Grateful Dead—Performing Arts Center, Milwaukee, WI, October 24, 1972
Just the second set for this gig, and there’s a sound drop-off before Casey Jones, but it doesn’t matter. This one’s about the beauty of the fall of 1972 and a band that is playing above and beyond everyone's expectations. That said, you can blindly grab any one of the autumn recordings and always come out with some of the best Grateful Dead moments ever. Trust me, I’ve listened to everything from the tour.
The tape opens onto a fiery, extended take on Truckin.’ The take is close to perfect and it’s one of those ‘72 versions with an outro jam that just keeps on cooking. A quick drum interlude serves as a bridge to The Other One. Tonight’s run through the Weir-Kruetzmann song is buzzing with verve, and chockful of compelling jam structures. The post-verse improvisation is outstanding as the quintet moves with seamless translation between jam and spatial motifs, before sidestepping a bit for a Lesh bass solo with a deep Kreutzmann backbeat, and then traveling outward, led by Garcia, into space. He's Gone soothingly comes out of a deep Tiger meltdown, to the audience’s delight, and has an unusually fervid ending jam melding back into The Other One and an exceptionally bright final verse.
Recorded by Bear and transferred by Charlie Miller (from the David Gans reel master source), this soundboard fragment is aces all around.
Pyrotechnics Addendum
After the show, the band/crew initiates a fireworks fight inside the Marc Plaza Hotel where the McGovern campaign is also staying. Dennis McNally gives an A+ account of the wooly scene in his book A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Crown, 2011):
On the next night, their last in Milwaukee, Weir was in the final van load back from the gig to the hotel. Some of the local union stagehands had sold a considerable stack of fireworks, legal in Wisconsin, to the always enthusiastic crew. Just as Weir was halfway across the lobby, the first fusillade went off. All the men with sunglasses, tiny radios in their ears, and bulges in their armpits dove to the floor, guns out. Weir kept moving. Upstairs, he got on the phone, found out where the fireworks were stashed and got his share.
By now, of course, local police and the Secret Service were furiously trying to find the source of the artillery. Weir had landed in Keith's room, and fortunately, all that was left of their armory was blue smoke. When the police entered and demanded identification, Keith, who looked to Weir like the archetypal wavy-lipped cartoon drunk, snarled and slurred, "Fuck you, pig, I'm not showing you no fucking ID." Remarkably, he was the only person arrested that night, although Kreutzmann was ejected from the hotel after getting rude at the front desk.
Weir got Keith bailed out and stashed him at the Ramada, along with Kreutzmann, who in typically cyclical fashion had achieved a temporary nirvana. Once in his new room, he had turned on the radio and gotten a jazz station that was the best he'd ever heard. He lay down, blissed out, and listened to music for hours. 💀