Editor’s note: This article was written by Luke Z. Fenchel, and originally ran in the February 9 issue of The Ithaca Times. We reprint it here with their permission.
For a large subset of music fans, a single concert on May 8 of 1977 captured a monumental moment, and ranks above any other show in rock history. It speaks to the lasting significance of the Dead, and the lives of its listeners, although only a few thousand people were there to hear it.
The legendary show is best known as “Barton Hall ’77”. Fame often distorts factual details, and the myth of May 8 might make what went on at Cornell University that strange and snowy spring night ultimately unknowable. But long before it was etched in the minds of Deadheads through the viral spread of audience tapes – and then the pristine soundboard recording that surfaced in 1987, the most famous of the so-called “Betty Boards” – Barton Hall was simply a stop between Boston and Buffalo on a well-regarded live band’s itinerary – by best guess, stop number 977 on a long, strange trip that would include about 2,200 shows.
“The Barton Hall show has — as have many things Grateful Dead — grown in stature over the years,” said John Scher, who co-promoted the ’77 show with the Cornell Concert Commission. “And probably if as many people were there as say they were there, you’d be talking about hundreds of thousands of people. I actually know people who I know weren’t there who thought they were there because they’ve heard the tapes for so long.”
“I saw hundreds upon hundreds of Grateful Dead shows, and it is one that sticks out in my mind, but probably to some degree I’m as guilty as the next,” Scher said. “I was there, I remember it being a very joyful show, but because I’ve heard it many times since, and because of the legend of the show, it magnified itself.”
The band returned to Barton Hall in 1980 and ’81, and its members brought their side projects both before and since.
But for an immense number of people, Barton Hall ’77 will always help them remember the Dead.
Booking the Band
“I always thought of this as my show, from the moment it was booked,” said Pat O’Brien, who chaired the Concert Commission during the lead-up to the Barton Hall show. “This was my graduation month, and they were my favorite band.”
The person who booked the show, Mike McEvoy, chairman of the CCC’s selection and market research committee from ’76-’78, said a well-received October 1975 Jerry Garcia Band show at Cornell’s Bailey Hall “began to lay some of the groundwork.”
“I was lobbying for a Dead date from the very beginning, knowing that John Scher had a relationship with the Grateful Dead,” McEvoy said.
“Ithaca is not on the route maps for most bands. So it has to fit in well from a scheduling standpoint too,” O’Brien said. “We really focused on doing a professional job. It wasn’t a lot of starry-eyed groupies saying, ‘isn’t this cool’. We took a real sense of responsibility in terms of the quality of the production we wanted to present,” McEvoy said. “If you don’t do the right planning, and the right groundwork, then the whole show can deteriorate and be impacted by that. So our focus was on putting together a professional production and a great experience for the people coming to the shows.”
“You’d hear horror stories, especially in the college environment – a given college didn’t have it together and the show started an hour and a half late. When we started working with John and Monarch Entertainment, [that] was one of the things we established fairly early on – that we had a real commitment to doing quality productions.”
Confirmations came before celebrations. A telegram addressed to Michael McEvoy at 12:57 p.m. March 11 finalized the date, location and ticket price. An April 7 press release made the show public. On Tuesday, April 11, tickets would be sold at nine locations, including the three Cornell student unions, Cortland College, and record stores in Ithaca, Geneva and Johnson City.
“Mac had booked the show, and ordinarily I would have known, but he got the show booked before I knew about it,” O’Brien said. “I think he wanted to surprise me.”
Taping the Show
Bob Weir told musician and journalist David Gans in an Aug. 9, 1977 interview: “I guess where we get most of our converts is from any of a number of good nights we have. It’s pretty evident that what we’re doing is going fishin’ and sometimes we come up with catfish and sometimes we come up with trout.”
While few serious fans of the Dead would disagree with Lenny Kaye’s assessment that “Live/Dead,” the 1969 double LP that was the band’s first officially released live album, “explains why the Dead are one of the best performing bands in America,” it should be noted that Kaye’s review was published in 1970.
The liner notes of “Europe ‘72″ read, “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.” For many, May 8, 1977 proved it.
Because the Barton Hall appearance – along with all but approximately 150 of the band’s shows – was taped, no one has to take Kaye’s, the Dead’s or, for that matter, anybody else’s word for it.
