Deadology: The 33 Essential Dates of Grateful Dead History

PRELUDE

DEADOLOGY: A PYRAMID OF HISTORIES

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ince it was a forgone conclusion that I would write another book on the music of the Grateful Dead, friends and colleagues suggested that I should write about, and rank, their greatest shows. I was already considering such a project, but there were a few obstacles. How many shows should I rank, and how many pages should I dedicate to each gig? A top twenty or thirty list would give me an opportunity to really dig into the minutia of the landmark shows. However, there’s an abundance of exceptional Dead performances over their thirty years as a band, and I couldn’t work with a number that small. I could have proceeded with a list of fifty or more, but what criteria would I use to select and rank these all-time greats? That became the vexing issue.

If I took an intellectual approach to a top fifty list, most of my selections would have come from a five-year stretch starting in 1972 and ending in 1977. During this era, the Dead were in their performing prime, and their live repertoire was overflowing with their finest original compositions. If I removed personal sentiments from this project, I couldn’t argue that any show from 1983 is in the same class as an elite show from the legendary Europe ’72 Tour. Yet there are tapes from the early ’80s that are more appealing to me than some top-shelf shows from 1972. Desirable song combos like Scarlet > Fire, Help on the Way > Slipknot! > Franklin’s Tower, and Estimated Prophet > Eyes of the World, didn’t exist in ’72. And one could also make a strong argument that the Dead were in their primal performing peak in 1969. I can rank the best shows within a given year or era, but trying to rank the fifty best Dead shows covering their entire body of live performances wouldn’t do it any justice. Once I had this epiphany, the nature of my endeavor became crystal clear.

The solution was to write about the essential dates in Grateful Dead history without ranking them. This would give the book a timeless feel, as I could skip from year to year within a given date and elaborate on the most compelling performances. Since the Dead’s live archive is the most beloved and explored in the history of music, this would be a unique way to examine it.

Initially, I decided to roll with thirty essential dates, one date for each year of the Grateful Dead’s existence. My criteria for essential date consideration was that there had to be a minimum of three noteworthy shows on a given date. As I listed the contenders, cutting the list to thirty proved to be too painful a task. Due to the Dead’s prodigious output, I considered fifty or seventy-five essential dates, but I wanted the book to flow. Once an endeavor like this goes over the 400-page mark, it reads like a compendium or encyclopedia. It ceases to be a book.

The only number left that made sense was thirty-three. Besides the mathematical balance and aesthetic grace of 33, it’s a master number in numerology, a lucky number to the Chinese, and a spiritual number in other cultures. The universe confirmed my choice when I randomly drew the numbers 3 and 3 against 100-1 odds in a football pool for Super Bowl LIII. To sweeten the confirmation, the Patriots beat the Rams 13-3. I finally won a Super Bowl pool, and I knew this endeavor was on the right track.

Most critical studies of a musical artist or group are chronological in nature, with a focus on output from a year or era—a horizontal approach. Deadology will be taking a vertical approach as we look at all the years combined through the lens of a single date. Only the Grateful Dead’s live archive can be studied like this. Sure, a writer can take the career of Bob Dylan and present thirty-three essential dates, but that would consist of a mixed bag of events. Even though Dylan has now played more concerts than the Grateful Dead, the noteworthy dates of his career would be dominated by his brilliant deeds in the studio and the days he wrote his revered anthems.

This obsession with dates and performance history is unique to Deadheads. Even if you look at a team with an illustrious sports history, like the New York Yankees, how many of their fans remember the dates? As a hardcore Yankee fan, I remember players stats, but the dates are meaningless. I know Bucky Dent broke the hearts of the Red Sox faithful with his three-run homer over Fenway’s Green Monster on October 2, 1978, and that Derek Jeter became Mr. November when he hit an extra-inning home run after midnight in a World Series game against the Arizona Diamondbacks that began on October 31, 2001. But in all these cultural microcosms, no community obsesses over dates like Deadheads.

The dates and venues of Dead shows serve as de facto album titles, since they represent the band’s finest works. Deadheads salivate over 5-8-77 Cornell, 7-8-78 Red Rocks, 8-27-72 Venita, and 2-28-69 Fillmore West, the way classic rock fans drool over The White Album, Who’s Next, Blood on the Tracks, and Dark Side of the Moon.

