We’ve been big fans of Bob Weir’s fantastic Weir Here since it debuted last year. The semi-regular web variety show, which is broadcast live from Weir’s TRI Studios, has featured members of the Grateful Dead and its extended family swapping stories and performing a mix of tunes. During a recent episode, the former Bobby & The Midnights lead singer revealed that he will take the show on the road this fall, where he will be joined by Dave Schools (Widespread Panic), Jonathan Wilson, Jay Lane (Primus), Jason Crosby and Jeff Chimenti (Furthur, RatDog), as well former Dead crew member Steve Parish. According to Jambands.com the tour is currently scheduled to make stops at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, Philadelphia’s Tower Theater, Richmond, Virginia’s The National, San Rafael, California’s Terrapin Crossroads and Mill Valley, California’s Sweetwater.

• List Time: 10 Music Inspired Beers
• R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills talks to the New York Times about his fantasy sports obsession
• Cover Alert: Jack White tackles Loretta Lynn
• Ben Folds Five to release their first ever live album culled from their 2012-13 world tour
• Download This: Emmylou Harris -WBAI Studios – NYC – 1970
• John Cusack is being rumored to play Beach Boy Brian Wilson in a new biopic

Finally, it’s been roughly two years since The National dropped the news that they would be curating a Grateful Dead covers record for the AIDS charity Red Hot. While we still await some sort of update on that project, the band is seemingly taking a page out of the legendary psychedelic rock act’s Acid Test days, as on May 5 the Brooklyn-based act will play one song for six straight hours at the finale of MoMA PS1′s Sunday Sessions. The band will perform the High Violet track Sorrow as part of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansso exhibit – A Lot of Sorrow. Tickets for the one-time only performance, which explores “potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound,” are currently on-sale for $15.

The Grateful Dead and their fans have long been pioneers in technology. Among other things, the Dead helped spawn the popularity of internet communities with the WELL, was the first act to have a song embedded in a podcast, were the first to leverage mailing lists to communicate with fans, pushed concert recording technology limits and created the largest concert sound system to date with their Wall of Sound in 1974. Happily, fans continue to leverage technology to continue the quest to seamlessly catalog, collect and listen to every show from the world’s greatest band. A new site, ListenToTheDead.com, offers the easiest way yet to find and stream shows from the Dead’s massive catalog.

Dan Saewitz, the guy behind PhishVids, has put together a similarly streamlined and efficient site with ListenToTheDead.com. The brilliance of the site is two-fold. In addition to the utilitarian design allowing for blazing fast show selection and streaming, the site also allows for saving of custom playlists and sharing of links. While most of the site speaks for itself, I thought I’d ask the man behind it all a few questions. So read on as Hidden Track exclusively reveals the new site and talks with Dan about it, his motivation for creating it and future plans for what he likes to short-handedly refer to as Listen.

READ ON

Clearly we weren’t the only ones that had American Psycho in mind when it came to the announcement that Huey Lewis & The News would be celebrating the 30th anniversary of their breakthrough album Sports with a special expanded re-release and summer tour that will see the Bay Area-based band play it in its entirety each night.

Yesterday the folks over at Funny Or Die decided to reinterpret that pivotal scene by recasting it with Huey himself and Weird Al Yanokvic – whose 1983 album Dare to Be Stupid featured I Want A New Duck, a parody of Lewis’ I Want A New Drug. Check it out…

READ ON

We’d like to wish our readers a very Happy Easter in the best way we know how. We’ve compiled a list of ten easter eggs representing ten of our favorite bands. Enjoy the holiday!

1. Phish – The Jon Fishman Easter Egg

[via @arielomatic on Twitter]

2. Grateful Dead

READ ON

While the latest installment of the Grateful Dead’s Dave’s Picks live archival series – Volume 5 – isn’t expected to ship until February 1st, the band has just announced details of Volume 6, due to ship on May 1st. Dave’s Picks Volume 6 will consist of two complete shows featuring material that had been missing from the band’s “vault” for more than 40 years: 2/2/70 Fox Theater, St. Louis, MO and 12/20/69 Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA with a bonus disc for Dave’s Picks subscribers containing 75 minutes of music from the Dead’s 12/21/69 performance at the Fillmore Auditorium.

