February 13, 1981
Two great tapes
February 13, 1981
Date Listened
January 30, 2025. This one came down to the wire. The combined early and late shows add up to about 3 1/2 hours total, and there are quite a few slow songs (Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Sitting In Limbo, Russian Lullaby, I’ll Take A Melody, Dear Prudence).
Sources
We’ve got two really good audience tapes for this show. SHNID 9019 is a digitized master tape by Ohr Weinberger, and sounds absolutely fantastic. Note that it was digitized back in 2002, and that the files are in SHN format, not FLAC.
Meanwhile, SHNID 152466 is a digitized master tape that was recorded by Jim Vita. It also sounds just amazing.
I had a really hard time choosing between the two tapes. Both are excellent. Both tapes are clear, include plenty of audience and ambiance, and would do well in comparison with some of the best audience tapes in circulation.
In the end, I decided to go with SHNID 9019. The bass seems a little bit heavier, and the crowd seems to be slightly more prominent. You can particularly tell this in Tore Up Over You, where it sounds like the entire venue is singing along with Jerry.
That’s no knock on Vita’s recording, by the way. We should be extremely thankful to have two excellent recordings of this amazing show.
Reputation
I’m actually not sure how I decided to put this show in my randomized list.
I haven’t been able to find any mention of it on Reddit. In fact, at the moment the only mention of a February 1981 show seems to be a post I made.
I think that it’s generally accepted that the Jerry Garcia Band was at its height from around 1980 to 1983 (but please don’t attack me if that’s wrong).
We looked a few days ago at February 10, 1981, which is here if you missed it:
And you’ll love this show if you liked that one.
Discussion
The one thing I’m curious about is how they decided to do these split shows. They did them some nights, and there were other nights when they didn’t. Does anybody know why?