Going 'round and round' with the Grateful Dead

Before guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bobby Weir knew how to harmonize. Before keyboardist Ronald "Pigpen" McKernan started to deteriorate after years of hard drinking. Before those mind-bending shows from the mid-1970s that exemplified improvisational music. Way before the hit single "Touch of Grey" (1987) minted a brand-new generation of Deadheads. Indeed, before the name became synonymous with jamming (and everything right – and wrong – with the 1960s), the Grateful Dead consisted of a bunch of Ka-blooey kids performing some of the finest, most inspired music, as this show from Cortland, NY April 18 1971, attests. Steeped in blues, folk and rock, the Dead in 1971 had already climbed down from the psychedelic ramparts that had defined their music in the mid-to-late 1960s. In 1970, the Dead released the twin gems, “Workingman’s Dead,” which showed their penchant for country and western music, followed by “American Beauty,” which proved that the members of the Dead were bona fide songwriters (“Friend of the Devil,” “Ripple,” “Sugar Magnolia”). However, as they would demonstrate throughout (most of) their 30-year run, they knew how to mix things up and serve it up Goldilocks style – smoking hot and just right. The first set features the always crowd-pleasing “Bertha,” followed later in the set by a blistering “China Cat Sunflower” into “I Know You Rider,” one of the band’s signature segues. During the second set the boys show their ability to channel Smokey Robinson (“Second that Emotion”) and Otis Redding (“Hard to Handle”), but integrate their own material, with rollicking versions of “Sugar Magnolia” and “Truckin'.” The second set is capped off by the haunting “Uncle John’s Band,” which includes a sentiment that I’ve been wondering about with increasing frequency lately: “Woh - oh, what I want to know, where does the time go?”