Recently, a batch of reels containing long lost live recordings were given back to the Dead marking the first major return of material to the vault since 2005′s Houseboat Tapes. The return of these reels has allowed GD “legacy manager” David Lemieux to put out two complete shows as Dave’s Picks Volume 6. Though only six weeks separate the two performances, a lineup change happened in between. Keyboardist Tom Constanten is on hand for the 12/20/69 show while the 2/2/70 gig was the Dead’s first without Constanten. Tom does provide a first-hand perspective on 12/20/69 for the volume’s liner notes. Bear recorded both shows which both feature plenty of Pigpen material including a 35+ minute Turn On Your Lovelight from 12/20/69.

With each Dave’s Picks release limited to 13,000 copies, the Dead warn that the only way to guarantee yourself this year’s installments is to purchase a subscription. The subscription offer ends in a little more than a week on January 22, 2013 at 11:59PM PST and those subscribing will also receive the aforementioned 12/21/69 bonus disc. We look forward to hearing these long-lost recordings

As the story goes, when Pete Shapiro was gearing up to re-open Capitol Theatre, he reached out to the members of Strangefolk to see if they would reunite to play the legendary venue. The conversation eventually led to the ’90s-jam-favorites getting back together for the first time in 12 years for a series of reunion shows that began with a sold out mini-tour last spring, continued with an appearance at this summer’s Gathering Of The Vibes, and this past weekend with the four-piece act returning to the Port Chester, New York rock hall for the first time since 1998 for a two-night stand.

Over the course of the their four sets, Strangefolk offered up a mix of their “hits” with some deep cuts, sounding every bit as good as they did back their their heyday. Adding to the old-school jamband vibe of the run, was moe. guitarist Al Schnier, who served as the opening act, and sat-in with the band and the end of the first set each night. Al-Folk dipped into moe.’s songbook for collaborative takes on Moth and Mexico, while also tackling Strangefolk’s Gone Fishin’. On Saturday night, in a nod to the venue’s rich musical history, Schnier invited out the members of Strangefolk at the end of his set for a fantastic spot on cover of the Grateful Dead’s Jack Straw, which saw Al and Reid trade off on the verses.

As we mentioned last week, Strangefolk have announced that they will appear at moe’s Snoe.down festival on Saturday, March 24, while the indie-jam act will kick off a short West Coast swing on November 30, with a two-night stand at the Ogden Theatre in Denver.

The Capitol Theatre – Port Chester, NY

Friday, November 23

Set I

Fountain-> Poland, What Goes On, Blue Grey, So Well->Funky Town->So Well, Pawn, Moth (moe. w/ Al Schnier) Lines and Circles

Set II

Furnace, Valhalla, Faces, So Far Gone -> Strange Ranger -> So Far Gone, Woman Child-> Reubens Place-> Sanford and Sons theme-> Reubens Place

E: Roads

Saturday, November 24

Set I

Stout Hearted–> All The Same, Sometimes, Angry At The Sun, Dance, Mexico (moe. w/ Al Schnier), Rather Go Fishin’ (w/ Al Schnier)

Set II

Burned Down, Sinner, Walnut, Alaska, Whatever, Great Long While, Westerly (with Lone Tree lyrics)

E: Cabin John

Here’s LazyLightning55′s incredible vid of Al-folk’s Moth…

READ ON

Over the last few years the brewers at Dogfish Head have rolled out a handful of their “uniquely off-centered ales” that have had a direct correlation to the music world, honoring Miles Davis, Robert Johnson and Pearl Jam with their own signature beers. For their latest crossover, the Delaware-based brewery is teaming up with the folks at Grateful Dead Productions for their latest collaboration, which will be called American Beauty. The beer, which is still in the development phase, will be a strong pale ale with all-American hops and barley, but they are reaching out to fans of both the band and the brewery for help in choosing a special final ingredient, and asking for their the Dead-inspired story behind it. The brewers at Dogfish Head will be accepting suggestions online starting in December, with a joint panel set to select the ingredient they feel works best in the context of a strong pale ale recipe. American Beauty is set to hit taps and shelves in October of 2013, we can’t wait to try it!

