Grateful Dead
June 27, 1985
Saratoga Performing Arts Center
Saratoga, NY

Field Gear:  Nakamichi CM-100's w/CP-4 Shotgun Capsules > Sony D-5 > MAC

Transfer: MAC > Tascam 112 MKII > Edirol R-09 > WAV > Audacity > Trader's Little Helper > FLAC Level 8

Recorded, transferred, tracked & FLAC'd by Greg Holtz


Set One

CD 1:

d01t01 - Crowd
d01t02 - In The Midnight Hour
d01t03 - Bertha
d01t04 - Little Red Rooster
d01t05 - The Balcony Incident
d01t06 - Stagger Lee
d01t07 - El Paso
d01t08 - Crazy Fingers
d01t09 - Supplication-Lazy Lightning Jam
d01t10 - High Time
d01t11 - Hell In A Bucket
d01t12 - Don't Ease Me In


Set Two

CD 2:

d02t01 - Tuning
d02t02 - Feel Like A Stranger
d02t03 - Eyes Of The World
d02t04 - Goin' Down The Road Feelin' Bad
d02t05 - Women Are Smarter
d02t06 - Drums

CD 3:

d03t01 - Space
d03t02 - Truckin
d03t03 - Spoonful
d03t04 - Black Peter
d03t05 - Lovelight

Encores:

d03t06 - Johnny B. Goode
d03t07 - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue


Big thanks to Lukas Olsen, for allowing me the use of his Edirol to facilitate these transfers.

We have some BIG projects coming up, as many more master recordings are coming in from taper friends I have recently reconnected with....  this is going to take a long time...

Show Notes:

I taped many shows in 1985, and somewhere around Hershey, Saratoga or Merriwether I found out that my recording deck had a head alignment issue, so there were a couple of shows that could only be played back on that original recorder, as the master tapes were aligned with the heads of that master recorder only.  I know we made 1st gens off of the masters that way, and then got the deck worked on.  I THOUGHT I had most of those 1st gens packed away in the garage, but I did not remember what I did with those "defective" masters.  I know that I gave a friend a bunch of tapes back in the late 1990's, and I believe that he had those masters, along with dozens of other shows.  I THOUGHT that this Saratoga and the first night at Merriwether (1985-06-30) suffered from the head alignment issue.....but ...

I just received a couple of boxes of long lost masters of many shows, including this Saratoga, and the 1985-06-30 Merriwether.... and they are om MX-90s and sound GREAT.

Summing up, I cannot absolutely guarantee that this recording is from the master analog cassette.  It may be a high quality 1st gen, I just don't know.  It is from a pair of Maxell MX-90's, and I only used those for masters at shows, so this one leaves me scratching my head.

Regardless, it sounds darn good after all these years, so I decided to put it up.  Taping location was on the lawn, about half way up, shooting the shotguns at the reinforcement stacks on the top of the the SPAC roof.  We had GREAT sound up there, very thick air, and nice separation..  I made a zillion copies of this show for friends back in the day, and they always raved about how good it sounded.

SO...

That's all I have on this one for the moment.  If I can clear something up in the future, I will add the new info where appropriate.  

Special Thanks go to Dan Taggart for equipment logistics, transportation, moral support and friendship over the last 3 decades, and to Doug Kohler, who generously took me on as a rider on some of these East Coast 1985 Summer shows, and for letting me borrow a D-6 when my deck was in the shop.  Doug, I hope that you and Nancy are still doing well.  It has been a LONG TIME.......

If someone wants to apply for a shnid for this source, thank you, and enjoy!

Greg Holtz
March 22, 2011