“‘Barton Hall ‘77′ became that legendary for a number of reasons,” Scher said. “The band was at the height of their powers. And because the band always shared their music with the fans, and always let them tape, which in those days was very, very unusual, and pretty much unheard of, when they performed a show as magical as this one was, the word spread not only by word of mouth, but also by listening. I’m sure the tapes were duplicated thousands – tens of thousands – of times.”
“If you wanted to listen to field recordings, you either listened to somebody’s fifth- or seventh-generation copy, or you went out and made your own,” said Eddie Claridge, a longtime Dead recordist. “We loved the music, and this was the most effective way to do it. If you spent the time to learn what you were doing, you could make quite a good field recording,” he said. “And once you got it, it was hard not to do it at other shows. And that made some of us persona non grata at some other bands’ shows.”
Claridge is responsible for more than a few Dead recordings; his audience tape from May 16, 1981 at Barton Hall is a phenomenal document of that period. He also recalled that at the May 7, 1980, Barton show, the Dead changed “Playing in the Band” to “Playing in the Barn” – “because of the interesting acoustics.”)
“I missed Barton Hall [in ‘77] because I had a business commitment,” Claridge said. “Of course I regret I wasn’t there. … Just because I saw 50 shows that year doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have wanted to see more. Of the whole spring ['77] tour, Barton Hall and Buffalo were the only ones I missed,” he said, wistfully.
But the show was captured by someone who was probably in Claridge’s social circle. Claridge didn’t want to speculate, but likely candidates include Jerry Moore or Steve Maizner. (Moore, who edited Dead Relix newsletter from 1974-77, and one of the “original tapers,” passed away on June 3, 2009; Maizner was unavailable for comment). The provenance is less important than the tape’s existence.
Between October ‘74 and June ‘76, when the Dead’s activity slowed to a handful of live shows, “[t]he underground Grateful Dead tape trading network had blossomed,” Blair Jackson writes in his biography “Garcia: An American Life.” Jackson noted that of the four shows the band played in 1975, one was broadcast nationally, and another was a free concert with Jefferson Starship that drew 25,000 people even though it took place the day it was announced.
“Between audience-made concert tapes and the numerous Dead shows that had been recorded for FM radio broadcasts, there were many tapes in circulation among traders by the mid-’70s,” Jackson writes. “This encouraged more people to collect tapes and become tapers themselves.”
“There were not very many people taping in ‘75,” Claridge said. “If you were to cite a number in the double digits for the whole country you’d be pretty close. If I went to a show in ‘77, chances are that anyone in the room that was recording was someone I knew. And by 1980, at any given show there would be 150 guys recording.”
“[Barton Hall '77] was the first really great tape to come out that everybody had in their collection,” Dark Star Orchestra member Rob Eaton said. “So it became a favorite listening piece: a vehicle to listen to the Dead at all times because it was pristine quality of a really good show from a really great time period.”
The Greatest Concert on the Greatest Tour?
“Everything just clicked for the band that night – onstage, sound-wise for the audience, and vibe-wise for the interaction between the band and audience,” Scher said.
“Of what I was able to listen to, and from the crowd response, you could tell the band was on that night,” McEvoy said. “The Grateful Dead have a little bit of history, and there are nights that the band is not really on as much as other nights. And that night at Cornell they were really on.”
“Cornell and Ithaca in general were very hospitable to the band and to their fans,” Scher said. “I think there were a lot of Cornell students, a lot of Ithaca College students, and lot of Syracuse students, for whom the Dead were their favorite band of the era. It was a nice day; the topography around Cornell is really different and interesting. The gorges, I remember seeing Deadheads staring at and looking at, with sort of ‘Wow’ on their faces.”
“I was in the back of the hall when the second set started, and they launched into ‘Scarlet > Fire’ which is kind of a classic hallmark of the Cornell show,” said McEvoy, who went on to work with rock promoter Bill Graham. “I’ve come to realize that all I need to do is mention the Cornell show and a knowledgeable person who knows The Grateful Dead would say, Scarlet Fire.”
“I would say that ["Scarlet > Fire"] is one of the highlights, but it is not the only highlight,” David Lemieux, the Dead’s tape archivist, said by phone from his home in British Columbia. “When you listen to [the shows from] April 22 or May 28, you realize there are a lot of highlights.” He quickly added: “There is so much great music; it is without a doubt one of the great tours in the history of The Dead.”
Barton Hall may be simply the most well-known show.