• List Time: 15 Most Ridiculous In-Transit Musician Drug Busts
• Mick Jagger and Brian Grazer will co-produce the James Brown biopic
• Cover Alert: Kelly Stoltz tackles The Velvet Underground
• Frank Sinatra is getting his own line of premium Jack Daniels Whiskey
• Download This: Aquarium Drunkard- Vintage Halloween Mix Tape, Vol. 8
• Justin Vernon is auctioning off a guitar that was custom made from a whiskey barrel

Finally, in what seems like a sure fire sign of the apocalypse, CBS has inked a deal with The Big Bang Theory’s writer/co-executive producer Dave Goetsch to produce a multi-camera family sitcom to be called Smells Like Teen Spirit. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the show “revolves around an 18-year-old budding entrepreneur who forgoes Harvard and instead opts to launch a multibillion-dollar Internet company from his garage with the assistance of his sister, best friend and his 1990s indie-rock parents.” Somewhere, Kurt Cobain is crafting a t-shirt that reads “Corporate Sitcoms Still Suck.”

Since being hinted at roughly a year and a half ago, it’s been virtual radio silence about the details of The National curated Grateful Dead charity covers album. While we await for more news on this project, there have been a handful of new indie-Dead covers since the project was first hinted at, including The War on Drugs covering Touch Of Grey on their tour last fall, and Jonathan Wilson including a sublime cover of Mission In The Rain on his recent Daytrotter session.

The latest artist to throw their hat into the proverbial ring of acts that could be contributing to this project is Norah Jones. The lovely singer-songwriter has been including a sultry, country-inflected take on the Hunter/Garcia tune It Must Have Been The Roses on her current summer tour.  Let’s check out this version from her recent stop at the Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia…

Norah Jones - It Must Have Been The Roses

(H/T to Deadheadland)

Norah Jones’ lengthy world tour continues tonight with an appearance at the Kodak Hall at Eastman Theater in Rochester, New York.

• Previously on HT:  The B List – Grateful Dead Cover We’d Like To See Included on The National’s Compilation

Some might say that the surviving members of the Grateful Dead are experiencing something of a creative renaissance of late, collaborating with both new and old friends on a variety of musical projects. While Phil Lesh has been keeping busy by gigging regularly at his recently opened Terrapin Crossroads venue, his Futhur band mate and short, shorts enthusiast Bob Weir has been making the rounds with a new acoustic trio featuring two members of the extended Grateful Dead family – Chris Robinson and Jackie Greene.

The heavily bearded trio, who made their debut last summer, have been mixing Dead classics with music from their respective solo catalogs and familiar covers from the likes of Bob Dylan to Buddy Holly to the Everly Brothers. WRG continue their short tour together tomorrow night with a sold out gig at the Boulder Theater, and recently appeared at CrossroadsKC in Kansas City, Missouri, where they turned in this set opening take on Bertha. Take a peek…

Weir-Robinson-Greene Acoustic Trio – Bertha

Celebrities are used to having things like sandwiches,  streets or drinking games named in their honor, but there have only been a chosen few that have had a spider named for them. Today news surfaced that a new genus of the velvet spider has recently been named Loureedia, “in recognition of the fact that this velvet spider lives underground,” in honor of the Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed. The  spider, which is described as having a “dark and shiny” appearance and is known to live in Africa, Asia, Europe and Brazil. Reed joins both Frank Zappa and Neil Young, as the only members of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame that can claim the distinction of having an arachnoid named for them.

• List Time: Paste’s 70 Best Albums Of The 1970s
• A copy of the Dead’s 5/8/77 show will be added to the National Recording Registry
• Cover Alert: Pond tackles Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
• The Flaming Lips will attempt to break Jay-Z’s record for concerts in a 24 hour period
• Download This: The Head & The Heart – Fuel/Friend’s Chapel Sessions #15
• Beastie Boys’ fans are trying to get a Brooklyn park named after Adam Yauch

Finally, earlier this week longtime jam favorites Leftover Salmon released Aquatic Hitchhiker, their first new studio album in eight years. Produced by Steve Berlin from Los Lobos, and recorded at Cloud Sound Studios in Portland, Ore., the record is not only the Colorado-based band’s first containing all original material, but also their debut with banjo player Andy Thorn.

