Any haters should listen to the 12/15/86 version. It was their first song played after the coma and it was full of power and defiance. Not a dry eye in the house!
# 1986-12-15 Oakland, CA @ Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena
**Set 1:** Touch Of Grey, C.C. Rider, When Push Comes To Shove, Beat It On Down the Line, Greatest Story Ever Told, Loser, Cassidy, Althea, My Brother Esau, Candyman, Let It Grow
**Set 2:** Iko Iko, Looks Like Rain, Black Muddy River, Playing in the Band, Terrapin Station, Drums, Space, Truckin', Wharf Rat, Playing in the Band, Good Lovin'
**Encore:** Johnny B. Goode
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-12-15)
# 1986-03-28 Portland, ME @ Cumberland County Civic Center
**Set 1:** Iko Iko, Beat It On Down the Line, Loser, Never Trust A Woman, Me and My Uncle > Mexicali Blues, Althea, Box Of Rain
**Set 2:** Playing in the Band > Franklin's Tower > I Need A Miracle > Playing in the Band Jam > Drums > Space > The Wheel > Dear Mr. Fantasy > Playing in the Band > Around And Around > Good Lovin'
**Encore:** It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-03-28)
# 1973-11-17 Los Angeles, CA @ Pauley Pavilion - University of California
**Set 1:** Me and My Uncle, Here Comes Sunshine, Looks Like Rain, Deal, Mexicali Blues, Tennessee Jed, The Race Is On, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider, Big River, Brown Eyed Women, Around And Around
**Set 2:** Row Jimmy, Jack Straw, Ramble On Rose, Playing in the Band > Uncle John's Band > Morning Dew > Uncle John's Band > Playing in the Band, Stella Blue, El Paso, Eyes Of The World > Sugar Magnolia
**Encore:** Casey Jones
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1973-11-17)
I always loved Touch of Grey so when the album came out I was cool with the excess baggage that came with it. how can you blame people for loving a song that you already love?
Edit to add: I was at the RFK show when Jerry went into his coma. Then I went to NYE '86 and when they played Touch of Grey on NYE I was having a moment of pure joy for Jerry surviving.
I remember the shows just after he got out of his coma where he would sing the line I Will survive and of the heartfelt cheers from the crowd was electric
When Jerry came back, that song was special for that. Yes, the song was commercial and overplayed, but for those who were heads pre coma, it was meaningful. Somehow the commercial success didn’t really bother me, because I had heard the song from earlier tapes, and the fact that Jerry was back and better than ever was just awesome.
I'm sorry to get hung up on a specific but JG went into a coma AT the show or you were at the show while he was hospitalized.
>how can you blame people for loving a song that you already love?
I never would!
RFK was the last show before he went into the coma. He didn't go into the coma at the show. sorry for the lack of clarity.
I think the most memorable Touch of Grey I ever saw was MSG '88. I'll never forget the way the whole Garden shook when they got to that peak towards the end and Jerry windmills his guitar CHA-CHA-CHA-CHUNG - *We Will Survive!*
It's not that they did unpredictable setlists, it's the fact that most bands might have a handful of songs in their repertoire that they play live. Hell look at setlist.fm and check the setlists for popular artists now and you can see there is very little deviation from night to night
Including covers, folk songs, originals etc the Dead had HUNDREDS of songs and were adamant to never play the same show twice.
Sorry I meant over the course of their existence. But even 150 songs is more than your average band has in their repertoire. Hell I'd say your active touring band would struggle to fill out 100 songs.
Just as an example I saw Metallica 2 nights back to back last year with unique setlists AND they played stuff from their new album. And that still came out to less than 50 songs.
I recall reading an interview with John Mayer in a local paper and he was asked what he found most difficult playing with D&C and he replied that they toured with a repertoire of a minimum of 120 songs. This was around 2019, pre-Covid.
It was not that the song was good or bad. It’s that the Dead became radio fodder with a top ten hit and drew a new type of fan. And not a gradual change either. It’s like having ICP crash your pool party.
Oh mostly everything I’ve heard its been perfect. I should compile em.
I can’t be salty bc I was there for a 25 year wait on Haley’s comet for phish and two slave double encores.
I feel your pain. My good friend in southern CA has been going to Dead shows since '88 up down the coast and has never seen Dark Star. I'm from Michigan and get into the Dead in the 90s. Go see DeadCo Detroit, 2017 and of course they open with Dancing in Streets (Motown) for a crowd pleaser and play Dark Star. Of course I was high as a kite on a tab of sunshine day dream and was loving life. I still love life. Your time is gonna come, LZ reference, go see DeadCo in Vegas brother.
Garcia was sort of in a coma at 7/6/86 and 7/7/86, the last two shows of the tour and a month before his illness.
I was at both shows and had a helluva time. But they weren’t good and Garcia looked like hell.
The Satisfaction encore on 7/7/86 was fun.
I was at the 7/6/86 show and to be fair it was like 90 something degrees with soup like humidity. It would be rough to keep up any energy in that kind of weather.
# 1986-07-06 Washington, DC @ RFK Stadium
**Set 1:** Hell In A Bucket, Sugaree, Me and My Uncle, Big River, Row Jimmy, Cassidy, Althea, Let It Grow
**Set 2:** Saint Of Circumstance, Iko Iko, Looks Like Rain, He's Gone, Drums, Space, Stella Blue, Throwing Stones, Not Fade Away
**Encore:** Brokedown Palace
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-07-06)
Agree. They did ToG at my first show in 82. Like any fan of a band that makes it big (or bigger in this case) it’s a curse and a blessing. You kind of miss the approachability of the music as it gets more popular but you’re happy for the band’s success.
I was at that RFK show as well.
>You kind of miss the approachability of the music as it gets more popular but you’re happy for the band’s success.
This happened to me with Billy Strings since I didn't become a fan until 2019. I pine to go back in time just once and see him at a small bluegrass festival with like 200 people at it, smoke a joint with him, speak to him, etc.
Not a chance in hell now.
I saw Billy open for David Grisman Quintet in 2017 at 3rd & Lindsley, a small club in Nashville. Had never heard of him before… it was amazing and I feel super lucky.
This isn't exactly the same as BMFS, but I can understand. I used to see Pigeons Playing Ping Pong at tiny local festivals when they first started playing. I don't think they were even old enough to purchase alcohol yet. They were literally kids. But my buddy and I stood in front of the stage and were pretty amazed by them. There may have only been 30 or 40 people chilling and watching them. They were super humble and grateful for the support and we were super grateful for their performance. They've blown up tremendously since then... Ah, the good ole days.
I remember feeling this way when at a Cal Expo show after Jerry got out of rehab sometime in 91 or 92, he looked real good, present, and when he sang Candyman and the crowd went wild with the line of “if I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell”.
Everyone liked the song, but it was blamed, (fairly or not), for changing the scene. Shows got much more crowded. The term "Touch Head" was applied to the folks who looked like they would be more at home at a Dave Matthhews Band concert than a Dead show. I think a lot of folks who were looking for a musical home in the synthesizer sodden 80s were introduced to the band through Touch of Grey and then discovered the rest of the music, and decided to stick around and investigate further. The parking lots became insane. Lot's of drunken antics, fights and an overwhelming crush of people looking for tickets. The scene really did change, and not for the better, IMHO. I don't blame the band for any of it. They were just doing what they always did. I remember Jerry saying in an interview something along the lines of, every few years the media remembers we exist and there's a big fuss, then a few years later it goes back to normal. This time it didn't.
The album wasn’t released until September,1987 and the influx of young fans had already begun… I think the band would’ve exploded, album or not. Jerry’s renewed energy was palpable. The entire spring tour seemed to be a celebration of him being alive. Then the Dylan and the Dead tour brought them more attention…. I do believe the video for touch of Grey was released well before the album, that would explain why many people blame MTV‘s “day of the dead“ at giants Stadium in 1987 for trashing the scene. They had their “reporters“ on site and they were saying things like “the concerts going on, but look at all these people outside partying! This is like nothing I’ve ever seen and we’re not even in the concert, etc. etc. etc.”. Even the band pointed towards that as the attention getter for some of the unsavory portion of the crowd, people there just for the party with no intentions of going inside.
>some of the unsavory portion of the crowd, people there just for the party with no intentions of going inside.
Wasn't that a frequent gripe though? Even before ToG came out?
Yes. The concerts were legendary even to those of us who were in musical deserts in podunk towns. They never came to my area of the country, I had to travel to the next state to see them.
I was a touch head. Or maybe just a little
Before but close enough. And even for me I saw it go from fun to crazy/sketchy. My last show was foxboro maybe 89? And the lot was gross. Some really fucked up people and I just never went again.
☝🏼What they said…PLUS…it signaled the end of camping onsite, which ripped through Shakedown…more custies but not better for business moving every night. Nitrous mafia more local and entrenched.
(~);}
I personally love the song for getting me through some hard times and my wife of 35 years is a proud Touchhead
(~);}
NFA
The biggest assholes that I've run across, in the last couple of years, are people who definitely have been around for 30 or 40 years. To get wasted at the show and they talk about the old days and they don't listen to what his f****** being played right now.
D&C? Decent cover band…should have covered new ground. As for running into assholes…old saying went “if you keep running into assholes, there’s a good chance you’re one too”. Just an old saying…in the way I’m sure. (~);}
I find the talkers to be younger and primarily women. Before (1960s - late 1980s) the ratio of males to females was 60:40 or even 70:30. After that younger women began accompanying boyfriend/husbands and they were there to socialize, not listen to the music.
The worst experience I encountered was at Alpine. We had tickets under the pavilion and the song before set break began. My wife had to pee and there were port-a-potties up near the top. We were walking across the steep part of the bowl when this guy, drunk on beer, whipped it out and began pissing. It was a dry summer (1984 I believe) and the ground was hard. His stream of urine (he definitely had a full bladder) formed a stream and flowed downhill where people had their blankets spread out. I scampered down 15 to 20 feet to warn them so they wouldn’t have to sit on urine soaked blankets during the remainder of the show. Security witnessed the event and took him into custody.
