Giants Stadium Dead: Larry and guest Christian Sauska break down 8.4.94 and the 'new song' era

Deadhead Cannabis Show

Tips for guessing within two years when a song was played.

Larry Mishkin reviews the Grateful Dead concert from August 4th, 1994, at Giant Stadium. He discusses the show and welcomes guest Christian Sauska, who attended that concert and shares his love for New Orleans-style music and his journey as a Deadhead. The conversation delves into the 80s and 90s eras of the band, and they discuss their musical backgrounds and the band's new music.

Produced by PodConx

Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-show

Larry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkin

Rob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-hunt

Christian Sauska - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-sauska-5aab2310/

Jay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesberg

Recorded on Squadcast

Grateful Dead

August 4, 1994

Giant’s Stadium

East Rutherford, NJ

Traffic opened the show

Jerry sits in with Traffic on Dear Mr. Fantasy and Gimme Some Lovin

INTRO: Box of Rain

Track No. 2

3:42 – 4:51

SHOW #1: Jack Straw

Track No. 3

5:00 – 6:09

SHOW #2: Eternity

Track No. 7

0:36 – 1:45

A “new” Bob Weir song, music by Bob and Rob Wasserman and lyrics by Willie Dixon

first played on February 21, 1993 at Oakland Alameda County Coliseum

Played 44 times in concert

Last played July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field – second to last show

Released on Dead’s first post-Jerry box set, So Many Roads

Rob Wasserman (Rat Dog with Bobby) Wasserman started playing violin, and graduated to the bass after his teenage years. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he studied composing with John Adams and double bass with San Francisco Symphony bassists.[5]

He worked with Van Morrison, Oingo Boingo, and David Grisman. His 1983 album Solo won Down Beat magazine's Record of the Year award. On the albums Duets and Trios, he worked with Bobby McFerrin, Rickie Lee Jones, Cheryl Bentyne, Lou Reed, Stéphane Grappelli, Jerry Garcia, Brian Wilson, Willie Dixon, Branford Marsalis, Bob Weir, Edie Brickell, Les Claypool, Neil Young, and Elvis Costello.

Duets was nominated for three Grammy Awards. Bobby McFerrin won for "Brothers", which was performed with Wasserman. Wasserman also won Holland's Edison Award for Record of the Year.

His 2000 album, Space Island, incorporated more contemporary musical elements.

RatDog, which he co-founded with Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead, occupied much of his time. He toured extensively with Lou Reed.

Wasserman was a judge for the sixth-tenth annual Independent Music Awards.[8]

Rob Wasserman died on June 29, 2016. Cause of death was cancer.[9] Entombment was made in Salem Memorial Park and Garden at Colma, California.[10]

Willie Dixon (1915-1992) was one of the preeminent blues songwriters and performers of all time. The Grateful Dead covered a fairly lengthy list of his songs, attesting to his influence on the band: “Down in the Bottom,” “I Ain’t Superstitious,” “I Just Want to Make Love To You,” “Little Red Rooster,” “The Same Thing,” “Spoonful,” and “Wang Dang Doodle.”

The song was written during the sessions for Rob Wasserman’s Trios album. “Guitar Player” magazine ran an interview with Weir in 1993:

“I had this chord progression and melody that I wanted to run by Willie to see if he liked it .... he did, so he started dashing off words. He wanted me to run a certain section by him again and stuff like that, and we started working on a bridge. Then he dashes off this sheet of lyrics and hands it to me. Now I'm really stoked to be working with the legendary Willie Dixon and I'm prepared for just about anything.

“He hands these lyrics to me and I'm reading through them. And they seem, you know, awfully simplistic. Like there wasn't a whole lot to them....

“....Now he wants me to read through it and sing the melody I have and see if they fit. And so I started singing through these simplistic lyrics, and that simplicity takes on a whole other direction.

“By the time I had sung through them, it's like my head is suddenly eons wide. I can hear what's happening just sort of echoing around in there and I'm astounded by the simple grace of what he has just presented to me. I'm sitting there with my mouth open literally, and Willie's laughing. He's just sitting there laughing, saying, 'Now you see it. Now you see it. That's the wisdom of the blues.'”

David Dodd (author of Complete Grateful Dead Annotated Lyrics) – “Weir’s songs from this era (anything from “Victim or the Crime” forward) seem aggressively innovative, shall we say. The rhythmic patterns, the big multi-layered chords, the changes in meter and tone, all add up to something that seems calculated to disrupt any comfort we might have been sinking into. OK, I didn’t say that very well, but anyone who has struggled with these late-period Weir songs knows what I mean.”

SHOW #3: Childhood’s End

Track No. 8

3:10 – 4:15

A “new” Phil tune, first played July 24, 1994 at Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, IN

Played 11 times in concert

Last played July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field – last show

Never released on a studio album

“Childhood’s End” on 7/20/94 – the last original Grateful Dead song to enter the live repertoire, written and sung by Phil Lesh.

