oh my alaska at that! Fucken wonderful!
Yeah - that was before my time up here. In fact, I never saw the Dead live.
I just was curious one night and checked out the Alaskan show and stumbled across a really nice Sugaree. A lot of random shows on IA are pretty poor audio.
And for those that don't know, Grateful Dead encouraged fans to record and share shows. Since they were such prolific performers, there is now a ton of stuff available on the Internet Archive site. There are other legal bootlegs there - Phish is another notable band. However, the Dead have so much, they have their own section separate from all other live concerts.
There are only a handful of Dead shows that are illegal to share bootlegs - and those are the ones that were professionally recorded for the live albums.
p.s. Of course, the ones you won't find on IA are probably on YouTube even though it is probably illegal. That's why videos sometimes disappear from there. Oh well, I buy music still - support public radio and all that. I'll just assume others do as well, and all this sharing is for "reference and educational purposes." It is for me - if I really, really like something I discover in the RIU music forums, I'll probably track down the album on Amazon. For a lot of other things, I can evaluate and then decide to save my money.