Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Dire Wolf
2. Race Is On
3. Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie
4. It Must Have Been The Roses
5. Dark Hollow
6. China Doll
7. Been All Around This World
8. Monkey And The Engineer
9. Jack-A-Roe
10. Deep Elem Blues
11. Cassidy
12. To Lay Me Down
13. Rosalie McFall
14. On The Road Again
15. Bird Song
16. Ripple

Disc 2:

1. To Lay Me Down
2. Iko Iko
3. Heaven Help The Fool
4. El Paso
5. Sage And Spirit
6. Little Sadie
7. It Must Have Been The Roses
8. Dark Hollow
9. Jack-A-Roe
10. Cassidy
11. China Doll
12. Monkey And The Engineer (1)
13. Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie
14. Ripple
15. Tom Dooley
16. Deep Elem Blues

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76084 in Music
• Released on: 2006-05-01
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Live, Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .29 pounds

CD Description
By late '79, the Dead were beginning a new phase of their existence, with the addition of keyboardist/vocalist Brent Mydland, who added some bluesy grit to the band's sound. This 1980 live document presents the band in a rare acoustic set that finds Mydland settling in nicely, and the other memberssounding distinctly invigorated, despite the homey, back-porch arrangements. To complement the stripped down circumstances, the Dead reached into both their folk bag and the more traditional-sounding corners of their own catalog. The traditional "Jack-A-Roe" and "Deep Elem Blues" are given respectful but lively treatments. Beautiful Hunter-Garcia ballads "China Doll" and "It Must've Been the Roses" are rendered withpoignancy. "Dire Wolf" and "Dark Hollow" (among others) make a convincing case for the Dead as the godfathers of alt-country.

Customer Reviews

Acoustic Dead - a must!
Lovingly remastered and gloriously expanded to include an extra discs worth of music this re-release from Rhino is truly a wonderful treasure featuring The Dead playing "unplugged" from their legendary 1980 gigs at the Warfield in Frisco and Radio City in NYC. If you love the Dead then you need this album as it showcases their folk roots superbly and reinterprets some classic Dead originals like Cassidy, China Doll and Bird Song with an intimacy that is heartwarming and with a great depth to the sound that lets you hear ever note. Featuring old blues chesnuts like Rosalie McFall, Deep Elem Blues, folk gems like Tom Dooley, Jack-A-Roe and a rare performance of Bob Weir's Sage and Spirit this is an album that will reward with repeating listenings so sit back around the campfire and let the Dead sing your Blues away. My only gripe is that it features alternate takes of ten songs already on the original release so it would have been nice to hear some of the other songs the Dead played from the tour, but nonetheless it's a must have for Dead Heads or any fan of acoustic/folk/roots/rock.

Astonishing testament
This is now quite an old recording. This week I was around the old stomping grounds in the south of England where I had first bought this, some 21 years ago, and even there, in the days of vinyl LPs, it was an exceedingly rare and precious item. I had been looking for it for years, and was lucky that the store owner had no idea what it was.

This is a collection of songs that formed part of an acoustic set performed in a couple of locations, carefuly recorded and very slightly edited, but you would never notice this process; sufficient to say that this release is at the utmost opposite pole of "steal your face"; the quality is excellent and the performance absolutely breathtaking.

The Dead here perform a series of fairly straightfoward ballads, starting with Dire Wolf, and continuing with some very competant performances of other songs from their repetoire. The recordings are very clear and a great joy.

Then things start to get interesting. The songs that follow China Doll suddenly acquire an aspect of tremendous intimacy (as 9ftNeil mentions) and it is almost as though you are witnessing a secret world that few listeners have really been admitted to. The music extends beautifully; in Cassidy the music effortlessly traverses a distance stretched out between folk, country and western, to something like a raga from the lonely, hot desert of another world, then in typically Grateful Dead style, pulls back to the familiar; and then back with Bird Song, a beautiful gem of melody, love and comforting memory, whistfulness and poetry that perhaps thay have never equalled.... The invention and quiet lyricism that results is absolutely magnificent, and not a little terrifying; these strange wandering minstrels truly have you under their spell.

You really don't want to say goodbye; but there is more to this recording than there was in the original two LP set and my goodness me, if you are going to get ANYTHING by the Grateful Dead, get this.

I promise it will make you smile.

Acoustic shows-Dead back to their roots
In 1980, the Dead recorded a sequence of shows in both San Francisco and New York.As a treat for the fans,they went back to the structure of shows they did in 1970-71,with an acoustic set then an elecrtic one.
"Reckoning" is edited highlights of the acoustic shows.It's a pleasant change from the electric shows,but not that memorable,and a bit dull after a while.That's just me though,as I much prefer the electric shows to Garcia and co. gettting back to their roots.