“It’s sort of ubiquity breeding consensus,” said Gary Lambert, longtime editor of the Grateful Dead Almanac and host of “Tales from the Golden Road” on Sirius XM’s Grateful Dead Channel. “It’s like saying that the popularity of ‘Star Wars’ somehow makes it inherently greater than a film like ‘Shoot the Piano Player.’ I would rather talk about the fact that the band was playing at such a level.”
Lambert noted up front that “Barton Hall does not particularly stand out because I was never a great seeker of or accumulator of tapes at the time.” He first “stumbled” on the Dead on May 5, 1968 in Central Park, but was living on the West Coast by ‘77. “I first heard the ‘Terrapin’ [album] material in March of ‘77 at Winterland,” he said, with palpable excitement in his voice. “And hearing those songs for the first time was already revelatory, even though they were just testing them out as live pieces, because they had a compositional complexity that was apart from what [the band] had tried before. Instead of coming up with a riff and developing it live – [the Dead's] method used to be to turn a jam into a tune – ‘Terrapin’ was a really well-written song, and it came out well-realized. So by the time it become a live performance piece it was already very well-developed and only got better.”
The May 8 show did not include the “Terrapin” suite, though it does include “Estimated Prophet” from 1977’s “Terrapin Station,” as well as Hart and Hunter’s “Fire on the Mountain.” [Complete set lists for almost every Dead show are available in the three volumes of The Deadhead's Taping Compendium, as well as on deadlists.com and elsewhere on the internet).
“Remember, Barton Hall saw one of the rare 'Morning Dews' played at the time,” Lemieux said. “They only played it a few times on that tour, so 'Morning Dew' itself is something significant. As is 'Saint Stephen.' And a brand-new 'Estimated Prophet.'"
"If Barton Hall '77 only existed in the memory of 4,000 people, and if every show had been equally available and equally recorded …" Lambert mused. "If you could separate the experience and the artifact, then probably the Barton show would not be as highly regarded. If you ask me about the best shows of 1977, I would be hard-pressed to call any show a ‘best show’ without 'Terrapin Station.'"
"It doesn't matter what they played!" Lemieux exclaimed after hearing about Lambert's comments. "To me it's about performance quality ... I have never even considered [the set-list] part of the quality of the show.”
O’Brien recalled: “The only specific thing is that I do remember when they started up “St. Stephen,” because I thought, ‘oh yes!’ ”
“You always wondered if they were going to play ‘St. Stephen’,” Ithaca musician Dave Pohl said. “And same with ‘Morning Dew.’ So to hear both things in such proximity was important for me. … And ‘Estimated Prophet.’ That’s not even my favorite song, but I remember when they played it, something was going on there. It was special.”
“If you look at the five songs Deadheads would want to hear, ‘St. Stephen’ was always there. It is one of the songs you seek out like crazy,” Lemieux said.
“Any number of shows from the spring circuit are arguably just as good as Barton Hall,” Lambert said, citing Hartford, Buffalo and Chicago as examples. Buffalo and Chicago are not commercially available, but the Hartford soundboard recording (of May 28, known as “To Terrapin”) is – as is the second of three nights at the Palladium in New York (April 30, the first release in the Grateful Dead download series), and three consecutive Southern dates (May 19, 21 and 22, released as Dick’s Pick’s Vols. 29 and 3).
In comparing soundboards in the vault (Hartford, for instance) to Barton, Lemieux noted: “It’s not exactly comparing apples and oranges, but comparing oranges and tangerines. [Barton Hall] sounds pretty good. The non-commercial release was never mastered in HDCD. The commercial releases have gone through some technology that adds a heck of a lot.”
Lambert also praised the Winterland shows he saw later that spring. “Those June ‘77 shows were extraordinary, and for those of us who had seen them in March, June was like the payoff. Everything had become a glorious beautiful monster, and there was a sense that the band had emphatically shaken off whatever cobwebs they had acquired during their nearly two-year hiatus.”
“I’ve characterized the Grateful Dead as ‘America’s longest-running musical argument’,” Gans told Phil Lesh in an interview for Musician magazine in 1982.
Lesh responded: “The very definition of a musical argument is something that keeps going, and that you uncover new details and new combinations. A musical argument is not the same as a verbal argument … That’s really a good description, in sort of an abstract verbal sense.”
Gans, also the host of the weekly radio show “The Grateful Dead Hour,” is the closest thing to an oral historian the band has.
“You know, I’m not as obsessed as the next 10 people you’re going to talk to – and I don’t make lists of favorites,” Gans said by phone from his Bay Area home. “It’s just not something I can rattle off. I don’t give a shit. What I can say of the spring tour is that it’s interesting/great music, and I can tell you why.”
