I was luck to be able to pick up many Live Dead concert CDs at a reasonable price. If you are in Maine visit a local Bull Moose Music store. I am lucky to have access to a great music store with plentiful numbers of used Grateful Dead CD. While a great resource for those of us not conversant in bit torrent, these releases where frequently expensive and (to my ears) over produced which subtracted from the raw energy of the original sound board tapes. Beginning in the last decade of the last century, the Dead organization began to issue live sound board recordings from this corpus. The early taping of Dead shows from the sound boards (thank you Owsley) and later by dedicated deadhead tapers left us with a rich vein of music and magic in the over 3000 individual live performances available in one form or another. After the (limited) success of the Grateful Dead Movie in capturing what the Dead were, the world moved on. In the intervening years I was more attracted to Frank Zappa who produced a consistent recording experience that the Dead never would achieve. Like many, my first experience of the Dead was prepared only by my youth and The Bear’s purple haze of the night. Nor was I aware of the mythical aura that was even then growing around the band and Jerry and their fans. I was young and was unaware that this was Captain Trips. That over weight, black clad, Prankster with a halo of unmanageable black hair playing guitar was clearly the center of the band and the performance. Like many, this was a seminal experience for me, changing my understanding of the meaning of performance and of Rock and Roll. I first heard the Grateful Dead live in Albuquerque in 1971. I’m younger than that now My Back Pages by Bob Dylan
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