The first set of the day was the Great American String Band. As tape recorders got steadily smaller and better, these kinds of smuggling shenanigans were no longer needed. These details of what I would stoop to humor me at this point as a 54 year old CPA. We had also considered smuggling the deck inside a watermelon, but this proved impossible so we opted for digging instead. This worked okay, due to several layers of plastic seal. I used BASF 120 minute cassettes, and held the mikes by hand, and recorded the show with the Dolby system on.Īs I had some problems with getting the deck confiscated by authorities (including Bill Graham in person at the February shows at Winterland earlier that year), we decided to bury the deck for the Santa Barbara show inside the stadium the night before the show. The deck was "portable" with slots for four "D" batteries, but it was really a full sized cassette deck of the day, including the dolby noise reduction system. My large tape deck kept me out of trouble there. The girls were very cute, in a more southern California blonde way but still with the underwearless style of the era and also very much into dancing. Paul and I had already gotten accepted to Santa Cruz and Cal respectively, where we were to start in the fall. However, there was a real college atmosphere for this show, with many UCSB students as well as students from other California schools in attendance. The university was not nearly as popular then as it is now. Santa Barbara had suffered a major oil spill in 1969, the beaches were still not their pristine selves. On May 25,1974, we were three weeks away from graduating from high school in San Mateo, CA, and had a thoroughly entertaining drive down the coast. The stage was ringed with the enormous sound system that filled the stage and went up probably thirty feet all around the stage. The weather was great, dry, sunny, and warm. I attended the Dead show at UC Santa Barbara in May, 1974, accompanied by friend Paul Handelman and my Sony TC-152 cassette recorder and Sony microphones.
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