photo: Bob Makin

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“This box set is conceptual,” observes Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux, while detailing the origins of the band’s comprehensive new release, Enjoying The Ride. “I’m not generally much of a concept guy, but in this case I think the concept is warranted. It’s 20 complete shows from 20 important Grateful Dead venues. So that’s 20 important venues in Dead history, three CDs per venue for a perfect 60 CDs on the Dead’s 60th anniversary.”

But wait, there’s more. The packaging itself maintains the elevated standards that have generated multiple Grammy nominations for the Grateful Dead design team at Rhino, including a win for In and Out of the Garden: Madison Square Garden ’81, ’82, ’83. Beyond this, Enjoying The Ride also includes an audio bonus in the form of a cassette tape with nearly 90 minutes of music from an April 1969 performance at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom.

Lemieux explains, “This box set is about the 20 venues that were important to the Dead, but they were also the venues that were important to all of us Deadheads. These include the Boston Garden, Madison Square Garden, Winterland, Fillmore West, Alpine Valley, Red Rocks, the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester—all these important venues. Enjoying The Ride is also about the Deadheads and their journey, and that includes taping. So I think it’s a very fitting thing to include a cassette tape.”

Speaking of the Capitol Theatre, Relix has an ongoing series of newly created, officially sanctioned posters and merch, keyed into the performances that the Dead performed at the venue during 1970-1971. When asked about these, Lemieux offers, “With so much of the Grateful Dead’s history at the Capitol Theatre unknown due to the lack of good soundboard recordings from the 1970 shows they played there, it’s been wonderful to be able to add some visual context to these famous shows with the new Capitol Theatre poster series. Each of the posters reimagines the visual iconography of the Grateful Dead with era-appropriate art that is at home today as it would have been in 1970-1971.”

Back to the box, while the 6,000 individually numbered physical copies have sold out, ALAC and high-res FLAC downloads are still available. In addition, one song from each of the 20 shows featured on Enjoying The Ride appears on The Music Never Stopped via 3 CDs, 6 LPs or digital options. The band’s archivist notes, “I spent the last few months of 2024 and early 2025 putting together the compilation, and I’ve been listening to it a lot over the past few weeks. It’s like a definitive live document that covers 25 years of live Dead from some of the most important Dead venues ever, which is to say the performances are just spectacular.”

Before we get to Enjoying The Ride, I wanted to ask about your announcement videos, which so many folks enjoy. They’re typically Seaside Chats, but you’ve also done them from the office, a ski slope and even a golf course. Is there some musical correlation or subtext that leads you to a given setting?

No, it’s complete happenstance. For pretty much anything we do, the announcement comes via one of my Seaside Chats. That’s four Dave’s Picks, a box set and other things that we might have throughout the year.

Rhino loves putting those videos in the announcement emails and on socials. I have the release dates and announcement dates in my calendar, but I don’t really focus too much on them because I’m always working on a project.

So generally what happens is I get an email from Lauren Goldberg at Rhino, and she’ll say, “Hey, we need the Seaside Chat by Tuesday.” I’m usually at home and if the weather’s good, I’m two blocks away from the seaside where I shoot most of those.

I’ll literally put the tripod on my back and walk down there with the camera and shoot the video. But occasionally they’ll say, “We need the video Tuesday,” and I’ll look at the forecast, which indicates it’s nothing but rain and wind for the next five days leading up to that Tuesday. That’s when I shoot them in the office. Or if I happen to be away when I get that email from Lauren, that’s when I shoot them in places like the ski hill or when I’m out for a walk alongside a golf course.

So it’s all based on when Rhino needs it, where I happen to be and it’s also weather dependent. Most of the office ones are because the wind or the rain where I live is just a little too much.

You maintain a conversational vibe in those videos that reminds me of exchanges I’ve had with passionate Deadhead friends over the years. Utilizing a golf metaphor here, when it comes to prep, do you basically just grip it and rip it?

I think it might be pretty evident, but I don’t script them. What happens is if I know I need to shoot one at 10:00 AM, I might be out for a morning run at 5:30 for an hour or two, and while I’m on that run, I’ll go over that show in my head. So, for example, with Dave’s Picks 54 from Baltimore ‘73, I know the 33 song setlist, so I’ll kind of go through that and interesting facts pop into my head about the Dead at that time, March 1973.

