Here Comes Sunshine: RFK Stadium, 6/73

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead For The Committed And The Curious.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season seven of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. I'm your co-host, Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. Well, this week, we wrap up season seven with a Here Comes Sunshine box set finale, covering the June 9th and 10th, 1973 shows at RFK Stadium. It is grand indeed, loaded with all kinds of great music and stories, including a dive into the Allman Brothers Band who were also on the bill for both shows. Speaking of Here Comes Sunshine, here comes Here Comes Sunshine 1973 This new release is a 17 CD limited edition set available exclusively from dead.net that features five previously unreleased concerts recorded during the band's transformative Spring 1973 tour. The shows included in this set are Iowa State Fairgrounds, Des Moines, Iowa 51373, Campus Stadium at UCSB in Santa Barbara, California on 52073, Keysar Stadium, San Francisco 52673 and today's subject, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium Washington, DC on June 9th and June 10th, 1973 The 61073 show, the second of the two RFK shows, will also be available as a standalone release in two configurations, a four CD set and an eight LP set.

The 17 CD big box and the four CD set will be released on June 30th. They'll also be available digitally and the eight LP set comes on July 28th. You can pre-order all of the Here Comes Sunshine 73 releases now over at dead.net.

Head on over to dead.net/deadcast. There's lots to look at. Check out all of our past episodes while you're there, including the complete seasons one through six. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen when, where and how you like to listen.

Please help this podcast by subscribing, hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. And if you think about it, post an episode on your social media. It really helps us out and spreads the word. Very kind of you. Thank you very much. Did you know we have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for you reading pleasure? Well, we recently uploaded season one, so bop on over to dead.net/deadcastdashindex and check them out.

Thanks to everyone who has left their stories at stories.dead.net. We're asking you to share your stories now about going to shows in 73 Anything that you've got, we want to hear. The Dead were on fire. We want to hear your firsthand account. Share those stories over at stories.dead.net and you just may hear yourself on the Deadcast.

In this final episode of season seven of the Deadcast, we head to Washington DC to cover two shows at RFK Stadium held on June 9th and June 10th, 1973 The Allman Brothers Band were also on the bill for these two mega shows and they were hot, literally and figuratively as you'll soon find out. Take it away, Jesse.

Jesse Jarnow (4:04)

The Grateful Dead finished the spring of 1973 on the East Coast, playing two giant shows with the Allman Brothers Band at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, that now conclude the Here Comes Sunshine box set. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager, David Lemieux.

David Lemieux (4:19)

The RFKs on many occasions have very nearly become their own box set, but we're very glad that they ended up all being together. So we've got May 13th through June 10th, we've got four weeks of Grateful Dead spread over five weekends with some of the best and most inspired Grateful Dead I've ever heard. And that goes for everything from Des Moines right through June 10th, the final set with all those guys.

Jesse Jarnow (4:45)

The box set captures mellow Midwest sunshine from Des Moines on May 13th, breezy Pacific Ocean sunshine from Santa Barbara on May 20th, and dreamy Golden Gate Park sunshine from Kizar Stadium on May 26th. But the two shows in RFK were a different variety.

Blazing hot East Coast sunshine, musical and otherwise.

David Lemieux (5:05)

Thank you all for giving us a chance to get a wonderful sun tan.

RFK was really the first time the dead had played a big East Coast stadium. They'd done Roosevelt, but this was a big stadium. This was an NFL stadium. Bear was much more involved in that. The construction of the sound system had to be much bigger than anything they'd used up until then.

Jesse Jarnow (5:25)

Working on the sound system and capturing sonic journals of that work was Owsley Stanley, 11 months post-prison.