The Grateful Dead - Golden Era Cover Versions, Volume 4: 1973

Here's the fourth and last volume in this series of albums of cover versions by the Grateful Dead from their "golden era" of 1969 to 1973.

This one is a bit different than the others in the series, because virtually all the songs in previous volumes were officially released, but six out of the ten songs here are still unreleased. But never fear, because the sound quality is excellent throughout, with everything coming from soundboard recordings.

Actually, the first two songs have been officially released (and just last week as I write this in July 2023, for one of them). However, I didn't use the official version because it actually sounded a bit worse than the bootleg version I already had.

You may notice that six songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. Those are all the unreleased ones. For some weird reason, all those had the lead vocals way down in the mix, even though they're from three different sources. So I did my usual thing, using the audio editing program UVR5 to boost the vocals relative to the instruments. 

You may notice this volume is significantly shorter than the others in the series, although it still has a reasonable length. That's because I did most of the volumes in this series by year, and the band did fewer covers in 1973. Their golden era was a tremendous burst of creativity, but by 1973 they were slowing down. They continued to tour into 1974, but then went on touring hiatus for a year and a half. Strangely, from 1974 through the rest of the 1970s, they did almost no new cover songs in concert, so this is a good place to end the series.

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry [Edit] (Grateful Dead)
02 That's All Right, Mama [Edit] (Grateful Dead)
03 You Ain't Woman Enough (Grateful Dead)
04 The Race Is On (Grateful Dead)
05 Nobody's Fault but Mine (Grateful Dead)
06 Peggy-O (Grateful Dead)
07 Working Man Blues [Edit] (Grateful Dead)
08 Thirty Days [Edit] (Grateful Dead)
09 Rip It Up [Edit] (Grateful Dead)
10 Blue Suede Shoes [Edit] (Grateful Dead)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15409332/TGratefulD_1973_GoldnEraCovrVrsionsVolume_4_atse.zip.html

As with the other covers in this series, the cover uses a concert poster from the relevant year. And, as usual with posters, I had to do some cropping and editing to get the rectangular poster art to fit into a square space.