Last week, we took a listen to the Grateful Dead in their so-called "primal" stage. We’ll pick up the thread seven years later, to find the group climbing to an experimental, unclassifiable plateau. In 1974, the Dead were making some truly strange sounds—and stranger still, they were making them in packed stadiums full of rock'n'roll fans.

It’s an enormous understatement to say that a lot had happened to the Grateful Dead between '67 and '74. They gained and lost keyboardists, drummers, and vocalists. They started their own record label. They were ripped off by shady managers. They helped develop one of the most innovative, high tech sound systems ever created. They played hundreds upon hundreds of shows, from the ballrooms of San Francisco to fields in England. They did it all while (usually) doing copious amounts of mind-altering drugs.

-=-=-=-Other bands might have succumbed to the chaos. The Dead seemed to thrive on it. During these hectic years, the music (especially onstage) deepened and expanded, whether the band was exploring the farthest out regions of psychedelia with "Dark Star" and "The Other One", or joyously digging into the roots of folk, blues, and country on their 1970 studio classics, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

Jerry Garcia, the band’s guiding light, was an insatiable musical omnivore during this period, somehow finding the time for a dizzying array of extracurricular activities amidst the Dead’s busy touring and recording schedule. Away from the band, he played adventurous jazz-funk with Howard Wales and Merl Saunders; he picked a banjo on classic bluegrass with Old & in the Way; he contributed pedal steel to the country rockin’ New Riders of the Purple Sage. Garcia may be seen as the quintessential hippie, but more than anything else, he was an extremely ambitious musician, devoted to developing his talents and following his muse wherever it took him. After Garcia’s death in 1995, Bob Dylan wrote: "There’s a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and say Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school."

Alexandra Palace, London, England, September 11, 1974

All of Garcia’s diverse influences (plus plenty more from other members of the band) fed back into the Dead, and by 1974, the group was swelling with ideas—and had the guts to actually test out those ideas onstage. There's no one show that's quite up to the task of encompassing everything they were up to during this era, but this recording of the band on a short European jaunt gives a good overview.