May 21, 1983

The Wheelchair Tape

May 21, 1983

Date Listened

January 28, 2025. This is a short show, at only a little over 90 minutes.

Sources

This is another one of those rare Jerry Garcia Band shows where we have multiple sources.

SHNID 91115, a first generation tape, isn’t bad, though sounds a little bit distant to me. Apparently the original tape suffered from variable speed issues; the digital version that circulates has been fixed.

I think that SHNID 96908 is a different source. It claims to be a master tape, though it sounds even more distant than SHNID 91115.

And then there’s SHNID 167384. Lossless Legs shows this as the least downloaded of the three, though this might be because it was only uploaded in April 2024. Regardless, this is easily the definitive version of the show. It was clearly recorded up close, and the band sounds absolutely awesome.

The text file indicates that the microphones were situated in the brim of the hat of a man who was in a wheelchair:

I met the taper and his friend in line for the early show. He was in a wheelchair which made smuggling in his gear quite easy, He had a brimmed hat with a microphone hidden on each side of the brim. After the late show we listened to his recording in his van and it sounded great.

There’s actually a little bit of speculation on Lossless Legs as to the identity of the wheelchair taper. It seems that somebody knew him, and that there might be other recordings out there that haven’t been digitized yet.

At any rate, this source is simply incredible. You have to listen to it.

Reputation

1983 was a great year for the Jerry Garcia Band. When I pieced together a list of shows to listen to in random order, I paid particular attention to adding as many 1983 shows as I could.

Interestingly enough, Jerry Garcia’s Middle Finger features a blog post on this particular tape, which I suppose increases its reputation slightly. Aside from that, I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about this show in particular.

Discussion

Aside from the cool story about how this tape was created, this show is yet another example of the sort of gems you can find in the catalog.

I strongly feel that a lot of the Jerry Garcia Band shows have been unfairly overlooked over the years. While this show doesn’t necessarily include a ton of truly “hot” moments, the band is energetic, and Jerry’s enthusiasm really stands out. It’s worth listening to — especially with a source like this.