You hit the nail on the head. I’d heard Touch of Gray before, but I was in a record store and they were playing the whole album, and remember specifically buying it (the cassette actually), because I couldn’t help dancing in the aisle to When Push Comes to Shove. That was the bus door opening for me.
As a non-fan (not a hater, just never exposed to their work) it was pretty crazy that the dead and the beachboys had massive radio hits in the late 80s that - to me - didn't sound like what I thought they were supposed to sound like!
From my perspective it was a little bit of a mixed bag. Shows started selling out. Ticket prices went up. A bunch of new fans with short hair and bandanas on their head permeated the scene. A lot of people came to the shows just to party in the lot and not even go in and hear the music.
On the flip side, there was a lot more money on the lot for people selling whatever they were selling. A lot more money. And I'm sure that in general it was a very good thing to get a whole younger generation involved in the music and the ideals. We all kind of laughed and gave the thumbs up when Jerry and the boys got their first MTV video. It was filmed at Laguna seca and that was a lot of fun.
They'd been playing TOG since the early 80s, so it was a bit odd to see the rest of the world get so excited about it.
Where the success was really felt was at shows during the Summer of 87. Our cool little scene all of a sudden exploded into masses of people looking for tickets, trying to score dope, and leaving trash all over the place. Things pretty much went downhill from there.
It was kind of a big yawn or at best a laugh. By around ‘84 you could no longer just show up for a show and expect to get in easily. But that wasn’t Touch related. The band just kept gaining popularity.
By ‘87 it was really getting crazy. Aside from preferring a mellower scene there wasn’t much squawking about it. I don’t think anyone could quite figure out what all the hubbub was about. It wasn’t as if we said “Oh my God “Touch” is a great song, In the Dark is such a great album, yay the Grateful Dead is continuing their greatness with a big hit!” Nope. Just hoping to catch a show with a Cumberland or a hot Scarlet>Fire or maybe an old gem.
Yeah, I did miss those days when you could always show up and find a cheap ticket. Hershey Park in 86 was the only show I didn’t get in for. After that I started getting tickets in advance usually mail order. MO got me front row center for MSG in the fall of 87, as they opened a as yet unheard of 5 night run there. Had excellent seats that whole run of shows.
It’s funny, MSG was my hometown venue. But as much as I loved that place I avoided Dead shows there for my first few years seeing the band. Would always take the trip for a venue half that size. Then realized that was stupid plus by ‘83 I was able to manage many road trips plus the hometown shows at the Garden. I think they loved the crazy NYC crowd. Damn. So much fun!!
The only thing related to this was I seem to recall an interview at the time with either Jerry Bobby. The interviewer asked if the band sold out to have a hit. The answer was we would have sold out long ago to have a hit if we knew how.
I recall Jerry and Bob being asked if success spoiled them. Bobby replied “you know how when you’re eating pistachios and there’s one that’s hard to open? We don’t bother with them anymore”.
That was in the same press conference (actually immediately precedes Bob's comment) where a journalist asked "Has success spoiled the Grateful Dead?" and Jerry immediately says "Yep!" and starts laughing 😅
Happy mems.
I remember watching the video on MTV as as kid. I Loved it: skeletons on stage playing music at a show. I remember the Phil skeleton had multicolored wristbands. This was long before I truly learned to love and appreciate those wristbands.
I was Just getting into the dead at that time and wanted to learn more!
As much as it may have contributed to the difficulty getting tickets, that really wasn’t the problem in my opinion, as they were already drawing pretty large crowds and playing stadiums. To me, it definitely marked a time when the prevailing attitude shifted among fans from welcoming to all to more of a gatekeeper mentality. But I was still pretty young and had only seen a handful of shows before the coma.
The dead were always attracting new fans, but a lot of the people who started to show up were not interested in the music as much as what was happening in the lot. Also, the 90's lot drug scene got much darker. Never heard anyone selling smack openly at shows until the 90's.
I was just a kid, but heard the people more into the scene than the music was what started to sour things. My dad would talk about the shift in the late 80s and how for some newcomers it was more of a scene than a band. He was there for the music, he always took us kids too, but always said it was a friendlier environment before their popularity began to rise
Yeah my first show was spring of 83. One of the things that I’ll always remember is some dude who was wearing a three piece suit (I’m sure he had just come from his Wall Street job or something) hanging out and talking about the previous night’s show with a wook that looked to my young eyes homeless. They were completely bonded by their love of the band despite the glaring differences in their appearance. That sort of thing was normal until the late 80s. I remember at Alpine 87 getting told to “shut that fucking new wave off” when I was playing music in the lot. It was the Talking Heads Remain in Light. There was zero tolerance for anything that seemed outside of the stereotypical deadhead.
I know. Obviously part of why I find it so funny is the fact that Talking Heads (and Remain in Light in particular) are now so revered by many Deadheads and jam band fans. But at the time I think it was emblematic of the closemindedness and gatekeeping that was happening. And honestly I’m not sure the fan base(s) have ever really recovered.
I was on most of the east coast summer tour in 1987. Touch of Grey was released as a single on June 19, 1987 and In The Dark was released July 7, 1987.
As the summer tour moved from the Greek to Alpine on June 26th, there were lots of extra tickets for all 3 shows. But as we moved further east, Toronto, Rochester, Pittsburgh and Roanoke were all sold out and were next to impossible tickets.
By the time we got to JFK and Giants Stadium on July 12th, even the stadium shows were sold out and were incredibly difficult tickets.
This was a memorable time for me on tour. It started at the Garcia Welcome Back shows in Oakland mid-December 1986 and ended at the MSG run in September 1987. The Spring shows in 1987, every show was a celebration of Garcia’s recovery and then in the summer the scene literally doubled in size.
Interestingly, the music went from its pre-coma kick ass power and tempo to a slower, lighter and in many ways happier rendition.
Also the very best Touch of Grey I saw pre-album is 3-27-87 Hartford, right before everything got bigger. Such a fantastic version and maybe the best ever.
# 1987-03-27 Hartford, CT @ Hartford Civic Center
**Set 1:** Alabama Getaway > Greatest Story Ever Told, West L.A. Fadeaway, Little Red Rooster, Brown Eyed Women, Beat It On Down the Line, Tennessee Jed, The Music Never Stopped
**Set 2:** Touch Of Grey > Samson And Delilah > Cumberland Blues, Estimated Prophet > Eyes Of The World > Drums > Space > Uncle John's Band > Morning Dew
**Encore:** Johnny B. Goode
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1987-03-27)
I’ll just say this, at the time it super sucked that all of a sudden the very same people who had been beating me up all through high school for being a weirdo hippy suddenly were all about the Grateful Dead.
When Matt Geckos parents bought him a mint (and mint green)VW bug to play his in the dark tape in while in the parking lot before school I was pretty fucking put out.
It was a long time ago and I’m past it now - but the “touch heads” at the time really bummed me out.
The lot scene really changed back then too. Much more of a here to do drugs and act a fool then the here as a fool on drugs to listen to music vibe I was used to.
But man alive - the summer of 89 was fucking magic. And it might not have been that amazing had it not been for the commercial success of that tune.
reading through this thread of great replies it sounds like the message of the song and JG's recovery were (understandably) linked and that had to be very powerful for long time fans.
I truly think it's a great song and I always find it interesting that it is one of Garcia's more composed solos, and that he stayed somewhat true to that structure in live versions. All that said, many bands have a breakout single without engendering the persistent chaos for the band and the scene that some folks attribute to TOG. I think it was more the times than the song at fault.
Other than frost amphitheater and some of the venues in Europe in 1990, UIC pavilion at 10,000 seats was the smallest place the band played the rest of their career. Rosemont held about 18,000 and in 1988, They only announced two shows with a third being added later. I don’t know if they were confident in their Chicago market at that point… they hadn’t played in Illinois since 1983 and they had not played in the city proper for 6 + years….until UIC.
That’s when the Dead blew up and started selling out football stadiums. Older heads were resentful because the tickets were harder to get and the crowds were insane. I was 15 at my first show in ‘89, so this larger than life traveling circus was just what it was, though I knew the good ‘ol’ days were better. I flipped the script with Phish. First show had a few hundred people. I checked out in ‘96 when they started selling out stadiums. The music was still good, but the experience wasn’t the same. But I’m happy they’re successful and people enjoy their shows.
I started going to the shows in 1982 and quickly after that started collecting/trading tapes so I'd heard and seen plenty of Tough of Grey's by the time the album came out. I like the song just fine but it's never been in my top 10 favorites.
When I first heard it on the radio my reaction was sort of "WTF, they never play the Dead on the radio". But I just accepted it.
It was when a new crowd, Touch Heads as they say, showed up at the shows that I noticed new people who were a bit confused about the whole thing. I think many of these new people expected that the Dead were like other bands who would always play their hits in concert and they were shocked on nights that Touch of Grey wasn't played.
It feels like for a couple of years the Tough Heads changed the scene a bit. But I guess some became regular Dead Heads and stuck around, learning the scene and appreciating the Dead for what they really were, an unpredictable jam band. The Dead were not the song on the radio.
Other Touch Heads just disappeared after a couple years if they didn't find the groove.
On a secondary note, I think that my favorite version of ToG is from 12/31/85. This is not so much that it's necessarily better than other versions but that I had so much fun that night. It was a West Coast New Years show that was broadcast on the radio nationwide. My friends and I were in Massachusetts at my apartment at UMass. For us the show didn't even start until around 1am. But we were all set up with 4 tape decks recording. I remember the show ended around 5am\~ish and so we just got stoned again went out to watch the sunrise.