I won’t even call it a rehearsal, I’ll just kind of think about it. Then, once I set the camera up, I completely wing it. I know this stuff so well—as much as any Deadhead—and because I’ve been working on that specific release so closely for four to six months, I know the nuances. But, yeah, it’s completely unscripted and it’s just me, a camera and a tripod.

We all have sports fan friends and there’s always that one person who knows the baseball stats. You can throw out anything, like an obscure player from the 1980s and they’ll tell you their stats from the 1984 season with batting average and home runs and RBIs and maybe even some interesting facts. I do the same thing with the Grateful Dead and like you say, this is not uncommon amongst Deadheads. I’ve been living and breathing this stuff pretty much all day, every day, for the last 40 years of my life. I’ve been listening to the Dead since ’85 and working for them since ‘99. There’s really nothing more to it than that.

I always look forward to making the videos, although like I say, I don’t really pay attention to the calendar, so it can be a surprise when I get word from Rhino that they need one. But I will say that when I’m working on a something—for instance, a Dave’s Picks, whether it’s 53 or 54 or currently 55, which is now in the can—I get excited because I’m like, “Oh, I can’t wait to tell people about this terrific ‘Here Comes Sunshine,’” or this or that. When I do my Seaside Chat, I really want to share that information.

I still love doing it as much as day one, and I think about that all the time. It’s nice to reflect on the things you’re grateful for and that can be your health or your family. But on a professional level, I’m very grateful that I get to do what I do and I’m very aware of how fortunate I am.

I’ve also aimed for transparency in the way we do things and the why we do things. I hope that comes through. When I buy a Dave’s Picks—and I do buy them—part of the charm is that there is a transparency. That’s not just me as a Deadhead, the entire Rhino team are Deadheads from Mark Pinkus, the president of Rhino, to everybody else. We do this because we are all Deadheads and we love doing this for Deadheads, making the music accessible.

When you say you buy them, do you mean for friends? I assume you get a comped a version of everything you do.

I do get them comped, but the Dave’s Picks and most of the things that we release are limited edition and numbered, and I love receiving a numbered one in the mail. I love the anticipation. I bought the new Grateful Dead box set, Enjoying the Ride, and it just came in the mail two days ago. I  haven’t opened it yet, though. I’m waiting for my daughter to be ready to open it with me. I love seeing what number it is.

This all goes back to the Fillmore West box set that we released in 2005. That was a 10 CD set with the four nights in 1969, the Live Dead shows. We did a limited edition of 10,000 and there was skepticism around the office as to whether people would be interested in paying $80 for a 10 CD box set. It’s way less than $10 a disc with beautiful packaging, but there was that skepticism.

I wanted to make sure that we made at least one sale, so on the day it went on sale, I ordered it. I put my money where my mouth was because that was a project that I pitched, I fought for, and I talked to enough Deadhead friends who had said, “Oh, absolutely, I’ll buy it.” So I had anecdotal information that five or six people would buy it, but I wanted to make sure. [Laughs.]

Ever since then, I think I’ve bought everything we’ve ever put out. That includes every box set and I’m also one of the first subscribers to the Dave’s Picks series every year. I subscribe way back in October, just like everybody else.

So I get the comp one, which I keep for archival purposes, but then the numbered one that comes, that’s the one I end up using for my listening. I can get number 21,612 out of 25,000—it’s not a low number or anything—but that’s the one I put on immediately and later bring in my car.

So yeah, I put my money where my mouth is, and that Fillmore West box set sold out the 10,000 units pretty quickly, which I was happy to see.

Before we talk about the new box, I want to ask about the exhibition of your tapes, your Sony D-5 and a couple of your dubbing decks at the Dead Forever experience in the Venetian around the Dead & Company Sphere shows. I was struck by the accompanying descriptive text, which suggested that some present-day Deadheads might be entirely unfamiliar with the practice of taping and trading shows. What are your thoughts on that?

I’ve met a lot of younger Deadheads, in their 20s and 30s, particularly since the advent of Dead & Company, who certainly were not trading tapes. I find that a lot of them are fascinated by tape trading once they hear about it.

