drawn-out West Coast style of playing… The concept of psychedelic music was about roaming and roving, but never actually coming together. That’s why Zeppelin succeeded. There was a real urgency about how we played. Everyone would be getting laid-back, and we’d come on and hit ‘em like an express train.”

Country Joe & the Fish were the ones unfortunate enough to be playing after Led Zeppelin at the Fillmore. (Taj Mahal opened the shows.) Their loose jamming was quite a contrast from Zeppelin’s intense assault. One set was released as the Live! Fillmore West 1969 CD – the liner notes describe their long jams, “joined sporadically with an actual ‘song’… Flying High is played instrumentally and then somewhere in the middle of the piece, Joe counts it in and the song ‘starts’. On other occasions a song flows into a long extended collection of songs, sometimes with lyrics and sometimes without.”

Since these sets were recorded for a possible live album, we know that a couple Dead members jammed with Country Joe on those nights. On one night, Mickey Hart joined them at the end of a set to jam on Flying High. The Jerrysite notes that “KSAN-FM in SF once broadcast the final number of either 1/9 or 1/10, an awesome Flying High with Mickey Hart and Dave Getz sitting in.” Garcia, Hart, and others came on 1/11 or 1/12, for an almost 40-minute Donovan’s Reef jam (released on the CD) to end the show.
So it’s quite possible that Garcia and Hart heard Zeppelin’s set, and also that Zeppelin (if they hung around the Fillmore) heard these long jams. No telling what Garcia thought – of course, loud blues-rock and proto-metal groups were quite common in those days, and Zeppelin might not have struck him as anything new. (After the run, on January 13 the Dead would jam with Fleetwood Mac at their rehearsal space, as Zeppelin headed to San Diego.)

At least one member of Zeppelin seems to have paid some attention to Country Joe’s sets. John Paul Jones was asked about these shows in a recent interview –
Q: In 1969, [my father] went to the Fillmore West in San Francisco to see his favorite band, Country Joe and the Fish. [Jones starts laughing. Led Zeppelin was the opening act.] He went to see a calm concert. Led Zeppelin started burning guitars and breaking things.
Jones: No, we didn't do that! We were musically just bloody noisy, and musically we were fairly abrasive.
Q: Not at all like Country Joe and the Fish.
Jones: Although, I think we shared similar attitudes. So if you went for a quiet evening of a silent protest and some country music, we wouldn't have sounded very good. Country Joe and the Fish liked us.
Q: You got along with those guys?
Jones: Yep. We got along with them fine… To be honest, most of what Country Joe was doing was just a band of friends going on stage. They would play, start a song and drift into another song, which sounded really great. And we would just go on and go "bang, bang, bang" with three driven songs with solos, and people must have thought, "What did we just see?" And there was nobody else doing that at that time. I'm sure it had a lot to do with the success. We got four numbers in by the time most bands had tuned up.
http://thecelebritycafe.com/interviews/john_paul_jones.html

We can compare Zeppelin’s bootlegged sets with the Country Joe release (the Zeppelin shows are up on youtube, although the sound quality is really poor). Zeppelin play the material from their first album: they aren’t quite as hard-hitting as they’d later be, and the songs are shorter than they’d become, with the improv kept reined-in. They sound crude and raw, and there’s a dark, tumultuous feeling to their blues sets, Plant wailing and blowing harmonica over Page’s intense solos. Aggressive, dramatic stuff – they had a talent for pulling in the audience’s attention with their threatening sound.
Coming after that, despite some fiery guitar playing and thunderous Jack Casady bass, Country Joe sounds pretty loose and unfocused. It’s very representative of a San Francisco night – “a band of friends going on stage,” as Jones observed, jamming and drifting through songs in a succession of long-winded solos; what Page called “that drawn-out West Coast style of playing.” Much of it’s still hard-rocking – even Zeppelin-like at times! – but it’s a set like this that Page heard as “roaming and roving, but never coming together.” It’s a different perspective – for all the musicians involved, the Donovan’s Reef jam flows quite well and even gets downright hypnotic.

There are claims that Led Zeppelin had opened when Country Joe toured Scandinavia in November ’68, but this is not so – Zeppelin were playing in England at the time. However, Country Joe did play again with Led Zeppelin at a couple Scandinavian shows in March 1969. This time, Country Joe opened! A Swedish newspaper reviewer was not too impressed: “Led Zeppelin Better Than Tired Country Joe: Even though Country Joe & The Fish was the big name at Friday night’s concert in Stockholm, Led Zeppelin did a much more interesting performance. If one was disappointed at Country Joe & The Fish, one was happier to hear Led Zeppelin.”
http://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/march-14-1969

The Dead and Zeppelin did not cross paths again. Zeppelin played the Atlanta Pop Festival two days before the Dead in July 1969. (Zeppelin were also invited to play at Woodstock, but their manager declined.) And on 9/19/70 while the Dead were playing the Fillmore East in NYC, Zeppelin were playing one of their best shows of the year over at Madison Square Garden. Both bands also toured through the South in May 1977, but managed to avoid playing the same cities. (Although dedicated fans in Alabama could’ve seen the Dead in Tuscaloosa on the 17th and Zeppelin in Birmingham on the 18th, just an hour’s drive apart…)
Also, in 1973, Led Zeppelin played Kezar Stadium on June 2, one week after the Dead had played there. It was a noisy occasion that pretty much ended music concerts at Kezar Stadium! But one of the bands that opened for Led Zeppelin that day was the Tubes, with Vince Welnick…