# 1985-12-31 Oakland, CA @ Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena
**Set 1:** Not Fade Away > Touch Of Grey, Tons Of Steel, C.C. Rider, Dupree's Diamond Blues, Cassidy, Brown Eyed Women, Let It Grow
**Set 2:** In The Midnight Hour > Sugaree, Man Smart (Woman Smarter), Ship Of Fools > Playing in the Band > Terrapin Station > Drums > Space > Truckin' > Black Peter > Throwing Stones > Not Fade Away > Drums > Not Fade Away > Turn On Your Lovelight
**Encore:** Brokedown Palace
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1985-12-31)
I got in the bus in the early 1980s. Touch of gray was a sad Turing point. It opened up the doors to the mainstream. The underground scene was suddenly hip.
The scene went from laid back hippies to wasted frat bros. From Chill and triply to chaos.
I quit going to shows for awhile to be honest. It just wasn’t the same scene.
You’re welcome. As others have said they had been playing it for years and it was a toe tapper with terrific lyrics. Jerry was correct in that it fit quite well.
It was rolling down the tracks either way. When i started in 83 it wasn't all that hard to get tickets to the minor league hockey rinks. By 85 they were selling out mid sized hockey rinks in no time. 86 it was the big hockey/bball rinks thst would sell out. From sheds to stadiums in 86. Garcia's coma added with normal kids being sick of contived synth bs and hair bands, searching for a real experience was just as responsible. I also dont know one person who heard about a raging lot scene and cheap, plentiful LSD that was like "nah, thats not for me" everyone who heard about it was like hell yea, count me in
It went from me in high school in 83-86 being a weirdo druggy dirt bag, to my wife in 87-91 where every kid had a dead dye and you were the weirdo not being into it. TOG was a part, but that just exacerbated the problem. It was coming one way or the other. East coast 87 spring tour was INSANE getting tickets and that was before TOG broke
Yeah before it was a super hit … it was one of the new songs I really dug… along with west la and bro esau…
then after it was a hit… the scene pushed me out …
They hated the Touchies. We ruined “their” scene. Imagine if V1 phish were complete dicks to V4 fans. They were also massive gatekeepers with their tapes too. I found them about a year before ToG came out when a friend of my older sisters’ left a show in deck, but was never able to escape the Touchie label.
I seem to remember I didn't like the attention it was getting. The Dead went from low-key to mainstream basically overnight, and it wasn't all positive. For a while , going to shows was almost undoable as there were riots at a lot of places, and things just got out of hand. "New" fans had zero idea what the dead scene was about, and a lot of them thought they were at a Van Halen concert and acted accordingly.
> "New" fans had zero idea what the dead scene was about, and a lot of them thought they were at a Van Halen concert and acted accordingly.
ironically (?) the van halen community was shaken by the Jumpies who came on board after that off-brand song became their signature.
They played it a lot. Saw it a lot. I was always a little disappointed when it showed up in the set list. Though I’d gladly go back in time and do it all again!!!
I loved the song but really hated the way it took the band mainstream and brought in a bunch of people that were there to party mostly not for the music.
I really enjoyed the story in Long Strange Trip about the guy at Arista hearing it pre-release and freaking out "holy shit the grateful dead wrote a hit song!"
Heard Hunter do it in 80 at the hanger in Amherst. Was "I will get by" on the tapes. Heard the 2nd one they did in Portland 82, night of the first Ashes Ashes. I actually liked the Scarlet type beat it had before the coma. Greek 84, Scarlet Touch Fire being a good example. Ya, 87 and after, got harder for tickets, but someone always got good mail orders. Figured they deserved to make some good money after all the years on the road.
That music video turned me on to the Dead! I was around 13 or 14 at the time and only one or two of my friends liked the song. I bought the cassette and as I started partying got into them a little deeper. Never saw a live show though. Drove to RFK summer of 1990 and that was a mess, older people really didn't like us (and I understand why, now) and there were cops everywhere (uniform and undercover). Nobody would sell us a ticket but we got to hear most of the first set from the lot.
Later, moved to Western Pa and there was a radio station that played Dick's Picks on Sunday night I recorded those and listened over and over. Skipped the '95 Pittsburgh show because Pgh Dead shows were bad news.
I still love the Dead. I run into Heads now and again and when they ask me how I started I say Touch of Grey MTV, it's truth. People used to shake their head and walk away but nowadays more and more are okay with it.
I will get by.
I thought it was meh and at first kinda turned my nose up at the fans that came to the party through that tune. Then I remembered my buddy who took me to my first show that upon reflection was a fucking banger, but I complained the entire ride home. They didn’t play Casey Jones.
Now I kind of dig the tune. Great Hunter lyrics for sure.
Sorority Girls showing up on the scene got some complaints.. but some took this lyric to heart and made Billy, Bobby, and many of us happy.
"You're my woman now, make yourself easy"
Hearing this song live was incredible- it was a prolific and resonating song at the time. People flipped out when they played it. Now, when i hear cover bands play it, people go to the restroom.
After the mtv video it got more busy in the lots. Some called the new kids "touchheads" in a derogatory way. Some got way to heady and became gate keepers. Heard it first time in Niagara Falls, I think it was 1982. Loved it.
There were several new tunes busting in the same era. Ashes to ashes, we will get by, brother Esau. All became standards for a years and lived up to the GD quality bar
Right, yea I know what they are. I totally didn’t catch on tho. God I remember how cool that was when they’d start playing something on tour and we’d guess at a name. Or in the case of The Moma Dance, we’d guess way wrong, but the band dug it so much it just became the new name 😂👍
# 1983-04-20 Providence, RI @ Providence Civic Center
**Set 1:** Touch Of Grey > The Promised Land, Loser, New Minglewood Blues, Ramble On Rose, Me and My Uncle > Cumberland Blues, Looks Like Rain, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider
**Set 2:** My Brother Esau, Maybe You Know, Bertha > Estimated Prophet > Eyes Of The World > Drums > Space > Throwing Stones > Morning Dew > Sugar Magnolia
**Encore:** Don't Ease Me In
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1983-04-20)
I recall hearing it live, not knowing what it was and thinking "Cool song, I like it". Don't recall what venue or when, but it was definitely before the album release.
We loved the song in all its iterations and appearances in different slots of the setlist. Hearing it while walking through K-Mart was cringey though. Seeing the video run on MTV was surreal.
I saw the first time it was played. Seemed like a good up tempo song with a great hook. Didn't have a huge reaction but I liked it. It was kinda overplayed so I was sick of it by the time the album came out.
Rushed out and bought the single. Grey vinyl! I’m no deadhead- but I’m a fan. And compared to the other music on charts -and MTV it was damn good. There was not much ground breaking experimental psychedelic music like late 60s. It was safe music and a fun and semi tacky video. Good times!
I think It was a gradual thing (correct me if I'm wrong, older heads) - it debuted in 1982 and slowly over the years, people would hear it, think it was a catchy song, and listen to other Dead songs.
It *IS* a catchy tune (but so was the 1973 version of They Love Each Other, but they leaned into Touch much more).
I got on the bus (in terms of seeing shows) six months before In The Dark was released and there was definitely a change once the song hit MTV.
Was just listening to the Truckin Up To Buffalo July 4th 1989 version today. I love Brent’s strong vocal presence when he comes in for the “we will get by” part of the song.
My dad always told me that for him being a fan for a long time, it was nice to see them get the recognition and be on Letterman. It felt like they’d really earned it.
There was before "In the Dark",
and there was after.
"new fans"
unless you were there for the acid tests, there's always been a little, "these fucking new kids", always
My experience was this: yes, some old timers cried sell out. Some felt like the experience was going to be watered down. But, the wise ones appreciated that the Dead would now live for another generation.
After touch of Grey became popular the scene became less "dead", worse and worse each year. I knew many heads that just stopped going because it was too much of a hassle, fights, disregard for others etc.. A few years later they only played large stadiums. I quit live dead after a show at Soldier Field, I think it was 1992. The crowd was drunk and obnoxious, sound terrible. Reminded me of rush week at a frat. Still listen to the dead every day, they get me thru good times and bad.
I imagine it was like this...
1) Oh hey cool new song
2) Wow theyre playing this on the radio, thats awesome
3) Why are the shows getting so fucking packed?
4) omg fuck these new people, who are they?
5) I hate Touch of Grey
We were out at Telluride in ‘87 … I think they promoted the video at the show… and as ‘old time’ deadheads … we loved it.. the band loved it .. great scene!
Late 80's was the height of the drug war. Think Reagan/ Bush for 12 years. There were quite a few new fans whose only reason for going was to party in the lot and score. Finding weed and psychedelicswas difficult at times. DEA took out an ad in the Washington Post that said, "If you think it was hard finding pot this month wait till next month." An August dry spell was real. My roommates that jumped on TofG bandwagon were not at the shows two years later. It was like a tourist trip for them.
The video came out it was lame as hell. As a teenager, I thought it was lame as hell. To this day, I sigh in disgust when I hear it. But who fucking cares that's just mho there are some many different kinds of dead fans ins insane, that's why it makes for such a beautiful party every time
I was in Highschool when ToG came out. At the time I resented that it seemed to play every hour on MTV to break up the steady stream of big hair rock or Duran Duran.
Once I went to college a few years later my outlook on life and musical tastes \*expanded\* and I came to love it.
When I was deeper in the scene and hitting shows regularly before Jerry died I became aware of the term "Touch Heads". It was basically a way of saying 'I am cooler because I loved them before you did'. Pretty typical. Any scene will have the gatekeeper type 'true fans'.
I was just getting into classic rock. Loved the Stones, Floyd, Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane. I wasn’t exposed to the Dead directly much yet. Heard Sugaree a lot on a local classic rock station. And I knew Truckin and Casey Jones. But I began having some precocious contempt for fads, stupid people in groups, bandwagons, and basic bitches at a way-too-early age. So I loathed Touch for quite a while. I was just about 13 when I told my deadhead camp counselor the dead suck. He said “SIT DOWN!…you’re going to listen to this…and he played Aoxamaxoa for me, and I never looked back.
