The Grateful Dead—Mammoth Gardens, Denver, CO, April 25, 1970
w/John Hammond
In the fall of 1969, Stuart Green, a law-school dropout from New Jersey, purchased an erstwhile dancehall in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver. Mammoth Gardens first opened in 1907 as a skating rink and, over the years, served as a manufacturing site for electric cars, an all-purpose sports arena, and storage warehouse among other odd and inventive uses. Green reportedly spent $50,000 to refurbish the place and dropped another $13,000 on a sound system, hoping to create a club that would emulate Bill Graham's Fillmore. The joint opened for business in the Spring of 1970 and the opening weekend featured Clouds, the Boulder-based Zephyr, and headliner Jethro Tull. Playing mostly music from Benefit, Tull reportedly put on an outstanding show.
The Grateful Dead made their only Colorado visit of 1970 a week later with John Hammond on the co-bill. Unfortunately, we only have the tape of the 4/25 show. The recording of that night’s performance circulated as 4/24 (Friday) for quite some time, although we now know via attendees and newspaper reviews that it is in fact the Saturday evening show. As for the 4/24/70 gig, we can list a drum duet in electric 1 (Set I), Wake Up Little Susie in the acoustic (set II), and Not Fade Away > Turn on Your Lovelight to close the electric 2 (Set III overall). We can also note that Pigpen's backing of Hammond took place on this date and not on 4/25/70.
Our tape opens with some acoustic numbers, most likely another practice run for the soon-to-be implemented An Evening With The Grateful Dead format with the New Riders that would debut at Harpur College in early May. The field recording takes a bit of getting used to but once the ears adjust it’s a joy to hear the tunes presented in the unadorned acoustic arrangement. I Know you Rider is first out of the gate—separated once more from China Cat Sunflower and slowed down to a funereal dirge, Weir harmonizing with Garcia on some verses. The crowd chatters throughout and a few audience members shout for the people up front to sit down. Garcia: "There it is, the famous dichotomy, the famous duality—those who like to sit and those who like to stand." Weir: "It's better to stand on your head." The rest of the set passes without incident. We get Bobby’s take on Jesse Fuller’s Monkey & the Engineer, and early versions of Friend of the Devil, Candyman, and Uncle John’s Band, songs that will emerge on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.
The electric portion of the night kicks off with a hot, hot Easy Wind. A month removed from laying it down at Pacific High Studios, the Hunter song is really starting to purr on stage. After a few more Workingman’s cuts—Cumberland Blues and Dire Wolf—we arrive at the big jam portion of the show. This Dark Star is a classic—tight and focused, with a drive similar to the Europe ‘72 Stars (think Hamburg). The opening jam starts out deliberately paced, but steadily becomes more energetic. The quick strumming drops into a quiet space and the atmosphere thickens with Garcia's expanding riffs, tense pauses, and lingering feedback. The audience is hushed. Jerry goes with a Sputnik jam before Lesh, Weir and he take a detour into the Feelin’ Groovy motif. They hold this for a few bars before shifting their course—via a few Tighten Up chords—to a long, dynamic jam sequence. The music carries the band, the jam explodes, and Garcia rips into the Dark Star riff with incendiary soloing, resulting in a segment that is as outside and exploratory as anything you'll hear all year.
Dark Star transitions into a charged St. Stephen that flows with an exultant bounce. The crowd is delighted and the version is everything it should be, including a tremendous bang after "another man spills," as (true story) Pigpen fires off a pistol. Though 1970 Stephens usually cue up Not Fade Away, tonight they segue into The Eleven for the last time. The tune had been dropped since 2/14/70, so it's like the return of an old friend as they swerve headlong around the corners of the jam. The take is raw and unhinged, exploding forward in the 11/8 time signature in full galactic flight. And instead of segueing into another jam vehicle such as Lovelight, they stop for a short drum solo. Out of the drum break emerges a fast, latin-style rhythmic jam. Unfortunately, the tape cuts off after only two minutes and we’re left to wonder what could have been. The taper does manage to get a bit more life out of his machine, and we get a five-minute fragment of It's A Man's Man's Man's World, with a dazzling Garcia solo before the tape runs out again.
A few days after the performance, Mike DeLong, from the Colorado Springs Sun, penned the following: "The Dead left the stage, and their subjects screamed and stomped for at least 10 minutes for them to return. Wisely, they did not; after that devastating medley, anything else would have been painfully anticlimactic. Understatement of the Year: The Grateful Dead are terrifyingly good. They are an overwhelming, almost mystical experience. Magic is alive and well."