One unfortunate band did get to play after both Zeppelin and the Dead, in the same week. Poor Iron Butterfly never knew what hit them – not only did they have to follow Led Zeppelin at the Fillmore East at the end of January ‘69, then they had to follow the Dead at a couple midwest shows in early February! Iron Butterfly couldn’t quite compete with their underground openers – a couple attendees of the Dead shows on the Archive have mentioned, “Iron Butterfly was put to shame that night,” and “the contrast between the two bands was something to behold.”
Bear said of the 2/5 Kansas City show, “We had to help the Butterfly’s marginally competent roadies with setting up their gear. The IB fans who filled the hall were in such a state of shock after the opening set by GD that it was nearly halfway through their beloved Butterfly’s set before they came round and starting jumping.”
The situation in St Louis on 2/6 was even worse – one Archive witness writes that the Dead’s set “was supposed to end with Lovelight. But…after listening to the Dead burn the house down, Iron Butterfly didn't want to come out. So, the Dead came back on to play a "few more minutes" and proceeded to add insult to IB's injury with the Cryptical sandwich & Feedback…” [On the tape you can hear the Dead decide to keep going after Lovelight when Iron Butterfly doesn’t come on.]
This followed the even more humiliating evening at the Fillmore East on 1/31 – you can hear on the audience tape, midway through the set when Plant says the band has to “cram as much as we can into the next twenty minutes,” someone in the audience shouts, “To hell with the Butterfly!” After Zeppelin’s set (Mick Wall writes) “the crowd began stamping their feet and chanting, ‘Zeppelin! Zeppelin! Zeppelin!’” According to the LZ Concert File, “Iron Butterfly waited a full 45 minutes before taking the stage… ‘When they finally appeared it was anticlimactic to say the least.’” Iron Butterfly had actually asked that Zeppelin be dropped from the bill, fearing this would happen; and when they finally dragged themselves on, Peter Grant recalled, “The audience was still going ‘Zeppelin! Zeppelin!’ when Iron Butterfly started their set… [They] were very despondent about following us on stage.” Supposedly, Iron Butterfly refused to play the following day.
(To add to the band’s troubles, Iron Butterfly was invited to play Woodstock that year, but got stuck at an NYC airport, and nobody at the festival bothered to pick them up! Iron Butterfly had the last laugh, though. Their In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album sold more than probably most of the Dead’s albums put together, and they are still playing it live to this day.)

It’s interesting to wonder how the Dead would have responded if they’d been on the same bill with Led Zeppelin. In early ’69 the Dead were still in noisy-rock mode much of the time, playing fast & furious sets ending with bouts of feedback.
The Dead had certainly played next to British hard-rock groups before. They’d gone through something of a trial by fire following the Who at Monterey in ‘67. As the Who set off smoke bombs and smashed up their equipment, Lesh had said, “We have to follow this?” But the Dead acquitted themselves well, playing a distorted, hard-driving set.
The Dead also had to open for the Jeff Beck Group at the Fillmore East in June 1968. Far from being humbled, they played the intense, fiery set of 6/14/68, doing their best to match Beck’s guitar pyrotechnics.

Zeppelin, in turn, never mentioned the Dead, if they ever even noticed them. The one most likely to be in sympathy with the Dead was Robert Plant, who’d always yearned for the SF scene. Before joining Zeppelin, “I really just wanted to get to San Francisco and join up… I just wanted to be with Jack Casady and with Janis Joplin. There was some kind of fable being created there, and a social change that was taking place, and the music was a catalyst in all of that.” His band before Zeppelin specialized in covering California bands – Love, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, etc. Page commented, “It was stuff that I didn’t personally like very much. He was a Moby Grape fanatic, and the group was doing all of these semiobscure West Coast songs.” Even Zeppelin would often cover For What It’s Worth or Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco in the middle of live versions of Dazed & Confused. (When Zeppelin did get to California, paradoxically they found Los Angeles much more to their taste, and made it their ‘second home’ in America.)

I doubt the Dead paid much attention to Zeppelin’s type of music (at least they never said so). Garcia was an open-minded fellow, though – the New Yorker article in ’93 mentioned him listening to “anything from Haydn string quartets to the Butthole Surfers,” and in ’78 he admitted to really liking Cheap Trick and the Ramones.
On the other hand, Garcia sometimes spoke out against fast, flashy guitar players. For instance, he did not like John McLaughlin’s playing; and in the ’85 Obrecht interview he was asked if he ever listened to Eddie Van Halen: “Not seriously, no. Because I can hear what’s happening in there. There isn’t much there that interests me. It isn’t played with enough deliberateness, and it lacks a certain kind of rhythmic elegance that I like music to have, that I like notes to have. There’s a lot of notes and stuff, but the notes aren’t saying much – they’re like little clusters. It’s a certain kind of music which I understand on one level, but it isn’t attractive to me.”
He could have said the same about Page’s playing, as it points out one difference between their styles – while Garcia played fluid, elegant long lines, Page played fast little clusters. Plant’s playing and stage presence was a lot flashier than Garcia’s, but he’s often accused of having more flash than substance.

Among hard-rock bands, Garcia especially admired the Who. He even went so far as to say, “The Who are one of the few truly important architects of rock ‘n’ roll. Townshend may be one of rock’s rare authentic geniuses.” To some extent, Zeppelin were patterned after the Who – from the lineup & aggressive style to the long show-closing medley, it's but a short step from Live at Leeds to a Zeppelin show from the same period. The musical similarities are so great, perhaps Zeppelin wouldn’t have been entirely alien to Garcia’s taste. On the other hand, as a Who fan he might’ve seen Zeppelin as being more derivative in their style and second-hand influences, copycats compared to the older, more pop-oriented Who.

Garcia once spoke about his introduction to the Who at Monterey:
“We were scheduled to go on after the Who. They had been out at our motel all the previous night trying to get Pigpen to come out. 'Cause they’d heard about Pigpen and they wanted to party with the Pig. He wasn’t having any, he wasn’t opening the door for no English guys. Anyway, we’d heard a little about the Who by reputation but we had no idea what their act was like. So we’re standing there watchin’ and their music is good, they’re playing solid and Daltrey’s singing good. Then they do ‘My Generation’ and do their destructo routine. We didn’t realize they’d made an art of blowing shit up. It wasn’t just something they did, they were good at it. So we’re standing there amidst the debris and smoke and it’s time for us to go on. I don’t think anybody even saw us, they were still recovering from the Who. So we went on and played our set and then Jimi came on and just annihilated the place and then he destroyed all his shit, too. We might as well not have been there.”
http://blogcritics.org/music/article/memories-from-the-road-the-who/
But strange as it seemed, disparate as their styles were, the Who & the Dead respected each other and played together again in October 1976. Kreutzmann writes, “After the Dead’s set the second day Pete came up to Jerry and told him that he was amazed that after watching two different shows the Dead had not repeated one song. The Who had been doing the same show for the last year and a half, Townshend told him.” (Zeppelin could have said the same thing.) Funnily enough, Townshend seems not to have been too familiar with the Dead’s music – he invited them to play with the Who on 3/28/81, but when he guested in the Dead’s show, he had some difficulty with the songs. “He was surprised at having trouble keeping up at some points because he thought the Dead never rehearsed.”
Garcia spoke about the same conversation with Townshend in a ’78 interview, when asked about the Who: “They’re great; I have a lot of respect for them and I admire what they do. However, I spoke to Pete Townshend before their set, and he was telling me that they’ve been playing the same show for four years. I mean, the same show… He was depressed about it – to have to do exactly the same numbers in exactly the same order for four years in a row, it’s not exactly a sign of progress. The guys are capable of more than that, they’re capable of better things.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIM3Jf0qGZ0

