Jerry Garcia had no idea as he lethargically laid into the first few lines of Grateful Dead’s "China Doll" at University of Washington’s Hec Edmundson Pavilion in 1974 that he was creating a great holiday gift 44 years later. But after a new collection of Pacific Northwest recordings was released this fall (and put on Spotify a couple of weeks ago), Garcia singing “Take up your china doll / It’s only fractured / and a little nervous from the fall” is now one of the best things you can get a Grateful Dead fan this holiday season.

You can buy the entire collection of recordings from the Grateful Dead’s two Pacific Northwest Tours in 1973 and 1974 as an attractive box set with Salish Native American art embellished onto its side. Or you can stream a selection of the best songs from these two tours, including three songs played at UW, for free on Spotify. Free gifts are the best gifts ... if you can consider giving someone a link to a streaming service as a present.

David Lemieux, a Grateful Dead archivist who worked on the project, said this set of recordings includes some of the best live performances of the Dead’s entire career, including two “canonical” shows, one in Vancouver in 1973 and one in Portland in 1974, both shows that happened during one of the Dead's strongest musical eras. According to Ned Lannamann at The Portland Mercury:

“This was toward the end of their first run—the Dead took a hiatus at the end of 1974—and these six shows capture a band whose experience and familiarity resulted in incredibly tight (and, simultaneously, appealingly loose) interplay, while also in the process of running out of creative steam.”

Now that these songs are free on Spotify, there’s no reason you shouldn’t “give” your local deadhead friend a link to this set.

This was also a time when the band was able to invest more money in their live performances. The 1974 shows on this set include the Dead’s famous “Wall of Sound,” a massive PA system that was specifically designed for the Dead but only was used between 1974 and 1976. Lemieux said the band’s version of “Truckin'” live at Portland’s Memorial Coliseum in 1974 is “one of the most inspired bits of improvisation genius gold that the grateful dead ever did.”

I have probably listened to less than 1/100th of the Grateful Dead that Lemieux has listened to, but I agree. The jamming on that version of "Truckin'" sounds effortless, holding an emotional tension for 10 minutes before closing with a jubilant version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” The 46-minute version of “Playing in The Band” recorded at University of Washington in 1974 isn’t bad either, giving us a chance to hear Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir trade diverging guitar solos. I doubt they knew back on that May '74 day in Seattle that hammering away on their guitars in front of a wall of speakers would eventually brighten a dark December four decades later.