Don’s Pick • Halloween Special, Week 2 of 5

The Only Dick’s Pick That Ever Fit on One Disc, Because the Jam Wouldn’t Let Anything Else

Grateful Dead • October 31, 1971 • Ohio Theatre, Columbus, OH

Out of thirty six releases in the Dick’s Picks series, only one ever fit on a single disc. This show is the reason. Producer Dick Latvala had to cut several first-set tracks just to make room for the second set’s uninterrupted, forty five minute suite, and once you hear why, the decision makes complete sense. Some nights earn that kind of editorial ruthlessness.

This show caught the band in genuine flux. Mickey Hart had left earlier in 1971, leaving Bill Kreutzmann as the sole drummer, a shift that let the group play tighter, lighter, and faster, planting the seeds for the jazz-leaning improvisation that would define their legendary Europe ’72 run. Pianist Keith Godchaux had just joined that October, filling in for an ailing Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and this Halloween show was only his eleventh with the band. His bright, melodic acoustic grand piano work gave Garcia’s guitar solos a new kind of lift they hadn’t had before.

The first set leans into songs that hadn’t yet made it onto a studio record, “Bertha,” “Jack Straw,” “Tennessee Jed,” and “Brown-Eyed Women” among them, giving the crowd that night a genuinely fresh, electric sense of hearing new material live before most of the world ever got to. Kreutzmann drove a blazing “Casey Jones” to close the set, and rather than reach for anything particularly spooky to mark the holiday, the band closed the night with pure celebratory rock and roll, Bob Weir’s “One More Saturday Night” into a blistering cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

Then there’s the second set, the reason this night became legend. “Dark Star” stretches out for over twenty minutes before flowing seamlessly into “Sugar Magnolia,” “St. Stephen,” “Not Fade Away,” and “Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad,” an unbroken suite that critics have called some of the most vibrant, crystal clear playing the Dead ever captured on tape, Garcia’s guitar, Lesh’s bass, and Kreutzmann’s drums locking in with a clarity rare even by the band’s own standard.

Dick Latvala had thirty six shows to choose from and only one earned a single disc. Tonight you get the whole thing, trimmed tracks and all. Week two of five.