New Grateful Dead CD collection includes a 1978 Tampa show

No rock ‘n’ roll band in history has documented the sonics of its career more thoroughly than the Grateful Dead.

The grandaddy of all jam bands officially ended with the 1995 death of guitarist Jerry Garcia, but interest in the its three decades of live performances, recorded either professionally by the Dead organization or by “taper” fans, who did so with full permission, has hardly waned.

A new box set, Friends of the Devil, contains no less than 19 CDs – it’s the audio chronicle of April, 1978, eight full-length Grateful Dead concerts from that month, recorded direct through the mixing board.

The new set starts with the April 6 show at the long-gone Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa. It was the opening date on the band’s spring tour, and it lasted just under four hours.

Because live Dead shows were different every night, fans and collectors revel in these loose-limbed musical snapshots in time. It’s also a poignant farewell to beloved bassist Phil Lesh, who died just last week.

Tampa 4/6/78, Dead scholars believe, documents the first-ever performance where drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart’s improvisational segment “Drums” evolved into what fans knew (and loved) as “Drums/Space.”

(It’s not the first bay area show to turn up on a posthumous CD from the Grateful Dead. Dick’s Picks, Volume 1 includes a Curtis Hixon performance from Dec. 19, 1973.)

Newspaper critics in the bay area were not impressed with Tampa 4/6/78 – failing to grasp, as did most mainstream reviewers of the time, that Dead shows were not slick packages of one hit song after another, but a start-to-finish “experience” that resonated almost exclusively with “Deadhead” fans. This was a band that communicated with its slavish followers through a private language.

The Grateful Dead has never had any concept of time, except as an abstract to be bent, stretched and expanded.

Michael Kilgore/Tampa Tribune

April 8, 1978

 For their fans, the group’s thrilling production of mystical, moving music means that at least one vestige of the psychedelic era survives with relevance in today’s slick world.

Bob Ross/St. Petersburg Times

April 8, 1978

Grateful Dead/All Tampa Bay concerts

1973/12/18 – Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa

1973/12/19 – Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa

1978/4/6 – Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa

1978/12/13 – Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa

1985/10/26 – USF Sun Dome, Tampa,

1988/10/15 – Bayfront Center, St. Petersburg

1988/10/16 – Bayfront Center, St. Petersburg

1995/4/7 – Tampa Stadium, Tampa

Friends of the Devil is available exclusively through dead.net