In conjunction with album, LoS have also released the five-part making of documentary, Salmonlandia, exclusively through iClips. The doc, which will run you just $5.99, includes a five-song download with two tracks only available through Salmonlandia on iClips. Leftover Salmon will kick off their first extended tour in quite some time with an appearance at this weekend’s Summer Camp Festival.

While some people get excited about St. Patrick’s Day or Fat Tuesday, around these parts there is another “unofficial” holiday that, if you haven’t already noticed, we like to geek out about and that’s Record Store Day. The annual celebration of independent music stores, which is celebrating its fifth anniversary, features scores of exclusive releases specifically made to be put out this Saturday. While we detailed some of those yesterday, and we’ve got a list of our favorite RSD releases coming later today, the one that I’ve got my eyes on is a split 7-inch single that features a rather out-of-left-field pairing of Feist and Mastodon covering each others songs. The Feistodon single will feature the Canadian singer-songwriter tackling Mastodon’s Black Tongue, while the flip side will showcase the metal band taking on Feist’s A Commotion.

• List Time: NME’s 100 Best Tracks Of The 1970s
• American Bandstand host, and TV legend Dick Clark passed away at the age of 82
• Cover Alert: Wild Flag tackles Fugazi
• David Byrne & St. Vincent have collaborated on an album together, due out this fall
• Download This: Rearrange The Old/Call It New – the Fuel/Friends Spring 2012 Mix
• Mythbuster – the Tupac hologram wasn’t really a hologram. Check out how it was done

Finally, if you notice people vending local craft beers and veggie burritos outside of your local cineplex this evening, don’t be alarmed as tonight marks the second annual Grateful Dead Meet-Up At The Movies. This year select movie theaters around the country will be screening a previously unreleased Dead show, which was filmed on July 18th, 1989, the middle of a three-night stand at one the band’s favorite outdoor haunts, the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, in East Troy, Wisconsin. For more information, and to find tickets and the theater nearest you, for this one-night only event click here.

For a taste of what you’ll see tonight, check out this video of the show-opening Touch Of Grey…

[via Rolling Stone]

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Europe ’72, a legendary Grateful Dead tour now available in all its 16-track glory, we enlisted the help of Joe Kolbenschlag and the Steel Cut Oats team to break down a handful of the most memorable shows from the run. Today, they continue with a look at a performance that took place 40 years ago today at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Grateful Dead, April 16th, 1972, Stakladen, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark:

When the “Euro Box” (Europe ’72: The Complete Recordings) was announced in January 2011, the first thing I thought about was being able to hear the 16-track upgrades to some of the shows that circulated with less-than-perfect quality in the past. My short list included the performances from Newcastle, Hamburg and the Bickershaw Festival set. I was much more familiar with April’s half of the tour (England, Denmark, West Germany), and although most were available in at least decent to very good quality, I figured I probably hadn’t missed out on too many of its offerings, although there was one show that never really caught my attention – until now…

Two of April’s classics happen to come from the same venue in Copenhagen, Denmark. On April 14th and 17th, 1972, the Grateful Dead played the Tivoli Concert Hall – a venue built in the 1950′s, designed to host classical music concerts. With its excellent acoustics, and seating for just under 1700, it was a perfect venue to begin the journey through “The Continent.” It’s important to note that this was the first time the band had performed to a ticketed non-English speaking audience. They had played once before in France (June 21st, 1971), but that was more of a special invitation after the festival they were booked to play was rained out. Instead, the group retreated to the famed Chateau d’Herouville near Paris, and performed to mostly unknowing local townsfolk. Garcia recalled, “It was an event and everybody just had a hell of a time — got drunk, fell in the pool. It was great.”

