Did the Grateful Dead play their best show at Cornell University's Barton Hall on May 8th, 1977? True connoisseurs usually say no, pointing instead to something from the peak years between 1969 and 1974 (or, if they are contrarians, something from the Brent era). The argument is that Cornell only got so hyped up because a high-quality Betty Board circulated widely among tapers before everything went onto the Internet Archive. For a long time, Cornell was the only bootleg I had, with cassette labels handwritten by my friend Ellie. But the Heads don't just love Cornell because it's familiar. I have listened to a lot of other shows now, and I stand by the second set opener as an all-timer. It's a pair of songs, "Scarlet Begonias" and "Fire on the Mountain", which Deadheads know as a single entity, Scarlet>Fire.
This Scarlet>Fire clocks in at a little under 25 minutes. It may sound long, but it's not even close to being the longest one; that would be the 34-minute version from 11-1-79. Some people like the more ruminative and exploratory performances, but I prefer Cornell for its tighter focus (by Dead standards).
Scarlet>Fire is remarkably uneventful from a musical structure perspective. The band spends about 19 of the 25 minutes of the Cornell version's running time playing an unbroken loop of the chords B and A. If you aren't predisposed to liking the Dead, this might sound mind-numbing. I could defend it by saying that it's music for dancing, not music for sitting and listening. But I also think it's more interesting for sitting and listening than my description makes it seem.
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