Grateful Dead 6/11/93 Buckeye Lake in Hebron, Ohio

As many of you already know, I am writing a book about the Grateful Dead. As of now, I have already written over 45,000 words and I figure it will take another year or two before the book is finished. I'll go the self-publishing route for starters, while simultaneously researching and reaching out to some small press indie publishers to gauge their interest. The following is a sample chapter from the forthcoming book, Tank a Little Still in the Gas: The Grateful Dead in 1993. * 6/11/93 As of this writing, the Buckeye Lake show from June 11th is the only pro shot video of a complete 1993 performance that has been made available by the Grateful Dead on their official YouTube channel. That fact alone should give you some idea about how the surviving members of the band feel about this particular concert. They have also made available a handful of individual tracks recorded at other shows in ‘93 but Buckeye Lake remains the only film of a complete 1993 show streaming online. The days of home video releases from the band are probably over. Fans will recall VHS releases followed by DVD reissues of a number of performances in the 80s. (Downhill From Here, View From the Vault, Truckin’ Up To Buffalo, Ticket to New Year’s, etc.) The home video market has all but gone completely over to streaming, with DVDs no longer found in many homes.

For their part, the Dead organization continues to release live clips every couple of weeks for their ongoing YouTube series called “All the Years Live”. In recent years we’ve seen a few things from ‘93 surface there, but not much.

On the subject of official releases from 1993, the Grateful Dead has released very little from the entire calendar year. (The dearth of officially available music from ‘93 is yet another motivator for this author’s mission.) Only the Cal Expo shows from May have been released and neither of those in their entirety. The 30 Trips Around the Sun box set however did include audio from one complete 1993 show and that would be from March 27th at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, New York. Again, as of this writing in 2023, there are a number of 50-year anniversaries being celebrated for the band’s accomplishments in 1973. Of course thirty years is nothing to sneeze at, yet ‘93 remains largely overlooked and underrated. On a grassy Ohio hillside 50,000 heads were witness to the 40th Grateful Dead concert of 1993. The band would eventually play 81 shows in total by year's end. So we are about at the midway point here. The stompin’ “Jack Straw” opener finds our boys in fine fettle from the start of this show. “Foolish Heart” is of much more recent vintage, yet the band starts weaving throughout the instrumental sections as if they’d been playing this tune since birth. Lesh and Garcia in particular feel locked in and frisky right away. Almost as if the entire premise of loading all this gear onto the stage and luring scores of fans to the scene was entirely to set up Phil and Jerry to unleash the beast with four hands and one brain. It’s only the second song of the night but the revelry and the ravelling are in full swing with total abandon. Next, Bobby’s gonna cool us off a bit with a chill reading of “The Same Thing”. His voice is cracking a little bit again tonight, though it’s barely noticeable in “Jack Straw” and the scruff actually lends itself quite nicely to this “Same Thing”. Moving on to a beautiful and stately version of Jerry’s “Lazy River Road”, somebody is a little out of tune and it causes this otherwise tender performance to sputter just a little bit. Despite the low hum and gurgle of flat notes throughout, it remains a remarkable feat that the Dead were able to put across something as soft and intimate like a handshake at a funeral to a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands trippin’ balls on a grassy hillside. The Ohio crowd laps up Phil’s awkward shouting of “Tom Thumb”. Then Bobby snarls giddily through “Masterpiece” as if to definitively declare once and for all, “No, Phil. THIS is how you sing a Dylan song.” Somber Jerry takes us down “So Many Roads” and sounds convincing enough to nearly lose his voice in the song’s last chorus. All told, Bobby’s voice is holding up well tonight, only starting to seriously trouble him in the first set closer “Promised Land”. Of course this particular band need not be in tip top shape to crush a Chuck Berry song like an insect underfoot. In the moment to moment experience of being there in person and indeed in the immediate aftermath of this first set, it’s hard to not just let the smile overtake your face. For many of us, the opening chord sequence to “Eyes of the World” is quite simply the sound of summer. Again, one has the feeling that we have gathered here just to see and hear Lesh and Garcia weave their sonic tapestry as the two men effortlessly elevate the entire hillside with the jam here. As we segue into “Playin’ in the Band” and its frequent partner “Uncle John’s Band” there is a palpable sense of this evening stepping inexorably upward into classic status. This writer implores you to keep your chin up when you hear the introductory strains of “Corrina” rise from the “Uncle John’s” jam. Incredibly, this is in fact where an already fantastic second set ascends to indisputable greatness. Herein lies perhaps an unexpected lesson as to why you can’t be too quick to turn your back on these new songs. Anybody that saw “Corrina”’s arrival as an opportunity to run to the concessions area for a beer would have missed out on one of the tune’s first truly successful forays into uncharted territory. Weir’s unabashed enthusiasm for the vocal was never once matched by his teammates’ background harmonies. Perhaps part of the reason why fans failed to get excited to hear “Corrina” was because the band never really sounded very excited to play it. In particular those laconic background vocals from Jerry, Phil, and Vince in the chorus sound like three men who would rather be anywhere but on stage singing that particular song. But the outro jam here is simply stellar, with Lesh really chewing up the scenery as he leads the ensemble into “Drums” and “Space”. After teetering precariously on the brink of monotony for the first few minutes, this "Drums" segment finally opens up like the entire history of percussion instruments tumbling down the side of a mountain. Again we are treated to what sounds like Phil's bass being played with a wiffle ball bat in all its menacing hilarity. Dark sound clouds and oceanic waves squirm and swirl like a synthetic symphony set on stun as atonal chords and note clusters bicker and squabble, fighting for air and dominance in a raging sonic debate. In a weird way, this resembles the skeleton of “Corrina” after she’s shaken all the flesh off her bones and set about the dance of death while forces of evil pull her strings like a molting marionette. Somehow a thing of stunning beauty slowly emerges from that ugly scenery and it is “The Wheel” of course. This study in contrasts is worth the price of admission alone and when the boys start to sing you can almost feel 100,000 feet leaving the ground with weightless elation, exhilaration and unbridled joy. Give yourself over completely to the listening experience and it’s a virtual guarantee that your skin will crawl with glowing goosebumps. It’s another otherworldly group improv from these warlocks formerly known as the Warlocks and it registers here as the high point of a show that could easily qualify for official release as a live album by the Grateful Dead. The “Watchtower” tease of three nights previous is finally realized with a full blown rendition here. Ironically, they decide to drop it in on a night when they had already performed two Bob Dylan compositions in the first set, bringing tonight’s total up to three. I’ll leave it to another writer to call up the exact date when the Dead played the most Dylan songs in a single night. But I will mention that out of the 81 concerts performed by the Grateful Dead in 1993 only 14 of them passed without a Bob Dylan song in the setlist. (At the end of December they would go two nights in a row without playing a Bob Dylan song. The only time they did that all year.) With the passing of the home video age, streaming this performance on YouTube is now the closest approximation we have to the experience of bringing home a newly discovered VHS or DVD of a complete concert. There is much to glean from viewing the show in its entirety, from facial expressions, to the band’s fashion sense - or lack thereof, some would say - to the state-of-the-art jumbo-tron visuals of the era that were incorporated into the multi-camera video presentation on the night of the performance. Soundboard audio recordings circulate for every show from 1993, as well as the aforementioned pro-shot clips of a few songs from throughout the year. But for the Couch Tour experience of watching a Dead concert from ‘93 in its entirety, this is all we’ve got. And, in fact, video of the last two songs of the night has been lost to the ages. So, even this visual artifact is incomplete.

