Hartford Heat Index II

Heavy haze of hallucinatory flow: The Grateful Dead at Dillon Stadium 7/31/74

https://archive.org/details/gd1974-07-31.115499.aud-anderson.bershaw-berger.flac16

Something about this recording, it’s like the heat from the day was baked into the tape, a leaf tissue imprint cooked into the iron oxide. There is a mist of sorts which slowly hazes off the audio, one you both feel and see in front of you, in fact you can probably low key smell the heat here too. Like always in 1974, The Grateful Dead are turning air into water, fire into earth, or maybe they’re not doing it themselves at all and are merely observing an outer process and spitting back a sort of geometric proof on an effervescent scroll which unfolds and disintegrates in front of us and them – whatever it is, it is trance inducing and it blurs inner and outer beyond recognition.

I had to check comments all over the web about this show to see, and it seems as if most people who were there remember it as a very hot day, more than they speak about the music (a lot of “it was hot – both the day and the band”). A shared heat hallucination, between band and audience, vision and sound, earth and space. The mind melting from both heat and hallucination, the singular mind of the individual melts into the larger overmind river of the crowd, which opens to channel the events frequency to etch clear waves of new DNA, an altered helix rewritten as eras of age decay within an instant. It’s all sort of Zen/Tao “welcome to the warp zone” and it’s the type of thing you are deeply enmeshed in as you listen but can’t really retain anything more than a general image of once it’s over.

Set 2 begins with a whatever “Bertha”, not bad but you wouldn’t be mad if you skipped it. “Big River” comes in hot af, frying pan trying to balance on a bed of pressurized mirage air in the hot sun energy – kind of dentist drill brain surgery vibes. We are back in that weird proto-Ginn no zone when Jerry solos, restrained but it has that same sizzling and dangerous thing going on. Phil is feeling both the song and himself here, and in the second solo Jerry lays back to let him take some goofy, lighthearted leads, more of a polka shuffle than an outright bounce, but still bouncy if you feel me. Jerry lights it back up for the verse and lets it rip p hard for the 3^rd solo – he’s still in Johnny Cash cover territory, but as I said for the set 1 “Me and My Uncle”, there is a lightheartedness the band engages in on Bob led songs which often tilt into a kind of joyous, overflowing frenzy. “Eyes of the World” begins and sounds like the sun is setting, I am not sure if that’s actually how time, space and matter lined up here, but I’d like to imagine that. Immediately Phil takes the lead and Jerry and Bob trade W African soap-sud/bubblebath riffs which melt in slow motion from the heat, the melted emulsion causing the negative image geometric proof to dissolve and warp. Phil really stomps around here, while Jerry lets lightning bolt but calm leads slip in and out of the gently deforming image being built, filling in strange corners and cracks of existence both immediate and beyond. By the second solo Jerry is deeper into that liquid slinky bounce melt, somehow giving tones of both metal and wood sprayed with a hot and dirty water/air mirage.

This isn’t the best Eyes of 1974 (that’s probably 6/18/74, maybe 6/30) or even a top one, but there are no bad versions of this song in this year, it is always one of the standout songs of any set. Once they start jamming, Phil really has the lead, bouncing around melodically and then laying down dissonant slabs which Bob dances around. It sounds like Jerry stepped out for a few minutes. He slides back in when they switch to that E flat from E and the jam goes dark, and the band starts that strange spectral pyramid mirage building they are known for. Sheets of sand get melted by light again and again, the sound going back and forth between a darker shaded sandstorm in slow motion and a contained fire being danced around from all possible angles at once. The majority of the jam stays w this formula, gentle brain drilling mixing with butter melting inside of ice in slow motion. Keith really stands out in this section, his Rhodes laying down weird thin yet layered stretched tones that sound slightly delayed (or is this Ned?). When they get to the 7/4 Egyptian heavy metal type riff, they play it without emphasis, sort of letting it float in its implied heaviness, while the jam after is a bit like lightning cracking a mountain on half speed and electric lava pulsing out. There’s a mini mirage meltdown into “China Doll”, which is usually both turgid and sloppy. The last minute does have some nice third VU record/"You Walk Alone" type guitars, but I wouldn’t sit through the track for it again. A nice carwash style “Promised Land” follows, Jerry exploding liquid from the core of the bands playing. I always enjoy a 1974 “Ship of Fools”, photo negative sweet soul which usually has, as this one does, a creeping lightning solo or two from Jerry.

“Weather Report Suite -> Let It Grow” is a song which encapsulates exactly what 1974 Dead was – it’s a song about becoming, change as the only constant, the way one thing turns into another only to come back to something resembling what it once was but redefined by what it isn’t. The prelude section sounds like both sunset and sunrise, waves of light and airy water poking through grass and trees, always there, but outside of time. “Knowing… Flowing…  Growing…”, the lyrics create both a confusion and understanding between similar yet different concepts or manifestations, much like the music itself. They are full of seasonal and elemental references, and as I keep saying, or trying to articulate over and over, 1974 live Grateful Dead is truly elemental sound; both in the way it relates to and encapsulates the natural, but also by the way it channels a primal, or principal force known to all but often obscured or hidden. There are no secrets going on here, but hidden worlds are being revealed, investigated, integrated and erased in split second soundwaves. “Let It Grow” continues the same confusion articulation – “water bright as the sky from which it came”, and the flow/grow mirror. Garcia has that electric charge amped up early on in this song, getting into lightning bolt leaf scan lung mapping type shredding.

This song became a sort of proto-new wave/PVC guitar type jam post 76, but I am having trouble describing what it sounds like here. It’s very hectic already but it still has a bit more post sunset decay/haze than it would come to have in later years. There is a fusion influence, there is still some biker drive and also Europe 72 style Kraut jamming, even a little bit of garage punk going on – but it’s never fully or even mostly any of that. Very slippery yet solid jamming dominates here, Garcia sounding like drops of oil moving through and changing the bands water, while at the same time sounding like an x-ray of a large tree in the wind on a dry day. The overall playing is sloppy, in a very enjoyable way, the band rides a Mahavishnu but too stoned to flex type trench, while Jerry and Bill the Drummer attack with quick lightning and thunder blasts in the corners. There is no full meltdown, but they always hint that it could happen, ebbing and flowing from still to rushing and back again all within seconds, it’s a great way to end the second set, before the set 3 “Seastones” warps and morphs frequency beyond known and unknown.