"For all our muddy friends, the Grateful Dead..."

Grateful Dead
5/7/72
Bickershaw Festival
Wigan, England

Discs 1 & 2 are a compilation of multiple Audience sources which were used to piece together
the complete 1st set and first 4 songs of the 2nd set. A big thanks to Mick Etherington,
Dave Lang, Simon Mould, Simon Phillips, as well as Chris Jones- the only taper we can
identify- for supplying their copies of this show, as well as Alan Schlissel and Steve Barbella
for getting the different versions all in one place. The various versions were all speed
corrected, but there are still some speed fluctuations and "wow and flutter" here and there.

Discs 3 & 4 are supplied from a Master Soundboard Reel  > DAT source.  The previously
circulating, 2nd set partial Betty Board was used to patch "The Other One".

There is a 5th disc which contains the NRPS set and is not for the faint of heart.
-Scott Clugston

Disc 1
1st Set
1. Intro>
    Truckin'
2. Banter
3. Sugaree
4. Banter
5. Mr. Charlie
6. Beat it On Down the Line
7. Banter
8. He's Gone
9. Chinatown Shuffle
10. China Cat Sunflower>
11. I Know You Rider
12. //Black Throated Wind
13. //Next Time You See Me

Disc 2
1. "Happy Birthday Billy"
2. Playin' in the Band
3. Tennessee Jed
4. Good Lovin'
5. //Casey Jones
     2nd Set
6. Greatest Story Ever Told
7. Big Boss Man
8. Ramble On Rose
9. Banter
10. //Jack Straw

Disc 3
1. //Dark Star(patched)>
2. Drums>
3. The Other// One(patched)>
4. Sing Me Back Home

Disc 4
1. Banter
2. Sugar Magnolia
3. Turn On Your Lovelight>
4. Going Down the Road Feeling Bad>
5. Not Fade Away
    Encore
6. One More Saturday Night
7. Bonus - Banter Highlights

Disc 5
NRPS
1. Contract
2. Truck Driving Man
3. Rainbow
4. Sailing
5. Whatcha Going to Do
6. Willie & The Hand Jive


I was approached by Mick Etherington about finding and putting together the best possible
sources for his only Dead show, the Bickershaw Festival.  Bickershaw was a 3 day festival
with many popular bands of the day.  By all accounts the weather was cold and rainy with mud
everywhere.  The cold weather wreaked havoc with the equipment and the band and it made
conditions extremely unpleasant for concertgoers.  Mick recalls sheltering under the sound
tower from the rain, wet and tired after a long weekend.

Mick had long harbored the dream of getting the whole show together after having listened to
the second set from Dark Star onwards that had circulated for some time.  What Mick started
ultimately became an effort spanning 2 oceans and 3 or so continents to find all versions of
this show that were known to be in circulation.  We eventually turned up many pieces of this
show, some workable, others not.  We were only able to identify one of the tapers, Chris Jones,
who did a good job considering the circumstances.  Mick introduced me to Dave Lang who provided
many of the versions used here and he was able to connect me with other people who provided
their alternate versions.

I approached Steve Barbella to locate someone with the knowledge and proper equipment to
analyze, clean up and sew together the bits and pieces. Steve suggested Scott Clugston and
I subsequently mailed him a large stack of discs.  Scott examined all the source material and
the result of this effort speaks for itself.  Scott supplied his copy of soundboard material
that was used on discs 3 and 4.  After some consideration he decided to use only audience
tapes for discs 1 and 2 since the soundboard segments we obtained were of poor quality.
Scott considers this to be one of the more difficult projects he has worked on and I thank
him for his time and talent.

Only a few hours after I initially released this "new" show, Steve contacted me to say that
he had heard from Seth Kaplan and that he had a version of the soundboard that did not have a
cassette generation in it.  We agreed to recall the few copies that we released and to see
what Seth had.  Seth had the same partial set 2 soundboard only it was remastered by Bill
Giles, whose comments follow below.

Scott contacted me regarding this new soundboard version and according to him:
"I've spoken at length with Jeff Tiedrich regarding the Sbd portion of this show.....here's
the scoop;-)........when the more complete copy of the 2nd set began to circulate, we were
told that the lineage was MSR>DAT.....after listening, and based on the hiss levels, the
pedigree was questioned and the source came back and said that it was possible that there
was a cassette gen present, but couldn't confirm one way or the other........being a bit
conservative when it comes to pedigrees, we opted to list this new copy (with the Betty
Board patch in The Other One) as MSR>C>DAT........this was approximately March of
2000.........I never gave it a second thought and since then, Jeff has confirmed that what
we have (and patched) is MSR>DAT......"