Audience and Soundboard, Experience and Artifact
“What the Grateful Dead invented, and what they inherently knew, was that the more people that had the music, that got to participate, the better fans they would become,” Scher said. “The community created camaraderie – they would make fans, [who] would make tapes. Lifelong friendships were made by audience members, not only by seeing friends at shows, but the relationships that were made by [the] trading of tapes.”
“There were lots of tapes around before that,” said a man named Artie, an Ithaca music scene veteran. During our interview at a local coffee shop, he opened his briefcase and placed three CD-Rs of Barton Hall on the table. “This was, as you know, one of the first Betty Boards that widely circulated. I brought you the soundboard of the entire show.”
He pressed a fourth CD-R into my hands. “But this is the audience [recording] that I prefer. Personally, the soundboards are amazing, but on the other hand … for me, I listen to recreate the experience of being there. The audience tapes crackle with energy. I stood right there, and I can hear myself on the tape.”
“In fact,” Artie said, tearing up, “I thought about one person I was with who was my best friend at that point, and who has since passed away, and you can hear him on the tape. He yells out periodically during solos. For me, that’s one of the most important parts … when I will periodically listen to tapes.” He paused. “I don’t listen to tapes much anymore.”
“For most people, when they have special moments like this, there is no artifact. Their memory is their only connection to it. What a luxury I have to have this artifact. I play it, people who are gone are there with me. The space sounds the same, and the connection is amplified – it’s so much more real.”
“What’s the difference between the best and my favorite?” Artie asked later. “Who am I to judge? It’s less about the best and more about your experience. To me, Barton Hall is a largely widespread if not universally acknowledged Dead show. Thirty-three years on, people are still talking about ‘Is it or isn’t it?’ Well, is not that the indicator right there?”
Did It Matter? Does It Now?
“There has been no band in history that has the sociological effect on the public more than the Dead,” Scher said near the end of our interview. “The Dead had social impact on millions of people.”
“I can’t tell you what I think about the show,” O’Brien said, firmly and flatly. “How could I when I have described to you what it meant to me? Most of my family was there. Many of my brothers came up; one worked the show. I could never be objective because, as I said, it was my show.”
“Obviously you’re well aware of the music from that night, but I think that it was also a pretty smooth event,” McEvoy said. “We all enjoyed it and it was good fun, but we had some real good people, and we enjoyed working together and putting something on for the community.”
“We did talk about the Dead, of course: Mac and I, and others,” O’Brien said. “But I don’t really remember when I heard it as a recording. One of my brothers-in-law is a tape collector. So I probably got [it] from him.”
“For years I just thought it was this really super event that happened to coincide with my graduation. It was years, maybe even decades, before I knew about the reputation of Barton Hall.”
The Hall
Barton Hall ’77 has become one of the best-known performances of arguably the finest live band in American history. “It’s simply classic. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up,” Dead publicist/biographer Dennis McNally told Cornell Magazine in 1997.
On Sunday, February 14, two of the band’s founding members return to perhaps the most storied ROTC center and basketball court-cum-concert hall in the world for a sold-out concert with their band, Furthur (named for Ken Kesey’s famed psychedelic bus and a tag for various Dead-related concert tours since the band continued on in 1996 after Garcia’s death). The band features Lesh and Weir, as well as Jeff Chimenti, John Kadlecik, Jay Lane and Joe Russo.
The 2010 Furthur performance is a point on a continuum that stretches back to The Dead’s earliest live performances, touching on May ’77, May ’80, and ’81, and further, far into the group’s possible future.
“Barton Hall holds a special place in my memories,” Phil Lesh told me. “Of course, we did that legendary show there with the GD; then I went back to Barton Hall [in 1999] with my band Phil Lesh & Friends while touring with Bob Dylan; this time, I get to go back with Bob Weir and our new band Furthur. I will also get to say hello to Ray King, who is a student at Cornell and the drummer in my son Brian’s band ‘21 Aces.’”
“Furthur is, as someone once said, ‘in the transportation business – we move minds.’” Lesh said. “Using the GD classics as a starting point, we are trying to expand and elaborate the music – and by extension the community.”
To peruse photos, memorabilia, correspondence, period press accounts and other materials previously unavailable to the public, and to read more excerpts from interviews, visit www.theithacapost.com. Add your comments, and join the conversation about The Dead.
This article is dedicated to the memory of Jed, who was, and remains, a force for good.