For you and me, this is how we got our music. It was more than a hobby. I’m 54 now and I consider every one of us, every Deadhead who was tape trading in the 80s—and the fortunate ones who started even before then—to be amateur archivists. Of course, we wanted to have tapes so we could listen to them.

I recorded the Dead live from 89 to 93. I’d come back from tour and I’d make eight or 10 copies of the best shows of any given tour and I’d send them out. Then presumably those 10 people, those 10 Deadheads would trade them to another five to 10 people. I was one of 200-300 tapers at the show who was disseminating this music. From each of those master tapes, there are hundreds or maybe thousands of tapes that were made. Yes, someday magnetic tapes will probably fade a little bit, but we were helping to make sure that this music is going to live on.

I always felt that I was an amateur archivist back when I was 18, 19 years old and I was taping the Dead. It’s very similar to when we put out a Dave’s Picks and we sell 25,000 units. With that many out there, there’s a pretty darn good chance that there’s going to be something that survives in 500 or a thousand years.

So we’re all archivists. Everybody who’s buying a Dave’s Picks is buying an archival document because they want this great music, but I think they also want to preserve this archival document. When we put out something physical on CD or a box set, it sells incredibly well. It sells much more than the digital versions. I think it’s because Deadheads love that physical thing. It’s why Grateful Dead vinyl does so well.

We love having that physical item, and they’re pretty darn beautiful as well. You look at the Dead’s history of box sets from the last 20 years, as well as all the Dave’s Picks—there’s some pretty darn great artwork both in terms of the art itself and the package design. There’s a reason that six or seven times in the last 15 years, the Dead have been nominated for Grammys for their package designs. That’s kudos to Rhino.

To your point of preserving music, I had a friend from that era who wouldn’t spin tapes for others but would freely lend them out so that folks could copy them on their own. The one exception was 5/8/77, which he listened to regularly and wouldn’t let out of his sight. Having said that, the Barton Hall show did find its way into so many tape traders’ collections, which is why I appreciated that Rhino still decided to release it on Get Shown A Light in 2017. That box also included the Boston [5/7] and Buffalo [5/9] shows, two other personal favorites that were heavily circulated.

It’s funny you mentioned 5/7 in the context of those shows because I got that one a few months before Cornell and Buffalo. I remember getting that Boston show and I still know it to this day from that first listen when I thought, “I’ve never heard a show like this.” Then I got Barton Hall and I got Buffalo and realized that this was a great three-night run. Then you add New Haven [5/5] and it’s a great four-night run.

But to your point about us putting out something that’s already circulating, about a year into working for the Grateful Dead, I realized that as much as we love putting out great shows that nobody’s heard before, it’s just not possible because most of the best shows already circulate in the tape trading world and a lot of them have been released.

Way back in 2000, we changed our criteria when it comes to our releases being shows people hadn’t heard before. First and foremost, the most important criteria is, “Is it a great show?” That actually goes back to when Dick put out Dick’s Picks Volume 4 from the Fillmore East in New York—the February 1970 shows. Then just four picks later, he went back to May of 1970 with the Harpur College show. These were shows that were the cornerstones of my tape collection going back to 1985, and to some people going back to the early 70s. So to me, it demonstrated that our job is to make sure that the Dead legacy is well represented with great music, it’s not to fill in holes in tapers’ collections.

There are a lot of shows in the vault that might not circulate in good soundboard quality, but they’re not necessarily great shows. We want to make sure that anything we release is great music. If it happens to be something that Deadheads might not have heard in soundboard quality, that’s a bonus, but it’s certainly not the criteria.

Speaking of cassettes, what prompted the decision to include one in the new box set?

I will give credit to Ivette Ramos. If anybody reading this has been buying Grateful Dead releases for the last decade or so, Ivette has been the manager of everything Grateful Dead at Rhino. She keeps everything on track. She was the package design producer along with Shannon Ward on the new box set. So Ivette has an incredibly huge role in the Grateful Dead world and a lot of great ideas as well.

