Sea Stones: Space noise electronica with Phil & Ned. Not for everyone, but sends me into well into the interstellar place.

May-June '74 might be my top time for Sugaree. This just builds up to so much intensity. Great stuff.

Intimacy levels: Campfire. Acoustic mellow to the point where I feel like just went camping with my favorite band. A treasure.

Clutch yer nuts and hold on for dear life. Heavy headiness where the squiggly hippies and the madman bikers get massively Dead nailed.

Explosive jam like they had 11 months of unplayed Truckin's compressed into one.

The Billy/Bobby interplay is clear - and beautiful - in the mix, which is a rare treasure. It reminds me of being at shows and being able to focus (when focus was even possible) on different combinations of the boys at play, depending on where you were in the audiospace. This isn't the most polished or most experimental version you'll hear. It isn't even the most well-played. It is,however, bursting with creative synchronicity and it quite simply doesn't resemble any that went before it. PiTB is a study in the Dead's evolution, and within one year it went from the weirdly apocalyptic psychedelic jam "The Main Ten" to a twangy country warble with its off-kilter meter and explosive energy. Within another year we arrive at Veneta and PiTB is there with Dark Star as one of their vehicles for interdimensional exploration. This one stands at one of the junctures.

Right on, unstrucksound, glad you dug it!

Little known fact: Phil has twenty fingers. Evidence? This song.

Good goddamned hot, this one. So much energy, they're just giving giving and giving.

Sure thing, Deadhoe69, but here it's uptempo, fresh, and pushing forward. Later ones don't (for me) have that essential pulse as the earlier ones. And Jer's vocals here push it forward with meaning and soul. There's a pulse here that sometimes I lose in the later ones. He's right, this is a good call. You'll love it. I do.