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This August 1970 stint received quite a bit of media coverage, including a contemporary Rolling Stone article which waxed poetic about the Dead's changing sound. A more impressionistic interpretation of the events that went down can be found in Ed McClanahan's "Grateful Dead I Have Known", which also includes interview material with Garcia shortly after the Fillmore West closed a year later.



The acoustic set is slightly chopped up, but overall sound fidelity is pretty strong--Pigpen's piano comes through very strongly on the songs he plays on, though the organ is (as is commonplace for these early audience recordings) barely audible. I point out Pigpen's piano in particular because it adds a completely different feeling to those American Beauty songs--he certainly adds a little bit of grit to the otherwise saccherine sweetness of Ripple, and the boogie riff he contributes to Truckin' defines the song for me. Why they had to bring in Howard Wales and Ned Lagin for the studio record is beyond me--Pig could certainly hold his own on these fairly simple songs.



The electric set is about equivalent in clarity to the acoustic set--at least to my ears, your mileage may vary. There is a tad bit of high end distortion at certain points so you may need to fiddle a bit with the EQ. The boys are clearly spent from three days of marathon sets, and thankfully Crosby and Nelson enter the picture on NFA and begin to resuscitate things (due to the quality of the tape they're practically inaudible but are clearly influencing the direction of the jams, as is duly noted in the accompanying notes). If you're just cherry-picking, the Lovelight is an absolute keeper--pure primordial Dead and easily one of the top five versions they ever played. Pig's wild exhortations drive the crowd into a state of sheer frenzy; for about two minutes after the twenty minute mark he simply raps solo to the crowd, just accompanied by the handclaps of the other band members and the audience. One of the band's most unparalleled moments.



The NFA > Lovelight alone is a 5+, but with the audience fidelity quality, the incomplete (though stellar) acoustic set, and the generally mediocre electric set taken into consideration, I'm forced to give this no more than a 3.

- September 2, 2005Historic Run, Above Average Quality... NFA > Lovelight Saves Set From Mediocrity