Best Of All Time?

Jerry Garcia Band, March 11, 1978

Best Of All Time?

I’ll be honest with you. One of the reasons I decided to start this project was in hopes of finding the best Jerry Garcia Band shows of all time.

There isn’t much to guide you. You can find a few loose Reddit threads here and there that give you some vague recommendations. Some of the shows are amazing, while some of the shows are a bit questionable.

Today’s show, however, is legitimately one of the best of all time. Oh man, this show is awesome. There seriously is not a weak moment in the show, and the audience is right on top of everything, engaged at every minute.

This one comes at the beginning of a two week East Coast tour by the band. They started off in Cleveland on March 9, moved all the way over to Rochester, New York on the 10th, and then made this show in Pawtucket, Rhode Island their third night in a row.

Now, the old secret in theater is that the last show of a consecutive string is almost always the best. You don’t want to show up on opening night, which is where all the mistakes are made. When you hit the final show, you’ll notice that the actors start improvising a little bit and start going more with the flow. The stiffness is gone, and the show becomes fun and exciting again.

That’s exactly what this concert is like.

Keith Godchaux sounds absolutely fantastic on the keyboard. He’s all over every single song, and he keeps the beat going during Mystery Train when Jerry’s amplifier gives out for a minute at the beginning. If Keith could have played like this through all of 1978, both the Dead and the Jerry Garcia Band would have been completely out of this world.

This is the first performance of Rhapsody In Red, and is arguably the best. This might be the best Catfish John. It’s almost certainly the best I’ll Be With Thee, and Lonesome And A Long Way From Home includes an instrumental interlude that is nothing short of fantastic.

I recommend SHNID 97682, an audience recording that sounds really good to my ears. It’s not perfect, sure, but it’s more than good enough.

Seriously — give this one a try. I think is an all time classic.