HEADLINES [excerpt]
Stevie "Guitar" Miller - what a flash you are. Not only do you blow us out at the Crater Celebration but at the Civic too. With his new group; addition of Jimmy Miller, Steve's younger brother on rhythm guitar. Steve told me, "Jimmy plays better than I do." Well, I won't go as far to agree with him, but it sure added the much needed full sound the Miller band had been lacking since the Boz Scaggs left the group many moons ago. I've always loved the Miller Band no matter what they did, but with the addition of Jimmy, live performances can now sound more like the albums.
As far as Steve's very short hair-cut: "I got tired of long hair, it gets to be a hassle, so I cut it every few years." Then a little later Steve says, "Actually, I tried to give myself a trim and blew it." With or without the hair, Steve Miller is one of the finest performers in rock today. When his latest album comes out this July, run down and buy it because this is the year for the Steve Miller Band.
Also on that Civic bill, Quicksilver Messenger Service putting across one of the tightest sets we've heard. Quicksilver has made Hawaii its home for the last month and a half, making music for their new album. They have been living and working in a country house six miles into the cane fields of Haleiwa. Not only did they record one album but have created enough material for two and a half albums...now that's creativity! One comment that's been made before but should again be brought out is Dino Valente. He sticks out on stage like a sore thumb. It seems to me if he continues to dominate the stage, the group should change their name to "Dino Valente with Quicksilver." Why don't David Freiberg and Gary Duncan sing more? Dino has a nice voice but Gary's at least, if not David's, is just as good. Why not, for the sake of the group, be part of Quicksilver rather than being Dino (which by the way isn't his real name). I have always liked Q.M.S., but seeing Dino trying to take over the already great group turns me, as well as most of the Q.M.S. fans, off.
We hear Nickey Hopkins has left the group, we can only hope this is temporary because when Nickey plays things like "Edward (Mad Shirt Grinder)" with Q.M.S., it's one of the best highs we've ever felt in music. Nickey received a standing ovation for that piece of art...he modestly accepted the cheers... Now that's a person Dino Valente could learn from.
I missed the Grateful Dead...unfortunately...but judging from their new album "Workingman's Dead," which is the Dead's best recording effort to date, I bet the set was a gas.
Side note: Noah's Arc Lighting did the finest light show we've seen in the Islands, keep it up!
(by Ken Rosene, from the Honolulu Advertiser, 22 June 1970)
*
'HORSE' HAS ITS MERITS [excerpt]
The opportunity to see top-rate talent here in Honolulu is fast approaching the level of San Francisco and New York. In the past and in the upcoming two weeks, about two or three dozen of the finest talent in the country have played or will play here, and that may explain in part a growing (?) insouciance. We're getting ho-hum blase and so Quicksilver and Steve Miller and the Dead with New Riders of the Purple Sage can't even fill the Civic.
Riders are pure country and good. They have Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel guitar and he's the best part of them.
Steve Miller's set, excepting a shaky start to "My Dark Hour," was great and the band, now with brother Jerry Miller, sounds bigger and better than ever. If anything, the set was too short.
(by Steve Moore, from the Honolulu Advertiser, 22 June 1970)
Thanks to Jesse Jarnow.
https://archive.org/details/gd70-06-13.sbd.hanno.9079.sbefail.shnf
& Quicksilver's set has been released as "Hawaii 1970": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpLiMY8fALg
Jun 5, 2020
September 26, 1970: Terrace Ballroom, Salt Lake City, UT
GRATEFUL DEAD IS SCHEDULED SATURDAY AT TERRACE HALL
The San Francisco rock group, the Grateful Dead, will appear Saturday in the Terrace Ballroom.
The Grateful Dead performs what has been labeled "underground or heavy rock music" and will perform entirely alone, with no supporting acts.
The group has not only left its mark in music but has become associated with the attitudes and attempts at change made by today's contemporary youth. Impromptu concerts in Federal Court in San Francisco and the articles in national magazines catapulted the Grateful Dead to national notice.
