Cornell '77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead's Concert at Barton Hall by Peter Conners

 Published 2017 by Cornell University Press

Whether fans believe Barton Hall was one of the best Grateful Dead shows ever played, or that it’s an overhyped stuffed sausage of a show, the root of those opinions is an unyielding passion for the music and band. 

With Cornell ’77, Peter Conners takes on the most widely distributed, discussed, debated and dissected Grateful Dead show ever performed. The subject comes with baggage. Shortly after being disseminated through the wider tape-trading network, 5/8/77 began to be treated by some as sacred text. After the show was later repackaged by the entertainment industry into CDs, vinyl and lavish box sets, I fretted Conners might fall into the trap of typing into an echo chamber. He does not. Instead of settling into the old argument over whether 5/8/77 deserves its reputation, he traces how the reputation began to take hold and how the concert tape was deemed important enough for inclusion into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.

The story begins where the Grateful Dead fit, or didn’t, among the sounds of disco, punk, soft rock and shifting commercial tastes. Against the national cultural backdrop of 1977, the band almost seemed untethered from the moment. They had not released a studio album in two years, their last live album, Steal Your Face, had been panned and to many observers they were viewed as a relic from another era. The music told a more complicated story. Garcia’s guitar sound was evolving in real time, with the Mu-Tron III envelope filter adding a rubbery, vocal quality to “Estimated Prophet,” “Fire on the Mountain” and the disco-funk exploration of “Dancin’ in the Streets.” If the Dead appeared commercially out of fashion, they weren't standing still. Their 1977 sound was more muscular, focused and rhythmically alert than the caricature of a fading psychedelic warhorse might suggest. The local situation on the Cornell campus was no less precarious. The student-run Cornell Concert Commission was still recovering from the fallout of a canceled Deep Purple show where a terrible rain storm and angry fans destroyed tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Even if the students managed to pull off the Dead show, would it even matter?

The Grateful Dead had nothing to do with 1977. They were anachronistic, out of step, out of vogue, and, excepting the ether to cut their cocaine, out of cultural gas. Fortunately, no one who loved them gave a damn. 

For all practical purposes, Cornell ’77 could be described as 200 pages of liner notes. That may sound like faint praise, but I love it. At their best, liner notes are a form of archaeology, tracing the people, studios, gear and accidents that provide a cultural context for recorded music. When the CD era found its groove in the early 1990s, labels like Rhino raised the standard with reissues and box sets that included thick booklets, deep research, recording details and historical context. Those booklets became important companions for music obsessives perched in a chair listening to the tunes.

That is one reason I found Conners’ approach compelling. For a band whose official live catalog now stretches beyond one hundred releases, Grateful Dead archival packaging has not always matched the depth of the audience’s curiosity. Many releases contain a brief insert and a couple of photos. It’s an amuse-bouche. But Deadheads tend to want more: details of the venue, headlines of the day, weather conditions, what was happening around the band and how the tape circulated. Given the belief among many Heads that circumstance could, would and should shape the performance of a concert, a song or even a segment of a song, those background details matter.

Conners seems to understand what Deadheads are hungry for. Cornell '77 is not simply about a three-hour performance on a Sunday night in May. He examines the sound Betty Cantor-Jackson captured that night, why her clean, warm recording moved through the tape-trading network and how collectors helped spread the show decades before it became an official product.

To build the story, Conners interviews students who helped bring the show to Cornell, early tour rats, tape traders, Grateful Dead archivists and academics. He even acknowledges the wacked and cracked corner of the Cornell conspiracy world, where a few Heads have argued the show never happened.

 You will hear from record executives, academics, scholars, Dead family members, tapers, traders, and trolls.

The only moment that made me raise an eyebrow comes when Conners refers to the “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire on the Mountain” pairing as “Scar>Fire,” a shorthand he suggests many Deadheads use. Perhaps they do. But I never heard it. In my circles, the couplet was always “Scarlet>Fire.” Less a quibble, it’s a reminder that for decades Deadhead culture was not been bound by geography. Instead, it was connected by tapes, parking lots and photocopied setlists. A hardcore group of Heads in Raleigh, Eugene, Hartford or Ithaca could develop its own shorthand and nomenclature. In Deadhead culture, the lack of standardization was part of the standard.

Is one Grateful Dead concert worthy of a full book? In lesser hands, perhaps not. In Conners’ hands, the answer is yes. (And, I want more!) Cornell ’77 succeeds as a page turner because it is not really trying to declare a winner in the tiresome “best show ever” argument. It’s an exploration of why a recording dubbed in dorm rooms could become a monument, a debate and… a punchline.

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