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Although the Dead's vault is enormous and impressively full, the band certainly doesn't have a tape of every show it played; in fact, they don't even have a copy of every show they recorded. Tapes drifted off in a variety of ways - including Jerry Garcia handing them out... And therein lies the story of Dick's Picks #35.
This spring, our archivist David Lemieux got a call from Donna Jean Godchaux-Mackay. It seems that in the late summer of 1971, just before Keith Godchaux began rehearsals with the Dead, Garcia handed him a big box of tapes and said, "Here, this is our most recent tour. Learn our music." The irony was that Donna Jean doubts mightily Keith ever bothered to listen to them - he'd never listened to the Dead all that much before he auditioned, first with Garcia and then the rest of the band - he just had an uncanny innate facility for the music. In any case, he left the tapes on his parents' houseboat in Alameda, and there they stayed. For 35 years.
A month ago, his brother Brian and son Zion were cleaning out the houseboat, found the tapes, and gave them to Donna, whose jaw dropped. One call to Lemieux later, and the Dead's long-lost missing tour from the summer of 1971 had resurfaced. Master tapes include April 28 and 29 at the Fillmore East (released as "Ladies and Gentlemen," taken from the multi-track masters), the 7/31 Yale Bowl (alas, blank), a small piece of the Hollywood Bowl, Berkeley Community Theatre, and others.
Dick's Pick #35 will be four CDs: the complete San Diego (8/7/71) show, all that was salvageable of the 8/24 Chicago show, and an hour-plus from the Hollywood Bowl (8/6). It will be available at Dead.net Friday, June 17th.
Not a soundboard-recorded note of that tour's music circulates among Dead Heads, so this is a truly remarkable find. How they survived 35 years in a damp environment simply proves, yet once again - if you needed convincing - that God smiles on the Grateful Dead.
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