Jerry Garcia Band
Nassau Coliseum
Uniondale, NY
11/1/1993
BARN269

Original master recording:  Sony ECM-959 stereo mic in painter’s cap, very FOB, center, on the floor -> Denon DTR-80P (master @16 bit/48khz)

DAT Transfer: Sony R-500 -> Sound Devices 722 digital input (@24/48khz)

Mastering:  Spectralayers 11 for painstaking manual scrubbing of thousands of yells, whistles, conversations, howls, yelps, laughs, etc @ 32 bit float/48khz.  Then to Adobe Audition 25.3.0.71 for EQ and fixing hundreds of small +/- 2-5db volume differences between the L/R channels due to the mic being loose in my hat — all at 32 bit float/48khz.  24 to 16 bit dithering done in Adobe Audition 2025. Tracked in CDWav 1.98.  Flac files tagged using Tag&Rename 3.9.15.


Set 1
(Cats Under The Stars) <<- not recorded
1. Stop That Train (Peter Tosh)  (missing beginning)
2. Let It Rock (Chuck Berry)
3. Simple Twist Of Fate (Bob Dylan)
4. Ain't No Bread In The Breadbox (Norton Buffalo)
5. Struggling Man (Jimmy Cliff)
6. My Sisters And Brothers (The Sensational Nightingales)
7. Deal

Set 2
1. The Way You Do The Things You Do (The Temptations)
2. And It Stoned Me (Van Morrison)
3. Think (Jimmy McCracklin)
4. Reuben And Cherise
5. Don't Let Go (Roy Hamilton)
6. Tangled Up In Blue (Bob Dylan)
(No encore)

Jerry Garcia - guitar, vocals
John Kahn - bass
Melvin Seals - organ and keys
David Kemper - drums
Jacklyn LaBranch, Gloria Jones - backing vocals


To get to Nassau Coliseum, I had to take the LIRR from Penn Station in NYC and then take a bus from the train station to the venue.  The train was extremely delayed (I believe due to a rainstorm), which caused me to miss recording the opening song "Cats Under The Stars" and the beginning of "Stop that Train".

Recorded, transferred (2/12/2011), tracked (8/4/2025), mastered (5/13-8/4/2025), tagged (8/5/2025), and posted (8/5/2025) by Scott Bernstein.

Taper notes:
For BARN269, I am reaching back to a recording I have been wanting to release since 2011 -- my recording of the Jerry Garcia Band from Nassau Coliseum, as part of their Fall 1993 tour.  I was lucky enough to see him 3 times on this tour -- the big show on Halloween night at the Brendan Byrne arena in NJ, this show the following night in Long Island, NY -- and then again almost 2 weeks later at MSG (the famous show where saxophonist David Murray sat in for the entire show).

This show, the night after the big party night on Halloween was very much a sleeper show.  Filled with really tasty song choices from the first note -- 2 spectacular Dylan covers, 2 killer reggae covers of Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff, Van Morrison, classic Chuck Berry, blues from Norton Buffalo ("Ain't No Bread..."), classic soul ("The Way You Do...") and gospel ("My Sisters and Brothers")...and just a couple of Jerry Garcia's originals ("Cats Under The Stars" and "Ruben Cherise".

I just so happened to score a spectacular ticket dead center on the floor, which also happened to be an ideal location to record the show from.  Everyone knows that the Grateful Dead allowed taping (at least openly since the mid 1980s), but hardly anyone realizes that in his solo forays outside of the Grateful Dead, Jerry did NOT allow his shows to be taped.  So, any Jerry Garcia recordings that you've heard (Jerry Garcia Band, Garcia/Grisman, Garcia/Kahn solo shows) and are not official live releases from the band were either leaked from Jerry Garcia's vaults or "stealthily" recorded.  So, in this case I decided that given my ideal recording location, I would sneak my Sony stereo mic and recently purchased DAT recorder in.

The main problem with the fact that I had to be sneaky about recording is the fact that when I'm taping openly, I can put my microphones on a tall tripod and raise them up and above the fray of crowd noise.  In this case, the boisterous Long Island crowd (many of whom were chemically altered) turned out to really intrude on my recording.  Fans close to me loudly whooped, hollered, whistled, hooted, howled and cackled their way through the show -- which listening to this otherwise-shimmering recording a less-than ideal listen.  Back when I originally transferred and started working on this recording in 2011(!), the tools that I had were much more primitive than what we have now.  Trying to wipe away the loud crowd from the music was inelegant at best.  Flash forward 14 years, and the tools can work a lot more "magic" on recordings that need restoration.  Yes, there are many automated features that can help break out individual instruments (or vocals) from a stereo recording...and even some than claim to be able to separate audience sounds from music.  Unfortunately none of that automation was helpful here.  That said, I was able to listen to the entire show and painstakingly find every annoying expression of a member of the audience wipe it away from the recording -- in most cases with no trace left of the original blemish.

Unfortunately this was a very slow process and it took me many weeks of slow progress to get through it all.

To add insult to injury, as I worked on this recording, I noticed a somewhat constant "sway" of microphone levels going up and down a few decibels at a time between the left and right channels -- which I recall being due to a problem with the piece of duct tape I was using to keep the microphone in place in my hat, and the (stereo) mic kept moving on its own on top of my head...  This channel drift was also not something which I could deal with automatically (unless I wanted to apply automated level compression to the recording to the recording, and I didn't want to do that).  So this was another painstaking manual process that I took on -- for a total of nearly 3 months of actively chipping away at this recording.

So, ultimately, 32 years after I recorded this incredible dark horse of a show -- and 14 years after I first started working on amazing show out, I'm excited to present this recording to you in a massively upgraded form.

One warning:  Jerry's voice is a bit hoarse -- especially late in the show.  This version of "Reuben and Cherise" (one of his best songs) is marred by both Jerry's haziness on remembering the lyrics and his hoarseness (though his guitar playing and the rest of the band's performance on the song step up admirably).  On the positive side, this performance of "Don't Let Go" goes DEEP and has an expansive jam in it.  Both of the Dylan covers in this show really swing for the fences.  On the whole, Jerry does a great job with the rest of the lyrics and his vocals are fine.

Sadly, I was stuck in a major delay on the Long Island Rail Road from NYC on the way there, causing me to miss the opening song ("Cats Under The Stars"), but I did get my recording running pretty quickly for the next song.

Enjoy!