Once we had the concept of 20 shows from 20 venues, we started looking at the venues. It wasn’t that hard to get it down to a list of about 25 or 26. Then in bringing it down to 20, the final one we left out was the Avalon in San Francisco, which basically was venue number 21. I was on a call with Ivette early in this process, so probably a year ago before anything was completely finalized in terms of the package and all that stuff, she said, “You’ve got all the 20 shows and we’ve started mastering. So everything’s going well?” I said, “It is, but I’ve got to lament that I really had a tough time after we got to 21 about which venue to cut. I ended up going with the Avalon.” The Dead didn’t play the Avalon too often, but it was an important era for the Dead in the mid-to-late 60s when they played there.

Then Ivette said, “What do you think about the idea of including an 80 or 90 minute cassette of Grateful Dead music from the Avalon?” I said, “Are you serious?” She goes, “Yeah, I think we can make that happen.” Now I don’t know how many listeners of this box set have a cassette player, but I certainly do. So I said, “That is a great idea. Let’s do it.”

I went to the April 69 shows at the Avalon and I crafted about 80 minutes or so of some really top-notch Grateful Dead music. This was just a month after the recording of Live Dead and we have some incredible Bear-recorded two-track tapes.

So we ended up putting a cassette in there and for those who don’t have a cassette player and might think it’s a bit of a novelty, it really isn’t. This was a way to get more music out there, and I’m sure it’ll make its way into people’s ears one way or another. But again, Ivette came up with the idea and it was a cool thing.

Going back to what you were saying about the tape exhibit at the Venetian, I think having that cassette in the box is a nice touch for Deadheads who were tape traders as kind of a throwback to a very important part to our lives. There were 6, 7, 8 years where trading tapes was all I did as a hobby. I was either at shows or I was working to get money to go to shows or I was flipping tapes.

I had my two tape decks and even at night I used to set alarms every 45 minutes so that when the tape ended, I could wake up and flip the tapes. That way I could make more tapes and therefore get more tapes in trades. I’m not unique in this, it’s what we did. There was nothing better than getting that package of six to 10 tapes, usually in a padded envelope. I was living in Canada in an area without a Grateful Dead radio show but I’d get two or three packages per week.

The other thing is that there was no email back then, so we’d send out physical lists. You’d send your list to someone and they would peruse it and find 10 shows that they wanted that they didn’t have, and you’d look at theirs. Tape trades were easy to do, but they came about through letters that you’d write. It was a ton of fun and I loved it.

You’ve noted that Enjoying The Ride offers a nod to Deadheads’ favorite venues and road trips. Can you share one of your own from back in the day that might intersect with this release?

I can think of a bunch, but I’ll give you two. In the summer of ‘89, I was 18 years old, and I did the whole tour with my lady friend from Foxboro on July 2^nd through Alpine, July 19th. After Alpine, we woke up the next morning in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and it was the end of July, we didn’t have jobs to go back to. We’d just finished high school and university was about to begin pretty soon.

Then we realized that the Dead were playing in Sacramento two weeks later. So we made the decision to drive to Vancouver and visit my dad who was working there. After a few days, we drove to Banff, Alberta, and down to Sacramento for the Cal Expo shows on August 4th, 5th and 6th. Cal Expo immediately became one of my favorite places to see the Dead. To me, it felt like a high school soccer stadium. It held maybe 14,000 people. It was a little field with like 12 rows of bleachers. That was a great place to see a show and although it didn’t make the box, it made the long list of 26.

But in terms of this box set, that same summer of 89, the tour started in Foxboro and then it went to Buffalo, then JFK, and then two at Giants and two at RFK. I was 18 years old, on my first really big road trip. I’d seen the Dead at Alpine the year before and a bunch of other shows, like the Cap Centre 88, but I’d never been on a full two week road trip on tour following the Dead.

We were kind of getting burned out on stadiums—not on the music, on all the traffic. Then after these stadium shows, the Dead were booked at this new place in Indiana called Deer Creek Music Center. Nobody had any idea what it was. First of all, it was brand new. Second of all, there was no internet to help us learn about this place.