When bandying about potential names for a cat I adopted, a friend suggested that I name him 3-9-81 MSG. March 9, 1981, was my first Grateful Dead show at Madison Square Garden, and one of the hottest shows of the year. Naming my tabby 3-9-81 MSG was a nifty notion, but I opted to name him Otto. The title of my first show has a mystical ring to it, and it works mathematically—all the numbers are divisible by three. If you multiply the day by the month, and then multiply the sum by three, you have a perfectly balanced equation: 3 x 9 = 27 x 3 = 81.

Deadheads love their numbers, and numerology is only a small piece of this puzzle. Deadology is the intense study of the band’s live archive in accordance with related historical occurrences from that day. Stemming from the mind-bending jams and musical innovations, a pyramid of histories takes flight. There’s the ongoing development of the band through the years, collectively and as individuals. There’s the continuous saga of the Dead’s live repertoire and how the songs evolved over time. Deadology is also an account of the venues the band played through the years. These settings influenced the music, and some of these brokedown palaces became defined by their relationship to the Grateful Dead. And then there’s the history of Deadheads and the emergence of a fanatical underground counterculture unlike anything that existed before in the world of entertainment. Eventually, the Deadhead experience became as American as apple pie.

As I focused on weaving narratives linked by noteworthy performances, each date turned into a unique chronicle of the band—thirty-three shades of Grateful Dead history. In addition to the pyramid of histories, this musical realm was influenced by an eclectic mix of arts, sciences, and passions: algebra, astrology, chemistry, sociology, sorcery, abnormal psychology, physics, philosophy, prognostication, obsession, transcendence, and extrasensory perception. And the band’s live archive encompasses a vast and endless stream of musical influences. Impresario extraordinaire Bill Graham wrapped it all up with his iconic quote about the Grateful Dead, They aren’t the best at what they do, they are the only ones that do what they do.

As complex and unpredictable as the Dead’s musical kingdom appears, their canon of live performances coalesces in an organized manner, as if it naturally flows from the universal mind. Each year the band’s sound and song rotation evolved organically, without radical changes, yet each year has a distinctive personality that separates itself from the previous one. Seasoned Deadheads can sample a snippet of a performance and often identify the year of the show immediately by the nuances of the sonic landscape; the tone of Garcia’s guitar, the urgency of Weir’s voice, the thickness of Phil’s bass. It all rolls into one. One year picked up where the last year ended, and following the Grateful Dead had the symmetry and suspense of following a successful sports franchise season after season. It’s astonishing that a band can develop that kind of work ethic after going through the Acid Tests and being in the thick of the Summer of Love.

Grateful Dead history can neatly be split into three phases: 1965–1974, the wonder years through the Wall of Sound (followed by a brief retirement); 1976–1985 BC (Before the Coma); 1986–1995 AC (After the Coma). Jerry’s life-threatening coma shortly after the summer ’86 tour was a significant turning point for the Dead. Numerology puts forth the belief that there are three phases of life, and that people go through nine-year cycles of change. And that’s exactly how Dead history unfolded: three nine-year cycles of change. I’m fond of this three-nine theory because it mirrors the date of my first show, 3-9-81 MSG.

Instead of presenting the Dead’s essential performance dates chronologically, I’ve divided them into seven sections: An End or Beginning, Spring Tour, Collaborations, Summer Tour, Birthdays, Fall Tour, and Celebrations. I tried to group these dates as if there was a unifying principle that caused the band to consistently be inspired on these days. In some cases, I put forth valid theories, and at other times, I concede that inspired shows on the same date may be coincidental. Or as Dylan sings in Man in the Long Black Coat, There are no mistakes in life some people say. It’s true sometimes, you can see it that way.

The Dead didn’t regularly perform winter tours, and consequently, there’s no section for this season. Essential dates from December and February are grouped elsewhere. Annual spring, summer, and fall tours spurred essential dates for obvious reasons. An End or Beginning brings together dates that have multiple firsts and lasts: song debuts and final performances, the beginning or ending of eras…etc. One example from this section is October 19. Keith Godchaux made his debut with the Dead on 10-19-71. At the same gig, six original tunes were performed for the first time: Jack Straw, Comes a Time, One More Saturday Night, Mexicali Blues, Tennessee Jed, and, Ramble on Rose. Jerry performed his first and final gig in the land of his ancestors when the Dead played Barcelona, Spain, on 10-19-81, and the band played their last Madison Square Garden show on 10-19-94. There’s more from this date, but you get the gist of it.