Content among their fans in the Bay Area, road trips for the group have been rare in the last few years, so the Salt Lake appearance is expected to generate interest among "heavy rock" fans.
(from the Salt Lake Tribune, 21 September 1970)
* * *
THE GRATEFUL DEAD LIVED WELL AT THE TERRACE
Three hours of very live Dead. That's what it was at The Terrace Sept. 26 when The Grateful Dead, "San Francisco's first family of fine music," showed some three thousand enthusiastic fans what has kept them on top of the San Francisco music scene.
Performing by themselves, the Dead pulled the audience together into a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, whistling fan club.
The show was divided into two long sets, one acoustic and one electric, each about an hour and twenty minutes of nonstop sound.
Captain Trips, also known as Jerry Garcia, led the band through the first set with his vocals and excellent guitar work. This in spite of hassles with the soundman as to who gets his mike turned on and how loud. (As can be expected when no warm-up group is used.)
It took a while for the crowd to get into the music, but by the time the Dead were halfway through, we knew we were in for a real treat. And by the time the Dead got into "Uncle John's Band" it was standing and shouting time.
That song has to rate as one of the real good ones of this or any year, and the album it is taken from, "Workingman's Dead," is probably their best effort to date.
"Uncle John" ended the soft set in great style, and when they broke out the electricity for the second set there wasn't much sitting down to do.
Using two drummers - something very very difficult to pull off well - to great effect, the Dead went into their own stuff and outstanding arrangements of Tim Rose's "Morning Dew," the Stones' "Not Fade Away," and the often-recorded "Dancing in the Streets." All were punctuated by Garcia's excellent guitar licks and fine work by both drummers.
At this point I guess I should point out the bad spots of what was mostly a first-rate show. First the Dead, themselves, are pros, real pros. And it showed all night. But neither the songs nor the musicians were introduced.
Now this might seem like cutting things too close, but when a band changes players as often as The Grateful Dead it would be nice to let the audience know who is playing. This also tends to run things together until you get a Santana-like effect of not knowing when one song ends and the other begins.
Secondly, The Terrace caught the Salt Palace fire code bug and was tossing people out for lighting up inside. The ushers were dressed in their red Smothers Brothers coats and acting like the Royal Canadian Mounties spying around for an illicit red glow in the crowd.
This is particularly upsetting when The Terrace is advertised as a place where people can get together, sit on the floor, move around, and rap with friends and smoke if one has a mind to. I think the duplicity here deserves some explanation, especially to the folks who got the hook before a warning was issued.
But I don't want this to sound negative, because it was a night of positive things. Positively a great band, an audience very into the music, and an ovation that shook the place, redcoats or not.
Those that missed it really missed it, and those of us that made it will have a tough time getting up over the next band coming through. Not just anyone can follow an act like that.
It was a good night. Long Live the Dead!
NOTE: For those interested, Jerry Garcia's guitar work can be found on It's a Beautiful Day's "Marrying Maiden" and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Deja Vu."
(by David Proctor, "In" Music Writer, from the Salt Lake Tribune, 2 October 1970)
Alas, no tape!
Thanks to Dave Davis.
For the aftermath at the Terrace, see:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-dead-in-daily-utah-chronicle-1967.html
The San Francisco rock group, the Grateful Dead, will appear Saturday in the Terrace Ballroom.
The Grateful Dead performs what has been labeled "underground or heavy rock music" and will perform entirely alone, with no supporting acts.
The group has not only left its mark in music but has become associated with the attitudes and attempts at change made by today's contemporary youth. Impromptu concerts in Federal Court in San Francisco and the articles in national magazines catapulted the Grateful Dead to national notice.
Content among their fans in the Bay Area, road trips for the group have been rare in the last few years, so the Salt Lake appearance is expected to generate interest among "heavy rock" fans.
(from the Salt Lake Tribune, 21 September 1970)
* * *
THE GRATEFUL DEAD LIVED WELL AT THE TERRACE
Three hours of very live Dead. That's what it was at The Terrace Sept. 26 when The Grateful Dead, "San Francisco's first family of fine music," showed some three thousand enthusiastic fans what has kept them on top of the San Francisco music scene.
