But you get older, you spend more time in the past. “Scrap the past instantly,” Henry Miller wrote in a book I loved at eighteen and never glanced at again. I myself was listening to “Sugar Magnolia” one afternoon when suddenly I was in the hills above Boulder circa 1991, Europe ’72 on the tape deck of my ’85 Ford Escort, my senses flooded with the overwhelming data of that day. This recording just isn’t the same as being there, but when I listen, I am there all over again.įlood of memory returns, most of them thankfully good ones, of High Times and peace. The aroma of the weed wafting through the air as the second set opener China-Rider kicked off is locked in my olfactory center-I can go back to that exact moment in a flash.Įvery once in a while something triggers a long forgotten memory. The Deadhead comment threads posted under these shows are an obsessive terrain given over mostly to banality (“great show u had to be there awesome show”), arguments about whether this night’s version of a song is better than that night’s, people saying things like “did you ever notice planets kinda wobble around in the sky,” and unhinged imitations of rock-crit hyperbole: “At times it sounds as though they are standing at the edge of the earth and the music is just ringing through the canyons of time.”īut after embarking in earnest on the Search, I began to notice that more than a few comments return to a familiar theme: Which is why I’ve been thinking lately about the Grateful Dead.įor years I’ve listened to Dead shows hosted on the Internet Archive-somehow the Dead played more concerts than should have been physically possible, more of which were well recorded than should have been technologically feasible, initially circulating among aficionados on cassette, now streaming online like everything else. You can’t, of course, and that’s also the point. The point, even within the fiction of the novel, is to see them again, to see anything in the past again. They’re almost incidental, if it makes sense to put it that way when several hundred pages are devoted to describing them in pointillistic detail. So when I first read Swann’s Way as a young man, I couldn’t quite see that the aristocracy and its parties aren’t really the point. Throughout the course of this long, obnoxiously intelligent novel, Proust exposes “society” as consisting of self-important buffoons-buffoons with whom he chose to spend all his time. “We can sometimes find a person again,” writes Marcel Proust, “but we cannot abolish time.”Īt the unthinkable age of fifty, I resolved to finish In Search of Lost Time, having read the first two volumes long ago and then read a lot of other stuff instead for a couple of decades. A spectacular show from start-to-finish, Boston 5/7/77 is one of the most upbeat, accessible shows the Grateful Dead ever performed.The only claim I want to make in this piece is that time is a motherfucker. The second set is filled with then-new and older songs from the Dead's catalog, including “Terrapin Station,” “Estimated Prophet,” “Eyes Of The World,” and “Wharf Rat,” amongst others. From its opening, playful “Bertha,” through a flawless first set featuring “Cassidy,” “Jack Straw,” “Mississippi Half Step,” “The Music Never Stopped,” and many others, the Dead are clearly having a wonderful night in Bean Town. These three shows, along with their near-equal from May 5 in New Haven, made up the long-ago sold out box set "Get Shown The Light." The last two nights of this run have been released on vinyl in previous years, and we're thrilled to add to the canon the magnificent Boston show. The Grateful Dead performed more the 2,300 concerts, and of these many live shows, a three night run in May 1977, spanning three cities on the East Coast, is arguably the Dead's greatest trio of shows: May 7 in Boston, MA, May 8 in Ithaca, NY, and May 9 in Buffalo, NY. Available for the first time on vinyl, Grateful Dead’s performance at Boston Garden.
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