Bobby's black tank top advertising some Rastafarian enterprise. Jerry's t-shirt a purple parachute. Both men in short pants unfortunately. Phil's huge wristband, for Christ's sake. Obviously these men don't give a fuck. Vince might as well be a disheveled science teacher in his button down. The big man Jerry is being blasted by at least two high-powered fans throughout the whole show, his white mane at full sail. Bob too, blowin' in the wind. Huge eyeglasses on Phil as well as a white Rex Foundation t-shirt. Weir plays slide on "Lazy River Road". Phil gets a partial pass tonight. At least he wore long pants. Bobby's little starter bald spot just peekin' out. The first few grays in his sideburns. Weirdly expressionless band across the front and in the back. It’s only Mickey and Phil who occasionally grin. The deathbed parable of “Black Peter” is as haunting and obtuse as ever. Its melancholy melody at odds with the crowd’s joyous embrace, it’s a nice comedown from the previous hour-plus of psychedelic skullfuckery. Garcia sounds so present here, so fraught yet focused and full of fire, it’s hard to believe that he’d been onstage exposed to early summer Ohio heat and humidity for close to three hours by this point. Like so much in the man’s vast catalog, it’s subtle but stunning. Bobby signals the segue to a solid “Sugar Magnolia” that closes out this epic set. Amazingly, Jerry just keeps rippin’ through this “Sugar Mag” as if he were just getting warmed up! We get a heart-wrenching “Brokedown Palace” encore to bring this momentous evening in for a smooth landing and gentle kiss goodnight. Speaking from firsthand experience, this show left an entire hillside of stunned freaks in its aftermath. Many fans lingered until the wee hours of the morning, seemingly unable to come unmoored from the spot where such a spectral, spatial experience enfolded them. - Buckeye Lake Music Center, Hebron, OH (Friday, 6/11/93) Opening act: Sting

Jack Straw

Foolish Heart

The Same Thing

Lazy River Road

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

When I Paint My Masterpiece

So Many Roads

Promised Land

Eyes of the World

Playing in the Band ->

Uncle John's Band ->

Corrina ->

Drums ->

Space ->

The Wheel ->

All Along the Watchtower ->

Black Peter ->

Sugar Magnolia

Brokedown Palace

- Recommended tracks: At the top of their game from start to finish, this show has almost nothing in the way of flaws or low points to report. Aside from some minor tuning issues in the first set, along with our collective acceptance of Phil’s terrible voice hacking away at “Tom Thumb” as usual, this show is in the conversation for year end Best Of lists for sure. It’s hard to imagine any serious head excluding it from their top ten shows from ‘93. Epic and essential.