In all likelihood, Scott's version has the same lineage as this upgrade.

This upgrade has a very nice patch that restores the opening notes of Dark Star.  Also, Bill
scrubbed some broadband noise from the quiet passages of that song.  I did an A/B comparison of
discs 3 and 4 and found that the 2 versions were identical in quality except for the patch of
the first 5 notes of Dark Star and a slightly reduced noise level during certain quieter
passages in Dark Star.

The other advantage to using Seth's version of the soundboard is a little extra banter at the
beginning of disc 4 before Sugar Magnolia and some excerpts of assorted stage banter that was
placed after the encore.

I verified and fixed sector boundaries with shntool and seek enabled all tracks with seek
tables appended using shn v3.

Enjoy the show,
Alan Schlissel

Credits:

Digital wizardry by Scott Clugston, discs 1, 2 and 5
SBD Remastering by Bill Giles, discs 3 and 4
Concept by Mick Etherington
Ways and Means by Steve Barbella
Audience taping by Chris Jones and others
Special thanks to Dave Lang for his role in tracking down other sources
Thanks to Simon Philips and Simon Mould for providing me with their sources


"I'd like to pass on my sincere thanks to all involved in bringing this to fruition."
- Mick Etherington

"Little did I know at the time that two of the shows that I taped are now regarded as 'master'
audience recordings. Jeez, I'm so glad I did. If Alan wants to know, the recorder I used was
an early Pye Cassette recorded with a hand-held mic."
- Chris Jones

Notes by Bill Giles:

"Bickershaw:
I'm 100% confident that this remastered version *is* the best in circulation.  When Gavin
Lawson kindly sent me his CDR some months ago, his source's lineage showed a cassette gen.
In contrast, Tiedrich's Resources for Traders said the best source had no cassette gen.

"This version starts with Dark Star (but missed the first 5 notes which I've patched in from
a poor denoised and re-equalised SBD cassette. It's OK!! You'd never know if you hadn't been
told).  It is not the Betty Board, the circulating copy of which only starts in the 1st verse
of TOO (33 mins late!).

"The Dark Star's a true beauty, er blissfully spatial in the 72nd degree......... but the
source contains a lot of broadband noise - a bit like there's glass reverberating
intermittently but frequently on your speakers (or, if you're grooving in the cans, inside
your head). Sometimes it's one channel, sometimes the other, sometimes both.  Real irritating.
David Hollister confirms that the noise is on the original master reel and that he had not
tried treating it because broadband noise is not susceptible to general scrubbing.  So, to cut
another long story short, I've been through each and every burst of  noise in Dark Star,
channel by channel, and tried to clean each one individually.  Well, it's one way of getting
into the music :))    The result's not perfect and never would be, but all the noises are
attenuated and some are removed.  It's definitely very OK, the basic  sound is first  class.
Most important, the MUSIC IS OUTTASIGHT.

"The other problem with the source is a 30 sec cut in TOO and the absence of stage announcements
(in particular Weir's "we've forgotten how to play St Stephen....... maybe we could go back
and listen to our records and cop our licks" rap, and apologies for yet another technical
problem "Garcia's got to clean his glasses".  (Weir was really on good stage rap form on this
tour)). I've patched in the music and announcements from BD>DAT>CDR (Betty Board), courtesy of
Steve Nicholls.  I had wondered whether to use the Betty as the master source from when it
enters in TOO onwards, but comparative listening shows the non-Betty is the better and clearer
sound - drums are crisper, instruments brighter - whereas the Betty has some bass saturation
and is slightly muddier in the middle.   (Very appropriate for Bickershaw, ha ha.)

"Finally, as a reminder of the atmospherix of the event, I've added a few other moments of the
concert from the poor quality SBD cassette, denoised (though you might not think so!) and
re-equalised, as a brief filler.  In particular 'Happy Birthday Billy' and Weir  explaining
that, to keep warm, they are playing under 30 knots of jet breath from hot air heaters and
getting dizzy with the smell of kerosene.....

"For those who don't know (or need help remembering) just how wet, muddy and great it all was,
you can read more about the Bickershaw festival - personal accounts, photos, programme extracts
etc - on this site:

http://tinpan.fortunecity.com/ebony/546/dead.html

"Pity you can't hear when the fireworks were launched in Dark Star!"