The first night’s gig from Copenhagen is the quintessential Europe ’72 party tape – a giddy affair that opens with my favorite Bertha of the tour, and is book-ended by some classic Pigpen in the knockout Good Lovin’ > Caution > Who Do You Love? > Caution > Good Lovin’ combo. The second Copenhagen show was also already well-known partly due to its widely bootlegged video of about eighty minutes of the three hour performance. Highlights of the pro-shot color footage include a beautiful China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider preceding the very first reading of the soon-to-be Dead staple, He’s Gone. This is as formal of a long-form video document that we will probably ever see from this tour, so make a point to view a copy if you have not already. The initial three-set show of the run was extremely popular in trading circles way back when as I’ve heard tapes of it as far back as twenty years ago, so I’m guessing this one has been circulating much longer than most.

• Europe ’72 40 Years Later: A Tale of Two Cities, Part 1
• Previous Steel Cut Oats Installments: #9, #8, #7, #6, #5

READ ON

On May 22 MVD Entertainment Group will release a documentary on DVD called Dawn of the Dead: The Grateful Dead & The Rise Of The San Francisco Underground, a film profiling the early days of The Dead and the other psychedelic bands that emerged out of the Bay Area.

This film contains rare archival footage of the Grateful Dead in action as well as brand-new interviews with one-time Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully, keyboardist Tom ‘T.C.’ Constanten, Big Brother’s Peter Albin, Mike Willhelm from The Charlatans, publicist and official Dead biographer Dennis McNally, Grateful Dead Hour host David Gans, Merry Prankster and Ken Kesey collaborator Ken Babbs along with commentary from journalists Anthony De Curtis of Rolling Stone, Village Voice’s Robert Christgau and Mojo’s Ritchie Unterberger. Here’s a look at the trailer for Dawn of the Dead…

You can currently pre-order the movie for $14.96.

Many potential Great GoogaMooga attendees were frustrated today in their efforts to sign up for free admission to the two-day food, drink and music festival, which is set to take place in Neathermead Meadow at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on May 19 and 20. Eventbrite, the company handling registration for the Brooklyn-based event, has updated the details on the sign-up page to read “Early registration is full. We apologize for the frustrations you had today in registering. If you haven’t been able to register yet please email us at info@googamooga.com.” There was also a note for those who made it through the registration process but didn’t receive an email: “For customers who received a confirmation message, but who did not yet receive an email with confirmation of your registration, please note that you will be receiving an email shortly.” So all hope isn’t lost for those who want to attend the inaugural edition of Superfly Presents’ new festival. If you want to go, either email the info@googamooga.com address or spring for the Extra Mooga Package.

• List Time: 10 Musical Mythologies
• WTF?-SXSW makes Homeless Hotspots available to festival attendees
• Cover Alert: The Walkmen tackle U2
• Bob Dylan is working on his 35th studio album according to Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo
• Download This: Beck & The Flaming Lips – Claremont, CA – 2002-10-14
• Jon Stewart interviewed Bruce Springsteen for the latest issue of Rolling Stone

Finally, while Jerry Garcia left behind a sizable musical legacy, that included 40+ years of recorded material both in the studio and of course on stage, the late Grateful Dead guitarist also left behind a treasure trove of his personal belongings after dying of a heart attack in 1995 at the age of 53. On May 8, auction home Bonhams will give fans a chance to buy a number of unique items from the Garcia estate, including a handful of original, never seen pieces of art, several acoustic stage-used guitars, handwritten setlists and even a 1983 Harley-Davidson motorcycle. An auction preview will take place in New York from April 11-16 and another in San Francisco May 4-7.

Last month the Grateful Dead asked fans to upload videos to YouTube of themselves covering a song written or recorded by the band for something they dubbed The Dead Covers Project. The month-long submission process saw everyone from national touring bands to up and comers to the casual musician upload versions of nearly every song in the cannon from popular nuggets like Sugaree and Looks Like Rain to the more obscure I Will Take You Home, as entrants took a shot at being one of five bands to to be featured across all of the Dead’s online sites.

[Press Photo by Tracy Graham]

Among the five finalists, who will also be profiled on Dead.net and in this year’s edition of the Grateful Dead Almanac, was folk-rock act The Giving Tree Band. The Chicago-based act turned in a fantastic country-fried version of Brown Eyed Women that’s drowned in some killer pedal steel and banjo work, which captures the rollicking spirit of arguably one of the better Grateful Dead songs that never made its way onto one of their studio albums. Let’s check it out…

The Giving Tree Band – Brown Eyed Women