[screen capture from video stream]
If you follow my twitter or read my taperssection posts, you are abundantly aware that I have been brutally honest about these five “Fare Thee Well” shows. There are clear problems with this twenty-years-removed version of the “Grateful Dead” beyond the obvious absence of the band’s deceased emotional core — the tempo is way too slow, the aged players are making way too many simple mistakes, and there is no way on Earth that Phil Lesh should be permitted to sing lead vocals, particularly on Jerry Garcia’s songs. All that being said, the first two shows in Santa Clara did have some serious high points. Trey Anastasio’s lead guitar work has been thoroughly inspired and engaged and he seems completely committed to these performances. Additionally, the band’s setlist selections have been quite imaginative — perhaps the worst aspect of the late-era Garcia-led Grateful Dead was their predictable sets. These 2015 selections are both diverse and unpredictable. At the first night in Santa Clara, the threesome of primal Dead “Born Cross-Eyed”, “Cream Puff War” and “Viola Lee Blues” was my own personal highlight of last weekend and not coincidentally featured Trey on both lead vocals and extended lead guitar work.
But that was Santa Clara. These Chicago shows have a different feel from the outset. Early views of the crowd pre-show indicates a significantly more rowdy and celebratory air. As the show begins, there is definitely an East Coast/MidWest vibe and the band is pretty much into a groove from the beginning. The set begins with the song that ended the band’s last show ever, “Box of Rain”, in a nice bit of synchronicity which also shows that these guys are both aware and willing the celebrate the history. Trey is engaged throughout and actually takes the lead vocal on Bertha and is centerstage for all of Crazy Fingers. Its also nice to hear that the keyboards are right there in the mix and both Chimenti and Hornsby are playing well. The first set ends in typical fashion, but Bobby is also seemingly focused and the song is tight. A nice set, albeit with a fairly standard setlist.
The second set began with another one of those breakout numbers, the early 70’s unreleased and obscure track “Mason’s Children”. From there, it was another instance of Trey dominating the day, with a superb take on Garcia’s “Scarlet/Fire”. The early drums and space segment left much room for the “post-Drums” and the band did not disappoint. The primal “New Potato Caboose” was unfortunately a vocal lead for Lesh despite that Bob sang the song on the Anthem of the Sun album and all of the late-60’s live versions. Trey again shone during the “Help On The Way” and with his guitar throughout the entire Help/Slip/Frank suite. The band completed the night with a very sweet “Ripple” that featured a full crowd sing-along.
This show was recorded by friend of the site Bill who was in the taper’s section. He produced a 6-microphone mix that included a pair of Busman BSC2 mics, two AKG 480/CK61 mics and my Sennheiser cardioids that I sent to him especially for the occasion. The sound in the section is quite nice and this ambitious mix of microphones is indeed excellent. Enjoy!
Download the First Set [MP3] / [FLAC]
Download the Second Set [MP3] / [FLAC]
Stream “Passenger”:
Grateful Dead
2015-07-03
Soldier Field
Chicago IL
Digital Master Audience Recording
Recorded from Taper’s Section
Sennheiser MKH-8040s > Tascam DR-680 > 24bit 48kHz wav file > Soundforge (level adjustments, mixdown, set fades) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3 and tagging via Foobar)
Please support this legendary band:
http://www.dead.net
Recorded by Bill Walker
Produced by nyctaper
Setlist:
Set 1
[Total Time 1:11:01]
01 Box of Rain
02 Jack Straw
03 Bertha
04 Passenger
05 The Wheel
06 Crazy Fingers
07 The Music Never Stopped
Set 2
[Total Time 1:53:58]
01 Mason’s Children
02 Scarlet Begonias
03 Fire On The Mountain
04 Drums-Space
05 New Potato Caboose
06 Playing In The Band
07 Let It Grow
08 Help On The Way
09 Slipknot
10 Franklin’s Tower
11 [encore break / donor request]
12 Ripple
If you download this show from NYCTaper, please support the band and buy anything from the plethora of available music and merch at Dead.net.
Thanks so much for “taping “this !!! enjoy the shows <3
Thank you SO much! What a great night of music :)
Enjoying the couch tour! Completely agree with banning Lesh from singing, or at least paying a crew member to cut his mic cord. Very nice AUD!
Thank you for the sounds that filled the air. It was wonderful to be there and be a part of it all. With this I have the vibrations to go with the memories:)
God Bless you nyctaper. Happy 4th!
I have such mixed feelings about this all. Couldn’t they have just played, unannounced on the back of a truck on the Haight, posted it to youtube in HD and made bank on the advertising and made a more gallant, less try-not-noticing-our-maxed-out-commerciality statement?
tl;dr its been a long strange trip since tour books with the tearout tickets for each city in the tour to…. “this.”
