Grateful Dead, Two From the Vault 2-CD Set
Grateful Dead, Two From the Vault
Tracks
CD1
Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl [15:59]
Dark Star [11:20]
Saint Stephen [4:40]
The Eleven [14:27]
Death Don't Have No Mercy [8:23]
CD 2
That's It For The Other One [15:40]
Cryptical Envelopment
Quadlibet For Tender Feet
The Faster We Go The Rounder We Get
New Potato Caboose [14:16]
Turn On Your Lovelight [17:13]
(Walk Me Out In The) Morning Dew [7:13]
Two From The Vault was released in May 1992. This album was taped over two nights, August 23 & 24, 1968, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Album Notes:
When I heard that the body of Ron "Pigpen" McKernan had been found in his Marin County apartment, I immediately remembered a Grateful Dead concert of a couple of years ago. For sheer energetic joy I still think it is the best rock concert I've ever been to, and Pigpen was the star.
The concert was in February of 1970 at a marvelous neo-Babylonian movie theater in St. Louis called the Fox...The concert started about two hours late. The Grateful Dead had been busted for possession of marijuana a couple of days before in New Orleans and the seven tons of equipment that they hauled around the country had been impounded in lieu of bond or something. A lot of it had just arrived and had been too hastily assembled and besides the PA wasn't working very well...
And then...along came Pigpen. He had been shaking a tambourine in a bemused sort of way, holding it up by his ear as if it were a seashell and he was listening for the ocean, but now he put it down on top of a speaker and walked to the front of the stage, with Garcia, Lesh and Weir stretched out behind him. He was wearing a big-brimmed cowboy hat with the sides rolled up and the hat band was actually a swatch of colored cloth that hung down in back by his long pigtail.
With the band rocking along behind him, he picked a microphone off a stand and held it out in front of him the way a knife fighter would. He made a dagger gesture with the mike and, even though he didn't move his feet, his body seemed to make a little rush forward at the audience. He poked again at the audience with the mike and the band cut back on the volume and left him a hole. Glaring at the audience as if he had just caught the whole bunch of them in bed with his old lady, but with a thin smile at the corner of his lips, he stepped forward and then began to sing: "Without a warning...you broke my heart"
His body began to rock back and forth, the band came in louder and stronger than ever and buddy that was all she wrote. Pigpen shouted and growled and screamed, he made little rushes across the stage, he did his Big Mama Thornton routine and his Otis Redding routine and his Little Richard routine and the place just went crazy as he hopped around the stage, screaming again and again, "Turn on your lovelight...Turn on your lovelight." As the concert came to a close with explosions of drums and shrieking of guitars, and the applause and cheers began swelling up from the audience, a tall black woman with the biggest Afro in town jumped up on that stage and began hugging and kissing Pigpen, swinging him around like a doll. Pigpen just went limp in her arms and, for the first time all night, he grinned.
LET HIS MEMORY SHINE!
Harper Barnes
The Real Paper (Boston)
April 4, 1973
Price: $20.98 plus shipping