Road Trips, Vol. 2 No. 3: 6/16/74 (State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, IA) & 6/18/74 [Freedom Hall, Louisville, KY]

Best of all the Road Trips. Nuff said.

1974 man. Whoa, what a year? Like a gorgeously radiant autumn sunset that only gets better and better as the sun dips below the horizon revealing cinematic colors, clouds and the faintest hint of glassy stars--the Dead in 74 were landing for a crash (they retired for 18 months once they made it to October). But, this explosion of music before they dried the well was never to be matched again (or before, arguably). If you like jazzy Dead, this is for you. If you like cool setlists, this is the tour for you. If you like it when Jerry does his spacey blues that drip with wha wha and channel extraterrestrials, then this is for you. True, most will come to this for the WRS>It's A Sin as well they should. But to my ears this is a pretty rocking collections of songs from two shows during the bumper part of Summer June in the midwestern states. While it's not a complete show and since it's a soundboard, those are the two biggest negatives. The soundboard makes it sound like Jerry is in a studio noodling away, one gets very little feel for the air in which this music descended from the Wall of Sound. A little matrix action would help here. I much prefer the Dave's Picks approach of using complete shows for the archival qualities however I'm sure some tracks on these shows were subpar. Perhaps Dave knew that going in and used Road Trips as his way to get the cream of the crop out there without bogging us down with complete shows. Who knows? Anytime you have a 28 minute deep spacey Playin' in the Band and a sweet sweet WRS you can't go wrong.