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Relix Streams Cornell ’77 (and David Lemieux Explains Why The Grateful Dead Have Not Released It)

Today is the 35th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s performance at The Mosque in Richmond, Virginia on 5/25/77. While this is by no means the best known show by the band from May 1977 (more on that in a moment), it received a formal release earlier this year as the first installment of current archivist David Lemieux’s Dave’s Picks series. As for that May 8, 1977 gig at Cornell University’s Barton Hall, this week it was announced that the recording will be added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. To mark the occasion, we are now streaming the second set and encore from that night on Relix.com.

Speaking of May 8, 1977, fans have long wondered why the band has yet to release a recording of that show. We spoke with Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux earlier today for insight into his current and future release plans and in the context of that conversation, he affirmed that 5/8/77 has yet to be released because the archives does not have the source tape. That tape was recorded by Betty Cantor, left in a storage facility and when she failed to make her payments in the mid-1980s, eventually sold via auction where the tape was then selectively seeded and distributed to the Deadhead community (along with about 60 other shows). It’s because of this series of events that so many people hold pristine copies of 5/8/77 which in part is how the show built its reputation (and why so many folks enjoy Jarrod, Brandi, Dave Hester, Barry Weiss and the whole gang on A&E’s Storage Wars).