Grateful Dead 1982

The year 1982 was a remarkable year for the Grateful Dead. Even though this was a year of an economic recession, leaving a lot of unsold tickets, some of the band still survived and played some of their best shows in years. In 1982, Jerry Garcia resumes singing career after putting it on hold from losing his voice at a concert a couple years prior, forcing him to cancel the rest of the tour for that year. On April 13th, Jerry and Bob Weir made their first of four appearances on Late Night with David Letterman playing Deep Elem Blues and Monkey And The Engineer. On April 21st, Jerry and John Kahn formed “Garcia and Kahn” that showed until April 26th 1988 whenever they weren’t on tour with the Dead. The Grateful Dead released two albums in this year: Promontory Rider (twelve tracks, eight of which were previously released in 1974 and ’75) and Run for the Roses (seven tracks).

The Dead started playing in ’82 from San Francisco on February 16th until New Years Eve after playing across the country and ending in Oakland. In ‘82, the Grateful Dead played a total of 109 different songs in 62 concerts. The majority of the concerts were played in California (20) and one concert was played in Montego Bay, Jamaica; being the only concert outside of the United States. The average setlist was comprised of 19 songs with an encore. The majority of their setlists started with Minglewood Blues and their popular closure of Sugar Mangolia with U.S. Blues being the typical encore. U.S. Blues was mainly their encore song for several years so that wasn’t a big surprise for most Deadheads. There wasn’t a single song that was played at every concert in that year but they did play a section called Drums where Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann would play the drums together (if both present on tour). This so-called “song” was mainly put in their playlist to give the rest of the band members a little bit of a rest since they have been shredding for ten-minute songs