With Deal, Around and Around, Going Down the Road, and One More Saturday night sprinkled in, this was the classic 1974 rock and roll show by the Dead. High points were Scarlet Begonias, Brown Eyed Women and China Cat in the first set, then Promised Land, Big River, and Truckin and Sugar Magnolia in the second set. Some of the voices I recognized on the tapes include above mentioned Paul (now a doctor of osteopathy in San Rafael, CA, friends Jay Abrams and Donny Hamlin of San Mateo, and several others whose names have been forgotten for posterity.) As far as the show goes, I remember that it took off from "US Blues" on at a fast pace and good sound from the get-go. I had yet to learn to keep my mouth shut during the show. I did a mock interview of Bill, as well as several of my friends. Bill Walton, then a senior and the basketball center at UCLA, was standing about ten feet in front of us (we were probably 100 feet back, in the center slightly towards the Jerry Garcia side of the stage.) We had to move further over so Bill's big red head did not block our view. We did run into a number of other familiar fans. Accordingly, I frantically searched but wound up dateless.
I was busy trying to hook up with my girlfriend Francine Lyons, who also attended the show but did not show up where I was supposed to meet her.
I recall that Maria Muldaur played also, though I do not think that I recorded it. Maybe somebody somewhere has a copy, as I would love to hear it again. I lost this tape somewhere down the road, as it became popular in my Cal dormitory the next year. The sound was great for this part as the crowd was quiet and the weather calm. I remember this as being an absolutely great set of bluegrass, featuring Richard Greene on violin, David Grisman, and Jerry on banjo. The first set of the day was the Great American String Band. As tape recorders got steadily smaller and better, these kinds of smuggling shenanigans were no longer needed. These details of what I would stoop to humor me at this point as a 54 year old CPA. We had also considered smuggling the deck inside a watermelon, but this proved impossible so we opted for digging instead. This worked okay, due to several layers of plastic seal. As I had some problems with getting the deck confiscated by authorities (including Bill Graham in person at the February shows at Winterland earlier that year), we decided to bury the deck for the Santa Barbara show inside the stadium the night before the show. I used BASF 120 minute cassettes, and held the mikes by hand, and recorded the show with the Dolby system on.
#CHINA CAT SUNFLOWER COW PALACE FULL#
The deck was "portable" with slots for four "D" batteries, but it was really a full sized cassette deck of the day, including the dolby noise reduction system. My large tape deck kept me out of trouble there. The girls were very cute, in a more southern California blonde way but still with the underwearless style of the era and also very much into dancing. Paul and I had already gotten accepted to Santa Cruz and Cal respectively, where we were to start in the fall. However, there was a real college atmosphere for this show, with many UCSB students as well as students from other California schools in attendance.
The university was not nearly as popular then as it is now. Santa Barbara had suffered a major oil spill in 1969, the beaches were still not their pristine selves. On May 25,1974, we were three weeks away from graduating from high school in San Mateo, CA, and had a thoroughly entertaining drive down the coast. The stage was ringed with the enormous sound system that filled the stage and went up probably thirty feet all around the stage. The weather was great, dry, sunny, and warm. In Jeremy Witt's own words.Dec 2010: I attended the Dead show at UC Santa Barbara in May, 1974, accompanied by friend Paul Handelman and my Sony TC-152 cassette recorder and Sony microphones.
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