While it’s hard to imagine a “Day on the Green” between Zeppelin and the Dead (I shudder to think how the rowdy Zep fans would have treated the deadhead crowd), there are a few interesting parallels between the two bands, despite their lack of musical or personal connections.
Some young newcomers to the Dead in the '70s thought that, with a name like "the Grateful Dead" and all the skull imagery, they must be some Zep-type metal band!
(You have to admit, the What A Long Strange Trip cover with its blood-red Gothic letters over the black background does look pretty satanic…)

In 1970, Zeppelin started billing their shows as “An Evening With Led Zeppelin.” On some tapes of Led Zeppelin's March/April 1970 shows, the announcer starts the show by saying, "We present an evening with Led Zeppelin." And by Aug/Sep 1970, they were using "An Evening With Led Zeppelin" on their posters. The idea was that a Zeppelin performance would be not just a show, but an Event: there would be no opening act, and Zeppelin would play for as long as they wanted (often 2-3 hours). As Richard Cole wrote, “The band felt liberated… As the sole act on the bill, they would have full control of the entire show. And the idea excited them. Some nights, they felt like playing til morning.”
The Dead were thinking along the same lines, and they very quickly adopted the term as well for “An Evening With the Grateful Dead,” starting in May 1970. They may have heard of Zeppelin’s usage, or it may have been a common show-business term that they thought of independently. At any rate, their shows were even longer than Zeppelin’s (though including generous intermissions) – they really did play til morning several times in 1970, while I’m not sure Zeppelin ever did. (I think the longest known Zeppelin show was said to be four and a half hours.)
http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2009/12/garcias-unidentified-guests.html (see comments)

Zeppelin and the Dead were both famed for playing long shows, but Zeppelin seems to have felt more trapped by this than the Dead did. John Paul Jones said, “Things got extended a lot… Every tour we tried to cut it down, especially in the later years. We’d say we’re only going to play an hour and a half. After a week, it would creep back up to two hours. By the end of the tour, it’s three hours!” Some tours did follow this pattern, as the marathon shows became ever longer til they approached four-hour lengths – versions of No Quarter or Dazed & Confused could be over 40 minutes long as the band wandered in endless solos. By their last 1980 tour though, Zeppelin were keeping things more concise and managed to keep their shows to about two hours long.

Both bands also did acoustic sets in their electric shows. The Dead started doing acoustic sets in December 1969; Zeppelin didn't start doing the 2-or-3-song acoustic interlude in their shows until about August 1970. The Dead’s acoustic sets were very rare (mostly confined to 1970 and a brief period in 1980) – Zeppelin’s acoustic segments, while shorter and usually limited to the same four songs, were more frequent, though they still came and went through the years. Zeppelin always placed their acoustic songs as a little breather in the middle of the show, the way the Dead did for a couple months in early ’70. “It was nice to have a rest, and it worked well for the dynamics,” said John Paul Jones. And while the Dead had to bring on David Nelson or David Grisman to add mandolin to their acoustic sets, Zeppelin already had a mandolin-player in Jones!
I should mention that acoustic sets were not entirely unique in 1970. One of the biggest groups of the day, Crosby Stills & Nash, split their shows between acoustic/electric portions, as did Neil Young; and probably other bands I’m forgetting. (Dylan had perhaps been the first to do this, starting back in late 1965.) So it was kind of a trend of the times. Zeppelin were the surprise in this bunch, being the last band fans in 1970 would expect to yank out acoustic guitars onstage – it was a sign they would be more diverse than people had first thought. Plant reported at the time, “We’ve got a few [new] things, and it’s all acoustic, folks! You can just see it, can’t you: ‘Led Zeppelin go soft on their fans,’ or some crap like that… It shows we can change. It means there are endless possibilities and directions for us to go in.”

Zeppelin took fans aback when they included so many acoustic songs on their third album, though they’d had some acoustic pieces from the beginning. Plant said, “The idea of using acoustic guitars and developing much more of a textural thing came about…[since] Whole Lotta Love had been such a statement, it was definitely time to veer over to the left and see how far we could take it in another direction.”
The Dead had also done an abrupt change of direction with Workingman’s Dead, when they left the jinglebell-rainbow world of psychedelia and embraced Americana. But in the case of the Dead, it helped make them more successful and increased their fanbase – at last, they’d gone mainstream and could be played on normal radio stations! With Zeppelin, though, their third album was one of their least successful, as listeners had been hoping for more hard-rock anthems and were confused by all the new folky stuff.
Page said in 1970, “We’ve started doing the acoustic things onstage and it’s been going off well…some places, though, it’s been a bit of a shock… The audience is hearing them fresh [since the album hasn’t come out yet] and there have been mixed reactions. They’ve always gone down OK, but you get the feeling that people prefer to hear the heavier stuff; which is a bit of a mistake because there’s a lot you can give, and the best thing is to show them what you can do altogether.”
Page griped to Cameron Crowe in ‘75, “The key to Zeppelin’s longevity has been change. We put out…a third LP totally different from [the first two], and on it went… A lot of reviewers couldn’t understand why we put out an LP like Zeppelin II, then followed it up with III with That’s the Way and acoustic numbers like that on it… Album-wise, it usually takes a year for people to catch up with what we’re doing… When the third LP came out…Crosby Stills & Nash had just formed…and because acoustic guitar had come to the forefront, all of a sudden [reviewers said]: Led Zeppelin go acoustic!”