Thanks for the download!!
The second night, though more enjoyable for the “serious Head”, seemed to lack energy all around. Why pull out Cumberland again? – They played it in Santa Clara and was a smoking Cumberland.
Me and My Uncle is one of my favorites and Bob sounded truly uninspired to sing it.
I’ve never been a fan of Saturday shows and this, though fun at times, makes me long for Sunday.
Thanks for this!
(Just a heads-up…some of set 1’s MP3’s are mislabelled. There’s a short 2:24 (tuning?) track inserted before The Wheel, which results in the everything after that in set 1 being off by one track. In other words, the MP3 labeled “The Wheel” is really tuning, Crazy Fingers is really The Wheel, etc.)
Great job. Will you be posting the 4th and 5th ?
I’m working on the files for the 4th right now, should be up a little later today.
In terms of my screw up of the tracking of the first set, sorry about that. My excuse is that I was doing the work in the files at 4am and I was not perhaps as sharp as I should have been. I’ll get the rest of them right!
Thank so much for your impressive review of the last Dead-Gigs! And together with your brilliant sound taping of the Chicago show, I´m getting a very close feeling to this great, worldwide Celebration of Grateful Dead and the spirit we keep in our hearts. Peace, Love & Purple Haze from Hamburg, Germany to You in NYC!
Thank you so much for doing this. The sound quality is very good, when I put it through my surround sound on concert setting and close my eyes I almost feel like I am there.
Wrote these geezers off when they backed Obama, how’s that working for ya Bob and Phil(rich bastard abuses liver, gets transplant). Face it folks- not the same W/O old Jerry. They fuck up the vocal phrazing on almost all songs. It just sounds like garbage.
But…I am still grateful for these, thanks.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING THESE AVAILABLE
I must say their sound in Chicago did improve over Santa Clara.
I CANNOT EXPRESS HOW GRATEFUL I AM FOR THESE RECORDINGS. BRINGS SUCH FABULOUS MEMORIES BACK.
Any chance you have Saturday and Sunday’s Show? Thank you for Friday’s show!
Thanks a bunch! Smoking set lists, band sounds as I expected them to, there are definitely better shows on my HD but knowing these are the last adds some sweet sentimental under currents that choke me up. Will be listening to these exclusively for a while I recon.
Thank you so much for the recordings! Any chance you have Sunday’s show?
Are you planning on posting the fifth?
are you going to be uploading the July 5th set as well? I really appreciate you taping this my mother really wanted to hear these before she passes and now she will have the chance!
Thank You
Kudos to the “thanks Obama” guy up there. Really nice work. Looking forward to chatting Common Core with you at a Panic show.
Hey – great sound. I couldn’t make it to Chicago, but this should cover it.
Meh, I think your assessment is poor in that this show was easily he best of the 5 shows. Most fluid, best guitar playing by Trey, and the closest that we have had to a Grateful Dead show since Jerry. The looks and mannerisms and fluidity of the night is evident. I agree that the these shows were far from the Garcia era, but this one was close enough to pretend.
Will you be posing the Santa Clara shows? Or does someone know where those can be downloaded? I like to have those in the same quality of these Chicago shows, which by the way, thanks for posting!
Thank you Bill and NYCTaper for putting in the time and effort to produce these beautiful recordings. Great quality, and greatly appreciated!!
Did you record all 3 Chicago shows? I was at the Sunday show dead center behind the tapers section in 322. Where do I buy these recordings? Also, I am NOT a fan of compression. Do you have an uncompressed version available on cd or DVDs?
Thanks for the splendid sounding recording!
I’ve tagged Set 1 Track 05 as:
“Phil’s Mic Is Falling To Hell Apart”
…and shifted the rest of the titles down from there.
Cheers!
It’s obvious your a Phish fan with disdain for the original Grateful Dead members so I suggest you and all the other twenty-thirty something Phish fans stick to Phish and leave the Dead tickets to Dead fans. This was a a Dead show not a Phish concert. Phil can sing lead where he wants (it’s up to him, not Trey) since he had a direct hand in writing almost every Dead song. Hopefully next time, they’ll employ Haynes to keep the Phish fans at home.
If you want perfect pitch and vocals go see New Kids on The Block. Phil is Phil. I guess Bob Dylan should get a stand in singer too.
A-it’s called real world man, sorry to burst your bubble. Have a nice trip!
As a good friend of mine said… It was a good concert, but it just wasn’t the Dead.
Docjbf-New Kids on the Block? Is that a spin-off of Phish, or something? Why don’t you tell us about them?
Remember what Mickey said fellas.
“Be kind, and beat the drum like it’s a rented mule.”
