For a legacy filled with legendary performances, the Grateful Dead Live at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on August 13th 1975 stands out. The band only played four shows during that entire year (remarkable, for a band that toured non-stop for decades), and at their August 13th show, they rolled multi-track tape which allowed the band to, decades later, properly mix the show.
Because the Great American Music Hall holds less than 1,000 people (another unique thing about this show), it was an invitation-only performance in which the band debuted their recent studio album Blues For Allah in a live setting.
Although One From The Vault has been available on CD nearly continuously since 1991, the vinyl version was only available for less than a year (and in Europe only) in the early 1990s. This deluxe vinyl reissue marks the first time this legendary show has been available anywhere in over 20 years and the first time in America.
Rolling Stone magazine has described One From The Vault as:
“The closest the Dead came in the Seventies to the band’s trippy, late-Sixties peak, and the performance indulged the group’s jazzy, free-form impulses even further. “Help on the Way,” “Franklin’s Tower,” and “The Music Never Stopped” cohere into a twenty-minute song cycle. “King Solomon’s Marbles,” a tumbling, polyrhythmic instrumental by bassist Phil Lesh, crackles with energy. Inventive percussion duets by Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are appended to “Eyes of the World,” as well as to the pretty, elliptical “Crazy Fingers.” The crowning touch is “Blues for Allah,” which runs 21 minutes and explores inner space with a meditative intensity barely hinted at on the studio version.”