Per John Hilgart of 4CPComics, the background story is that Lesh (and perhaps the others) felt that new songs would help fuel Garcia engagement in a period when Jerry was headed in the same direction as in the mid-1980s, when his drugged-out-bad-health put him in a coma that he narrowly survived – living on to drive the 1989-onward renaissance of the band. In the 1995 remake, Jerry died. The big musical difference between those two episodes is that everyone else in the band had their shit together in 1994, whereas the whole band was a mess in 1986.

John’s general take on post-Brent 1990’s Dead is that they were not to be dismissed – a band that had stopped depending on Garcia’s leadership to determine the musical outcome, but who were always therefore also ready when Garcia was feeling spry. Weir has said something to that effect. And when Garcia was feeling spry, it was just as you would wish it to be.

SHOW #4: Way To Go Home

Track No. 14

2:59 – 4:12

A “new” Vince song music by Vince and Bob Bralove, lyrics by Robert Hunter.

First played February 23, 1992 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum

Played 92 times

Last played June 28, 1995 at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills

Also wrote Samba In The Rain for the Dead.

Bob Bralove is a keyboard–synthesizer player who worked as a sound technician with the Grateful Dead from 1986 to 1995. Throughout his tenure, he performed as an auxiliary musician throughout "Drums" and "Space", the band's signature aleatoric music segments.[1]Accordingly, he played a key role in their integration of MIDI technology (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music.[1] ; Before the development of MIDI, electronic musical instruments from different manufacturers could generally not communicate with each other. This meant that a musician could not, for example, plug a Roland keyboard into a Yamaha synthesizer module. With MIDI, any MIDI-compatible keyboard (or other controller device) can be connected to any other MIDI-compatible sequencer, sound module, drum machine, synthesizer, or computer, even if they are made by different manufacturers.), first working with drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, keyboardist Brent Mydland, and later guitarist Bob Weir and synthesizer/piano player Vince Welnick. He also co-wrote several songs with Weir and Welnick, including "Picasso Moon" on Built to Last (1989) and "Way to Go Home" and "Easy Answers", which were slated to appear on the band's unfinished fourteenth studio album. (A live reconstruction, Ready or Not, was ultimately released in 2019 and contains both songs.) Perhaps his most significant project with the band was curating excerpts from "Drums" and "Space" on Infrared Roses, a 1991 compilation album. "Parallelogram" and "Little Nemo in Nightland" are some of his most notable "compositions" from this release.

Bralove was also a member and producer of the Psychedelic Keyboard Trio, along with Welnick and fellow former Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten.[2] Bralove and Constanten also collaborated as Dose Hermanos, a showcase for their improvisational keyboard work; since 1998, they have toured irregularly and released five albums under the moniker. Bralove also worked with Stevie Wonder, setting up and programming Wonder's synthesizers including while he was touring.[3]

OUTRO: Days Between

Track No. 20

5:55 – 7:24

“new” Jerry tune

First played February 22, 1993 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena

Played 42 times by the Dead

Last played June 24, 1995 at RFK Stadium in D.C.

It has become a favorite of the surviving band members, played the third night at the 50th Anniversary Shows at Soldier Field in 2015 and frequently played by Dead & Co. with Bobby singing, Also played by Bob Weir and Wolf Bros. and Phil and Friends. Great tune to end this episode.

David Dodd: “Days Between” has come to be an anthem that makes us remember Garcia in a particular way, and, in particular, the days between his birth date of August 1 and his death date of August 9. It’s a fitting song for such thoughts, with its big sweeping chords and its lyrics heavy with nostalgia and longing.

There’s a word in German, sehnsucht, that lacks a proper emotional counterpart in English, but which means, roughly, “longing.” It carries a sense of wishing you could see something—see something again, see something at all—that something is missing from your eyes and from your presence. I find that “Days Between” belongs with a raft of songs that induce this feeling in me.

“Days Between,” a late song in the Robert Hunter / Jerry Garcia songbook, was perhaps their last collaboration on a big, significant song, one that ranks with “Dark Star” and “Terrapin Station” as ambitious and intentionally grand. (I was talking the other day with a friend, about Garcia’s playing and songwriting, and the thought came up that Garcia, like few others, was unafraid of grandeur, and could successfully pull it off. Same with Hunter.)

During its relatively short time in the live repertoire, they played it 41 times, always in the second set, and fairly frequently rising out of the Drums.

Phil: “I don’t know whether to weep with joy at the beauty of the vision or with sadness at the impassable chasm of time between the golden past and the often painful present.”

.Produced by PodConx

Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-show

Larry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkin

Rob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-hunt

Jay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesberg

Sound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/

Recorded on Squadcast