So we slept the night in Washington DC after the show on July 13^th, then on the 14th, we drove to Indianapolis where we picked up our tickets from an old Deadhead friend. The next morning we woke up and we got out our Rand McNally Road Atlas [Author’s note: A staple for touring Deadheads back in the day]. We looked at these back roads of Indianapolis, and as we were driving on this little two lane road—I guess it was a rural highway—we were literally going through cornfields. We couldn’t see anything because it was middle of July and the corn was really high. So we were on this two lane road—there were Deadheads everywhere—and then all of a sudden we pulled into this grass parking lot which felt very different from what we’d experienced at the stadiums. with lots of room.

[Author’s advice, learned the hard way at Deer Creek: No matter how exhilarating it is to make your way through the cornfields and finally arrive at the venue, do not fail to note the location of your car relative to the venue. These days one can drop a pin, but at a minimum, take stock of your surroundings. Otherwise you’ll end up sitting around a makeshift campfire post-show with fellow Deadheads waiting for the lots to empty out until only a few cars remain, which is how you can finally locate your vehicle.]

I was taping, so we parked the car and went into the show pretty early. This is 36 years later but I can feel this huge sense of relief when I walked into this beautiful, brand new18,000 seat amphitheater with the sloped seats and then the lawn. We were one of the first in, so we set up the taping gear on the lawn right below a delay tower of speakers that was hanging in front of us. We ended up with what sounded like a soundboard recording, it was so good.

To this day I remember walking into Deer Creek, feeling so at peace, and saying, “I will not miss a show here.” I didn’t go to all of them, but I did return the next year for the great shows in 1990. To me, it was a breath of fresh air when the Dead were playing these huge East coast stadiums with all the traffic.

I should point out that the music was phenomenal at those stadium shows. They really rose to the occasion and somehow made the stadiums feel intimate. Thinking back to ’89, I thought the shows at Foxboro, Buffalo, JFK, Giants, and RFK were just outstanding. Most of them have been released on CD over the years, showing how good they are.

But going to Deer Creek the first time was very special for me, and that’s the show from Deer Creek that ended up in this box set. It’s a show that’s long been on my radar as a possible Dave’s Picks or any kind of release—not because of my experience there but because of the music itself. I remember the show like the back of my hand. I was constantly looking over at my friends every time something cool happened—“Oh my gosh, did you hear that? Wow, what a ‘Crazy Fingers!’ Oh, that ‘Truckin’ > ‘Smokestack!’ I remember that show very, very well.

I didn’t make it to Deer Creek that first year but I heard reports from people like yourself. Then when I finally went to see the Dead there, the drive to the venue through all those cornfields was just as described, which immediately validated the other stories I’d heard about the Deer Creek experience as a whole.

You’d leave your hotel in Indianapolis or just outside of it and you were driving through those cornfields. Then when you pulled into that grass parking lot it was something special. I’m sure they’ve updated it since then. But boy, it was really a unique experience.

I saw the Dead play in Paris in 1990, and that was as unique an experience to me because every show I’d seen up until then had been in a big arena, a big amphitheater or a bigger stadium. Then in Paris—I only went to Paris and London on that tour—as I walked into the venue, it was 6,000 seats. This was the kind of place the Dead might’ve played in the late 70s or maybe the early 80s, but certainly not at the height of their fame and power in 1990. To get to see them in there—that was 35 years ago—I remember being very aware of how special it was. I have the same feeling about Deer Creek where I spent a lot of time looking around saying, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Given your role as an archivist and the nature of this box set, can you share your thoughts on how the band’s experiences at those 20 venues manifested themselves on the recordings?

As far as venues go, I certainly think that if the band was playing in a beautiful theater, like the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester versus a crappy college gym, which they might have played a few weeks before or after, they’d feel, “Okay, this is our kind of venue.”

Remember there were the rumors—and I think there was some truth behind them—that the Dead had discussed buying the Fox Theatre in St. Louis because they played there a bunch in ‘71 and ‘72. They realized “This is a perfect venue for us. We should buy it, and this could be our Midwest hub, so people will come see us play rather than us go to them. Otherwise we’ll be going into a new venue with different acoustics every night, and it’s not really our thing.” It didn’t end up happening, but I understand where they were coming from—assuming that discussion really was true—because it’s a wonderful venue. I think any good venue must be exciting for the band to play.

