January 1976 Newsletter (Excerpt)

Dear Deadheads,

Here's the rundown on everything completed or sufficiently near completion to announce. This is the biggest batch of stuff we've ever got together, the fruits of incessant activity known as the Vacation. It includes four record albums, a feature length movie, and a decision that vacationing is too exhausting to continue, meaning the Grateful Dead has decided to get back into touring.

Intensive rehearsals begin this week to get the performing edge back on the band and to outfit it with new material. Rehearsals and then recording and then back on the road. The date is not yet agreed upon, or the place, but it will be somewhere around the middle of '76. Announcements will be made prior to the gigs. The hit and run method. In the words of Phil Lesh, "We're all horny to play." If you're as hot to hear us as we are to do it, we can get the mother rollin' one more time, for sure.

So, here's what we have for you in the meantime.

[ . . . . ]

When I first appeared around, the chaps known as the Grateful Dead (for some strange reason they did and still do call themselves Bozo's), I was always impressed by how hard they worked at their performances, records, and now their most interesting movie and how close they feel to you folks their "Dead Heads". It's really a source of great pride for me to have the Grateful Dead be part of my world.
Thank you.
Anton Round

P.S. Don't just sit there, popularize and proselytize!

* * *

MAY 1976

Dear Deadheads,
The Grateful Dead is planning to go out for 18 gigs starting June 9th. We don't want to pack around the equipment necessary to do ultralarge productions - in plain fact, we don't want to play giant gigs at all - so we're going to book into smaller places, keep promotion way down and give you first crack at tickets.
In our experience, the bigger the production, the bigger the expense and the overall feeling is not as satisfying as a smaller scale effort.
It will be good to be back on the road, actually trying to fulfill our fantasy of playing for a mostly deadhead audience in a comfortable environment.
The band is now into full scale rehearsal, preparing new material and re-working the familiar stuff. This tour will be strictly to satisfy us and you and to find out if such a format can work. If it does, it can point the way to future tours which are a necessity for any band which wants to stay at a dynamic level musically and serve as an energy source for itself and others.

St. Dilbert