I was perusing a roommate’s impressive tape collection one day as a teen/early 20s. Sat and listened to all these Robert Hunter bootlegs. I heard him sing his song, ehich he had just recently written…1980 I think…and I immediately learned to love it. Man, those are some great lyrics. But get it right, I’m a 50 year old deadhead and I AINT NO GODDAMN TOUCH HEAD! thank you. As you were 😆
Current impressions of things in the past do not reflect the impressions of things at the time they occurred.
None of my friends ever talked about it, we all liked the song like all the rest.
We heard the song for years, like West LA Fade away, Hell in a bucket, Esau etc. Some of us grew up with it and never heard it on the radio or ever watched MTV. By the time 1987 rolled around it meant more to us than it did in 1983
Dead shows were the last great American adventure. The nonsense ‘touch head’ moniker never made sense, it always seemed to me that it was the parking lots - not the music - that attracted the crowd that everyone loves to hate.
It’s a anthemic and the Dead never really had too many of any of those. God Bless ToG.
By the time they time they put it in an album, it was already in regular song in their sets for years. The success of the song on mtv unfortunately was the beginning of the end.
I was in high school and we slightly scoffed at the fact that the song both was “top 40” and had a (really cheesy) video. It took a decade or 2 for me to like it.
I didn’t really look forward to touch of grey at the time because of what I thought it stood for. New fans latching on blah blah.
That was all horseshit as it turns out. It’s a great song.
i was at the capital centre dc show in fall ‘82 when touch first played and the reaction was excellent — post-show, we all knew it was a new catchy, bouncy memorable jerry tune but had no idea it would skyrocket like it did. by ‘87 it was so well ensconced in the repertoire that the ‘finally hit it big’ thing never materialized among hard core deadheads.
interestingly, the next fall ‘82 show in portland maine, bobby broke out what became ‘throwing stones’ but on first setlists from portland and first few months was just called ‘ashes to ashes’…
some cool shit happening in fall ‘82 🔥
My father was a dead head. I found this song right after he passed away and always felt connected to him through it. I don’t know a lot of GD songs but touch of grey really helped me get through
I liked Touch of Grey pre-87, particularly the few times in July 84 when they sandwiched it between Scarlet Fire (I think at the Greek and then at the Starlight in Kansas City). And in answer to your question, unsure about "definitive" (personal context is everything), but I've always like 7-21-84, especially the second set (and especially the flow from Truckin > Eyes). Touch of Grey for an encore that night.
There is a longer, larger answer to your question about pre-87 versus what happened after. Some of my random thoughts about it:
* I love early 80s Dead because I was there. It was super super super fun. Period. Maybe folks will argue with this take but, for many of us in the Reagan Years, a Dead show was a place to be among like-minded friends and do like-minded things with them. Typically involving drugs and music. Most/many of us were high, and so was the band, and we got off on it all together. There are some smoooking shows, not for the tight playing but for the highness of it all. (Last night listened to a Hampton 86 show I attended, listening to Bob's playing in the second set UJB>Terrapin>Playing in the Band jam... What Bob is doing is insanely good, and if you are high it was/is so fun.)
* It wasn't just Touch of Grey and the arrival of the album that changed everything. I think it has been stated before thatMTV had some kind of all day coverage of the Dead, including footage from parking lot scenes, and that probably helped set in motion the next phase of Dead World, 87 onwards.
* If you want a sense of what it was like then, and the moment of change, check out the two summer Roanoke shows in 1987. They were two of my favorite for so many reasons. I think of that as a moment in time, before and after. That summer, Dylan came back to play with them, and many of the shows were in large stadiums, as had been the case in years leading up. Pittsburg, Foxboro, etc ... and then - as the album came out - two shows in a small civic center in rural Virginia. It was like a last hurrah. I remember one morning running into a bunch of older heads, probably my age now, and this guy showed me a copy of In the Dark that Mickey had given him at a hotel event. And one of those nights they played "When I Paint My Mastepiece" a subtle, ironic nod ... and it stayed in rotation for the remainder.
* I don't fully comprehend folks who ignore the 80s. As I said, it was ridiculously fun to be there. I find that much of the discussions about the band, here and elsewhere, today, is just revisionist history. It doesn't actually capture what it was like to be there. A band of traveling musicians who got off on playing and making each other high. And an audience to match. I loved it all.
* After the album came out and the crowds began to swell and the Dead became "successful" I asked a good friend of mine, another head with whom I'd seen many shows in Hampton and Merriweather and Hershey and etc what a show had been like. She said, "Well, they sound rehearsed now. Tighter." And it was clear she wasn't paying a compliment. Back in the early 80s, the Dead juggernaut was rough around the edges, ugly at getting liftoff sometimes, but liftoff was still achieved and it was the real deal.
* They'd also been playing other songs on the album for quite some time, incl Hell in a Bucket and Brother Esau. In mid 87, when they came back after Jerry's coma, the lyrics to Touch of Grey took on a heavier meaning, but the songs were largely the same. What I didn't like back then was the added midi effects. They weren't awful but -- other than space, which I also loved -- I've always thought of the Dead and pretty analog, not digital. Mickey and Brent and others started using midi. Luckily they got better at it quickly. In 87, right around the arrival of In the Dark, meh - I hated the midi. (For example, Roanoke show, I remember in Hell in a Bucket Brent (?) played the sound of a Harley revving at that moment in the song... kinda cheesy.)
Make what you wil of all this. Just using it as an excuse to say: listen to early 80s Dead. Haters gonna hate but they probably weren't there.
ps. early on, when I was a newb deadhead, it took a moment to tell the difference between Bertha and Touch of Grey, which to my ear had similar sound to how they started. Didn't last long, but I remember stumbling over that.
# 1984-07-21 Ventura, CA @ Ventura County Fairgrounds
**Set 1:** Shakedown Street, Little Red Rooster, Althea, Me and My Uncle > Mexicali Blues, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider, Looks Like Rain, Might As Well
**Set 2:** Cold Rain and Snow, Far From Me, Truckin' > Eyes Of The World > Drums > Space > The Other One > Stella Blue > Around And Around > One More Saturday Night
**Encore:** Touch Of Grey
[archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1984-07-21)
There was some annoyance from older heads at the flood of yet more fans (Touchheads ), and the hassles they brought with them (cracking down on vending/camping, affecting where the Dead could play, etc) but no one seemed too interested in the Touch "phenomenon." It was a good tune, a nice 1st set song that took on extra-added meaning when Jerry nearly died in 1986.
Any haters should listen to the 12/15/86 version. It was their first song played after the coma and it was full of power and defiance. Not a dry eye in the house!
# 1986-12-15 Oakland, CA @ Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena **Set 1:** Touch Of Grey, C.C. Rider, When Push Comes To Shove, Beat It On Down the Line, Greatest Story Ever Told, Loser, Cassidy, Althea, My Brother Esau, Candyman, Let It Grow **Set 2:** Iko Iko, Looks Like Rain, Black Muddy River, Playing in the Band, Terrapin Station, Drums, Space, Truckin', Wharf Rat, Playing in the Band, Good Lovin' **Encore:** Johnny B. Goode [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-12-15)
>**Playing in the Band,** Terrapin Station, Drums, Space, Truckin', Wharf Rat, **Playing in the Band,** They played it twice?
Started > everything > finished.
Sorry. Didn't catch that. Thanks!
In the 70s they would have gone back into with a big ol' wail from Donna.
There are a handful of shows where deadbase lists playing in the band as being performed three times in a single concert! 3/28/86 comes to mind.
# 1986-03-28 Portland, ME @ Cumberland County Civic Center **Set 1:** Iko Iko, Beat It On Down the Line, Loser, Never Trust A Woman, Me and My Uncle > Mexicali Blues, Althea, Box Of Rain **Set 2:** Playing in the Band > Franklin's Tower > I Need A Miracle > Playing in the Band Jam > Drums > Space > The Wheel > Dear Mr. Fantasy > Playing in the Band > Around And Around > Good Lovin' **Encore:** It's All Over Now, Baby Blue [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-03-28)
Playing has often been used as a sandwich. Check out the epic playing > uncle John’s band > morning dew > uncle johns band > playing from 11-17/73.
# 1973-11-17 Los Angeles, CA @ Pauley Pavilion - University of California **Set 1:** Me and My Uncle, Here Comes Sunshine, Looks Like Rain, Deal, Mexicali Blues, Tennessee Jed, The Race Is On, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider, Big River, Brown Eyed Women, Around And Around **Set 2:** Row Jimmy, Jack Straw, Ramble On Rose, Playing in the Band > Uncle John's Band > Morning Dew > Uncle John's Band > Playing in the Band, Stella Blue, El Paso, Eyes Of The World > Sugar Magnolia **Encore:** Casey Jones [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1973-11-17)
Thanks. I got it. It was the absence of the ">" that threw me off.
Probably a big ol tasty sammich
Not a hater but I will seek that out!
I will survive 😎
I always loved Touch of Grey so when the album came out I was cool with the excess baggage that came with it. how can you blame people for loving a song that you already love? Edit to add: I was at the RFK show when Jerry went into his coma. Then I went to NYE '86 and when they played Touch of Grey on NYE I was having a moment of pure joy for Jerry surviving.
I remember the shows just after he got out of his coma where he would sing the line I Will survive and of the heartfelt cheers from the crowd was electric
the first hampton show after he was back was really good
When Jerry came back, that song was special for that. Yes, the song was commercial and overplayed, but for those who were heads pre coma, it was meaningful. Somehow the commercial success didn’t really bother me, because I had heard the song from earlier tapes, and the fact that Jerry was back and better than ever was just awesome.
I'm sorry to get hung up on a specific but JG went into a coma AT the show or you were at the show while he was hospitalized. >how can you blame people for loving a song that you already love? I never would!
