Sweet country Dead. Great mix if you want to feel Phil's thunder.

Jerry leans into it with a jaw-tighteningly crisp and high-voltage tone for a killer solo, though the group is a bit loose. Pigpen sounds amazing.

Absolute goodness. These shows are all so beautiful, the playing is all virtuoso, and the feeling is so positive. Brent here is especially perfect.

Perfect. Bobby's silky voice, Gerry's understated but perfect picking, and Brent's barrelhouse honkytonk all on proud display.

Poor sound quality midway through, but its the first '76 set since the hiatus that goes off-the-rails weird, evoking the Wall of Sound era. Hot stuff.

Jerry reaches terminal velocity. The band is absolutely shredding, reaches Colemanesque harmolodic polyrythms at on point right before the Supplication re-entry.

The only reason this isn't much higher is that we don't have a SBD for it. Check it out, everything Glynn said here was right on.

Absolute stunner. There isn't a dud in this whole first set.

How have I gone this long in life without hearing this? Goddamn, this is perfect. I love how they take it down to almost zero, (some Heads probably thought, "hey, man, are they stopping?") before slowly building it back up into a long exploration of theme and rhythm make it such a danceable and beautiful homage to sudden inspiration and love. The Ferguson SBD has a great mix, especially for an old Philzone freak like me.

Listening again (and again and again) to that gentle lilting jam, and I'm more convinced now that you could describe it as a long teasing intro into the TOO that they finally reach after drums. It isn't TOO in the power-acid rollercoaster cannon shot, but right around 07:30 Keith switches up the chord changes and the drums switch from 12/8 feel (regular triplets over the 4/4 of the main melody) into a clear 6/8 (the meter of TOO). Jerry picks it up right away and turns his flutter of a butterfly wing solo into a rock waltz. By 09:40 Phil and Bobby are pushing it into uncharted territory (it almost sounds like the stuff Joni Mitchell would do with Jaco Pastorius starting the same year) but somehow TOO is already in the air, gently, touched by that beautiful '76 understatement. It's only in the last few seconds before Drums that they spell it out completely. What beauty!