“We play all kinds of music here, you know, country AND western.”

The whole show (good for one week and shhhhhh) is great, unsurprisingly for this tour, but all the meat is all towards the end of the show. Despite a nice, ten minute Playin’ in the first set, and a ten minute Truckin’ to open the second, all that’ll soon be forgotten.

This is the Brown-Eyed Women on E72, but it’s fairly different in the Box Set version, which doesn’t have the over-dubbed vocals, and, nicely, Bobby is louder.

Here’s a particularly sad Looks Like Rain. Sad because it’s a sad song, sadder because it’s the last version of the tour, and real sad because it’s the last pedal steel Jerry would play with the band until 1987. (He’d play steel briefly again on 72-11-23 in a thrown together band with Phil, Bill, Doug Sahm, Leon Russell and others, but not with the Dead.) Phil’s harmony is beautiful here, too, and even his bass parts manage to feel sad.

(Jerry also played pedal occasionally from 69-04 to 69-07. Check out 69-07-04: Bobby sings lead on Dire Wolf while Jerry plays pedal.)

Dark Star is marvelous, the first eleven minutes of which is full of memorable little melodies (Phil hints at Feelin’ 10:40) from the band and extra prettiness from Keith. It gets spacey but pleasant after the first verse (which finally shows up at 17 minutes into the song). Phil steps up the energy next, and finally gets the Feelin’ he’d wanted eleven minutes earlier. Eventually they somewhat disappointingly space their way into Sugar Magnolia (see 72-04-08 for the perfect DS > SM transition).

(If you’ve ever imagined a one-hour or two-hour “Dark Star” that never completely spaces out and keeps finding new melodic avenues, this is for you.)

Occasionally, Pig’s vocal improvisations can get tediously repetitive (there’s just so many times ’reach over my left shoulder’ and ‘quit playing pocket pool’ can remain fresh — it was about four times for me) but there’s nothing tedious about the Good Lovin > Caution > Good Lovin that comes next.

Maybe they were finally acclimated to Europe, and maybe everything else was exactly perfect (for example, in All a Dream, Donna says “The acoustics at the Tivoli were just so beautiful – it was made for music,”) because the interplay between the band and Pigpen is outstanding. It’s long, and Pigpen barely takes a break, which you’d think might get old, but it doesn’t, not the least because he’s not saying the same shit he says every night.

Indeed, so not-the-same he sings something he’s never sung before, Who Do You Love. It’s only a verse, but he plops it in just exactly perfectly, and completely extra-energizes the jam.

(They’d played Who Do You Love before with Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, & Papa John Creach, on 70-11-11, but someone else is singing (and the tapes are virtually unlistenable). The third and final time would come a month later on 05-11 in Rotterdam.)

Ramble On Rose is a fantastic song, and one of Hunter’s best lyrics, but it’s bound to wilt here, stuck as it is between Dark Stark > Sugar Mag > Good Lovin > Caution > Who Do You Love > Caution > Good Lovin (insert Ramble On Rose here) and GDTRFB > NFA > GDTRFB. Maybe they needed a breather during those 120 minutes. I would. I did.

Not Fade Away starts off with Billy playing the Bo Diddley beat half time, likely to alert the band, then bringing it smoothly back up to speed. Over the A before the vocals we get a couple pew-pews from Phil, which really get one in the mood. With thirty seconds left in the first NFA, Bob starts China Cat, and Jerry joins him a single, sweet pass through the verse, but it evaporates into GDTRFB.

“See ya later,” Bob says, and they would, three days later. Here is a great video of the show.