Performing by themselves, the Dead pulled the audience together into a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, whistling fan club.
The show was divided into two long sets, one acoustic and one electric, each about an hour and twenty minutes of nonstop sound.
Captain Trips, also known as Jerry Garcia, led the band through the first set with his vocals and excellent guitar work. This in spite of hassles with the soundman as to who gets his mike turned on and how loud. (As can be expected when no warm-up group is used.)
It took a while for the crowd to get into the music, but by the time the Dead were halfway through, we knew we were in for a real treat. And by the time the Dead got into "Uncle John's Band" it was standing and shouting time.
That song has to rate as one of the real good ones of this or any year, and the album it is taken from, "Workingman's Dead," is probably their best effort to date.
"Uncle John" ended the soft set in great style, and when they broke out the electricity for the second set there wasn't much sitting down to do.
Using two drummers - something very very difficult to pull off well - to great effect, the Dead went into their own stuff and outstanding arrangements of Tim Rose's "Morning Dew," the Stones' "Not Fade Away," and the often-recorded "Dancing in the Streets." All were punctuated by Garcia's excellent guitar licks and fine work by both drummers.
At this point I guess I should point out the bad spots of what was mostly a first-rate show. First the Dead, themselves, are pros, real pros. And it showed all night. But neither the songs nor the musicians were introduced.
Now this might seem like cutting things too close, but when a band changes players as often as The Grateful Dead it would be nice to let the audience know who is playing. This also tends to run things together until you get a Santana-like effect of not knowing when one song ends and the other begins.
Secondly, The Terrace caught the Salt Palace fire code bug and was tossing people out for lighting up inside. The ushers were dressed in their red Smothers Brothers coats and acting like the Royal Canadian Mounties spying around for an illicit red glow in the crowd.
This is particularly upsetting when The Terrace is advertised as a place where people can get together, sit on the floor, move around, and rap with friends and smoke if one has a mind to. I think the duplicity here deserves some explanation, especially to the folks who got the hook before a warning was issued.
But I don't want this to sound negative, because it was a night of positive things. Positively a great band, an audience very into the music, and an ovation that shook the place, redcoats or not.
Those that missed it really missed it, and those of us that made it will have a tough time getting up over the next band coming through. Not just anyone can follow an act like that.
It was a good night. Long Live the Dead!
NOTE: For those interested, Jerry Garcia's guitar work can be found on It's a Beautiful Day's "Marrying Maiden" and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Deja Vu."
(by David Proctor, "In" Music Writer, from the Salt Lake Tribune, 2 October 1970)
Alas, no tape!
Thanks to Dave Davis.
For the aftermath at the Terrace, see:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-dead-in-daily-utah-chronicle-1967.html
Jun 4, 2020
December 22, 1970: Memorial Auditorium, Sacramento CA
GRATEFUL DEAD CHEERED
"An Evening With the Grateful Dead" may be remembered long and lovingly by the 4,700-plus fans who turned up, then turned on last night in Sacramento's Memorial Auditorium.
They screamed, clapped, stood, stomped, and - during quieter passages - chattered through five hours of excellent rock music by the Dead and by a far-from-dead offshoot of this really viable Marin County morgue, the "New Riders of the Purple Sage."
Most of that teeming, teenish throng stayed to hear the concert end with a literal bang - someone popped a small powder charge onstage during the final chord - just minutes before 1 o'clock this morning.
And, watching the sleep-staring remnants of the crowd as its members contentedly filtered home, many with glazed eyes and near-zombie walks, it came in a flash just who the real grateful dead might be.
The onstage Grateful Dead - two sets of drums; lead, rhythm, and bass guitar, and organ - has a mellowness to its total sound that is surprising in view of its authentic Fillmore-psychedelic origins.
The psychedelia is still there in much of GD's material, but there is less treble, more bass to the sound. And there are heavy excursions into country, western, and flat-out funk.
