Solid smooth jamming on China Cat for a solid, beautiful 8 mins, including the FGJ. Rider has Phil high in the vocal mix, to a very nice effect.

Builds and builds and builds, faster hotter faster and hotter. The crowd goes wild (stage antics?) Something special was in the wind.

Who's playing the Theremin? There's definitely something odd going on here. Was Ned Lagin sitting in?

Slower tempo gives this one a special feel. Jerry sings it with great gusto and a deeper bluesier feel then others. The whole ride is great fun.

The band is having fun with it on live TV, even though squeezed into under 4 minutes: http://vimeo.com/35129207. Bobby slides over the disco beat.

Perfect transition into Cumberland. They turn up the juice, wind up the jam, speeding along from a stroll to a trot to a gallop to a sprint, land in coal country, and never play Viola again. Some say the '60s sound ended when VLB left the rotation. Well if so, they did it flawlessly.

Great truck drivin' sound. Sounds almost like someone was playing lap steel? NRPS played this show, so it could be, but Jerry's solo is guitar puro. In any case, this is a sweetheart.

Right on 1980sHead. Seems like we were both there that night, so nice to see you again after all these years! This is indeed some of sickest vocal nightmare tricky shit Bobby and Dan cooked up. Peace to you this fine All-hallows Eve.

They were much tighter than the night before. This one clicks into place right away.

There was still a lot of emotion on the scene here. This was only the fourth show since Jerry had come back, and they were working out new material (WPCtS, Black Muddy River - which we called "black murky reefer") and it still felt like any show could be the last. I saw the three Colosseum shows, this one, and New Years Eve, plus one of the nights in between, but I'm not 100% sure which. I also saw the first JGB show at the Kaiser in October. I doubt that anyone would list these as their all-time "favorite" or "best" shows ever, but my sense at the time was that we'd almost lost the band forever and the fact that they wanted to play for us again in the Bay Area meant that the world spun correctly again.... That sounds dramatic, but being on tour right before the coma left us in a shock that didn't really end until December. As Glynn says, this Playin' isn't going to blow your socks off, but having it frame the whole show, weaving in and out of the entire evening, evoked the deep Dead. We were dazed and delirious, full of joy to have them back. Great memories (and now back to 1970!). Peace.