This post first appeared on the Phish.net forum on April 29, 2021.
Well, here we are folks, 50 years after the famed final performance of the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East. It's really a testament to the Grateful Dead's live work that I am writing this (and that a handful of people are reading this) at all. This is a band who set out to have a good time and explore deep consciousness without a plan. The Acid Tests were a mere 5 and a half years prior to the night, here, immortalized on the 2000 release "Ladies and Gentlemen," and yet the world was already unrecognizable, transformed as it were.
For Deadheads, commercial release wasn't what immortalized this show. First of all, this was the final performance at the very venue that had solidified the Grateful Dead's foothold on the East Coast. To say that Bill Graham's venue was legendary would be an understatement. Patti Smith had her mind blown seeing the Doors there. Jimi Hendrix ushered in the 1970s with his Band of Gypsies there. The list is long. Talk to anyone who attended shows, any shows, at the Fillmore East, and you may not hear many clear details from this vantage point, but their eyes will light up.
My first introduction to 04/29/71 came when I started trading tapes in 1985. My dorm friend "Psycho" made a short list of "must have" shows, and this was at the top. Pre-Betty Board, I have no clue what the original source of my first Maxell XLII 90s were, but I can tell you they were of a fairly high generation evident in hiss. A lot of people had dubbed this prior to me, and I couldn't have cared less. For me, spinning the show in late night reverie, the experience was transformative. The semi-out-of-tune spare phrasing of Spring '71 acted like a time machine transporting me to an only-imagined world of the Grateful Dead.
Why an imagined world? In 1985, the only Grateful Dead pictures I had seen were record store posters and the vague memories I could conjure from a few live experiences. Hearing the band tune between songs, say after a short and sweet Dark Hollow, I was entering into a Coney Island of the Mind. Not surprisingly, each tape I collected from the venue conjured a different theater. The April 29, 1971 theater was a fuzzier and warmer place than, say, the hair-raising venue of 1970's Valentine's Day gig. The Persian carpets were there, as was the ever-present smoke, and Pig Pen was a dreamy impression of cowboy hat and ponytail.
Jerry, Bob, and Phil were bouncy geetars, only, twangier than during the '60s, still full of swagger but sounding tired. Billy was the metronome of single drummer swing, but I didn't fully understand that upon first listens. I was still trying to pick apart all those sounds happening at once, spare and unfiltered though they may be. Unlike 1970's final blast of shaking off the previous decade and 1972's brand new set of clothes, Spring 1971 always had struck me as sounding a bit tired, a bit laggy, a bit world-weary. And yet, it drew me in like no other year.
The 1971 tapes may have topped everyone's lists in 1985 due to the fact that there were solid board recordings of this final Fillmore East run. On the other hand, there may have been some cytoplasm of the final Fillmore run explosion that still lingered and stuck to tape traders 14 years later. There was an oral tradition that followed each trade, and each swapped reeked of the earlier Grateful Dead Free Underground Tape Exchange spirit. To dub was a Friday night event: hours of listening and copying in real time with all the usual enhancers.
Musically, a 21st century fan new to the Grateful Dead might not quite hear the magic inherent in this final night at the Fillmore. It is tired and a bit off-kilter. (Did Jerry even sleep on a four-night run like that?) However, for a fan like me, these tapes left a permanent stamp. Minglewood, here, is the original style Minglewood. That reinforces the extant element of the 60's magic evident in the transition from Alligator-> Drums-> Jam-> Going Down the Road. The guitars breathe sound rather than strum it. This is the five-headed-hydra becoming one. In fact, as Pig takes such a backseat, a jam like this is a rare quartet blast-off.
Fans these days might be in search of a longer jam or compare this to a full-on Europe '72 melt down. Fortunately, I hadn't heard much of that music yet when I sunk my teeth in, here. What I found were solid Rosetta Stones of classics such as Ripple, Cumberland, and Casey Jones. There was the Cornell Morning Dew, and then there was THIS Morning Dew. I would play and rewind and replay the Second That Emotion, shocked that this ragtag outfit could do justice to Smokey Robinson while making it their own. The same is true for Bobby McGee. Of course, I loved Dark Hollow, and for me, this performance erased my stored memory of the Reckoning version. Even Bill Graham and the band's banter prior to the encore conveyed something special.
In 1985, this seemed like a portal to a different time, a different world inhabited by giants of the underground. It didn't even resemble the same band that I'd seen just weeks before in Richmond, VA. At the same time, there was an undercurrent, a propulsion that knit it all together in a link to the present, though sometimes hard to grasp. Seeing the Grateful Dead play an electric Ripple in 1988 seemed a fulfillment of that connection, somehow: flawed and beautiful, acoustic played electric.
I could go on and on, I could ask for "more and more," but I'm content now to just "hang out" and know that the "musicians are here" in my heart. It has been nice to delve deeply into the Grateful Dead all these years, and now we have these spoils of NRPS opening sets, too. Don't mind the sonic warts and the clams, there is still magic to be found in them thar tapes.
If it's all new to you, don't distract yourself. Tune everything out, listen to the quin/quartet, and try to imagine a rotting ole theater filled with bug-eyed friends.
Ah, yes, this is the Good Ol' Grateful Dead, something timeless, something suspended, something with us, still.
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