Dark Star
June 24, 1973
Memorial Coliseum
I wanted to comment again on this marvelous version. I took one too many hits last night and this version surprised me even more. You can hear instantly within the first notes that there’s some kind of supernatural electricity going on. This is pure communication between musicians, music going in all directions but all end up in the same space. Jerry even tests the band in some exercises and sees how much Phil and Bobby can keep up. Hinting at key changes and allowing the music to go where it needs to go. It’s honestly incredible how free they allow themselves to be while letting the music flow out of them instead of pushing it. They truly treat the music as a living, breathing, thing. The elastic ping pong jam was the perfect springboard for the band to explore and cover new ground, they’re still allowing themselves to evolve. We get to the vocals and space section and with Jerry at the helm, I get these flashes of colors, specifically red, just plain red, then red and black, then orange, then brown, and even colors I can’t really describe. Phil is destructive, earth rendering, and shows a darker side to his playing. This is like a seance, that turns into extraterrestrial communication. Jerry made contact. He’s searching space and time and bending it to make contact with, god knows what. The whole suite of Dark Star>Eyes is dusk personified in sound. The dark clouds being lit up by the setting sun in the distance. Orange, black, red, yellow, the colors of the setting sun. What a truly mystifying version. Terrifying and beautiful.