This week Fry-day Comes Early: The Grateful Dead at Autzen Stadium in Eugene, OR 8-22-93

  I will be at the ACL music festival this Friday, so here is the weekly GD show a little early.

This show is, in my opinion, one of the best of the 93' tour and the nineties in general. The show is kind of infamous for the opening "Jack Straw" because Jerry came ready to rock and during the opener Bobby was having equipment trouble and melted down backstage, repeatedly slamming his guitar against a trash can. It was good for the fans though because while Bob was gone, Jerry and Phil took the opportunity to jam the ever-loving crap out of this "Jack Straw". It was a great, not for for Bob obviously, way to start a show. The Fat Man came ready to rock tonight. Followed by "Bertha" the one-two punch that opened this show is great. The rest of the first set has Phil responding to the "Let Phil Sing" banner with a solid "Broken Arrow" but the true glory of this show is in the "Help>Slip>Frank" second set opener.

Grateful Dead, Autzen Stadium, 8-22-93

The first set is nothing to brush off but the magical second set contained a wonderful rendition of "Ship of Fools" and has a very spacy drums that included Jerry joining the drummers on stage. Of course, the "Days Between" is amazing. This show was a benefit for the Rex Foundation so it was a matinee show but the band brought the heat. This is the first show I've brought to Grateful Music from 1993 and I hope you don't fall for the trope of "all nineties shows are garbage" because this show is a great one. Take your friends who listen to death metal and play them this "Help>Slip>Frank" and watch their faces. This is one of those "H>S>F" that makes new fans. There won't be any extended commentary on the set list because there are a couple of clips of the show to watch but trust me, listen to the whole thing and you will hear a nineties show that is well worth your time.

 This show proves they could turn it on when they wanted too. The jam section of "Music Never Stopped" to end the first set could go on forever. It was a smoking set closer. I don't even mind the "Corinna". I know I would've been getting down.

Written by: Greg Heffelfinger

Set One:

Jack Straw 
Bertha 
Little Red Rooster 
Broken Arrow 
Althea 
When I Paint My Masterpiece 
Tennessee Jed 
The Music Never Stopped 

Set Two:

Help On The Way ->
Slipknot! ->
Franklin's Tower 
Samson And Delilah 
Ship Of Fools 
Corrina ->
Drums ->
Space ->
The Wheel ->
I Need A Miracle ->
Days Between ->
Not Fade Away 

Encore
Liberty

Watch Jerry and Phil destroy this song while Bobby is off stage "fixing" his equipment against a trash can.

Check out the always touching "Days Between"

© 2016 Grateful Music LLC

The Grateful Dead Spent Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow at the Great Pyramids of Giza 38 years ago. The Egypt trip Sept. 14-16,1978

Because of Phil's interest in ley lines and "places of power", the Grateful Dead swung for the fences and pulled off a minor miracle by playing three shows at the Giza Light & Sound Theater.

The Grateful Dead and the Great Pyramids just seem to fit together. Not only because the Egyptian Book of the Dead mentions the grateful dead as stewards of the sun across the sky but anything that was sufficiently weird always peaked the band's interest. The band was planning on recording the concerts to recoup the price of trip for the band and their entourage. I think Ken Kesey and Mickey Hart might have had the most fun. They were both obsessed with miking the King's Chamber because the acoustics were perfect in the space but they never could quite pull it off. The Dead finally put together a box set from the second and third nights. For those not keeping count, that would be today and tomorrow, all those years ago and it was such a short time to be there. Is there a more epic picture than Jerry on a camel? 

The band was in the middle of the recording of Shakedown Street and they debuted the song at Red Rocks a couple of weeks earlier and the version they played at the Egypt shows is one of the finest Shakedowns ever played.  But that is for tomorrow. Today, not so many tracks were usable. In fact, they only released two on the main discs but the bonus tracks have the "Estimated Prophet" from the 15th and it was smoking. The band weren't happy with the first night's recordings so none of that night made the official release but they are available on archive to hear and you may still be able to download them if you are crafty. However, when you give them a listen you realize why they weren't released. This is a band that ate peanut butter so they could spend all their money on sound equipment. Said equipment was not built to be flown halfway across the world and set up in a basically third world country that is covered in sand. So I cut them some slack. Still, the band made some great friends, especially Mickey, like Hamza El-Din and they returned to the states to join the Dead on stage several more times.

  

Here is Ken Kesey's taping of the proceedings which include "Good Lovin" and the band goofing off before the shows and the backstage scene. It was released as two discs. All the shenanigans in the King's Chamber are on here, as well as more show footage and behind-the-scenes goodies. It's a two-disc affair. The first disc is at the top and the second is the bottom.

It's said in the Egyptian Book of the Dead," In the land of night the ship of the sun is drawn by the grateful dead" which is a weird coincidence in a band that thrived, nay survived, on coincidences and it's said as the band was playing the desert would slowly fill up with bedouins at night to watch the concerts and were seen dancing even though the language barrier was immense. It just goes to show that you can "get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at at it right". The third night, tomorrow, there was yet another coincidence in that there was a lunar eclipse that night and the bedouins traditionally beat drums and bang pots to bring back the moon/sun, whichever was being eclipsed. That night though, the Grateful Dead provided a little help in that endeavor and was a beautifully creepy cosmic finale to the trip. 

Since only "Stagger Lee" and "Jack Straw" are available as part of the compilation, here is the Lemioux-mastered version of "Jack Straw" from the Giza Light and Sound Theater in Cairo, Egypt on 9-15-78

Written by: Greg Heffelfinger

 

"Jack Straw" from Rockin the Cradle

  © 2016 Grateful Music LLC