Once, between songs during an acoustic set in the early 1980s, members of the Grateful Dead argued onstage about who was to blame for screwing up on the previous tune. I owned a tape of the show in question and, if I recall correctly, Bob Weir and the drummers, Bill Keutzmann and Mickey Hart, were the ones going at each other.

It was a soundboard recording; the whole argument was picked up, I assume, by the microphones on the drummers’ equipment. I lost that cassette years ago and don’t remember the date of the show. No matter. After sharing this post on /r/gratefuldead on reddit, I assume that pretty quickly some other unreformed Deadhead will fill in the exact details in a comment here: show date, venue, and between which songs this argument took place. We track such minutiae.

I do remember that things got pretty heated. And in the background: the white noise of applause and screams of the crowd, who probably had no idea what was going on. They likely only witnessed a huddle of band members talking among themselves, taking their sweet time, a pretty normal sight at most Dead shows between songs.

At one point on the tape, you can hear Jerry Garcia try to smooth things over with the amiable, “No one’s blaming you, Bob!” and then someone, Bob himself I think, replies, “I’m blaming you. I’m blaming you…” before he launches into why.

(Again, this is from memory. I’m counting on a redditor to provide an accurate transcript of the entire argument once this post goes live. Deadheads have thousands of such details available to us that we love to share and quote and clarify and repeat. I think we’re quick to offer the trivia because it brings a new frame of reference to the immense pleasure, shared pleasure, of listening to our favorite live music, which spans thousands of hours during thirty years of playing on the road — for many, the soundtrack of our misspent youth. We’re weird that way.)

So, yeah. Someone will come through with the actual transcript. Suffice to say, the argument ended. Bob said something into the PA along the lines of: “In a democracy I’ll support the drummers, but don’t ask me to vote for them.” Someone else in the band then said, “Hey, good thing this mic wasn’t on” and they kicked into a new tune.

Only, the mic was on. The mic was always on.

Mics, plural, I should say. Along with the standard setup for the singers, you also had equipment mics all over the stage and, in the crowd, the ubiquitous Nakamichis and Sennheisers et al poking their heads above the Taper Section, looking like a group of alien stick figure robots sent to witness a spectacle talked about in the far corners of the universe and beyond. Or something like that.

In the many thousands of hours of live music by our favorite band, all those microphones always picked up something.

The April, 1969, Avalon Ballroom poster.

For example. Late in the evening at the Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, on April 6th, 1969, the band transitioned on a dime out of a particularly electric That’s It For the Other One into a mournful cover of the Reverend Gary Davis masterpiece, Death Don’t Have No Mercy. When you listen to the recording, by this point in the show it’s easy to imagine that band and audience have traveled to the far reaches of the cosmos and back, thanks to the music and to Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley’s liquid magic. This is San Francisco, four months before Woodstock.

As Death unfolds at a walking pace, Garcia sings, dirge-like:

…come to your house, you know he won’t take long

look in bed this morning, children, find your mother gone…

and behind the music you can hear a poor soul in the audience, out of his mind, screaming over and over:

I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!

The guy is (in short) totally losing his shit — primeval wailing— faced with the sheer, psychedelic terror of his own mortality while in the middle of a crowd at the Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, on a Sunday evening in 1969, during a song whose title and chorus reminds us of the inescapable.

Death don’t have no mercy in this land.

All these years later, his wails are still harrowing. Truly. As one reviewer on the Internet Archive put it: “pure giddy terror that only the Dead can pull off.”

All that and more. The band’s response? Transition into a twenty-three minute version of the decidedly more upbeat “Turn On Your Lovelight” — with Pigpen at the wheel telling you how things work. Turn on your light. Leave it on.

If you’re a Head, these kinds of details elevate good recordings of great shows into … well … into magic, but that hardly captures it, right? It’s the real fucking deal. That is all. I often wonder who that guy was and what became of him. I love this recording for the window it opens into being there. I’m a sucker for this stuff.

