Good news in a morass of pitiful offerings, Enthusiasts: Cascadia’s champion, Mr. Completely, has once again graced us with a bracing blow of audio semi-fictionality. I cannot tell you what the best ever 1989 show was–4/2, 6/11, 14/3.14–but I can tell you what the best EVAR show was: this one.
These ones, more rightly, as Completely has created not one superb semi-fictional show, but two. (And they’re long fuckers, too.) Not “Best-Of” or whatever where the songs are jumbled and tossed without care, no: these two “shows” follow the rules of the Grateful Dead: alternating Garcia and Bobby tunes, little songs in the first set, weirdo bullshit in the second. If you didn’t know these shows didn’t actually happen, you might not realize it.
I won’t gush, but just tell you this: since Mr. Completely sent me the (almost) finished versions two weeks ago, I’ve listened to each show at least five times. It’s a home run mixed with a touchdown combined with a delicious corned beef sandwich while someone is touching your nipples in just the right way.
So: watch it on YouTube, or download either the FLAC, ALAC, or MP3 from the link, and then tell him how good it is in the Comment Section. Make sure you check out the detailed liner notes which, in keeping with Grateful Dead tradition, I was not asked to write. TotD gets a special thanks, but–in candor–my participation was mostly pestering him about including Foolish Heart.
I absolutely 100% invited you to write some bullshit for the liner notes. We were probably both a little high when those emails happened though.
Glad to see Victim included. I didn’t care much for the song for a few years, then at Richfield ’94 the light bulb came on and now I look back and ask how I didn’t like the song all along.
For me things were getting weird in 1989.
I get melancholy thinking about it.
Great work though
I composed a post of lavish praise, but, fortunately for Mr Completely’s sense of self worth, it has disappeared into the aether.
it’s okay, at this point all I can hear are the flaws when I listen to it. In six months I’ll be able to enjoy it again
OK, now that I have downloaded the .flac and copied it to my music server, I find that the tracks are now scambled and re-assembled thus:
89.03.31 – Greensboro Coliseum, Greensboro NC [Wings to Fly]
89.04.02 – Pittsburgh PA [Wings to Fly]
89.05.06 – Frost Amphitheater, Stanford U., Palo Alto CA [Wings to Fly]
and so on. Presumably this is because of the metadata. It means that setting up to listen to these meta-events in the correct meta-order is being frustrated by crap meta-data which results in sorting by different criteria. This mess is, of course, completely consistent with the usual practice of GD Productions.
It appears that real reality, even though its day is done, will not allow time scambling shuffles into alternate time sequences.
*scrambled