Plant also admitted, “Led Zeppelin III was not one of the best sellers because the audience turned round and said, ‘What are we supposed to do with this? Where is our Whole Lotta Love Part 2?’ They wanted something like Paranoid by Black Sabbath! But we wanted to go acoustic, and a piece like Gallows Pole still had all the power of Whole Lotta Love, because it allowed us to be dynamic.”
There were countless acoustic segments in which Plant had to plead with the audience to calm down & be quiet. Zeppelin crowds tended to be considerably noisier and more rambunctious than the Dead had to face. Early acoustic songs were often interrupted by audiences whistling and shouting; Plant sighed in one show, “We’ve had a lot of abuse in the midwest, every time you sit on a chair and pick up a mandolin.” In another show he complained, “There’s such a thing as listening to what’s going on!… There’s a lot of people who are making a racket so nobody hears what’s going on… If the guy next to you is trying to listen, you’ve got to respect that and be quiet!” And in another show, he reminded everyone, “The essence of these numbers we wanna do now is silence. Remember that! The crying of voices doesn’t really take us back to the Welsh mountains. Now cool it!” The Dead, of course, also had some trouble with rowdy audiences who wouldn’t cool down during the acoustic sets; but generally their audiences were more patient, knowing a long night was ahead.

Both bands also had important hiatuses in their tours. The Dead burned out on touring in late ’74, and took a break for nearly two years while Garcia tirelessly edited the film of their “farewell” shows. Zeppelin had done the same thing a year earlier, filming their last Madison Square Garden shows in 1973 for a movie & album, then taking a break for a year and a half, tinkering with solo sideprojects and coming back in early 1975. (Zeppelin also started their own record label in an effort at artistic independence, which turned out to be more successful than the Dead’s attempt!) “We’ve been coming to different conclusions and decisions, and we’ve got mixed up in a rather gargantuan film,” Plant said; “nothing’s preconceived right now. We’ll work a bit and then we’ll take a break.”
After the ’75 tour, Zeppelin were forced into yet another hiatus when Plant was injured in a car crash, leaving them off the road until 1977. And after ’77, Zeppelin’s career was more like a permanent hiatus interrupted by a couple short tours, as deaths, drugs and disasters finished them off. (The Dead, in contrast, were determined to stay on the road year after year no matter what happened, and never again stopped touring for more than a few months.)

The film of the ’73 shows, The Song Remains The Same, also offers a parallel to the Grateful Dead Movie. Both films took three years to finish and release (Zeppelin’s film coming out in ’76, and the Dead’s in ’77). Despite the obvious differences, both were meant to be more than mere concert films, but more complete portraits of the bands. The Dead turned the focus toward their deadhead audience, while Zeppelin went for strange fantasy scenes instead… The Dead’s film holds up better in artistry today, though it’s still a slog for non-Dead fans.
Zeppelin’s soundtrack album, by the way, doesn’t represent the band at their best any more than Steal Your Face did for the Dead (though it does represent an average show, while Steal Your Face was a haphazard selection). The band was not thrilled with its release; but with the long break from touring and the film coming out, there had to be a soundtrack. “It wasn’t necessarily the best live material we had, but it was the live material that went with the footage, so it had to be used,” Page said. “So it wasn’t like a magic night. But it wasn’t a poor night. It was an honest sort of mediocre night.”
Despite this, it would take Page many, many more years before he could bring himself to release any more live Zeppelin – in sharp contrast to the Dead. (Though one advantage the Dead had over Zeppelin was a much larger catalog & longer lifespan, so their live releases could be much more varied.) Page often talked about releasing a chronological live album covering Zeppelin through the years, but put it off for decades. The Dead were similarly reluctant to release ‘vintage’ shows until the ‘90s.

The ground shifted under both bands with the arrival of punk & new-wave music – suddenly, older bands from the ‘60s were regarded as out-of-date dinosaurs. And bands that played bloated, indulgent half-hour songs were the dullest of the lot! Zeppelin still had their legions of fans, but were sneered at by the punks; the Dead were less in the public eye, but were generally considered so uncool they were off the map.
The Dead’s albums did not help. While Page was a good producer who did excellent work creating Zeppelin’s studio soundscapes, Garcia & co. were rarely able to pull off a decent studio album, always sounding flat and lifeless. And they took a nosedive in the late ‘70s, each album worse than the last, as the Dead vainly pursued the latest trends and tried to sound slick and up-to-date.
Page made an amusing comment on Zeppelin’s lame last album in ’79: “It’s not like we’ve felt we had to change the music to relate to any of the developments that have been going on. There’s no tracks with disco beats or anything.” A rather disingenuous statement, considering how much of that album is smooth synth-pop very much of the time, even verging on disco in one song. (The Dead, meanwhile, were eagerly embracing synths and disco!)

Occasionally Zeppelin could stray into Dead-like territory, as in this Mountains of the Moon-type song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN5XevNGuus
In the other direction, the Dead’s early, fiery-crunch renditions of the Other One wouldn’t have been out of place in a Zeppelin show – it was their most metallic composition. The Dead also shared with Zeppelin a prog-rock tendency at times, as with the Weather Report Suite or Blues for Allah.
But the Dead’s closest approach to the Zeppelin style may have been the song Terrapin Station. In live versions it’s actually pretty similar to the later Zeppelin songwriting approach, a long quasi-narrative ballad that starts quietly and swells through different sections, ending with a bombastic riff repeated numerous times. (The longer album version even has an orchestra to make it more Zeppelin-like…)

Both bands had diverse influences, and they even shared a few, leading to some curious intersections. As guitarists, Page and Garcia naturally had a few of the same idols – Page had kind words for Clarence White (calling him “absolutely brilliant”). And, like Garcia, he worshipped Django Reinhardt: “Just fantastic. He must have been playing all the time to be that good – it’s horrifyingly good.” And both of them took the rock basics from Chuck Berry, and closely studied the black electric blues guitarists of the ‘50s.
Otherwise they had different inspirations – Page revered early rock guitarists like Scotty Moore, James Burton & Cliff Gallup (“the early rockabilly guitarists…were just as important to me as the blues guitarists”). Garcia, meanwhile, was more into bluegrass and country pickers. Garcia immersed himself in the American folk tradition, mainly as a source of songs; but Page focused on English folk guitarists and their technique. “People would tell me about Sandy Bull and I would say, I don’t know about Sandy Bull, you want to start listening to some of these people over here: Bert Jansch, Davy Graham…” (Actually, Page should’ve known about Sandy Bull, as they were doing some similar things!)

