12/18/73 and 12/19/73 Story Curtis Hixon Convention Hall, Tampa FL 12/18/73 and 12/19/73 Eric - These were my first shows. When I was in high school, small cassette recorders came out, and I began experimenting with recording music via the microphone by playing my stereo real loud. Some of the tapes came out quite good. So I decided that if Cream came anywhere nearby (Columbus, OH), I would record them. They didn't come, and I moved to Florida in 1969 and got into the dead around 1970. They didn't tour anywhere near Orlando or Gainesville for several years. A group of friends went up to Atlanta (about an 8-10-hour drive) in '72 to see them. I had to work. By Jan. 73 I was living in Gainesville (at UF). A friend from Long Island had a collection of dead tapes (mainly WBAI broadcasts). He went to Long Island over spring break and attempted to tape the 3/19/73 show. A roady confiscated his tapes, recorder and microphone about 3/4 of the way through the concert. He had passed the NRPS and first 25 minutes of the dead over to a friend, so those tapes survived. He brought them back to Gainesville; the dead portion sounded great. I was determined to begin recording concerts. Another friend worked at the campus radio station and recorded a Steven Stills concert with a shotgun mike from the top of Gator Stadium - that came out pretty good. When I found out the Dead were coming to Tampa I went to the best electronics store I could find to get the best microphone I could afford. Sony had just come out with an electric condenser mic, and the specs looked good. I bought it for $20.00. Powered by a penlight battery. It actually outperformed mikes costing $100.00 or more (that was pretty good money back then). I needed a decent recorder. I was working part time for the Medical Library at UF. They had just bought some Sony recorders to use in walking tours of the library. I checked the specs on them - they were decent recorders and had an indicator light instead of a level control, so you could see the recording level in the dark (continuous "on" meant you were overloading the recorder). I don't know the model number. I arranged to work on the Friday before the Dead shows (because the work study student locked up on Friday), and I "borrowed" the recorder for the long weekend. It was perfect for recording because smoking wasn't allowed, and flashlights would light the place up like matches, so this way the entire recorder could be kept hidden and the levels could still be adjusted. The night of the concert, the audience was filled with anticipation, as for many people this was their first dead concert. About 25 friends came down from Gainesville - others from Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville, etc. Curtis Hixon doesn't hold too many people - maybe 10,000 max. It was about half-filled I believe. There were signs going in about not taking drugs, etc. into the auditorium and also that tape recorders would be confiscated and that owners would be fined or imprisoned or both. The recorder was big and bulky so my girlfriend brought a large purse and we hid it in there. I chose to sit up in the seats (right side of stage, halfway back) because I thought it would be easier to hold the mike still. Since it was my first show I didn't know what it was going to be like. I was hoping for a Dark Star at some point; I was also hoping for minimal overlap on the two nights. They opened with Tennessee Jed, and the crowd just went crazy - like a big release - the dead were actually playing in Florida. I got my Dark Star, and all went well. Halfway through, Weir told a story about a German U-Boat in Tampa Bay; the evening was just about perfect. When I got back to the car, I checked two of the tapes and played about 30 seconds from each one - they sounded fine. The next day (12/19) we drove back down to Tampa, using the same procedures. A cop stopped my girlfriend and looked in her purse to check for drugs, then said "What's this?" when he saw the recorder. I blurted out -- "It's just a tape recorder -- I didn't want to leave it in the car because I was afraid it would get stolen." He said "ok - go on in." and I breathed easier. Another cop overheard and thought about the restrictions on recording and said "wait a minute..." but we were already in the crowd and moving through. When the band came out, Weir made a little speech about people getting busted for smoking the night before. Garcia chimed in: Remember your hippie training people... be cool!" The show was great. After the shows, my friends and I compared what had happened over the two days. Another friend had bought a Sony stereo recorder for the occasion and recorded the 18th as well. He was right up front. When I heard his tapes, they sounded rather odd -- He was so close to the stage that the mix was off - Weir's guitar overpowered everyone else - but the quality of the tape itself was very good. I preferred my tapes, but it was a matter of taste. No one else had recorded the 19th as far as we could figure out. I transferred both nights to open reel and returned the recorder to the library. Later I read about Dead Relix magazine in an ad in Rolling Stone and traded the Tampa shows with some of the people there. I traded occasionally until about 1977. ---------- Writing about the Tampa show reminded me of a bunch of other things about that night. I was learning a lot about folk and blues, and about two weeks before the concert I had been reading a folk song collection and read the words to a song called "Fenario." The introduction to the song in the book described it as something like "a beautiful little folk song that is hardly ever played anymore, even at folk festivals." It blew me away to hear it performed about two weeks later. They played a lot of folk stuff those two nights, like "Don't Ease me in," which I had been listening to in its original form by Henry Thomas (a fine country blues singer of the 1920s). The way I traded back then was to trade in the reverse of what format the tapes were in -- if I had cassettes, I traded with open reels. If my tape was a reel, I traded on cassette. I never used dolby because it always sounded muddy. I always had it in mind to get a Burwin (sp?) compander (compressor/expander) which did wonders for the tapes, but they stopped making them before I had a chance to buy one. I don't know if they make anything like it today. I took one of the tampa tapes down to the audio store that sold them once and had him put it through the compander, and it sounded great. It increased the dynamic range markedly. It became obsolete because of the convenience of Dolby, but it worked so much better it's too bad. Apparently people didn't like having to remember where they set the compression for a recording (so that it could be expanded to the appropriate level).