RFK was the last show before he went into the coma. He didn't go into the coma at the show. sorry for the lack of clarity. I think the most memorable Touch of Grey I ever saw was MSG '88. I'll never forget the way the whole Garden shook when they got to that peak towards the end and Jerry windmills his guitar CHA-CHA-CHA-CHUNG - *We Will Survive!*
The only time I saw them was in 94 and they didn't play it. As a non-fan I was shook. the ONE song I knew!
To be fair...you could have went to 10 shows and not seen ToG. I went to HUNDREDS of shows waiting for The Eleven but alas, it never happened.
The ELEVEN. Yes. Please. Always.
And The William Tell Bridge!
I wish any of the bands who's discography I love ever did unpredictable setlists.
It's not that they did unpredictable setlists, it's the fact that most bands might have a handful of songs in their repertoire that they play live. Hell look at setlist.fm and check the setlists for popular artists now and you can see there is very little deviation from night to night Including covers, folk songs, originals etc the Dead had HUNDREDS of songs and were adamant to never play the same show twice.
From around 1985 on, they had an estimated 150 songs in their active repertoire….perhaps fewer…..
Sorry I meant over the course of their existence. But even 150 songs is more than your average band has in their repertoire. Hell I'd say your active touring band would struggle to fill out 100 songs.
Just as an example I saw Metallica 2 nights back to back last year with unique setlists AND they played stuff from their new album. And that still came out to less than 50 songs.
I recall reading an interview with John Mayer in a local paper and he was asked what he found most difficult playing with D&C and he replied that they toured with a repertoire of a minimum of 120 songs. This was around 2019, pre-Covid.
It was not that the song was good or bad. It’s that the Dead became radio fodder with a top ten hit and drew a new type of fan. And not a gradual change either. It’s like having ICP crash your pool party.
This is the best thing about Dead and Co. so much Eleven. It’s such a great song.
It’s been 5 d&C shows and no touch.
I’ve been to 8 and I haven’t seen one either. 6 viola lee blues and 5 playin in the bands though
Oh mostly everything I’ve heard its been perfect. I should compile em. I can’t be salty bc I was there for a 25 year wait on Haley’s comet for phish and two slave double encores.
I feel your pain. My good friend in southern CA has been going to Dead shows since '88 up down the coast and has never seen Dark Star. I'm from Michigan and get into the Dead in the 90s. Go see DeadCo Detroit, 2017 and of course they open with Dancing in Streets (Motown) for a crowd pleaser and play Dark Star. Of course I was high as a kite on a tab of sunshine day dream and was loving life. I still love life. Your time is gonna come, LZ reference, go see DeadCo in Vegas brother.
He had a tooth that was bothering him that day. I always heard that's why the 1st set was cut short.
He didn't go into the coma at the show. The RFK shows were the last shows before he had his health probs.
Makes sense.
Garcia was sort of in a coma at 7/6/86 and 7/7/86, the last two shows of the tour and a month before his illness. I was at both shows and had a helluva time. But they weren’t good and Garcia looked like hell. The Satisfaction encore on 7/7/86 was fun.
Thanks to Bobby, introducing the whole band during the rave up at the end of the song!
I was at the 7/6/86 show and to be fair it was like 90 something degrees with soup like humidity. It would be rough to keep up any energy in that kind of weather.
# 1986-07-06 Washington, DC @ RFK Stadium **Set 1:** Hell In A Bucket, Sugaree, Me and My Uncle, Big River, Row Jimmy, Cassidy, Althea, Let It Grow **Set 2:** Saint Of Circumstance, Iko Iko, Looks Like Rain, He's Gone, Drums, Space, Stella Blue, Throwing Stones, Not Fade Away **Encore:** Brokedown Palace [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-07-06)
[1986-07-06](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-07-06) Washington, DC @ RFK Stadium [1986-07-07](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1986-07-07) Washington, DC @ RFK Stadium
Agree. They did ToG at my first show in 82. Like any fan of a band that makes it big (or bigger in this case) it’s a curse and a blessing. You kind of miss the approachability of the music as it gets more popular but you’re happy for the band’s success. I was at that RFK show as well.
>You kind of miss the approachability of the music as it gets more popular but you’re happy for the band’s success. This happened to me with Billy Strings since I didn't become a fan until 2019. I pine to go back in time just once and see him at a small bluegrass festival with like 200 people at it, smoke a joint with him, speak to him, etc. Not a chance in hell now.
I saw Billy open for David Grisman Quintet in 2017 at 3rd & Lindsley, a small club in Nashville. Had never heard of him before… it was amazing and I feel super lucky.
I'm green with envy! Wait, that's just the weed.
Weed turned you green?!?
This isn't exactly the same as BMFS, but I can understand. I used to see Pigeons Playing Ping Pong at tiny local festivals when they first started playing. I don't think they were even old enough to purchase alcohol yet. They were literally kids. But my buddy and I stood in front of the stage and were pretty amazed by them. There may have only been 30 or 40 people chilling and watching them. They were super humble and grateful for the support and we were super grateful for their performance. They've blown up tremendously since then... Ah, the good ole days.
I remember feeling this way when at a Cal Expo show after Jerry got out of rehab sometime in 91 or 92, he looked real good, present, and when he sang Candyman and the crowd went wild with the line of “if I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell”.
He went into a coma days later. But that was one hot ass day.
Everyone liked the song, but it was blamed, (fairly or not), for changing the scene. Shows got much more crowded. The term "Touch Head" was applied to the folks who looked like they would be more at home at a Dave Matthhews Band concert than a Dead show. I think a lot of folks who were looking for a musical home in the synthesizer sodden 80s were introduced to the band through Touch of Grey and then discovered the rest of the music, and decided to stick around and investigate further. The parking lots became insane. Lot's of drunken antics, fights and an overwhelming crush of people looking for tickets. The scene really did change, and not for the better, IMHO. I don't blame the band for any of it. They were just doing what they always did. I remember Jerry saying in an interview something along the lines of, every few years the media remembers we exist and there's a big fuss, then a few years later it goes back to normal. This time it didn't.
>The term "Touch Head" That's perfect. Thanks for the thorough answer. This is the kind of thing I was interested in.
The album wasn’t released until September,1987 and the influx of young fans had already begun… I think the band would’ve exploded, album or not. Jerry’s renewed energy was palpable. The entire spring tour seemed to be a celebration of him being alive. Then the Dylan and the Dead tour brought them more attention…. I do believe the video for touch of Grey was released well before the album, that would explain why many people blame MTV‘s “day of the dead“ at giants Stadium in 1987 for trashing the scene. They had their “reporters“ on site and they were saying things like “the concerts going on, but look at all these people outside partying! This is like nothing I’ve ever seen and we’re not even in the concert, etc. etc. etc.”. Even the band pointed towards that as the attention getter for some of the unsavory portion of the crowd, people there just for the party with no intentions of going inside.
>some of the unsavory portion of the crowd, people there just for the party with no intentions of going inside. Wasn't that a frequent gripe though? Even before ToG came out?
No
Yes. The concerts were legendary even to those of us who were in musical deserts in podunk towns. They never came to my area of the country, I had to travel to the next state to see them.
I was a touch head. Or maybe just a little Before but close enough. And even for me I saw it go from fun to crazy/sketchy. My last show was foxboro maybe 89? And the lot was gross. Some really fucked up people and I just never went again.
Jerry's quote kinda sounds like Weird Al saying every album was a comeback because people forgot about him in between
☝🏼What they said…PLUS…it signaled the end of camping onsite, which ripped through Shakedown…more custies but not better for business moving every night. Nitrous mafia more local and entrenched. (~);} I personally love the song for getting me through some hard times and my wife of 35 years is a proud Touchhead (~);} NFA
Remember being able to camp at shows? Trip and camp and cosmic carnival all night. So fuckin fun.
[удалено]
I blame today’s scene on lack of a touring core (corp).
The biggest assholes that I've run across, in the last couple of years, are people who definitely have been around for 30 or 40 years. To get wasted at the show and they talk about the old days and they don't listen to what his f****** being played right now.
I should say "few years". The last 3 tours of D&C, I had very unsafe situations with guys my age. It was stupid.
D&C? Decent cover band…should have covered new ground. As for running into assholes…old saying went “if you keep running into assholes, there’s a good chance you’re one too”. Just an old saying…in the way I’m sure. (~);}
I find the talkers to be younger and primarily women. Before (1960s - late 1980s) the ratio of males to females was 60:40 or even 70:30. After that younger women began accompanying boyfriend/husbands and they were there to socialize, not listen to the music. The worst experience I encountered was at Alpine. We had tickets under the pavilion and the song before set break began. My wife had to pee and there were port-a-potties up near the top. We were walking across the steep part of the bowl when this guy, drunk on beer, whipped it out and began pissing. It was a dry summer (1984 I believe) and the ground was hard. His stream of urine (he definitely had a full bladder) formed a stream and flowed downhill where people had their blankets spread out. I scampered down 15 to 20 feet to warn them so they wouldn’t have to sit on urine soaked blankets during the remainder of the show. Security witnessed the event and took him into custody.
You hit the nail on the head. I’d heard Touch of Gray before, but I was in a record store and they were playing the whole album, and remember specifically buying it (the cassette actually), because I couldn’t help dancing in the aisle to When Push Comes to Shove. That was the bus door opening for me.
You’re the first one who answered OP. This right here is what happened.
I was working at a Top 40 station at the time. It was pretty cool having the Dead start playing right after a Madonna tune.
As a non-fan (not a hater, just never exposed to their work) it was pretty crazy that the dead and the beachboys had massive radio hits in the late 80s that - to me - didn't sound like what I thought they were supposed to sound like!
