Yeah I've just seen they Play Bilbao on the 22nd !. That would be very attractive if I wasn't going away ; I rather like Bilbao !. A bit Gritty and they take no **** You might like it actually ! In a couple if bars they forced me into ordering in Spanish ; One Barmaid got really stroppy about it ! I ordered in Spanish and she shook my hand and said thank you !
One of my regrets in life, that I never got to see The Dead play live .Although by all accounts they could be very hit and miss. The two guitarists Bob Weir and Gerry Garcia were genius together. Neither had great singing voices though imo.
The hype is down to a couple of things imo. Firstly, they were all about the live experience, and gladly admitted that they didn’t really rate any of their studio albums. Live, by all accounts, when they clicked they hit a seam of pure magic. I have a CD made from bootleg recordings of their 1972 concerts at The Lyceum in London, and you can tell they were on fire. Then there’s the fact that throughout 30+ years, their concerts were a gathering of the tribes, counter-culture events for the Haight Ashbury/Woodstock generation. They were survivors of a time when rock n roll still felt like a revolution, an optimistic era that some people say was killed off by Altamont and the Manson Family, and also by the commercialisation of the underground scene (Turning rebellion into money, as Joe Strummer put it).
