Scarlet Begonias -> Fire On The Mountain
May 8, 1977
Barton Hall - Cornell University
I'll be forever grateful to my buddy Richie for handing me this tape over 30 years ago (2nd set only... it included the UJB from the next night) and saying nothing except, "Check this out." If he'd said, "Some say this is the best show ever," I would have listened with very different ears, expectations would have been ridiculous. Instead, I could not stop listening to it, and when I saw him a week later, I thanked him for an awesome tape. He laughed and finally told me, "A lot of people are calling it the best show ever." He wisely chose to tell me nothing, knowing I wasn’t paying much attention to what people were saying about certain tapes at the time. But… This show became one of the main go-to tapes to pop in, especially when listening with friends who were not yet entirely into the Dead. We could put this tape against any of the so-called greatest albums of all time and 5/8/77 always held her own (much like 5/9, 9/3, etc…). It became one of the best tapes to play to turn people onto the Dead, if not the best. So it doesn’t really matter if it’s the greatest show of all time. All’s I know, for those of us who knew nothing about this show when we first heard it, we were pretty much blown away by its beauty.
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