The crowd dug it all but expended its writhing, jiving energy on the faster, heavy-beat stuff. Under the Dead's tutelage, the audience became a seventh instrument - now lured into a rhythmic frenzy, now calmed by a quieter passage, now stirred to a renewed outburst by some repeated, increasingly insistent musical phrase or other.
The New Riders of the Purple Sage, which opened the evening, is a Grateful Dead offshoot that features the parent group's own talented lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, on steel guitar.
Augmented by lead, rhythm and bass guitar and a single set of drums, the NRPS group lays down what sounds like nothing short of the newer acoustic trend in rock - except that the guitars, though toned down somewhat, are decidedly electronic. The result is, again, the kind of mellowness that calls the Grateful Dead's own sound to mind.
NRPS's music trip concentrates on the country-western idiom in rock, with heavier emphasis on the country than on the western. Garcia's steel guitar - now soaring, now singing, now sounding like a down-home fiddle - catalyzes the total sound and helps put NRPS across as an excellent, solidly put together group.
It drew the connoisseur's kind of applause - slow-starting, swelling with recognition, finally giving way to the cheers of the converted.
There were no reserved seats for this concert - an unusual feature in the cavernous auditorium where "good" seats are at a premium. Although this led to some "shoehorning" in choice rows and now and then some crowded aisles, there were no observable hassles over seats. The crowd was there for excitement, but from the stage, not the arena.
(by John Hurst, from the Sacramento Bee, 23 December 1970)
Alas, no tape!
Thanks to JGMF.
"An Evening With the Grateful Dead" may be remembered long and lovingly by the 4,700-plus fans who turned up, then turned on last night in Sacramento's Memorial Auditorium.
They screamed, clapped, stood, stomped, and - during quieter passages - chattered through five hours of excellent rock music by the Dead and by a far-from-dead offshoot of this really viable Marin County morgue, the "New Riders of the Purple Sage."
Most of that teeming, teenish throng stayed to hear the concert end with a literal bang - someone popped a small powder charge onstage during the final chord - just minutes before 1 o'clock this morning.
And, watching the sleep-staring remnants of the crowd as its members contentedly filtered home, many with glazed eyes and near-zombie walks, it came in a flash just who the real grateful dead might be.
The onstage Grateful Dead - two sets of drums; lead, rhythm, and bass guitar, and organ - has a mellowness to its total sound that is surprising in view of its authentic Fillmore-psychedelic origins.
The psychedelia is still there in much of GD's material, but there is less treble, more bass to the sound. And there are heavy excursions into country, western, and flat-out funk.
The crowd dug it all but expended its writhing, jiving energy on the faster, heavy-beat stuff. Under the Dead's tutelage, the audience became a seventh instrument - now lured into a rhythmic frenzy, now calmed by a quieter passage, now stirred to a renewed outburst by some repeated, increasingly insistent musical phrase or other.
The New Riders of the Purple Sage, which opened the evening, is a Grateful Dead offshoot that features the parent group's own talented lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, on steel guitar.
Augmented by lead, rhythm and bass guitar and a single set of drums, the NRPS group lays down what sounds like nothing short of the newer acoustic trend in rock - except that the guitars, though toned down somewhat, are decidedly electronic. The result is, again, the kind of mellowness that calls the Grateful Dead's own sound to mind.
NRPS's music trip concentrates on the country-western idiom in rock, with heavier emphasis on the country than on the western. Garcia's steel guitar - now soaring, now singing, now sounding like a down-home fiddle - catalyzes the total sound and helps put NRPS across as an excellent, solidly put together group.
It drew the connoisseur's kind of applause - slow-starting, swelling with recognition, finally giving way to the cheers of the converted.
There were no reserved seats for this concert - an unusual feature in the cavernous auditorium where "good" seats are at a premium. Although this led to some "shoehorning" in choice rows and now and then some crowded aisles, there were no observable hassles over seats. The crowd was there for excitement, but from the stage, not the arena.
(by John Hurst, from the Sacramento Bee, 23 December 1970)
Alas, no tape!
Thanks to JGMF.
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