12-7-68: bellarmine college, louisville, KY.

1968 soundboards are few and far between, with over two-thirds of the shows unaccounted for. the first few months of the year are pretty well represented as the band was taping shows for anthem of the sun. after this, the spring and early summer is essentially a black hole for dead tapes until owsley re-upped as their soundman in june. the remainder of the year, though, is rather spotty, and it seems that many of bear’s tapes have disappeared. a couple of nice audience tapes fill the gaps but, unfortunately, there were very few people making field recordings in 1968. aside from the renowned mickey & the hartbeats matrix shows and some interesting garcia jam sessions, there's only a handful of tapes from the fall, and even less from the winter dates.

december 7 is notable in that it is the first archived performance with tom constanten. it's also the dead's first outing to kentucky (and the only time the band would ever play a gig at bellarmine college). you might ask what were the grateful dead doing at a small catholic college in louisville? well, the most reasonable motivation is they needed a stopover at the end of their fall midwest tour, and the 2600 seat knight's hall venue neatly fit the bill. either that, or the boys were dying to visit the repository for all of thomas merton's manuscripts.

the owsley tape opens with an abbreviated take on the dark star > st. stephen > the eleven sequence. the music flows with hints of free percussion & harmonics. TC's organ gyrates in the mix before the second dark star verse, st stephen is concise and energized, but the eleven derails due to a bad onstage echo. as the crew works out the technical issues, weir expounds: “nobody knows where present time is,” directly followed by a sedated promoter who provides stoned crowd control: “the curfew’s been cancelled, the kids are all in bed.” the tape cuts back in for the final four minutes of death don't have no mercy, which is fierce and can only make us wonder what the front end of the tune sounded like. jerry follows with a few words for the audience: "thanks, alot. we're gonna play a bunch more, we're not finished at all...and also you know you don't have to pay strict attention to us, we don't do very much that's funny. and if you want, you can dance. it feels good to dance. after a while you'll be pretty used to us." and with that, we're greeted with an adventurous 29 minutes of that's it for the other one > new potato caboose. the other one middle jam is really starting to catch and the energy is palpable. the cryptical reprise winds down delicately and the segue into new potato is seamless; tonight's take on the bobby peterson/phil lesh-composed tune is a bit more sloppy than in august, but it still evinces all of the anthem of the sun qualities with its intricate harmonies, rapid changes in tempo and meter, and instrumental weirdness.

billy kreutzmann is absent for the second frame. “one of our drummers, uh, broke down,” jerry explains. mickey adeptly covers his portion of the battery. the set begins with the only version of rosemary the dead would ever play to a live audience. it is an extremely quiet recording and you'll have to crank up the volume to really hear it. despite the levels, it's completely worth your full aural presence—a delicate, sensitive performance. he was a friend of mine is next and, unfortunately, is cut off right in the chorus. pig gets in the mix after this with a fine rendition of it hurts me too. his harp work is subtle and blends flawlessly with the rich tone of jerry's guitar. the set closes with an audience-requested morning dew, followed by a short, but sweet we bid you goodnight. “you’ve just been victimized by the grateful dead,” barbs garcia.

this one-off performance at bellarmine U captures the band in one of their most pivotal years for stage improvisation. both sets are loaded with boundary pushing compositions and the septet is in full experimental mode, ready to push many of their showcase songs to their fullest extent. despite the drops, cuts, gouges, and warts, i'm more than happy to be a victim of this late '68 recording.

https://archive.org/details/gd1968-12-07.sbd.miller.88674.sbeok.flac16