July 3, 1978

Don't overlook this audience recording!

July 3, 1978

Date Listened

January 27, 2025. At 2 1/2 hours, this is a show you can easily stick on in the background while you work.

Sources

This is where it becomes fun.

The infamous Betty Cantor-Jackson recorded this show. In general, her soundboard recordings (“Betty Boards”) are the gold standard for audience recordings.

I don’t have enough room in this post to go into deep detail about Betty’s recording methods and why they were so successful. There are some well known articles that go into greater detail.

To my knowledge, the only source for the Betty Board of this show is the official release, which is part of the July 1978 box set. Unfortunately, it seems that Spotify doesn’t have a copy of this show.

So that’s it, right? There’s nothing else to talk about, right?

Well, not quite.

A Bob Wagner audience tape also circulates for this show. Wagner is one of those legendary audience recorders that you get to know when you dig into the archives — one of the names that should cause you to stop and investigate. Wagner’s recording is SHNID 97601, and this is apparently a digitization of the master tape.

And then there’s a mystery audience tape. This is SHNID 120130. I’ve got no idea who recorded it, what generation the recording is, or what the details are.

All I know is that SHNID 120130 is incredible. In fact, I prefer it to the Betty Board.

That sounds blasphemous, but hear me out. The Betty Board is well mixed, sure. This audience recording, however, sounds like a front of board recording, and includes a lot more of the audience and the venue. This is also a recording of the house mix as it sounded when the show was performed.

Unlike the Wagner tape, which sounds a bit distant and muffled, SHNID 120130 sounds bright and close up. You can actually hear this in the very first few seconds of New Minglewood Blues. The first few notes were spliced in from the Wagner tape. You can tell the difference once it switches over to the mystery tape; it’s like night and day.

Anyway, the mystery tape wasn’t added to Lossless Legs until 2018, and hasn’t received much attention. I strongly believe, however, that it’s the definitive version of the show.

Reputation

We’ve had a run of Grateful Dead shows of lesser reputation recently, and this one is certainly no exception.

Heady Version shows that this is probably a slightly above average show, though none of the songs really seem to stand out. Most commentors compare these numbers with the more famous Red Rocks Amphitheater run a few nights later — and more than a few people say that this show wins out.

In contrast, The Deadhead’s Taping Compendium Volume II describes this as a relatively common and boring 1978 show, noting that the set list isn’t really anything special.

I believe that the quality of the source tape has something to do with the lukewarm review. The author of that Taping Compendium review notes that Keith sounds almost completely absent in the mix, for example. I could see that happening if you were listening to a multigenerational copy of the Wagner tape. However, the source we have here does a little bit more credit to Keith.

Keith’s playing isn’t great — but he does stand out on Deal, The Music Never Stopped, and the Scarlet > Fire. I’m not sure if it stands out as much in the Betty Board.

Discussion

Are there times when audience tapes are superior to soundboards?

Most fans of the band stick with soundboards. In fact, a cursory glance at download numbers on Lossless Legs will show that the vast majority of users go straight for the soundboards and don’t seem to even consider the other recordings.

I’d argue, however, that every recording should be considered before you decide which one you want to listen to.

Personally, I prefer previewing a track or two from every recording I’m considering when making my own decision. I usually go for an upbeat song that will give me a good insight into how the harmonies sound. In this case, I listened to the first part of Scarlet Begonias (up to the first solo). I was shocked when I found myself more drawn to SHNID 120130 than to the official release.

To make sure I wasn’t deceiving myself, I went through the same exercise with the first part of Peggy-O. This also gave me an idea of what the dynamics sound like in each recording.

And that confirmed it. SHNID 120130 is, for now, the best recording of this show available. And I really have a hard time seeing how anything else could be better.

The big question, though, is what happens when we try the same thing with other shows — and whether this changes our opinion of how “good” or “bad” each of these shows really is.