Grateful Dead: Ithaca, NY, 5/8/77 – the band’s greatest live show ever?
As The New York Times has documented, some have made that claim.
As far as I can tell from bootlegs I’ve heard, the show — which took place 35 years ago today — comes close. But my judgement might be colored by sentimentality. As I wrote in Love Goes To Buildings On Fire, I missed that particular concert:
In March the Voice ran a cover story titled “Why We Hate The Subways,” and everyone had their own tales. Me, I’d been mugged on trains a few times, twice at knifepoint, coming home from Manhattan shows alone at night. But the worst was in May, when I was stuck on a broken-down E train for an hour en route to Port Authority to meet a girl I was cross-eyed crushed-out on. She had tickets to see the Grateful Dead five hours north that night, at Cornell University’s Barton Hall. When I finally arrived, the girl and the bus, the last of the day, were gone. At the time, I was more upset about missing the girl. But in time, via magnetic tape, Barton Hall 5/8/77 would enter Dead lore as arguably the single greatest show the band ever played.
Fucking subway.
You can stream an excellent recording of the show I missed here.
Definitely not the greatest Grateful Dead show ever. While the ensemble playing is impressively together, and Garcia’s guitar work is more fleet than it was in, say, 1968-1972, they sound like they’re playing to a “click track” for the entire concert. St. Stephen is completely problematic and in none of the improvisations will you hear the free timing and magical SPACE of the earlier work.
There is no single “greatest night ever”. I’d pick ’72 as the greatest year, but only if I literally had to because some ****er was holding a gun to my head. That said Lawrence is on drugs; the St. Stephen is awesome, as is the whole show. This story by Will Hermes made me want to cry.