New Riders of the Purple Sage (with Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar)
Boston Garden
Boston, MA
Monday April 2, 1973


Maxell UD C90 tape > Sony WR665 Cassette Player >
Ego-sys Waveterminal 2496 > WAV > Soundforge for
track splitting > Flac (level 8) via TLH

Opener for Grateful Dead

1. Sutter's Mill
2. ??
3. ??
4. Duncan and Brady (traditional)
5. I Don't Need No Doctor (Ray Charles)
6. Groupie
7. Louisiana Lady
8. ??
9. Ring Ring Goes the Bell (Chuck Berry)
10. Take a Letter Maria (R. B. Greaves)
11. ??
12. ?? (inc Tape flip cut)
13. Last Lonely Eagle
14. Willie and the Hand Jive (Johnny Otis)

15. Honky-Tonk Women (Rolling Stones)

16. start of Grateful Dead set

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Now this was a concert! NRPS and
the Grateful Dead played a total of
6 and a half hours ending at 1am !
I feel very fortunate to have been
there.

RIP John Dawson
July 24, 2009
John Dawson, Country-Rock Songwriter, Dies at 64
By BEN SISARIO

John Dawson, a singer and songwriter whose band
New Riders of the Purple Sage began as a country-rock
offshoot of the Grateful Dead but had a long life
of its own, died on Tuesday in San Miguel de Allende,
Mexico, where he lived. He was 64.

The cause was stomach cancer, said
Trebbie Thomas, a family friend.

Mr. Dawson, known as Marmaduke, founded New Riders
of the Purple Sage in 1969 with David Nelson and
Jerry Garcia, whom Mr. Dawson had known from
Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band Champions, a
Grateful Dead predecessor formed in 1964. Mr. Dawson
was looking for a band to perform his country-inflected
songs, and Mr. Garcia was eager for a project in
which he could indulge his newest musical obsession,
pedal-steel guitar.

According to Dennis McNally’s book “A Long Strange
Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead,” the
group grew out of casual performances at the
Underground coffeehouse in Menlo Park, Calif., and
took its name from a 1912 Western novel by Zane Grey,
“Riders of the Purple Sage.” Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh
of the Grateful Dead were briefly members, and New Riders
became one of the Dead’s regular opening acts, its
country-leaning sound complementing the older
band’s psychedelic folk-rock.

The group’s formal association with the Grateful Dead
did not last long: Mr. Hart and Mr. Lesh departed
before New Riders’ self-titled debut album was released
in 1971, and Mr. Garcia left shortly thereafter. But
the band remained closely connected to many of the
top psychedelic groups of the era: Mr. Nelson had
played guitar in Big Brother and the Holding Company,
and Spencer Dryden, formerly of Jefferson Airplane,
joined as drummer in late 1970.

New Riders released a dozen albums into the early ’80s.
One, “The Adventures of Panama Red,” from 1973, went gold,
and a track from that album, “Panama Red” — a novelty
song about marijuana, not so thinly veiled — became a
staple. With Mr. Garcia and Robert Hunter, the longtime
Grateful Dead lyricist, Mr. Dawson also wrote the song
“Friend of the Devil,” which appears on the Grateful
Dead’s 1970 album “American Beauty.”

The original New Riders of the Purple Sage disbanded
in 1982, but Mr. Dawson continued to use the name,
with all new musicians, for 15 years. He retired to
Mexico in the late 1990s and by the 2000s was too ill
to take part in reunion tours, said Buddy Cage, who
replaced Mr. Garcia on pedal steel.

Mr. Dawson’s wife, Elanna Wyn-Ellis Dawson, died
in 2004. He is survived by his mother, Ruth Bioletti
of Hood River, Ore.; two brothers, Richard, of
Fremont, Calif., and Bruce, of Tucson; and a sister,
Mary Dawson of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.