Shakedown Street opens the second half, the band announcing that shit is about to get real with a lengthy, disco-heavy version. While Jerry is firing throughout, Brent also puts in a fantastic, funky keyboard jam to really shake up this stellar Shakedown. At the end of the tune, Phil is bombing away, before stopping on a dime as the drummers suddenly hammer it into Samson And Delilah. The Samson is energetic and a little feistier than most, the keys particularly resonant, pushing Jerry’s solos and undergirding, along with Phil’s bass, the vocals. A soaring Terrapin then brings it all to Playin’ In The Band, which evolves from a standard rocker to a heady jam-filled exploration to a probing and searching voyage, providing everything a Playin’ should have. Suddenly, the band cedes the stage to the drummers who, before too long, are joined by Ken Kesey. It sounds like Kesey starts off on harmonica (or some sort of flute?) before he gets in the thunder machine, but we have no confirmation on that from anyone who was there. A short Space – distinctly different than the one at the tail end of Playin’ – comes on the heels of Drums, leading to a righteous, drum-heavy entrance into a joyous Not Fade Away. A poignant Stella Blue follows before a raucous Sugar Mags end to the set. And the entire show is capped by a US Blues encore.

Brent is on fire throughout this evening. But his vocals do not come through on any of the recordings, audience or soundboard. Maybe Brent was under the weather and making up for it with his playing (like Jerry in early ’78). Or perhaps, though it seems unlikely, the Dead had some technical issues.

Here we have a Hunter Seamons matrix cued up for you. Hunter makes full use of the Barry Glassberg and Jim Wise audience recordings that are consistently excellent in the early 80s, mixing them with a Charlie Miller soundboard. As Hunter explains in more detail about the audience recordings, “The Glassberg source (the preferred source for this matrix) appears to contain 2 AUD sources in it. Towards the end of Drums there is a cut in the AUD; after the cut, a strikingly different sounding AUD is patched into the source. The quality of this “other” source was pretty bad, with some bass overload. Very luckily, Jim Wise’s AUD was available and sounds just as good as Glassberg’s, so I used it from that section in Drums onward to the end of the show. The audience happens to be a little more “defined” in Wise’s source, but I ultimately prefer Glassberg’s AUD for its richer tonal quality. So, there is a “complementary” shift in sound during Drums, but it sounds pretty much the same and is all good.”