Grateful Dead - Barton Hall May 8, 1977

Ah, Barton Hall '77. A general consensus puts this show at the top of the must hear list of Grateful Dead shows. Not so much for the performance, which is great but no more stellar than your average typical Dead show, but more for the atmosphere and the recordings themselves. There is a warm fuzzy feeling that surrounds this show. Much of that is most likely due to the fine soundboard recordings of Betty Cantor-Jackson.

This show has been officially released on May 5, 2017 as both as a stand alone package and as part of a four show, eleven disc box set. If I could make one complaint about live Dead it is the long gaps between songs and this show is no exception. If you are there in the audience and in the heat of performance this is fine but on playback the gaps just take me out of the show until the band kicks in again.

I'm all for archival preservation but when this show was released it takes up three discs due to those long pauses between songs. What I've done here is to remove those pauses to make a smoother listening experience. For those songs that do not run into each other I have made new transitions to reduce the gaps to no more than a few seconds. Each set should fit on a single 80 minute CD though set one is awfully close. Let me know if it works for you and make sure to burn the disc with no gaps. I did not use the official release for this edit. Instead I used a matrix recording from the Internet Archive.

Set One
01 Minglewood Blues
02 Loser
03 El Paso
04 They Love Each Other
05 Jack Straw
06 Deal
07 Lazy Lightning >
08 Supplication
09 Brown Eyed Women
10 Mama Tried
11 Row Jimmy
12 Dancin' In The Streets

Set Two
01 Take A Step Back
02 Scarlet Begonias >
03 Fire On The Mountain
04 Estimated Prophet
05 Saint Stephen >
06 Not Fade Away >
07 Saint Stephen >
08 Morning Dew
09 Saturday Night(Encore)

For the cover I utilized elements from a tour poster.