Now as for the sound quality itself, with certain recordings, such as Betty’s recordings from Spring of ‘77, I cannot tell the difference between any of the shows because they all sound consistently excellent. Every show on that tour sounds the same in a great way, and that’s because Betty’s recordings were just so incredibly dynamic. They were mixed specifically for tape. They weren’t PA tapes.

The thing about PA board tapes is that some venues might be very bass-heavy, for instance, which means there’s less bass coming through the PA because there’s so much coming off the stage. There are some Alpine shows in the early 80s where Phil’s bass isn’t overly prominent on the tapes because there was so much bass coming off the stage and through the subs, which meant that they didn’t need too much coming through the PA.

So there are certain venues that have a sound when you listen to them on tape. For the most part though, I don’t really hear a lot of difference. It’s more tour-to-tour and that’s based on different equipment, different instruments, and maybe different recording devices and recording techniques.

You just mentioned the Capitol, which is one of the venues you selected for Enjoying The Ride. It’s near and dear to our hearts at Relix, since it’s owned by our friend and publisher Peter Shapiro. How would you characterize the Cap’s role in Grateful Dead history?

The Dead played 18 shows at the Capitol Theatre, which is not a huge amount compared to Madison Square Garden or the Oakland Coliseum Arena, but they did those shows in 11 months or so. They played four shows in March of 1970, the early and late show in June of ‘70, then a huge run in November ‘70, and an even huger run in February of ‘71.

For New York Deadheads, this was an incredibly important place. I think of Blair Jackson, I think of Gary Lambert and I think of Ed Perlstein. They’re all huge Deadheads, and they’ve been seeing the Dead since 1970 or so. I think in Gary’s case, it’s even earlier than that but I know Blair’s first show is Capitol Theatre in Port Chester. I know that Ed Perlstein went to the Cap in Port Chester, and I think Gary was at all six nights at the Capitol Theatre in February of ‘71. So for New York area Deadheads, whether that’s Long Island or New Jersey or Brooklyn or Manhattan, it was a great place to go see them.

This is right when Bill Graham was beginning the process of closing down the Fillmore East. It’s unfortunate that the Capitol Theatre moved away from live music at that time because I think this would’ve become the Dead’s New York City home. After the Fillmore East closed and the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester stopped activities with the Dead following these February shows, they really didn’t have another New York City home almost for almost the next decade.

So yeah, the Capitol Theatre was an important venue for the Dead and many people I know of a certain age were very fortunate to see them many times from March of ‘70 through February of ‘71.

My understanding is that not all of those shows are represented in the vault. Is that correct?

None of them are in the vault with the exception of the 1971 shows. There are no board tapes of anything from March, June or November of ‘70. I think what happened is that it after February of ‘70, Oswley did not leave California for a little while. Bear did so many things, including being the Dead’s recordist for 1969 and early ‘70. But after the Fillmore East shows in February, he didn’t leave California for a spell, and that’s why there’s such a sporadic amount of tapes outside of California after February of 70. It wasn’t until late ‘70, early ‘71 that the crew started recording again.

Back in your tape trading days was there a Capitol Theatre show that you particularly enjoyed?

I loved 11/8/70, which interestingly enough—well, to me, at least—was 35 miles away as the crow flies to when I was being born. Literally, I was born 35 miles away at about 9:00 PM on November 8th, 1970. They played a huge “Dark Star” that night and I’ve joked with my mom—“You could have had me, then got in the cab and been there in an hour.”

So I did like that one as an audience recording when I first had it. I also liked the March of 1970 shows—I had a batch of them. The tapes weren’t very good quality, but I enjoyed listening to them, for sure—March 20^th and 21^st. Then, later on, I ended up getting the June 24th show, which is also really hot.

Can you talk about the music from the Cap that you selected for the box [2/20/71 and 2/24/71]?

I think this is an essential time for the Grateful Dead. The February 20th show was literally two days after Mickey Hart left the band. So you’ve got this new iteration of the Grateful Dead. By this point, Workingman’s Dead had been out for six or eight months and American Beauty for four or five months. So you’ve got this new Americana-centric Grateful Dead, and yet the band was certainly still able to do the psychedelic thing, if you want to call it that, with songs like “Dark Star” and “The Other One.” So you’ve got this really big transitional period for the Grateful Dead.