There’s another one, much more subtle but still involving a guy yelling in the crowd — captured forever — and it always entertains me. On December 6, 1973, the Dead played the Public Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, somewhere in the middle of an early-winter east coast tour. To my ears, the evening has a particularly acid-soaked tinge to the playing. It’s familiar, jazzy 1973 Dead, but with an extra psychedelic glow that sets it apart during that peak period; especially the Dark Star late in the evening. There’s cosmic dust on the edges of the mix. For example:

It starts with what appears to be tuning.

At least, that’s what I once thought. And that’s what some fellow in the audience who didn’t know better thought.

(The Dead tuned a lot. Somewhere online there a collage of all the tuning between songs from the entirety of shows in 1977. I love the idea; I doubt I’ll ever listen to it.)

Cleveland, 1973

And so, 1973 in Cleveland, tuning and noodling. Noodling and tuning. Then, quiet. Then some keys from Keith. Phil and his bass. More quiet. Bob here, Jerry there. Keith loses himself in a small repetition that unravels almost thoughtfully, but, yeah, it sure does sound like tuning. And really it isn’t. It’s actually the first few cracks, almost imperceptible, in a damn wall that holds a giant force of water behind it. (Yes, there’s always something in the water.)

The audience is quiet except when that one guy yells (54 seconds in): “STOP TUNING and …” the rest is garbled, but you can make out something like: “…and start playing a song!”

But really. Again. It’s not tuning.

I’ve listened to the deeply improvisational, 43-minute Dark Star that follows the “stop tuning” yell many, many times, and I still can’t wrap my head around how they get there. Like the soundcheck jam at Watkins Glen earlier that year, it involves Billy on the drums finally joining the mix, forming musical shapes out of air … things build and out of nowhere: oh, right, we’re in a song.

What’s next is a sublime version of the band’s epic vehicle for free-form musical exploration, made even better by that one, momentary, clueless yell. “Stop tuning and start playing…” As though the spaces between songs didn’t count at Dead shows.

I like to imagine that the guy had no idea what was about to hit him. Which is why it’s inevitable, 43 minutes later, that the band would transition into nothing other than: Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. That’s how it worked.

I’ve loved discovering these little moments of “found chatter” in live Dead recordings. Everyone has their own and the point of this post is to get people to share theirs— either here or on reddit, or wherever.

Thanks to the thoughtsonthedead blog for this one…

Windows into a world of music we love. Typically they’re snippets of conversation; jokes or just punchlines announced without the context of the original joke (Bobby telling the audience that Mickey talks to aliens with his special radio headset, or that Phil has disappeared, last seen talking to strange beings with pointy ears); setlist planning as pictured in this animated gif/video capture (or better yet, someone in the band yelling “Hey, what are we playing?” even after the song has started); non sequiturs (usually by Bobby); yellow dog stories (Bobby again); discussions regarding how many beats to count in to start Beat It On Down the Line (anything from 7 to 20); and, from the tapers’ mics, conversations and asides from the crowd. Among others.

There are so many to choose from — here are a few stand-out examples from my list:

February 14, Valentine’s Day, at the Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, 1968. The second set starts with words from Jerry “before we get into the real thick of it” — two announcements, one of a new life, the other to mark a death. First, friends of the band have given birth to a kid —and Phil calls out “Happy Levelle” which may be the state of the mind of the dad (mom is Tiffany), or the name of the kid. Hey, it’s 1968. Could be either. And then, from Jerry: “…and also we respectfully dedicate this set to the memory of Neal Cassady…”

Cassady and Kesey

…who died alone on the railroad tracks in Mexico just nine days before this show. And then the band kicks into a sublime That’s It For the Other One, Bobby’s brand new tune that, among other things, immortalizes Cowboy Neal at the wheel, and his undying influence on the band and the entire scene for reasons too numerous to recount here if you don’t already know. The end of an era and the beginning of a new one, found in a short stage announcement.