Collaborations features dates that have multiple shows with guest performers like Dylan, Branford Marsalis, and the Neville Brothers, or non-Dead performances from a Garcia configuration. Birthdays pays homage to the extraordinary music born on the birthdates of Weir, Hart, and Kreutzmann. Garcia, Lesh, and Pigpen’s birthdays didn’t make the cut. Celebrations honors the musical fireworks on July 4, Halloween, and New Year’s Eve. The Grateful Dead played twenty-two times on December 31. The rich history of these New Year’s Eve extravaganzas could be the topic of a book on its own. I also sprinkled in four bonus essays on momentous gigs that didn’t land on essential dates. These shows demanded inclusion in Deadology.

Before selecting the entries for Deadology, I guessed the month with the most essential dates would have been April, or perhaps May. Surprisingly, October topped all other months, with eight essential dates. Here’s the breakdown: October (8), September (6), April (5), July (4), May (3), June (2), February (2), November (1), March (1), December (1). No dates from January or August made the elite thirty-three.

In addition to landing eight spots in Deadology, October has a remarkable stretch featuring five essential dates in a six-day span from October 15–October 20. This harvest of October gold makes sense, since the Dead were flexing their touring muscle following the dog days of summer. They mastered the new twists to their shows as the year neared its final peak, and they often found themselves in front of their rabid East Coast fanbase. They also kicked ass out West in October as the leaves turned psychedelic colors on the trees.

In the Summer Tour section, I took the liberty of including a couple of dates that are technically still in spring. If you’re sweating profusely at an outdoor show on June 16, and the sun doesn’t start going down until 8:00 PM, damn the calendar, you’re on summer tour. And for most of us, summer’s over after Labor Day. If I’m wearing a jacket and headed to a show in Madison Square Garden on September 18, this is fall tour, even though it’s officially summer.

There are only five calendar dates when the Grateful Dead did not play: January 9 and 19, February 29, December 25, the day Jesus was born, and August 9, the day Jerry died. The beloved leader of Deadhead Nation gave his admirers an archive of brilliant live music that’s endless in magnitude. Garcia endured suffocating fame as only a fellow icon like Dylan could fathom. In Garcia’s darkest days he gave it his all, even when it was obvious that he should have stepped away from touring to save his life. He never turned his back on his extended musical family. As drug addiction and health issues plagued him during the second half of his career, Jerry’s best performances seemed heroic, and almost miraculous in nature. There are skeptics who’ll ask, What if Garcia wasn’t a junkie? I’d answer that Jerry gave us more music than any Dead devotee can listen to in a lifetime. As a person, it would have been beautiful if he lived longer and had more time to enjoy friends and family. As a performing artist, his massive body of work is up there with Dylan and Miles Davis. Jerry Garcia is one of the fab four who should be immortalized on a Mount Rushmore for American musicians.

As you read Deadology, it will be useful for you to know more about the author and his resume as a Deadhead, since all musical critiquing is subjective. On January 24, 1981, after watching a thrilling hockey contest in the Nassau Coliseum, I heard Europe ’72 for the first time on the ride home. The Grateful Dead switch in my brain was flicked on as I was mesmerized by a style of music that was unlike anything I’d ever listened to. Outside of enjoying a few of their FM radio hits, I didn’t embrace the power of their music until that night. My Garcia is God moment came when I scored my first bootleg tape consisting of various cuts from 9-3-77 Englishtown. Hearing Jerry go off on Mississippi Half-Step and Eyes of the World immediately made him my favorite musician.

I was eighteen when I made my first major road trip to see the Dead in the Philadelphia Spectrum on April 6, 1982. A freak April blizzard dumped eighteen inches of snow on my hometown of Nanuet, New York, the night before the show, turning the journey to Philly into a treacherous adventure. As if I was pushing the buttons in the second set, The Boys played the four songs I wanted to hear, Shakedown Street, Terrapin Station, Morning Dew, and Sugar Magnolia. This was the only time these four songs were played in the same concert. I was hopelessly hooked on every aspect of the Grateful Dead experience.

I saw 152 Grateful Dead shows and 50 Jerry Garcia Band shows. My heavy touring days were from 1982–1988. As I built my bootleg collection up to 500 tapes, I was enamored with shows from ’76–’87. I had a decent sampling of tapes from the Dead’s early years, but I didn’t appreciate how truly remarkable this era was for a while.