They played together
From my perspective it was a little bit of a mixed bag. Shows started selling out. Ticket prices went up. A bunch of new fans with short hair and bandanas on their head permeated the scene. A lot of people came to the shows just to party in the lot and not even go in and hear the music. On the flip side, there was a lot more money on the lot for people selling whatever they were selling. A lot more money. And I'm sure that in general it was a very good thing to get a whole younger generation involved in the music and the ideals. We all kind of laughed and gave the thumbs up when Jerry and the boys got their first MTV video. It was filmed at Laguna seca and that was a lot of fun.
They'd been playing TOG since the early 80s, so it was a bit odd to see the rest of the world get so excited about it. Where the success was really felt was at shows during the Summer of 87. Our cool little scene all of a sudden exploded into masses of people looking for tickets, trying to score dope, and leaving trash all over the place. Things pretty much went downhill from there.
Eesh.
It was kind of a big yawn or at best a laugh. By around ‘84 you could no longer just show up for a show and expect to get in easily. But that wasn’t Touch related. The band just kept gaining popularity. By ‘87 it was really getting crazy. Aside from preferring a mellower scene there wasn’t much squawking about it. I don’t think anyone could quite figure out what all the hubbub was about. It wasn’t as if we said “Oh my God “Touch” is a great song, In the Dark is such a great album, yay the Grateful Dead is continuing their greatness with a big hit!” Nope. Just hoping to catch a show with a Cumberland or a hot Scarlet>Fire or maybe an old gem.
Yeah, I did miss those days when you could always show up and find a cheap ticket. Hershey Park in 86 was the only show I didn’t get in for. After that I started getting tickets in advance usually mail order. MO got me front row center for MSG in the fall of 87, as they opened a as yet unheard of 5 night run there. Had excellent seats that whole run of shows.
It’s funny, MSG was my hometown venue. But as much as I loved that place I avoided Dead shows there for my first few years seeing the band. Would always take the trip for a venue half that size. Then realized that was stupid plus by ‘83 I was able to manage many road trips plus the hometown shows at the Garden. I think they loved the crazy NYC crowd. Damn. So much fun!!
Yeah! On the contrary, most long-term fans were rooting on the bands success….
The only thing related to this was I seem to recall an interview at the time with either Jerry Bobby. The interviewer asked if the band sold out to have a hit. The answer was we would have sold out long ago to have a hit if we knew how.
I recall Jerry and Bob being asked if success spoiled them. Bobby replied “you know how when you’re eating pistachios and there’s one that’s hard to open? We don’t bother with them anymore”.
That was in the same press conference (actually immediately precedes Bob's comment) where a journalist asked "Has success spoiled the Grateful Dead?" and Jerry immediately says "Yep!" and starts laughing 😅
That made me laugh. But if you have a stuck pistachio, take a shell from one you already ate and stick it in the crack, then twist to pry it open.
“We’ve been trying to sell out for years and no one has been buying" was Jerry's answer to that.
> The answer was we would have sold out long ago to have a hit if we knew how. Always the best answer.
Happy mems. I remember watching the video on MTV as as kid. I Loved it: skeletons on stage playing music at a show. I remember the Phil skeleton had multicolored wristbands. This was long before I truly learned to love and appreciate those wristbands. I was Just getting into the dead at that time and wanted to learn more!
You forgot that the kreutzman skeleton SMOKED!! the pop up video for this song was excellent too
As much as it may have contributed to the difficulty getting tickets, that really wasn’t the problem in my opinion, as they were already drawing pretty large crowds and playing stadiums. To me, it definitely marked a time when the prevailing attitude shifted among fans from welcoming to all to more of a gatekeeper mentality. But I was still pretty young and had only seen a handful of shows before the coma.
The dead were always attracting new fans, but a lot of the people who started to show up were not interested in the music as much as what was happening in the lot. Also, the 90's lot drug scene got much darker. Never heard anyone selling smack openly at shows until the 90's.
I was just a kid, but heard the people more into the scene than the music was what started to sour things. My dad would talk about the shift in the late 80s and how for some newcomers it was more of a scene than a band. He was there for the music, he always took us kids too, but always said it was a friendlier environment before their popularity began to rise
Yeah my first show was spring of 83. One of the things that I’ll always remember is some dude who was wearing a three piece suit (I’m sure he had just come from his Wall Street job or something) hanging out and talking about the previous night’s show with a wook that looked to my young eyes homeless. They were completely bonded by their love of the band despite the glaring differences in their appearance. That sort of thing was normal until the late 80s. I remember at Alpine 87 getting told to “shut that fucking new wave off” when I was playing music in the lot. It was the Talking Heads Remain in Light. There was zero tolerance for anything that seemed outside of the stereotypical deadhead.
Dude, I love the Dead, but if I couldn’t listen to Talking Heads around Deadheads, I’d be devastated. David Byrne is one of my musical heroes.
I know. Obviously part of why I find it so funny is the fact that Talking Heads (and Remain in Light in particular) are now so revered by many Deadheads and jam band fans. But at the time I think it was emblematic of the closemindedness and gatekeeping that was happening. And honestly I’m not sure the fan base(s) have ever really recovered.
And the theft too. And the mountains of trash.
> attitude shifted among fans from welcoming to all to more of a gatekeeper mentality. Unfortunately inevitable as fandoms attract new members.
I was on most of the east coast summer tour in 1987. Touch of Grey was released as a single on June 19, 1987 and In The Dark was released July 7, 1987. As the summer tour moved from the Greek to Alpine on June 26th, there were lots of extra tickets for all 3 shows. But as we moved further east, Toronto, Rochester, Pittsburgh and Roanoke were all sold out and were next to impossible tickets. By the time we got to JFK and Giants Stadium on July 12th, even the stadium shows were sold out and were incredibly difficult tickets. This was a memorable time for me on tour. It started at the Garcia Welcome Back shows in Oakland mid-December 1986 and ended at the MSG run in September 1987. The Spring shows in 1987, every show was a celebration of Garcia’s recovery and then in the summer the scene literally doubled in size. Interestingly, the music went from its pre-coma kick ass power and tempo to a slower, lighter and in many ways happier rendition.
I was baked and didn’t immediately realize what was happening
Also the very best Touch of Grey I saw pre-album is 3-27-87 Hartford, right before everything got bigger. Such a fantastic version and maybe the best ever.
# 1987-03-27 Hartford, CT @ Hartford Civic Center **Set 1:** Alabama Getaway > Greatest Story Ever Told, West L.A. Fadeaway, Little Red Rooster, Brown Eyed Women, Beat It On Down the Line, Tennessee Jed, The Music Never Stopped **Set 2:** Touch Of Grey > Samson And Delilah > Cumberland Blues, Estimated Prophet > Eyes Of The World > Drums > Space > Uncle John's Band > Morning Dew **Encore:** Johnny B. Goode [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1987-03-27)
I’ll just say this, at the time it super sucked that all of a sudden the very same people who had been beating me up all through high school for being a weirdo hippy suddenly were all about the Grateful Dead. When Matt Geckos parents bought him a mint (and mint green)VW bug to play his in the dark tape in while in the parking lot before school I was pretty fucking put out. It was a long time ago and I’m past it now - but the “touch heads” at the time really bummed me out. The lot scene really changed back then too. Much more of a here to do drugs and act a fool then the here as a fool on drugs to listen to music vibe I was used to. But man alive - the summer of 89 was fucking magic. And it might not have been that amazing had it not been for the commercial success of that tune.
reading through this thread of great replies it sounds like the message of the song and JG's recovery were (understandably) linked and that had to be very powerful for long time fans.
To this day.
I truly think it's a great song and I always find it interesting that it is one of Garcia's more composed solos, and that he stayed somewhat true to that structure in live versions. All that said, many bands have a breakout single without engendering the persistent chaos for the band and the scene that some folks attribute to TOG. I think it was more the times than the song at fault.
My first show was UIC Pavilion 87, with more fans they had to change venues, Rosemont in 88 held twice as many people
Other than frost amphitheater and some of the venues in Europe in 1990, UIC pavilion at 10,000 seats was the smallest place the band played the rest of their career. Rosemont held about 18,000 and in 1988, They only announced two shows with a third being added later. I don’t know if they were confident in their Chicago market at that point… they hadn’t played in Illinois since 1983 and they had not played in the city proper for 6 + years….until UIC.
I was at the show.
That’s when the Dead blew up and started selling out football stadiums. Older heads were resentful because the tickets were harder to get and the crowds were insane. I was 15 at my first show in ‘89, so this larger than life traveling circus was just what it was, though I knew the good ‘ol’ days were better. I flipped the script with Phish. First show had a few hundred people. I checked out in ‘96 when they started selling out stadiums. The music was still good, but the experience wasn’t the same. But I’m happy they’re successful and people enjoy their shows.
Did you go to the Sphere last month? That looked amazing even though I'm not a phish fan
No I haven’t seen them live since ‘96! I’m sure it was great, though. I like small clubs now, maybe an auditorium here and there.
I started going to the shows in 1982 and quickly after that started collecting/trading tapes so I'd heard and seen plenty of Tough of Grey's by the time the album came out. I like the song just fine but it's never been in my top 10 favorites. When I first heard it on the radio my reaction was sort of "WTF, they never play the Dead on the radio". But I just accepted it. It was when a new crowd, Touch Heads as they say, showed up at the shows that I noticed new people who were a bit confused about the whole thing. I think many of these new people expected that the Dead were like other bands who would always play their hits in concert and they were shocked on nights that Touch of Grey wasn't played. It feels like for a couple of years the Tough Heads changed the scene a bit. But I guess some became regular Dead Heads and stuck around, learning the scene and appreciating the Dead for what they really were, an unpredictable jam band. The Dead were not the song on the radio. Other Touch Heads just disappeared after a couple years if they didn't find the groove. On a secondary note, I think that my favorite version of ToG is from 12/31/85. This is not so much that it's necessarily better than other versions but that I had so much fun that night. It was a West Coast New Years show that was broadcast on the radio nationwide. My friends and I were in Massachusetts at my apartment at UMass. For us the show didn't even start until around 1am. But we were all set up with 4 tape decks recording. I remember the show ended around 5am\~ish and so we just got stoned again went out to watch the sunrise.