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Not all of it was quite so heavy. An old favorite of mine: May 7th, 1978, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York. In my bootleg collecting days, this soundboard tape was a standout — a quality SBD recording of a show with many peaks from start to finish. In the second set, after a particularly blistering Scarlet Begonias into Fire on the Mountain, there’s the obligatory downtime/tuning in which apparently Jerry discovers that the crew are playing cards (poker?) on the side of the stage. Before Bobby counts the band into one of the finest Estimated Prophets of the year (IMO), you can hear Jerry saying: “…what you got, 17 of spades? Shit, I can beat you with my NINE aces!”

“1–2–3–4–FIVE–6–7…”

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Bob the Tomcat, prettiest guy in the band, got a lot of shit from his brothers, much of it documented. Including: the two night run at Merriweather Post Pavilion in summer of 1985. I was there; Twilight Zone was in the air. At the start of the second set, first night (June 30), Brent incorporates the sound of a girlish “Boooobby, Boooobby” crooning into his synthesizer as the band winds up to play — wait for the hypebole again— yes, one of the top five Shakedown Streets ever played. No arguments; just the truth.

The second night at Merriweather, July 1, 1985, during the first set, right after Jack-A-Roe, a girl in the front row yells “Spit on me, Bobby! Spit on me, Bobby!” and Billy K hears. You can hear him chuckle about it and tell Mickey, picked up through the drum mics, I assume. You had to be there, I guess.

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The entire Grateful Dead archive is littered start to finish with instances of Bob announcing to the crowd that they band and crew were taking a minute to get things “just exactly perfect.” But one of my favorite Bobby announcements (there are so many) comes right after Bertha on August 6, 1971, when the band played the Hollywood Palladium. Bob notices someone in the audience taping the show. He doesn’t shut him down —instead, offers the rather helpful:

Hey, you down there with the microphone! If you want to get a decent recording you gotta move back about 40 feet. It sounds a lot better back there, believe me…

The crowd agrees.

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Another great Bobby moment. Poets have their Ars Poetica, poems about their craft — so surely there’s an Ars Musica to capture what it’s all about, right? Maybe the closest we get is Weir at Folsom Field in Boulder, Colorado, September 3, 1972 when he announces how things are going to go from here on out:

Well, every now and then we get the feeling that you want to hear us play something nice and straight. Well, we never ever do anything nice and straight. We gonna take the beginning of this song and start out nice and straight. And then we’re going to take the end of this song and finish it up. Real. Weird.

(Audio here)

Pretty much captures 30 years of good and bad, right there. The good being really, really good.

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So many scraps and morsels to choose from to make this great ongoing meal more of a feast, but here’s one of my favorite, for many reasons.

Jerry, 1978

First, because it’s so weird. It’s fall of 1978 and the Dead are playing Winterland after just having returned from Egypt. This is the part of the career when shows are taking a two-set structure and it’s the beginning of loose, exploratory space in the second set. Jerry and the band are fully into the zone, no longer making sense but making plenty of interesting music — it’s deep improv time — when a woman wonders onto the stage and says to Jerry (while the man is playing!), “I know this is strange, but I’d like to take banjo lessons from you.” (It’s around the 14 minute mark of Drums in this recording.)

Keep in mind, Jerry the banjo teacher is a key early detail in the Grateful Dead mythology. But this. 1978. Is weird. His response: “I don’t teach anymore.” Because, you know, it’s like he’s standing in line chatting as he waits for a coffee. Not, as it were, playing inside the zone for a packed house at Winterland.

The woman does not relent. “Is there a time I can take banjo lessons?”

Jerry is as cool and as kind as everyone says he was, simply repeats, because it’s the only truth that matters: “I don’t teach anymore.”

And here’s what gets me every time. It’s a Deadhead thing, I guess; you either get it or you don’t. The band segues out of this strange encounter during deep improv, and Jerry sings to everyone (and we should believe that he meant it):

If I had a world to give, I’d give it to you, as long as I live…

I like to believe he was also singing to the banjo girl. Why not? It adds to the magic.

What’s yours?