Grateful Dead – Frost Ampitheatre – 1982-10-09
I am testing the embedded player from Archive.org to see if I can put it into the blog.
I went to 84 Grateful Dead shows from 1981 to 1995 and I started documenting some of the experiences at my page on Dead.net . But, I thought I would add some actual concert audio on this blog with some commentary about the music and leave the real (and potentially not so family friendly) commentary about the concert experiences at Dead.net.
I was a tape collector and I still have DAT copies of 100’s of shows. I am going to post the audio of concerts that I attended and many more that I didn’t attend here.
The first post is a show that I did not attend. It is from the Frost Ampitheatre at Stanford in Palo Alto, CA in 1982. I had seen the Dead by this point, but hadn’t started traveling to see them yet. That really started in 1983. I had an audience recorded cassette of this show for years and I think I literally wore it out. Some nice soundboard copies have come around over the years and I have a good one on DAT. I am not sure I like the board copy better than the audience because it’s missing some of the energy and Bobby’s guitar is not high enough, but I have to put it here because the quality is so good. So, here is one of my favorite Grateful Dead concerts of all time:
The whole show is just about as perfect as the Dead were in 1982. The first set is extemely high energy and erupts with Music Never Stopped and Deal (the best I have ever heard). The second set has some of the first versions of Throwing Stones and Touch of Grey, before they were cheesed out and made into pop songs.
Tomorrow I will try to post the following night at Frost because it is considered in the top 10 of Grateful Dead shows to get on tape.
Enjoy!
(Update) Oh hell! I had to include the audience copy of this show because you just can’t hear Bobby’s guitar work well enough on the board copy. Listen to Deal to see what I mean. It’s a nice contrast: