"From Chicago to Egypt: Collecting Dead Memorabilia and Memories with Jay Blakesburg"
Larry Mishkin features a nostalgic recounting of a Grateful Dead concert from March 11th, 1993, at the Rosemont Horizon in Rosemont, Illinois. The discussion covers various aspects of the event, including the venue's challenges, the band's performance, and reflections on specific songs played during the show.
Larry also touches on recent music events, such as Phil Lesh and Friends' performances and upcoming Phish summer tour dates. It also highlights an exhibition by photographer Jay Blakesburg and his collection of Grateful Dead memorabilia, along with personal anecdotes related to Dead history.
Grateful Dead
March 11, 1993 (31 years ago)
Rosemont Horizon
Rosemont, Illinois (Chicago)
Grateful Dead Live at Rosemont Horizon on 1993-03-11 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive
Final night of 3 show run March 9 – March 11 (Tuesday – Thursday)
INTRO: Help On The Way
Track #1
:20 – 2:06
Released on Blues For Allah (1975)
Played 111 times
First time: June 17, 1975 at Winterland, S.F.
Last time: June 22, 1995 at Knickerbocker Arena, Albany, NY
SHOW No. 1: When I Paint My Masterpiece
Track #6
1:36 – 3:12
"When I Paint My Masterpiece" is a 1971 song written by Bob Dylan. It was first released by The Band, who recorded the song for their album Cahoots, released on September 15, 1971. Dylan himself first recorded the song at New York's Blue Rock Studio when he was backed by Leon Russell and session musicians, including Jesse Ed Davis on lead guitar, appeared on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II, released November 17, 1971, with Russell credited as the producer.
Dylan and The Band performed the song together live, in the early hours of January 1, 1972, at a New Year's Eve concert by The Band; a recording was released as a bonus track on the 2001 CD reissue of The Band's live album Rock of Ages.
Douglas Brinkley, while interviewing Dylan for the New York Times in 2020, noted that "When I Paint My Masterpiece" was a song that had grown on him over the years and asked Dylan why he had brought it "back to the forefront of recent concerts". Dylan replied, "It’s grown on me as well. I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable. That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context. In saying that though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece".
According to his official website, Dylan played the song live 182 times between 1975 and 2019.[4] Five live performances of the song from Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour were released on the box set The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings in 2019. The live debut occurred at the War Memorial Auditorium in Plymouth, Massachusetts on October 30, 1975 and the most recent performances occurred on the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour in 2023.
Played 146 times
First: June 13, 1987 at Ventura County Fairgrounds, Ventura, CA
Last: July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field, Chicago
My favorite Dylan cover. Would rotate in first set with other Dylan covers including Queen Jane Approximately, Stuck Inside of Mobile With Memphis Blues Again and Desolation Row.
SHOW No. 2: So Many Roads
Track #7
:39 – 2:21
So Many Roads was first performed by the Grateful Dead on February 22, 1992. It was then played regularly through to the last performance of the song on July 9, 1995. In total the song was played just over 50 times.
Jerry Garcia spoke about So Many Roads in an interview with Dave DiMartino in 1992;
“It's Hunter writing me from my point of view, you know what I mean? We've been working together for so long that he knows what I know. The song is full of references to things that have to do with me....
“....Hunter is the only guy that could do that. He can write my point of view better than I can think it, you know what I mean? So that's the kind of relationship we have. And he frequently writes tunes from my point of view that are autobiographical. There actually biographical I guess. He's the one writing them, but even so they express my point of view - and more than that they express the emotional content of my soul in a certain way that only a long-term and intimate relationship with a guy as brilliant as Hunter coughs up ... I can sing that song, feel totally comfortable with it.”
Robert Hunter's comments on the origins of this song in the notes in Box Of Rain: Lyrics 1965-1993;
“One afternoon, Jerry was playing some unstructured changes on the piano. Figuring they might be forgotten otherwise, I clicked on my tape recorder. Ten years later I found the tape and listened to it, liked it, and set these words to it. Listening to the pitifully recorded and time-degraded tape, Jerry protested that, although he liked the words, his changes were not very good and unfinished besides. This didn't seem to be the base and I requested that he at least give it a run through. The result was one of the better received new GD songs and one that almost got away.”
Never released on a Dead studio album but was a centerpiece of the Dead’s first Box Set: So Many Roads, 5 disc retrospective of the band from 1965 to 1995.
Many commentators said this was the best one ever. When I saw the show, we were still just all hearing the song fort the first few times and getting used to it. Over time, it has become a favorite thanks to Hunter’s lyrics and Jerry’s playing and singing. Very emotional.
SHOW No. 3: Iko Iko
Track No. 9
4:04 – 5:38
"Iko Iko" (/ˈaɪkoʊˈaɪkoʊ/) is a much-coveredNew Orleans song that tells of a parade collision between two tribes of Mardi Gras Indians and the traditional confrontation. The song, under the original title "Jock-A-Mo", was written and released in 1953 as a single by James "Sugar Boy" Crawford and his Cane Cutters but it failed to make the charts.
The story tells of a "spy boy" (i.e. a lookout for one band of Indians) encountering the "flag boy" or guidon carrier for another "tribe". He threatens to "set the flag on fire". Crawford set phrases chanted by Mardi Gras Indians to music for the song. Crawford himself states that he has no idea what the words mean, and that he originally sang the phrase "Chock-a-mo", but the title was misheard by Chess Records and Checker Records president Leonard Chess, who misspelled it as "Jock-a-mo" for the record's release.
The song first became popular in 1965 by the girl groupthe Dixie Cups, who scored an international hit with "Iko Iko". In 1967, as part of a lawsuit settlement between Crawford and the Dixie Cups, the trio were given part songwriting credit for the song. In 1972, Dr. John had a minor hit with his version of "Iko Iko".
Second set opener. From intro, it was hard to tell if they were going into Women Are Smarter to Iko. Really enjoyed Women Are Smarter, but always extra happy when it turns out to be Iko. Great version. Jerry very energetic and really getting into it.
Played 185 times
First: May 15, 1977 at The Arena in St. Louis
Last: July 5, 1995 at Riverport Amphitheater in St. Louis (first and last time in St. Louis!!)
SHOW No. 4: Space
Track #15 (note that there are 2 “Space” tracks, this is the first one, Track 15)
4:25 – 5:42 (The Island – Ken Nordine)
Ken Nordine (April 13, 1920 – February 16, 2019) was an American voice-over and recording artist, best known for his series of word jazz albums.[2] His deep, resonant voice has also been featured in many commercial advertisements and movie trailers. One critic wrote that "you may not know Ken Nordine by name or face, but you'll almost certainly recognize his voice.”
In 1955, he provided the voiceover on Billy Vaughn's version of "Shifting Whispering Sands", which peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. He subsequently attracted wider attention when he recorded the aural vignettes on Word Jazz (Dot, 1957). Love Words, Son of Word Jazz (Dot, 1958) and his other albums in this vein feature Nordine's narration over cool jazz by the Fred Katz Group featuring Chico Hamilton recording under an alias.
Nordine began performing and recording such albums at the peak of the beat era and was associated with the poetry-and-jazz movement. However, it has been observed that some of Nordine's writings "are more akin to Franz Kafka or Edgar Allan Poe" than to the beats.[8] Many of his word jazz tracks feature critiques of societal norms.[9] Some are lightweight and humorous, while others reveal dark, paranoid undercurrents and bizarre, dream-like scenarios. Nordine's DVD, The Eye Is Never Filled was released in 2007.[9]
Nordine hosted the weekly Word Jazz program on WBEZ, also carried on other stations, from the 1970s for over forty years.
In 1990, Nordine was approached by Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead to be the anchor for their New Year's Eve radio broadcast from Oakland, California.[13] For the broadcast he recorded some improvisations with Garcia, drummer Mickey Hart and Egyptian musician Hamza El-Din.[13] This subsequently led to an album Devout Catalyst, released on the Grateful Dead's own label in 1991[13] and Upper Limbo in 1993[14] and an appearance with the band live at a show at Rosemont, Illinois, in March 1993.
Ken Nordine died February 16, 2019.
OUTRO: Days Between
Track No. 18
4:51 – 6:51
“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.)
It appeared like the ghostly ships it describes, as if gradually from a fog and only slowly revealing itself as something very big, towering above everything around. It’s hard to say it any better than Phil Lesh did in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound:
“Achingly nostalgic, ‘Days Between’ evokes the past. The music climbs laboriously out of shadows, growing and peaking with each verse, only to fall back each time in hopeless resignation. When Jerry sings the line ‘when all we ever wanted / was to learn and love and grow’ or ‘gave the best we had to give / how much we’ll never know,’ I am immediately transported decades back in time, to a beautiful spring morning with Jerry, Hunter, Barbara Meier, and Alan Trist—all of us goofing on the sheer exhilaration of being alive. 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.”
Each verse in the song contains fourteen lines, and each evokes a different season of the year, although not in sequence. The first verse contains the lines “Summer flies and August dies / the world grows dark and mean.” I can’t hear that line without thinking about August West, in Wharf Rat, and, by extension, Garcia himself. “The singing man is at his song / the holy on their knees.” Who is the singing man, if not Garcia, when it comes to Hunter and his words?
Played 42 times by the band, always in the second set, almost always out of drums
First: February 22, 1993 at the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, CA
Last: June 24, 1995 at RFK Stadium, Washington, D.C.
This was just the second time it was ever played
“Gave the best we had to give, how much we’ll never know”
No chorus in this song, just verses that keep building on each other.
.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