During my prime touring years, I would catch 90 percent of the East Coast shows, and make cross-country pilgrimages during the summer. I craved the on-the-road aspect of following the Dead, and I usually rounded up a posse of fellow Deadheads and led these expeditions in my maroon ’78 Chevy Caprice Classic. I had a predilection for driving long distances, but what I loved most was controlling the tunes. Nothing but choice live Dead or Jerry Garcia Band cranked through those speakers as we raced across America in pursuit of Garcia’s next great jam.

As a young man, I was a hedonistic goofball. I experimented with acid early in my Dead experience, but I quit dosing because it rattled the music critic within me, although I was a million miles from sober at shows. My head was amply lubricated with some combination of weed, speed, blow, and beer. When the lights went out and the improvisation began, I couldn’t help but compare what I was hearing to all other versions I’d ever heard—the audio rolodex in my mind turned. Whether the jams were hot or sluggish, the tapes usually confirmed my critiques. I was on a mission to collect all the smoking tapes I could and spread the Gospel of Garcia.

The upside of this musical scrutiny was that when the Dead hit those unimaginable peaks, I enjoyed it way more than most of those around me. On the other hand, when the band didn’t have the mojo rolling, I found it disappointing, while those around me were dancing and having the times of their lives. I could still dig a subpar show, but the musical output was paramount. I wasn’t a writer at the time; however, I was meticulously chronicling the jams and experiences.

The only subject I was studying in college back in the day was the science of Grateful Dead set lists, and my only attempts at creative writing were when I filled my notebooks with fantasy set lists before spring and fall tours. I used to sit in class and completely zone out the professors as I created set lists for the Hampton shows in accordance with the guidelines of the Grateful Dead Universe. As the tour headed north towards New Haven, Philly, and New York, the sets would become longer and more appealing. All predictions would be in harmony with the unofficial rules governing show structure. A mid-tour Madison Square Garden second set might look like this: Scarlet Begonias > Fire on the Mountain, Playin’ in the Band > Uncle John’s Band > Drums > Space > The Other One > The Wheel > Playin’ Reprise > Morning Dew > Sugar Magnolia. Encore: Satisfaction. I never looked back at these prognostications. The overwhelming reality of the tour and tracking down the tapes blew away fantasy.

As Garcia’s health and virtuosity steadily declined in the ’90s, I stopped touring. The second substantial Dead phase of my life occurred at the turn of the millennium. A friend turned me on to a PC for the purpose of interacting with Dead chat boards and downloading shows from rogue sites. I was in bootleg heaven; but acquiring the shows required disciplined persistence. Back in the early Internet days it would take anywhere from two hours to two days to download a show before burning the files to CDs. Between downloading and trading through the US mail, I amassed a substantial chunk of the Grateful Dead archive and close to a thousand Jerry Garcia Band discs. I developed an immense appreciation of the Dead’s early years, and I spent a considerable amount of time discussing and debating this endless treasure trove of aural inspiration with kindred souls on the Dewboard, a chat board/website linked to the weekly Morning Dew Radio Show on WBAI, New York. After thousands of posts, more than one Dewboarder suggested I should write a book.

I channeled my passion for traveling musical adventure into following Bob Dylan’s Never-Ending Tour and decided to start writing my first book on my Dead and Dylan experiences in May of 2005. Due to my Dead wanderlust in the ’80s, I was a college dropout with an embarrassing transcript and GPA. I finally earned my Liberal Arts Degree at The New School in 2008, and continued my academic resurgence as an adult by earning an MFA Degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing by 2010. Two years later I published my memoir, Tangled Up in Tunes: Ballad of a Dylanhead. There’s a plethora of books covering every imaginable aspect of Dylan’s life and career, so I set my sights on bolstering the legacy of my other musical hero, Jerry Garcia.

There are many outstanding books on various aspects of the Grateful Dead, but except for Deadbase and three volumes of the Deadhead’s Taping Compendium, there wasn’t much exploratory literature on their live archive. In a special 2011 issue of Rolling Stone, top guitarists and other experts were asked to rank the 100 greatest guitarists. The usual list of guitar heroes filled the first five spots: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, and Jeff Beck. Somehow, Jerry Garcia finished forty-sixth in this poll. It’s a ridiculous ranking to the million or so Deadheads who believe Jerry is the greatest guitarist, with no equal.