Though Zeppelin followed the Yardbirds, Cream and other British bands in rocking up American blues, American folk didn't have much influence on them - with a few exceptions, like taking Babe I'm Gonna Leave You from Joan Baez. (Garcia was soaked in American folk and old-time music, and he probably wouldn’t have been caught dead using Joan Baez as a song source!) American country left a few vague traces here & there in their music, but Page was more of a rockabilly person, and bluegrass didn’t really enter his scope.
British folk had a large presence in Zeppelin’s music, though – most specifically, Bert Jansch strongly influenced Jimmy Page's guitar-style, and Page took Black Mountain Side from him. He gushed about Jansch in ‘77: “He’s the one who crystallized all the acoustic playing, as far as I’m concerned. Those first few albums of his were absolutely brilliant… I really think he’s one of the best… As much as Hendrix had done on electric, I think he’s done on the acoustic. He was really way, way ahead.”
Naturally, Page is said to have been a fan of Jansch’s band Pentangle. They were not so impressed by him – Jacqui McShee talked about Black Mountain Side in a 1970 interview: “I think it’s a very rude thing to do, pinch somebody else’s thing and credit it to yourself. It annoys me. In all the English papers at home he’s always talking about Bert; says he’s influenced. I mean, why say that and then put something on an LP and [credit it to] Jimmy Page?”
Garcia was also impressed by Pentangle, when they played with the Dead in '69:
http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/03/fillmore-west-february-27-march-2-1969.html

Robert Plant was especially interested in the Celtic-music style, which started slipping into Zeppelin’s work. He was also a Fairport Convention fan – Plant even invited folk-goddess Sandy Denny to sing on Battle of Evermore (“my favorite singer out of all the British girls there ever were”), kind of an early precursor to his recent work with Alison Krauss. The two bands were friendly, and Zeppelin also jammed with Fairport Convention in LA when Fairport were recording their House Full live album in 1970, the same night as Zeppelin’s famous “Blueberry Hill” show. (The Zeppelin show was their first bootleg; the jam with Fairport was taped but has never been heard since.)
Plant was also quite impressed by the Incredible String Band, and some elements of that snuck into Zeppelin's music. “This’ll probably sound strange, but ultimately, I can envisage Page and myself doing a whole Incredible String Band type of thing together, very gentle stuff,” he said in ’72. Incredibly, Plant even wanted to try ISB's "Very Cellular Song" - which includes 'I Bid You Goodnight'!
http://www.sahej.com/Incredible-String-and-Led-Zeppelin.htm
"The one thing we always wanted to do in Led Zeppelin was to finish off the show with the String Band's A Very Cellular Song - the bit that goes 'I was walking in Jerusalem just like John, goodnight, goodnight.' But Bonham said something very like Fuck Off!"

Both bands were quite interested in Indian music and used it in their own songs. The Dead were most influenced early on, adapting Indian stylings for the Viola Lee jams, or working on different time signatures for jams like the Eleven. Zeppelin also sometimes borrowed from Indian music – as early on as the Black Mountain Side instrumental, which mimicked a sitar/tabla raga. (Page had played a sitar sometimes in the ‘60s, but never used it on a Zeppelin track.) Later on they tried recording Friends and Four Sticks with Indian musicians: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70Mzk1Kn3A
And of course there’s Kashmir, though it seems not to be specifically Indian-influenced but more vaguely ‘eastern’ in feel. (Indeed, it was inspired by a trip to Morocco, which is nowhere near Kashmir.)

William Burroughs had an interesting conversation with Jimmy Page in 1975, in which they brought up the subject. Burroughs wrote:
“The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco… We talked about trance music. He had heard the Brian Jones record from recordings made at Joujouka. We discussed the possibility of synthesizing rock music with some of the older forms of trance music that have been developed over centuries to produce powerful, sometimes hypnotic effects on the audience. Such a synthesis would enable the older forms to escape from the mould of folk lore and provide new techniques to rock groups.”
http://www.arthurmag.com/2007/12/05/willima-burroughs-onled-zeppelin/
Page later recalled the conversation: “We had a lengthy discussion on the hypnotic power of rock and how it paralleled the music of Arabic cultures. This was an observation Burroughs had after hearing Black Mountain Side, from our first album. He then encouraged me to go to Morocco and investigate the music first hand, something Robert [Plant] and I eventually did.”
But otherwise Arabic music didn’t really show up in Zeppelin’s work, despite their interest in Morocco. (Plant was especially keen on Moroccan music due to its ancestry to early American blues, but this was a passion that wouldn’t really flower til the post-Zeppelin days, especially on “Unledded.”) The Dead, on the other hand, took the plunge in their trip to Egypt and invited Hamza el-Din to play with them several times, even joining in some performances of Ollin Arrageed, a classic case of east-west fusion.