Says it’s a 6 mic mix but the setlist and info just say its Sennheiser MKH-8040s….?? Doesnt sound much better than any of the other recording that are out but thanks!
Why is it that every time I download something the song order is all mixed up? Please help me.
Let’s leave the infighting to the youngsters.
Those of us old enough to have “been there…..maybe even done that”
understand that, whether Jerry was there in spirit or not, this is stuff that matters.
It matters because the songs, no matter who, what or why, are an integral part of our lives.
Who loves what band pales………….
I appreciate the chance to celebrate, vicariously, what we all have enjoyed if we really care about the music.
There are glorious moments captured here, very well.
It’s a celebration of the music, and, I’m more than glad to accept Earl’s posit on the Dead forum on archive.org, to some extent, a soundtrack to my life.
Couldn’t possibly have gone, so thank you for taking me there.
Thanks so much for posting these! Very grateful…
Thanks for taking the time to record and post the show; the spirit of sharing lives on!
I have to say however that I really disagree with the criticisms. Phil Lesh has always sung with the band, and I would say his singing is more on key now and better projected than ever before. the quality of his voice is part of the character of the band. Complaining about it reminds me of all the people who say they love Bob Dylan but don’t like his voice. If Weir can get up and sing Ripple, Shakedown and other songs, why does Phil have any less license to sing a Jerry song, or anything else he wants for that matter. I also have never demanded perfection from the Grateful Dead, and happily have never found it in anything they did, no matter how great it was. The “simple mistakes” were mostly done by Trey as far as I could see, or were a group mistake the whole band shared. (Trey did an AMAZING job, no complaint there…) Much of this material is very complicated and demanding, non-musicians don’t understand that. I hate it when people “keep score” and count every slight in their growing enthusiasm to claim the band is no longer competent to play their own music.
First off, thank you so much to all the tapers out there who help bring the magic from the shows to our living rooms. I moved to Asheville, NC from Chicago about two years ago and I was just not able to swing the trip back for these shows. I only got to see Jerry play once in 1995 at the old Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. I had just started trading shows with my older sister’s friend (remember tapes!) so my Grateful Dead listening time had grown dramatically. Therefore my ear was seasoned enough to know that something was off but my wide-open, virgin eyes also allowed me to enjoy every rain soaked second. My sister, who attended quite a few shows in the late 80’s and early 90’s just looked so sad. She knew what Jerry in full health sounded like live, and although Jerry was doing his damnedest to be Jerry he was just too sick to be touring.
I was emotionally shattered when Jerry died later that
Summer and I remember my friends and I petitioning our football coach to cancel practice so we could properly mourn. Flash forward twenty years, almost two hundred Widespread Panic shows, and 562 days of music on a hard drive later and the memory of that single Dead
show still shines just as brightly as it did when I was sixteen. I know there are thousands and thousands of Deadheads who never got the chance to see Jerry. I cherish that memory every time his sparkling lead floats out of my speakers. The Fare Thee Well shows are the closest we are going to get to the real thing. I agree that there were some issues (Phil’s singing is a major turn-off for me. Yeah, he gets to decide who sings what but he butchers “Eyes” and “Franklin’s”. I’m sorry ya’ll but there is just too much vocal talent on that stage to subject us to his versions of Jerry’s tunes. ) But even compared to Santa Clara Chicago was on a totally different level musically. I have now listened to the soundboard and AUD versions of the shows and as usual the SB tapes lack the warmth and “inherent nowness” of the AUD versions.
So thank you nyctaper for getting this show uploaded so quickly. The sound quality is excellent and exudes that energy we all know and love from live shows. Thank you to also to all the taping pioneers who went to great lengths to sneak in recording equipment before it was officially sanctioned by the band. Many of your names are mentioned in a previous comment but I would like to make a special shout out to Jerry Moore who created some of the most astounding AUD tapes to ever grace the airwaves. And also a hearty thank you to Bill, Mickey, Bobby, Phil, Brucey, and Jeff. Most importantly, thank you Jerry for giving us so much of yourself while you were here. Your legacy will always live on through your music. God bless the Grateful Dead.
Will there be a GD July 5 recording?
Wondering if ya can repost these without the tune ups, noodling and silent periods before a lot of the songs. If not, thanks for these anyway. Much appreciated though don’t like all the silence at the beginning(not really silence but crowd sounds)
You’re kidding, right?
Thank you so much for these recordings! They sound amazing! I know a few have asked, but I haven’t seen a response as to whether the July 5th show will be available?
July 5 is coming on Monday night or Tuesday. I have the files and I’m working on them now.
As always, so thankful for your work, this site and the shows. Thanks so much.
Thank you so much nyctaper. Your work is so appreciated!!!