Mickey left the band after that show on February 18th, and then they’ve got all this new music over the last 18 months from Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Then you’ve also got all the new songs that they debuted literally that week—”Wharf Rat,” “Bird Song,” “Deal,” “Loser,” “Playing in the Band”—so many new songs that would be a huge part of the Dead’s repertoire for the next 24 years, and to this day, they’re a lot of people’s favorite songs.

Pigpen was also still so powerful at this time. Towards the end of the Europe ‘72 tour a year later, you hear him starting to fade a little bit. You don’t hear that here. You hear a Pigpen as strong as he was in 1967, ‘68. He’s really the centerpiece of a lot of these shows with “Good Lovin’” and “Turn on your Lovelight,” as well as songs like “Hard to Handle,” “Next Time You See Me” and “King Bee.”

Going back to my tape trading days, I had all six of these shows in my tape collection and I loved them equally. So I think getting these two shows out is going to show people how tight they were, even though they had just lost an integral member of the Grateful Dead when Mickey left.

There’s so much good music on these shows and the sound quality is dynamite. It’s that big lumbering bass sound. That’s another thing—I love the sound of Phil’s bass at these shows where you’ve got the big bottom end, but you can also hear each individual note perfectly clearly.

Of course, Mickey Hart is Mickey Hart. Full sentence, full stop. Having said that, it’s fascinating to hear the band shortly after he steps away because it’s a different entity, of sorts.

It is, and you can compare that to the Fillmore West music in this box set from June of ‘69 and the Avalon cassette we talked about. It’s such a different iteration of the Dead. One of the many things I love about the Dead is that no matter how much Dead I listen to, I never get tired of it. That’s partly because I love it so much, but it’s also because of the variety. I can go and listen to the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, February ‘71, and I hear a very distinct version of the Grateful Dead. Then I go and listen to Winterland ‘77, and then I go listen to Deer Creek ‘89. These three iterations of the Grateful Dead are so dramatically different, and yet they’re so distinctly Grateful Dead.

In university, a friend of mine knew I was a Deadhead and he said, “How many versions of ‘Sugar Magnolia’ can you possibly listen to?” I was incredulous and I responded, “All of them. They’re all different.” It’s true. If you listen to the “Sugar Mag” from the Capitol Theatre in ‘71 and you listen to a “Sugar Mag” from ‘89 or ‘91, it’s very different, yet it’s still very distinctly Grateful Dead music. It’s still very distinctly the Grateful Dead.

To that end, I’m glad that people get to hear Hornsby with the band on Enjoying The Ride [at Shoreline Amphitheatre, 5/12/91].

Yeah, a great Hornsby show. This is a show that has been on my radar for 25 years since I first heard it. What turned me onto it was the first set. In my opinion, that’s one of the best first sets of the last five years of Grateful Dead. But then the second set with the “Help” > “Slip” > “Franklin’s” and the “Terrapin” and “China Doll” is certainly no slouch. It’s an incredible second set, but the first set is truly, start to finish, I’m going to use the word breathtaking—from the opening “Picasso Moon” on through “Deal,” which closes the sets and is one of the best “Deal”s I’ve ever heard.

We did a compilation from the box set, it’s a three CD or six LP set with one song or one jam from each show. The song we selected from the Shoreline ‘91 show with Hornsby is this version of “Deal” that doesn’t want to end. It’s nearly 11 minutes long and everybody who has heard it is like, “Oh my God!” Jerry just keeps building it and building it. It’s so good. So yeah, we get some Bruce in there too, which is always nice.

Finally, is there a recent release whether it’s a Dave’s Picks or something else that you think might have flown under the radar?

Well, to bring it current, this new box set, Enjoying the Ride is so exciting and everybody’s talking about it. However, I think the compilation [The Music Never Stopped] has fallen a little under the radar and it’s really, really good.

It’s like four hours of 1969 to 1994 from these 20 venues. That’s one I hope people don’t sleep on, especially if they didn’t get the box set. At $600, I don’t expect everybody got it, and for those who didn’t, the compilation is a real treat.