Partially lost in the shadows of the Grateful Dead are the touring exploits of the Jerry Garcia Band. In my first tribute to Jerry’s extraordinary output, Positively Garcia: Reflections of the JGB Volume 1, I dissect the finest performances of Garcia configurations from 1972–1984. My next project, Grateful Dead 1977: The Rise of Terrapin Nation, chronicles a rapturous year in the band’s history. I finished this trilogy with Dylan & the Grateful Dead: A Tale of Twisted Fate, a narrative of the reciprocal influence these American legends had upon each other. These books hovered around specific topics or periods of time. My next treatise would have a focus that provided more flexibility and freedom.

As my audio research for Deadology commenced, the enormity of the task demanded that I would have to dedicate most of my free time to listening to nothing but the Dead for at least an eighteen-month stretch. Thanks to the Relisten app, the Dead’s vast archive was easily accessible on my iPhone twenty-four hours a day. My expertise on the archive resided in the years from 1971–1987. But even to write about shows I knew, or thought I knew, I’d have to hear them again several times. If someone would have asked me to recommend some great shows from the Europe ’72 tour, one performance I would’ve suggested was the Dead’s May 7 appearance at the Bickershaw Festival on Billy Kreutzmann’s twenty-sixth birthday. Listening to Bickershaw again, I was blown away by an epic concert that I didn’t know as well as I thought I did. I could have obsessed on Bickershaw and listened to that gig twenty times in a row, but I needed to develop the discipline to move on, or this book would have taken a decade or two to finish.

Even though I was aware of the primal power of the Grateful Dead in 1969, the favorite year of author Blair Jackson and Grateful Dead archivist Dick Latvala, many of the shows I write about from this year I was exploring for the first time—ditto for the sublime years of ’68 and ’70. And outside of hearing bits and pieces of shows on the Sirius Grateful Dead Channel, the years after Brent Mydland’s death were a blank slate for me. I only saw the Dead four times in the ’90s. Every one of these essential dates pushed me out of my comfort zone and had me listening to shows that I never would have otherwise. Hopefully, Deadology will have the same effect on you as you let the music play. May you discover inspirational jams, and rediscover favorites that you haven’t considered in decades.

The Grateful Dead played around 5,500 hours of live music. If you listened to one show a day, it would take you over six years to take it all in. If I listened to a show a day for this endeavor, it would have taken me a year to hear everything from these essential dates once. Forget about second listens or writing about them. I had to skip listening to a few Me and My Uncles and Look Like Rains along the way. And if there were shows from less than stellar years that didn’t look great on paper, I’d sample the best songs to see if they were worth further investigation. These are holy performance dates. I didn’t need to bog these momentous mini-histories down with superfluous critiques of a Black Peter > Throwing Stones > Not Fade Away kiss-off. I savored and celebrated the extraordinary—shows, sets, jams, and signature segues, and linked them within the framework of that date through the years.

In a 1989 Rolling Stone interview, Garcia had this inciteful comment on the allure of the Grateful Dead experience. It’s an adventure you can still have in America, just like Neal on the road. You can’t hop the freights anymore, but you can chase the Grateful Dead around. You can have all your tires blow out in some weird town in the Midwest, and you can get hell from strangers. You can have something that lasts throughout your life as adventures, the times you took chances. I think that’s essential in anybody’s life, and it’s harder and harder to do in America.

Jerry was right on about this last great American adventure, as if he could foresee how the Internet, social media, and smartphones would take much of the mystery and suspense out of road adventures. I didn’t take any photos of myself or the band from my years of touring. Most of us lived in the magic of the moment, and that grows in stature as we revel in the tapes. Nobody was scrambling for smartphones so they could capture a brief video to post on Facebook. When Garcia says, You can have something that lasts throughout your life as adventures, the times you took chances. I think that’s essential in anybody’s life, he may have been nostalgically describing his own role as the relaxed leader of Deadhead Nation.