Page and Jones were both admirers of classical music, but, the violin bow aside, it didn’t enter overtly into Zeppelin’s music very much. Frequently in live shows, though, Page would quote a little Bach snippet in the Heartbeaker solo, or Jones would play part of a Rachmaninoff piece in his No Quarter solo. Page admired Segovia, but classical guitar style wasn’t a big part of the Zeppelin repertoire; and the violin bow was used more as a sound effect than for classical allusions.
However, when doing the long bow-solos in Dazed & Confused, a couple definite classical quotes were used. Most famously, Page would play Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars, the Bringer of War.’ (This is a much-covered piece among prog & metal bands; in fact Page might have got the idea from King Crimson. I’m not sure which band did it first, but they both started playing it in ‘69.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bcRCCg01I (Mars)
It also seems Page was thinking of a modern avant-garde composer – Krzysztof Penderecki’s ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.’ Page has sometimes said he was influenced by Penderecki in that piece, and mentioned of his guitar-bowing, “Sometimes it would sound like that Hiroshima piece by Penderecki, and other times it would have the depth of a cello.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzOb3UhPmig (this is just the kind of piece Phil Lesh would love!)
One engineer recalled that Page wanted Zeppelin’s music to keep changing and broadening into new areas of music. “He wanted to keep going, keep expanding. He would talk about rhythms, and people like Bartok, Stockhausen, or John Cage. He was totally into Indian classical music, Irish folk music, all sorts of things.”
Jones suggested that classical music influenced some of Zeppelin’s song structures, in a few of the longer tracks that grew through several movements: “Both Jimmy and I were quite aware of the way a track should unfold and the various levels that it would go through… I suppose we were both quite influenced by classical music, and there’s a lot of drama in the classical forms. It just seems natural for music to have that, as opposed to everybody starting and just banging away and finishing. That’s part of song structure.”

The Dead and Zeppelin were both big fans of the '50s Chess blues style, but covered the blues in different ways. Zeppelin were notorious plagiarists of course, who tended not to credit their song sources, but besides that, they tended to turn their blues covers into screechy frenetic hard-rock, emphasizing the sexual side of it. (This was pretty common in late-‘60s blues-rock bands.)
Pigpen, in contrast, was quite the blues traditionalist, trying to sing his covers just like the originals. The transformation of Viola Lee Blues aside, the Dead tended to cover blues songs pretty faithfully, but used a couple different approaches. With Pigpen, they would sometimes expand a song with long instrumental sections (as with Lovelight, Midnight Hour, Same Thing, Smokestack Lightning), but most other blues songs were done short & straight (the way Weir would generally do them in later years).
So the Dead hit a balance between doing blues songs authentically and doing them acid-rock style. Perhaps their most conventional cover in the usual blues-rock mode (the way Zeppelin did I Can’t Quit You Baby or Since I’ve Been Loving You) was Garcia’s cover of Death Don’t Have No Mercy, full of groaning vocals and aching guitar solos.
http://gratefuldeadworld.blogspot.com/2010/07/hi-heeled-sneakers-and-big-boy-pete.html

While Zeppelin didn’t play blues songs as traditionally as the Dead, they were coming from a different tradition themselves – a line of descent from English groups like the Yardbirds and Cream who reworked classic blues songs into modern rock interpretations. While the Dead could do that occasionally (in older acoustic tunes like New Minglewood Blues, Big Railroad Blues, or Samson & Delilah), they preferred to stick more closely to the originals.
Weir told Blair Jackson in 1992, “My favorite of all time is Robert Johnson… I’m a huge Willie Dixon fan.” The Dead covered many of Dixon’s songs (mostly via Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters), generally in authentic style – and of course, Led Zeppelin were also Willie Dixon fans, using many of his songs in new guises. But it wasn’t their purpose to be faithful to the originals. It’s hard to imagine Jimmy Page cowriting a song with Dixon, as Weir did!
Occasionally the two bands could cross paths, though – the Dead often trotted out their cover of Walkin’ Blues (orig. Son House, via Robert Johnson), and Zeppelin once did a relatively straightforward version of Johnson’s Traveling Riverside Blues. (For once, Zeppelin actually sounds somewhat closer to the original style.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgjw4hnPvIg (Son House, Walkin’ Blues)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecwW2fX1Yew (RJ, Traveling Riverside)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtEAp-Rybl0 (LZ, Traveling Riverside)

Zeppelin also differed in having one guitarist, so their blues songs tend to be dominated by the lead solos. This was standard for most blues-rock groups, who centered themselves around their lead guitar player. Page reminisced about the brief period when he and Jeff Beck both played guitar in the Yardbirds: “The Stones were the only ones who got into two guitars going at the same time, from old Muddy Waters records. But we were more into solos, rather than a rhythm thing.” Page and Beck worked on playing “a lot of harmonies” in their twin-guitar solos, though none of that was recorded. (Shades of the Allman Brothers?)
The Dead, with two guitarists, focused more on the group interaction in the original blues recordings. Weir told Blair Jackson in ‘92, “Way back early we developed a lot of our blues chops from listening to the Rolling Stones, those first couple of albums. Then, right on the heels of that, we started digging a little deeper and listening to Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, that little quartet they had, and Howlin’ Wolf, and we started to develop some of those blues chops as well… [Our playing] is almost a Dixieland style. But if you listen to a lot of those old Chicago Chess recordings, there’s a fair amount of that going on in there… When you get somebody like Muddy Waters playing secondary support lines behind another guitarist, you get those nice counter lines. That’s a major influence on our style of playing blues.”
Blues songs always remained an important part of Zeppelin’s repertoire. The case was different with the Dead – though they started out as a largely blues and r&b band, over the years their blues numbers diminished to a token few songs, almost all done by Weir. Weir complained in ‘92, “I wish Garcia would pick up a few new blues tunes. I think Garcia is kind of hesitant to sing blues tunes because he doesn’t feel qualified… It’s some peculiar neurosis he has, I think. That’s my only guess: otherwise why doesn’t he do some? I sing at least a few blues tunes; he doesn’t do any.”

Nobody’s Fault But Mine was one blues song Garcia still did very occasionally in the ‘90s (about once a year). It’s the only song that both Zeppelin and the Dead covered, but I find Zeppelin’s version quite long and unpleasant. Though the Yardbirds had done their own blues covers of songs like Smokestack Lightning or Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Zeppelin dispensed with those, so they didn’t share any other blues covers with the Dead that I know of, save for some snippets in their long ‘50s/blues medleys.
For instance, Zeppelin played bits of Turn On Your Lovelight a couple times in the Whole Lotta Love medleys. Most surprisingly, Zeppelin also played brief snatches of Donovan’s There Is A Mountain a few times in 1969, inside other medleys:
http://www.ledzeppelin-database.com/geekbaseweb/songpage.aspx?songid=273&sort=0 (has audio sample)
You can hunt around that site for other examples – Zeppelin zipped through Johnny B Goode and King Bee just one time each (and Around & Around just once at a soundcheck); and though Page shared Garcia’s fondness for Hideaway or Feelin’ Groovy, he would only quote them briefly for a few seconds before moving on. Among the songs Garcia played, Zeppelin did That’s All Right Mama many times, and Mystery Train acoustically a couple times in ’77. (When doing oldies from the ‘50s, Zeppelin tended to prefer Elvis, while the Dead preferred Chuck Berry.)