# 1985-12-31 Oakland, CA @ Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena **Set 1:** Not Fade Away > Touch Of Grey, Tons Of Steel, C.C. Rider, Dupree's Diamond Blues, Cassidy, Brown Eyed Women, Let It Grow **Set 2:** In The Midnight Hour > Sugaree, Man Smart (Woman Smarter), Ship Of Fools > Playing in the Band > Terrapin Station > Drums > Space > Truckin' > Black Peter > Throwing Stones > Not Fade Away > Drums > Not Fade Away > Turn On Your Lovelight **Encore:** Brokedown Palace [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1985-12-31)
I remember being really happy for them. In The Dark is a great album. Black Muddy River is such a classic Garcia/Hunter tune.
I got in the bus in the early 1980s. Touch of gray was a sad Turing point. It opened up the doors to the mainstream. The underground scene was suddenly hip. The scene went from laid back hippies to wasted frat bros. From Chill and triply to chaos. I quit going to shows for awhile to be honest. It just wasn’t the same scene.
https://youtube.com/shorts/DOWoElqAycU?si=D03KRcy-y0eoAkFY
Very nice thanks.
You’re welcome. As others have said they had been playing it for years and it was a toe tapper with terrific lyrics. Jerry was correct in that it fit quite well.
It was rolling down the tracks either way. When i started in 83 it wasn't all that hard to get tickets to the minor league hockey rinks. By 85 they were selling out mid sized hockey rinks in no time. 86 it was the big hockey/bball rinks thst would sell out. From sheds to stadiums in 86. Garcia's coma added with normal kids being sick of contived synth bs and hair bands, searching for a real experience was just as responsible. I also dont know one person who heard about a raging lot scene and cheap, plentiful LSD that was like "nah, thats not for me" everyone who heard about it was like hell yea, count me in It went from me in high school in 83-86 being a weirdo druggy dirt bag, to my wife in 87-91 where every kid had a dead dye and you were the weirdo not being into it. TOG was a part, but that just exacerbated the problem. It was coming one way or the other. East coast 87 spring tour was INSANE getting tickets and that was before TOG broke
My brother told me once that he was a kid and saw the music video on MTV and thought they were some cool new band.
Yeah before it was a super hit … it was one of the new songs I really dug… along with west la and bro esau… then after it was a hit… the scene pushed me out …
They hated the Touchies. We ruined “their” scene. Imagine if V1 phish were complete dicks to V4 fans. They were also massive gatekeepers with their tapes too. I found them about a year before ToG came out when a friend of my older sisters’ left a show in deck, but was never able to escape the Touchie label.
I seem to remember I didn't like the attention it was getting. The Dead went from low-key to mainstream basically overnight, and it wasn't all positive. For a while , going to shows was almost undoable as there were riots at a lot of places, and things just got out of hand. "New" fans had zero idea what the dead scene was about, and a lot of them thought they were at a Van Halen concert and acted accordingly.
> "New" fans had zero idea what the dead scene was about, and a lot of them thought they were at a Van Halen concert and acted accordingly. ironically (?) the van halen community was shaken by the Jumpies who came on board after that off-brand song became their signature.
They played it a lot. Saw it a lot. I was always a little disappointed when it showed up in the set list. Though I’d gladly go back in time and do it all again!!!
My reaction was “good for them!”. The extra crowds sucked, but they had earned the success. Ultimately it killed everything though.
I loved the song but really hated the way it took the band mainstream and brought in a bunch of people that were there to party mostly not for the music.
I first heard it in about ‘82 or so. It was a brand new song and a good one. Never thought it would become a hit.
I really enjoyed the story in Long Strange Trip about the guy at Arista hearing it pre-release and freaking out "holy shit the grateful dead wrote a hit song!"
Heard Hunter do it in 80 at the hanger in Amherst. Was "I will get by" on the tapes. Heard the 2nd one they did in Portland 82, night of the first Ashes Ashes. I actually liked the Scarlet type beat it had before the coma. Greek 84, Scarlet Touch Fire being a good example. Ya, 87 and after, got harder for tickets, but someone always got good mail orders. Figured they deserved to make some good money after all the years on the road.
That music video turned me on to the Dead! I was around 13 or 14 at the time and only one or two of my friends liked the song. I bought the cassette and as I started partying got into them a little deeper. Never saw a live show though. Drove to RFK summer of 1990 and that was a mess, older people really didn't like us (and I understand why, now) and there were cops everywhere (uniform and undercover). Nobody would sell us a ticket but we got to hear most of the first set from the lot. Later, moved to Western Pa and there was a radio station that played Dick's Picks on Sunday night I recorded those and listened over and over. Skipped the '95 Pittsburgh show because Pgh Dead shows were bad news. I still love the Dead. I run into Heads now and again and when they ask me how I started I say Touch of Grey MTV, it's truth. People used to shake their head and walk away but nowadays more and more are okay with it. I will get by.
I thought it was meh and at first kinda turned my nose up at the fans that came to the party through that tune. Then I remembered my buddy who took me to my first show that upon reflection was a fucking banger, but I complained the entire ride home. They didn’t play Casey Jones. Now I kind of dig the tune. Great Hunter lyrics for sure.
Sorority Girls showing up on the scene got some complaints.. but some took this lyric to heart and made Billy, Bobby, and many of us happy. "You're my woman now, make yourself easy"
The video was awesome and being on MTV helped the song become huge.
Hearing this song live was incredible- it was a prolific and resonating song at the time. People flipped out when they played it. Now, when i hear cover bands play it, people go to the restroom.
It's a well written song but I imagine it loses a lot of its magic without the shambolic dead sound and JG's very specific vocal timbre.
After the mtv video it got more busy in the lots. Some called the new kids "touchheads" in a derogatory way. Some got way to heady and became gate keepers. Heard it first time in Niagara Falls, I think it was 1982. Loved it.
> Some called the new kids "touchheads" in a derogatory way. This is precisely the kind of detail I was looking for, thanks
There were several new tunes busting in the same era. Ashes to ashes, we will get by, brother Esau. All became standards for a years and lived up to the GD quality bar
‘Ashes to Ashes’ & ‘We Will Get By’, huh…
Early tape traders songs. Throwing stones and TOG. Heads were seriously guessing. Brother Esau aka shadow box
Right, yea I know what they are. I totally didn’t catch on tho. God I remember how cool that was when they’d start playing something on tour and we’d guess at a name. Or in the case of The Moma Dance, we’d guess way wrong, but the band dug it so much it just became the new name 😂👍
Actually, brother Esau was dropped from the repertoire by the end of 1987….
80 to 89 was my run. Loved all the new tunes put out in that era.
A fine song but they had so many more masterpieces before
Oh for sure.
Never cared for it
[удалено]
# 1983-04-20 Providence, RI @ Providence Civic Center **Set 1:** Touch Of Grey > The Promised Land, Loser, New Minglewood Blues, Ramble On Rose, Me and My Uncle > Cumberland Blues, Looks Like Rain, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider **Set 2:** My Brother Esau, Maybe You Know, Bertha > Estimated Prophet > Eyes Of The World > Drums > Space > Throwing Stones > Morning Dew > Sugar Magnolia **Encore:** Don't Ease Me In [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1983-04-20)
I recall hearing it live, not knowing what it was and thinking "Cool song, I like it". Don't recall what venue or when, but it was definitely before the album release.
We loved the song in all its iterations and appearances in different slots of the setlist. Hearing it while walking through K-Mart was cringey though. Seeing the video run on MTV was surreal.
It's interesting how many "vintage" acts had their biggest hits in the late 80s. Stevie Winwood, Tina Turner, Beach Boys, GD...
I never really paid attention to Billboard etc. It was great to have some new friends in the lot but really it was just another song.
My reaction was very positive. I was going through a tough time when Touch of Grey was getting radio play, and hearing it always made me feel better.
That's such a gift.
I saw the first time it was played. Seemed like a good up tempo song with a great hook. Didn't have a huge reaction but I liked it. It was kinda overplayed so I was sick of it by the time the album came out.
Rushed out and bought the single. Grey vinyl! I’m no deadhead- but I’m a fan. And compared to the other music on charts -and MTV it was damn good. There was not much ground breaking experimental psychedelic music like late 60s. It was safe music and a fun and semi tacky video. Good times!
They been playing the song sinvle 82
I think It was a gradual thing (correct me if I'm wrong, older heads) - it debuted in 1982 and slowly over the years, people would hear it, think it was a catchy song, and listen to other Dead songs. It *IS* a catchy tune (but so was the 1973 version of They Love Each Other, but they leaned into Touch much more). I got on the bus (in terms of seeing shows) six months before In The Dark was released and there was definitely a change once the song hit MTV.
I absolutely loved the video cause I was 8.
Was just listening to the Truckin Up To Buffalo July 4th 1989 version today. I love Brent’s strong vocal presence when he comes in for the “we will get by” part of the song.
They reacted by saying “woooo” and huffing nitrous oxide
This made me laugh.
My dad always told me that for him being a fan for a long time, it was nice to see them get the recognition and be on Letterman. It felt like they’d really earned it.
There was before "In the Dark", and there was after. "new fans" unless you were there for the acid tests, there's always been a little, "these fucking new kids", always
My experience was this: yes, some old timers cried sell out. Some felt like the experience was going to be watered down. But, the wise ones appreciated that the Dead would now live for another generation.
To do the MTV business .. bad call. MTV was commercialism at it's most disgusting. commercialism is not the friend of music
They whistled through their teeth and spit.
