Grateful Dead: June 1976
Most serious Deadheads can rattle off key events in the band’s timeline by memory—they know, for example, that following a series of five shows at San Francisco’s Winterland in October 1974, the band went on hiatus. Their mammoth sound system was put on mothballs while the musicians tried to determine where they would head next—whether they would even return as the Grateful Dead or continue only with the individual spinoff projects with which they’d become involved. In 1975, the Dead ceased touring, playing only a small handful of shows in the Bay Area. Then, finally, in June 1976, they were ready to continue. Mickey Hart, the drummer who had officially vacated in 1971, returned to the fold, and the Dead came roaring back to life, introducing new material and resurrecting old tunes they’d long ago dropped from their repertoire. After a couple of test shows in Portland, Ore., they headed east, where many of the band’s most devoted fans had patiently awaited their return. June 1976 zooms in on those five shows—Boston, New York and New Jersey—throughout 15 CDs, in one of the most visually attractive packages (only 12,000 made) ever created to distribute GD music. For those familiar with the ‘75 shows at the Great American Music Hall and Golden Gate Park, the band’s overall approach during this period will be fairly familiar. They were, to be sure, a somewhat more disciplined outfit, having shed most of the vestiges of the here-goes-nothin’ psychedelia and experimentation that marked their earliest years. More structured now, they nonetheless reached for, and often touched, the stars in their second set jams, notably on the “Dancing in the Street” segue into “Cosmic Charlie” and a “Help on the Way” suite that left patrons of New York’s Beacon Theatre stunned on 6/14/76. (The new goodfootin’ arrangement of “Dancing,” in fact, turns up on all five of these shows.) A rearranged “Friend of the Devil” and the revival of tunes like “St. Stephen” and “High Time” were pleasant surprises, but it’s the newer, uptempo future favorites, among them “Might as Well” and “The Music Never Stopped” (and their cover of “Samson and Delilah”), that gave a better indication of where the band was heading as they continued along their way. And they would never again take such a long break in the nearly two decades they had left.