Once Whole Lotta Love came into being, it became the standard closer at Zeppelin shows, swelling to ever-increasing lengths as the band threw everything but the kitchen sink in it. The Dead’s equivalent was Lovelight, another anthemic song adapted from the blues and adored by the fans which kept getting ever-longer (often over a half-hour), extended by Pigpen’s raps on how to get some. (Not so different in tone or spirit from Plant’s raps!) The Dead would end it in true rock & roll fashion by building up to a crashing crescendo of chords & screams & drumshots, not so different from a Zeppelin climax.
After Pigpen left, Not Fade Away or Sugar Magnolia might substitute in the same slot, but weren’t quite the same – Weir lacked Pigpen’s charisma as a frontman, and his screeches are rather painful to take. The band remembers Pigpen doing funny little dance steps onstage, but no video survives of this. At any rate, Pigpen was the closest the Dead got to having a Plant-like sex symbol singing about love & lust to lonely souls in the audience.

Both groups were legendary for their live shows. While Zeppelin had a lot more success in terms of album sales and widespread popularity, they were generally critically scorned, and it was mainly by word of mouth that their live fame grew. As John Paul Jones said, “That’s how we got our reputation. The press hated us in the early days. Our only way of promotion was to play a lot of live shows… It used to spread by word of mouth.” Audiences would be pummeled into a frenzy by three-hour shows, then tell everyone they HAD to see this band, as they went back time and again. (I haven’t heard of any Zep-heads following the band on tour, though – apparently it wasn’t quite that addictive!)
Zeppelin "peeled the paint off the walls" in different ways than the Dead - in the beginning they were all about the hard riffs & high energy & testosterone. Not very spacy, except in the depths of some 40-minute Dazed & Confused... But Jimmy Page droning on with his bow isn't much like Garcia doing his wah-wah warbles!
They did get pretty indulgent in live shows, with their lengthy instrumental sections & drum solos – which the Dead were also notorious for. Jimmy Page said, “Right from the very first live performances there were these stretched-out improvisations.” Plant concurred: “The thing about the group was the extension of the instrumental parts, and that was in full fling by the time we even made our first record.”
Though Zeppelin’s jams were very different from the Dead’s – the setlist on any given tour tended to be static, and the improvs within songs tended to be either spontaneous medleys of ‘50s covers, or playing through a set series of themes or prepared riffs within an instrumental section – nonetheless, they shared the philosophy of playing very long shows where you wouldn’t know quite what was coming next, and the next night could be played differently.
As Page observed, “Every show we did was different. You never knew when you went onstage what you might do by the end of it ... Once a song was recorded, and it went into the set, it began to mutate. The whole improvisational aspect, the riffs coming out of the ether ... it was a magical vehicle collectively soaring into the stratosphere. And as more albums came out, the set got longer and longer.”
And: “The beauty of playing in the band was that when we went onstage we never actually knew what was going to go on within the framework of the songs. They were constantly changing. New parts would come out on the night. The spontaneity was on the level of ESP, which meant it was always exciting.”

John Paul Jones recalled, “You had to be on the ball in those days, especially in the improvised parts, because the stuff would change all the time. You’d have to watch each other for cues. There was a lot of eye contact…we’d watch each other’s hand movements all the time. There would often be seemingly amazing unrehearsed stops and starts. We’d all go bang – straight into it. The audience would think, ‘How did they do that?’ It was because we were paying attention.”
But there were plenty of inconsistent nights as well, where the band just couldn’t come together on some numbers. Often they took a long time to warm up; Plant’s voice could be painfully hoarse or completely shot; Page could be very sloppy & erratic; or the band could get disjointed and lose each other at times – then recover nicely later on in the show. Plant remembered, “We often used to take off and get lost. We were quite ramshackle at the best of times. People who tell you we were always good or always bad are wrong – it was always on a wing and a prayer.”
One thing Zeppelin collectors enjoy is hearing how some songs develop over time. Tunes might be played in different versions before their album release, or new sections might be added to them later on. Sometimes as the band jams on riffs during Whole Lotta Love or Dazed & Confused, you can hear future songs being previewed in embryo. As Dave Lewis writes, the long jams “became a breeding ground for new riffs and ideas to develop…which were later used in the studio.” The Dead used this technique sometimes as well; Weir claimed that he’d come up with songs in Dead jams. He told David Gans, “We’ll go back and listen to the tape, and by god, there’s the basis of another song there… About half the songs I write have their basis in some jam somewhere.”

Page was very proud of the improvisational side of the band, and spoke of it often. He told Guitar Player in ‘69: “Led Zeppelin’s music never duplicates itself. We might use the same pattern, but it’s always changing. By now a tune may be entirely different from when we first started. The only thing which will remain the same is the first couple of verses. Although we’ve got cues when we cut in, the idea is to get as much spontaneity as possible. But to get yourself out of trouble, you’ve got certain keys you can use to come in. Otherwise it can be chaotic. Usually we just start the song off and then go in different tangents, change it four or five times, and then come back to the original song.”
And in ’77: “We always start off shaky and it’s at the end [of the show] when the whole thing builds. Which we build up between ourselves…the ESP aspects of it where you start jamming and entering areas which are open to free-form… A lot of larger bands play it safe with everything just about note-for-note perfect…but they don’t let the solos go on for a long time on purpose so they can really get their teeth into improvising and showing what can really be done.”
But Zeppelin’s idea of improvisation was more limited than the Dead’s, confined either to oldies medleys, variations within a long solo, or to the band jamming on riffs. They did have the ability to turn on a dime, but you don’t really hear them spinning off in new unknown directions like the Dead did. (Sometimes jazz writers will try to claim Zeppelin for their own, but I find such efforts unconvincing.) Then again, their music and purpose was totally different from the Dead’s – a ’69-era Other One would’ve been up Zeppelin’s alley, but never a Dark Star – and it’s perhaps impressive enough that they’d extend tunes like Dazed & Confused or No Quarter to half-hour lengths, when many in the audience would have preferred them to keep things shorter.