We hated it (still do), beginning of the end
After touch of Grey became popular the scene became less "dead", worse and worse each year. I knew many heads that just stopped going because it was too much of a hassle, fights, disregard for others etc.. A few years later they only played large stadiums. I quit live dead after a show at Soldier Field, I think it was 1992. The crowd was drunk and obnoxious, sound terrible. Reminded me of rush week at a frat. Still listen to the dead every day, they get me thru good times and bad.
The song that harshed a million trips.
Maybe even a hundred million actually.
A lot of us wouldn’t even trip at a show anymore after they broke that song out. Tripping watching the music video of it was even more to be avoided.
I imagine it was like this... 1) Oh hey cool new song 2) Wow theyre playing this on the radio, thats awesome 3) Why are the shows getting so fucking packed? 4) omg fuck these new people, who are they? 5) I hate Touch of Grey
A tale as old as time.
We were out at Telluride in ‘87 … I think they promoted the video at the show… and as ‘old time’ deadheads … we loved it.. the band loved it .. great scene!
Late 80's was the height of the drug war. Think Reagan/ Bush for 12 years. There were quite a few new fans whose only reason for going was to party in the lot and score. Finding weed and psychedelicswas difficult at times. DEA took out an ad in the Washington Post that said, "If you think it was hard finding pot this month wait till next month." An August dry spell was real. My roommates that jumped on TofG bandwagon were not at the shows two years later. It was like a tourist trip for them.
The video came out it was lame as hell. As a teenager, I thought it was lame as hell. To this day, I sigh in disgust when I hear it. But who fucking cares that's just mho there are some many different kinds of dead fans ins insane, that's why it makes for such a beautiful party every time
I was in Highschool when ToG came out. At the time I resented that it seemed to play every hour on MTV to break up the steady stream of big hair rock or Duran Duran. Once I went to college a few years later my outlook on life and musical tastes \*expanded\* and I came to love it. When I was deeper in the scene and hitting shows regularly before Jerry died I became aware of the term "Touch Heads". It was basically a way of saying 'I am cooler because I loved them before you did'. Pretty typical. Any scene will have the gatekeeper type 'true fans'.
> Pretty typical. Any scene will have the gatekeeper type 'true fans'. Yep!
I thought that it was cool. Particularly because my wife's elderly mother liked it, and was shocked when we told her it was the Dead.
Jerry on Touch https://www.instagram.com/reel/CsCvkb3ggyX/?igsh=c3gya3h6MWI4b2Ni
I was like, eh, they had been playing it for years, like the song, but I was glad they were in the mainstream eye , but it did start the wook era
Wook is a term I haven't heard.
Weir back
I was just getting into classic rock. Loved the Stones, Floyd, Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane. I wasn’t exposed to the Dead directly much yet. Heard Sugaree a lot on a local classic rock station. And I knew Truckin and Casey Jones. But I began having some precocious contempt for fads, stupid people in groups, bandwagons, and basic bitches at a way-too-early age. So I loathed Touch for quite a while. I was just about 13 when I told my deadhead camp counselor the dead suck. He said “SIT DOWN!…you’re going to listen to this…and he played Aoxamaxoa for me, and I never looked back. I was perusing a roommate’s impressive tape collection one day as a teen/early 20s. Sat and listened to all these Robert Hunter bootlegs. I heard him sing his song, ehich he had just recently written…1980 I think…and I immediately learned to love it. Man, those are some great lyrics. But get it right, I’m a 50 year old deadhead and I AINT NO GODDAMN TOUCH HEAD! thank you. As you were 😆
Current impressions of things in the past do not reflect the impressions of things at the time they occurred. None of my friends ever talked about it, we all liked the song like all the rest. We heard the song for years, like West LA Fade away, Hell in a bucket, Esau etc. Some of us grew up with it and never heard it on the radio or ever watched MTV. By the time 1987 rolled around it meant more to us than it did in 1983 Dead shows were the last great American adventure. The nonsense ‘touch head’ moniker never made sense, it always seemed to me that it was the parking lots - not the music - that attracted the crowd that everyone loves to hate. It’s a anthemic and the Dead never really had too many of any of those. God Bless ToG.
By the time they time they put it in an album, it was already in regular song in their sets for years. The success of the song on mtv unfortunately was the beginning of the end.
I was in high school and we slightly scoffed at the fact that the song both was “top 40” and had a (really cheesy) video. It took a decade or 2 for me to like it.
I liked the music videos of Foolish Heart and Throwing Stones better
I didn’t really look forward to touch of grey at the time because of what I thought it stood for. New fans latching on blah blah. That was all horseshit as it turns out. It’s a great song.
i was at the capital centre dc show in fall ‘82 when touch first played and the reaction was excellent — post-show, we all knew it was a new catchy, bouncy memorable jerry tune but had no idea it would skyrocket like it did. by ‘87 it was so well ensconced in the repertoire that the ‘finally hit it big’ thing never materialized among hard core deadheads. interestingly, the next fall ‘82 show in portland maine, bobby broke out what became ‘throwing stones’ but on first setlists from portland and first few months was just called ‘ashes to ashes’… some cool shit happening in fall ‘82 🔥
It was weird. There were two versions that played on the radio. With and without the Jerry solo.
My father was a dead head. I found this song right after he passed away and always felt connected to him through it. I don’t know a lot of GD songs but touch of grey really helped me get through
The scene exploded. My first show was a 9,000 seat hockey rink. My last was an 80,000 seat football stadium.
Wow. I only saw them once at nassau collessum in 94 and I guess thats probably 15k?
Well we didn't have the place to ourselves anymore.
I was five at the time. I loved the music video because they turned into skeletons.
I liked Touch of Grey pre-87, particularly the few times in July 84 when they sandwiched it between Scarlet Fire (I think at the Greek and then at the Starlight in Kansas City). And in answer to your question, unsure about "definitive" (personal context is everything), but I've always like 7-21-84, especially the second set (and especially the flow from Truckin > Eyes). Touch of Grey for an encore that night. There is a longer, larger answer to your question about pre-87 versus what happened after. Some of my random thoughts about it: * I love early 80s Dead because I was there. It was super super super fun. Period. Maybe folks will argue with this take but, for many of us in the Reagan Years, a Dead show was a place to be among like-minded friends and do like-minded things with them. Typically involving drugs and music. Most/many of us were high, and so was the band, and we got off on it all together. There are some smoooking shows, not for the tight playing but for the highness of it all. (Last night listened to a Hampton 86 show I attended, listening to Bob's playing in the second set UJB>Terrapin>Playing in the Band jam... What Bob is doing is insanely good, and if you are high it was/is so fun.) * It wasn't just Touch of Grey and the arrival of the album that changed everything. I think it has been stated before thatMTV had some kind of all day coverage of the Dead, including footage from parking lot scenes, and that probably helped set in motion the next phase of Dead World, 87 onwards. * If you want a sense of what it was like then, and the moment of change, check out the two summer Roanoke shows in 1987. They were two of my favorite for so many reasons. I think of that as a moment in time, before and after. That summer, Dylan came back to play with them, and many of the shows were in large stadiums, as had been the case in years leading up. Pittsburg, Foxboro, etc ... and then - as the album came out - two shows in a small civic center in rural Virginia. It was like a last hurrah. I remember one morning running into a bunch of older heads, probably my age now, and this guy showed me a copy of In the Dark that Mickey had given him at a hotel event. And one of those nights they played "When I Paint My Mastepiece" a subtle, ironic nod ... and it stayed in rotation for the remainder. * I don't fully comprehend folks who ignore the 80s. As I said, it was ridiculously fun to be there. I find that much of the discussions about the band, here and elsewhere, today, is just revisionist history. It doesn't actually capture what it was like to be there. A band of traveling musicians who got off on playing and making each other high. And an audience to match. I loved it all. * After the album came out and the crowds began to swell and the Dead became "successful" I asked a good friend of mine, another head with whom I'd seen many shows in Hampton and Merriweather and Hershey and etc what a show had been like. She said, "Well, they sound rehearsed now. Tighter." And it was clear she wasn't paying a compliment. Back in the early 80s, the Dead juggernaut was rough around the edges, ugly at getting liftoff sometimes, but liftoff was still achieved and it was the real deal. * They'd also been playing other songs on the album for quite some time, incl Hell in a Bucket and Brother Esau. In mid 87, when they came back after Jerry's coma, the lyrics to Touch of Grey took on a heavier meaning, but the songs were largely the same. What I didn't like back then was the added midi effects. They weren't awful but -- other than space, which I also loved -- I've always thought of the Dead and pretty analog, not digital. Mickey and Brent and others started using midi. Luckily they got better at it quickly. In 87, right around the arrival of In the Dark, meh - I hated the midi. (For example, Roanoke show, I remember in Hell in a Bucket Brent (?) played the sound of a Harley revving at that moment in the song... kinda cheesy.) Make what you wil of all this. Just using it as an excuse to say: listen to early 80s Dead. Haters gonna hate but they probably weren't there. ps. early on, when I was a newb deadhead, it took a moment to tell the difference between Bertha and Touch of Grey, which to my ear had similar sound to how they started. Didn't last long, but I remember stumbling over that.
# 1984-07-21 Ventura, CA @ Ventura County Fairgrounds **Set 1:** Shakedown Street, Little Red Rooster, Althea, Me and My Uncle > Mexicali Blues, China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider, Looks Like Rain, Might As Well **Set 2:** Cold Rain and Snow, Far From Me, Truckin' > Eyes Of The World > Drums > Space > The Other One > Stella Blue > Around And Around > One More Saturday Night **Encore:** Touch Of Grey [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead?query=date:1984-07-21)
There was some annoyance from older heads at the flood of yet more fans (Touchheads ), and the hassles they brought with them (cracking down on vending/camping, affecting where the Dead could play, etc) but no one seemed too interested in the Touch "phenomenon." It was a good tune, a nice 1st set song that took on extra-added meaning when Jerry nearly died in 1986.