For access to just about everything that the Grateful Dead brewed musically, we now live in the best of times. These recordings are the soundtrack for a psychedelic caravan that was as bizarre and compelling as any traveling circus that hit the road under the direction of P. T. Barnum in the late nineteenth century. Grateful Dead music infiltrated American society and altered people’s consciousness as it transposed them to other times in forgotten space. You didn’t have to be at the Acid Tests, Egypt, Woodstock, Madison Square Garden, or under the influence of LSD. When the Dead were on, they took you into the past and future in the present. Transcendence is impossibly attractive. All you have to do is let the music take you there.

The Dead were a thinking man’s band. As sophisticated musical conversations took place on stage, most of the audience was with them mentally, emotionally, and physically. Deadheads had the intuition to sense the future direction of the music as if they were in the band. If it was a momentous night and the Dead was on the verge of playing Morning Dew, you could feel it in your bones even though there were no musical hints. From a more logical viewpoint, you also might have an idea of when the Dew was last played, and how likely it was to appear in that given spot. This unspoken interaction was a complex communication indigenous to this band and their fans. The Dead tailored their shows to impress their followers on tour by not repeating songs on successive nights and generating diverse jam segments. Every show was a unique creation, for good or ill. The band respected the musical IQ of their fanbase, and Deadheads thanked them with unconditional loyalty.

Unconditional support for the band didn’t equate with everything always being hunky dory. After a nine-hour road trip to Hampton, Virginia, the Dead performed what my friends and I thought were two flat shows to start the 1985 Spring Tour. This road trip was a waste of time and money, but giving up was not an option. The next two shows in Springfield were phenomenal, especially the second night, when Garcia’s incendiary guitar playing exceeded optimistic expectations. Jerry had that heroic comeback quality that sports fans admire in athletes like Muhammed Ali. You could never count him out; great thrills beckoned when he was on stage. Touring with the Grateful Dead was an epic human drama, a fascinating passion play for all involved.

It’s almost a quarter century since Jerry Garcia’s death, yet the majesty of the Grateful Dead refuses to fade away. It’s been embraced by another generation of musicians and fans who will pass it on to the next generation. It seems like you could go anywhere in America and find a Dead cover band playing at a local bar at least one night a week. The Grateful Dead Universe is as vast and almost as unexplainable as the world it resides in. It’s as if destiny had already charted their chaotic path. Haight Ashbury culture and fashion flourished as spinners and hyper hippie dancers set the pace. Tapers were taping from the get-go as if they were disciples passing these sacred tones on to an eternal audience. And it oddly feels predetermined that I would write about this music extensively, although I had no idea of my mission while I was on tour. The seeds of my obsession were sown in Madison Square Garden on 3-9-81.

AN END OR BEGINNING

OCTOBER 19

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ost Deadheads wouldn’t instantly think of October 19 as an essential date in the band’s illustrious history, but with six striking shows in a ten-year period, this date features many outstanding live performances. October 19, 1971, kicks off a new era for the band, and ten years later on this date, Jerry Garcia played in the homeland of his ancestors for his first and final time.

Due to years of hard boozing that led to advanced liver disease, Ron Pigpen McKernan, the group’s blues-singing, harp-blowing organist, couldn’t tour with the band in the fall of ’71. The Dead debuted their new piano player, Keith Godchaux, at the first show of the fall tour in Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis on October 19. Keith and his wife, Donna Jean, were fans of the band. In a serendipitous move, Donna approached Jerry and asked him to give Keith a tryout and Jerry obliged. Although Keith was a jazz-influenced pianist with a limited rock and roll resume, Garcia liked what he heard. Keith was exactly what the band needed as the Dead’s improvisational abilities soared and peaked over the next several years. Keith’s rhythmic playing helped fill the harmonic midrange, freeing the rest of his mates to explore. There were few awkward moments during Keith’s debut in Minneapolis. The right musician had arrived at precisely the right time. Donna Jean joined the band as a vocalist on New Year’s Eve, 1971.

Strictly analyzing the performances, 10-19-71 is just an adequate show. In the coming weeks on this tour, there were several extraordinary gigs. Keith’s presence revitalized the band’s sound and vision. The other significant development from this concert was the debut of six new original compositions unveiled in this order: Tennessee Jed, Jack Straw, Mexicali Blues, Comes a Time, One More Saturday Night, and Ramble on Rose. From this extraordinary batch of tunes that would remain in the live repertoire through the years, Bob Weir’s composition, One More Saturday Night, was the standout performance. The music’s rambunctious and Garcia’s solo steams. The first Jack Straw" was a success, but if one were in attendance that night, it would have