Why It Truly Was Summer Magic 1985 For The Grateful Dead

1985 is the year Grateful Dead fans skip past — Jerry Garcia's drug bust made headlines, but on stage the band was playing faster and more dangerous than they had in a decade. Check out our membership and get free access to the Shakedown Observatory:    / @theshakedownarchives   Explore the Observatory: https://theshakedownarchives.com/obse... Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033EHpF... Voiceover for this video provided by Rich Bonniface (https://www.richboniface.com/) January 18, 1985: Jerry Garcia is arrested in Golden Gate Park on drug charges. Six days earlier he'd sat for an interview with Jas Obrecht of Frets magazine that's still painful to read today. Weeks later, the Grateful Dead's twentieth-anniversary tour — "Twenty Years So Far" — sent the band digging through their own catalog for songs they hadn't touched in years, and what came out was some of the fastest, most unhinged playing of their career. At Nassau Coliseum in March, High Time and Smokestack Lightnin' were already back in rotation. At the Greek Theatre in June, they debuted Keep On Growing, brought back Stagger Lee, and revived Cryptical Envelopment for the first time in thirteen years. Dennis McNally pushed for a celebration; the band delivered something closer to a reckoning. Days later at Riverbend in Cincinnati, during an actual thunderstorm, the Grateful Dead played the full Cryptical Envelopment / The Other One / Cryptical Envelopment sandwich — a structure that hadn't been performed since 1971. The tour rolled on through Merriweather Post Pavilion, a brutal heat wave in Houston and Austin, Richmond Coliseum (later released as Dick's Picks 21), and Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland. Tape traders still call it underrated. Eighteen months later, Jerry Garcia was in a diabetic coma, and the version of the Grateful Dead that played 1985 was gone for good. Want to go deeper? Join the channel and get free access to the Shakedown Observatory — our interactive journey through 30 years of the music:    / @theshakedownarchives   CHAPTERS 0:00 Why 1985 Isn't On Anyone's Peak List 1:31 Jerry's Bust and the Nassau Bustouts 2:34 Keep On Growing Debuts at the Greek 3:26 Cryptical Envelopment Returns After 13 Years 5:22 The Riverbend Thunderstorm Sandwich 6:57 Merriweather's Documented Tempo Surge 7:34 Heat-Wave Shows in Houston and Austin 8:44 Richmond Becomes Dick's Picks 21 9:24 Kaiser Oakland and the Underrated Verdict SOURCES Dead.net — official Grateful Dead site: https://www.dead.net Internet Archive — Grateful Dead live recordings collection: https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead Jas Obrecht — the complete 1985 Frets interview: https://jasobrecht.substack.com/p/jer... Jerrybase — Grateful Dead setlist database: https://jerrybase.com/events/19850624-01 Shakedown Archives tells the rise-and-fall stories of the bands and artists that defined an era — the music history nobody filed away. The music history nobody filed away. #GratefulDead #ClassicRock #MusicHistory