For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: The Dead Do Dallas in ’78 (and ’72 and ’69 and …)

I’m not much of a Grateful Dead fan, if I may end the week with an understatement; I pretty much start and finish with American Beauty, depending on the hour and the herb, though the missus was once known a long while ago to follow a tour or two. Lord knows it ain’t hard to turn up a Dead bootleg; I was, in fact, hoping to find a decent version of the Who’s ’67 Memorial Auditorium show for this week’s weekend adios, or at least something from the Texxas Jam that sounds better than this Boston offering.

But I’ll offer this instead: the Dead at the Dallas Convention Center Arena in 1978, a mediocre audience recording that gives me an excuse to link to Jeff Liles’s Echoes and Reverberations acid flashback from December of ’08 in which he recounted his trip to this very show. (“Why are all
of these people barefoot? Do they not own shoes? Do these people
drink their own pee?”)You’ll find better Dead Dallas concerts — and, look, that ’72 Memorial Auditorium gig and the ’69 show on the SMU campus sound awful good, if that’s your box of rain — but now you can tell Jeff you were there too.