Precarious?
“Yo.”
How you holding up?
“This corona shit’s for pussies. Back in ’82, we had something going around called groupie pox.”
That sounds terrible.
“Contracting it was fun.”
Sure. Small question about the microphones on Bobby’s speaker cabinet.
“Okay.”
Why four?
“There’s not four. Look careful. There’s five.”
Why?
“Weir had been complaining about wanting a fuller sound. So we did that to shut him up. I think only one mic is actually plugged in.”
Placebo mics?
“Essentially.”
Always something new with this band.
“Never boring, though. Except when we’d play Indianapolis. That was always boring.”
Indianapolis Sports Center 1984 was weird.
It was at a fancy clay court tennis arena.
The staff was like you would expect, polite teenagers and moms who said please.
The show was getting ready to start and the line was moving so slow that folks with tickets just said, Fuck it and climbed the fence, and then passed their tickets back through the fence for others.
Folding chairs on tennis courts, during trucking the crew put the lights on the trucks behind the stage.
It seemed like the Candace Brightman (?) lighting arrangement was not in effect at that time, it seemed sort of bush league.
It was a good show, folks like it.
https://archive.org/details/gd1984-06-30.sbd.123778.miller.flac16
Big fan of that show. Spoonful is so spaced out with that vocal echo. Interesting to hear about the venue–I’d’ve thought they were long done with playing weirdass setups like that by ’84.
Boring? Give this Let it Grow to end set one a listen
https://archive.org/details/gd1981-12-05.sbd.miller.111784.flac16
shakedown is funky and railroad blues is a classi
So is this from the pocket era of Phil being fatter than Garcia, or were they both men of girth here? Hard to tell with Jer absent from the picture.
I think Garcia and Lesh’s paunches were about even in 1981-82, with Garcia starting to look really puffy again by 84