not to wax nostalgic, but...

...ah what the hell, it's my blog.  I was digging around in the one box of cassette tapes that has survived the decades (snicker if you want, but when you've been carting around a thousands LP's and CD's for half of your life, a box of tapes is easy to throw on the pile and forget about), and this is all that is left of my Dead tape collection:

There were more.  But for reasons both known and unknown, these are what have survived a quarter century, give or take.  At the time (the mid/late 1990's), I was more interested in getting as many Phish tapes as I could, so I never had a particularly enviable Dead collection.  There were, of course, a lot of crummy aud tapes and super hissy incomplete sbds that were given away or taped over, but I did try to save the cream of the crop... and I know that Veneta, Cornell, Freedom Hall, NYE 78 were all complete at one point, but c'est la vie.  10/14/94 was my last Dead show (and a really great Scarlet>Fire, thank you very much).  I have no clue how Garcia/Saunders 6/4/74 found its way to me, since I can't imagine it was a common tape in the pre-shn age.  Note the misdated 10/8/68 Hartbeats tape!  11/8/69 has the irritating clicking noise that Jim Wise painstakingly repaired, manually, click by click, on a home digital workstation (the story), which was the first time I had heard of such a thing being done -- oh brave new world!

Also, let's have a moment of silence for the lost art of tape filler.  The tape formerly known as 5/5/82 had the huge Mystery Train jam from 12/31/75 on the b-side, which made for an incongruous yet inexplicably satisfying juxtaposition.  Ditto 10/16/89 which had just exactly the perfect amount of space to fit the Garcia solo track from Zabriskie Point as filler.  Good filler was always the perfect comedown.  

I wrote a while ago about the GD Hour broadcast of 1/22/78 that basically changed my life, and I am most pleased to find that that one has held on.  But of course all of these were very, very special in their own way.

That's it.  B&P welcome, or your list gets mine.