While Zeppelin were not very psychedelic, the Dead in turn were not very good at hard rock! After their early years, they’re not the band to turn to for tight, synchronized hard-hitting riffs. Increasingly after ’71, their playing lacked much visceral punch – gentle souls at heart, they preferred shambling to stomping. It can be hilarious sometimes when you can tell they all want to play something in unison, but keep wandering in different directions and can’t stay in time… As one person wrote, “It’s like watching a beetle or a turtle try to get upright.”
As one example of the contrast, there's an amusing comment in this blog-post about the Philo Stomp:
"Phil does this bass chord riffing that is somewhere between a Stones riff and something Peter Hook would do in Joy Division. I SO WISH the band all joined on this in a totally ballsy way. But, being the Dead, Phil is surrounded by some drugged impotents that aren't up to the challenge. If this was, say, LED ZEPPELIN, this would have become one of those awesome head banging riffs they'd go into in the middle of "Dazed and Confused" or "Whole Lotta Love". But instead, Jerry noodles, Bill can't seem to find the "one" and the promise of complete rock and roll satisfaction is dashed."
http://wheresthatsoundcomingfrom.blogspot.com/2012/01/greyfolded-say-it-fast-aloud.html

The Dead got ballsier in ’77-78, perhaps due to the example of other hard-rock bands – lead solos were emphasized more, Garcia’s tone got more distorted and he’d start trilling at the drop of a hat. When you get to a show like 6/25/78, the energy pours out and Garcia rips up NFA>GDTR like there’s no tomorrow:
http://archive.org/post/298650/hottest-show-of-78
Occasionally they could even do a funny little Zeppelin imitation, as at the end of the famous 11/6/77 Truckin':
http://archive.org/details/gd77-11-06.sbd.nawrocki.283.sbeok.shnf (after 7min in the Truckin - the Dead challenge Zeppelin on their own turf!)

Coincidentally, Garcia and Jimmy Page both played solo guitar spots in the 1977 shows, though with an extremely different approach – while Garcia played gently wafting solos, noodling hypnotically, Page would play long bursts of rather irritating, jagged noise effects. One random example from 5/21/77:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzliq2KjSEI
Compare to track 22 here from 5/11/77, where Garcia goes off by himself:
http://archive.org/details/gd1977-05-11.sbd.miller.83196.flac16

Page also occasionally played other instruments more identified with Garcia. He played pedal steel on a few Zeppelin tracks – Your Time Is Gonna Come, Tangerine and That’s The Way – and even the banjo on Gallows Pole. (He’d first played pedal steel on an early version of Tangerine the Yardbirds did, which is a surprising listen. Zeppelin had also planned to resurrect Babe I’m Gonna Leave You on the ’77 tour with pedal steel – “it sounds pretty different from the original,” Page said – but they dropped it after rehearsals.) These were just dabblings, though, when he wanted to add color to a song – he definitely didn’t immerse himself in these instruments like Garcia did.
Page told Guitar Player in 1969: “We wanted to use a steel guitar in Led Zeppelin. I have used one for about a month. It’s frustrating to play it, though. You hear those country guys, and they can play it so damn well. It’s such a complicated instrument for someone who doesn’t have that sort of line to begin with, and it’s a struggle for me to play. We used it on our album a couple of times, but nothing really complicated.”

Though this is perhaps not a subject worth dwelling on (as it’s so common among rock guitarists), both Page and Garcia became serious heroin addicts in the late ‘70s. With Page it started in ’75 and continued through Zeppelin’s tenure, to the detriment of his playing, though apparently he kicked it afterwards. With Garcia it started in ’77 and continued, off and on, for the rest of his life. (This, of course, is in addition to the usual blizzard of drugs that most successful bands indulged in.) I just mention it here since in both cases, it led to the other bandmembers complaining that their lead guitarists were withdrawing from the bands and contributing less to the music.
By Zeppelin’s last album, Page seems to have been barely present: “distant, less enthusiastic, and not entirely comfortable, showing particular indifference to Plant’s mellow leanings” (as Dave Lewis writes); perpetually late for sessions, and with little to contribute. The resulting album was largely a Jones/Plant keyboard album in which Page played little part. He later dismissed it as “a little soft… I thought, ‘That’s not us’… I wouldn’t have wanted to pursue that direction in the future.” Plant also felt, “I don’t think it was really a Led Zeppelin record.”
Likewise, Garcia (after a much longer period of burnout) grew uninterested in Dead rehearsals or studio sessions. This wasn’t due to addiction so much as poor health and loss of interest. The Dead’s last studio sessions in November ’94 were dismal – McNally writes, “Garcia sat in a corner grumbling about whatever caught his attention, but never really settled down to work.” Jackson concurs: “Garcia seemed distracted and out of sorts much of the time. He arrived late for some sessions, left others shortly after arriving, and skipped a few altogether.”

When Garcia and Bonham died, the bands could no longer continue. In my view, they both had already been in steep decline, and perhaps should have called it off sooner. But the stage beckoned, the money kept rolling in, and personal habits didn’t change. And unlike the Who, once a core member died, there was no thought of replacing him and carrying on.

Many listeners outgrow Led Zeppelin after becoming Dead fans – once you’ve acclimated to Garcia, it can be hard to admire Page’s guitar prowess and all Plant’s shrieking. I think remarks that Zep are ‘one-dimensional’ are a little off-base though; though they predominantly played hard rock, from the start Zeppelin had more than one style going on, from gentle, intricate acoustic-guitar arrangements to high-speed metal riffs, and later on embracing a diverse range of textures in their music. (Granted, not as diverse as the Dead, but how many bands are?) As with the Dead, I favor early Zeppelin myself, especially the third & fourth albums – for me, the band goes downhill from there.
At any rate, I thought it would be interesting to compare two such different bands, since Zeppelin has rarely been written about from a Dead perspective before! I hope there have been a few illuminating points in this strange endeavor...