Rhino Factoids: Jerry Garcia’s Last Show with the Grateful Dead

19 years ago today, when Jerry Garcia stepped off the stage after the Grateful Dead’s performance at Soldier Field, neither he nor anyone else knew that he’d just completed what would prove to be his final concert as the band’s frontman. But he had.

In truth, though, Garcia hadn’t been in the best of health for some time – indeed, Phil Lesh observed in his memoir, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead, that Garcia’s physical and mental acuity were both far less than 100% – and, although he’d been clean for several years, he returned to using drugs to help numb the pain, leading to a stint at the Betty Ford Center not long after his final show with the Dead, after which he moved to Serenity Knolls, a treatment center in Forest Knolls, California, which is where he died on August 9, 1995, having suffered a heart attack.

To commemorate today’s anniversary, we’ve pulled together a playlist which features every song performed by the Grateful Dead during Garcia’s last show with the band except, um, the ones it doesn’t.

Okay, that begs for a bit of a clarification, so here goes.

If you’ve seen the set list from the show or perhaps heard a bootleg of the performance, then you know that, between “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Cumberland Blues,” the Dead delivered a performance of a Phil Lesh composition entitled “Childhood’s End.” Unfortunately, although the song turned up in almost a dozen Dead shows during the last year or so of the band’s existence, they never got around to recording it, and it’s not featured in any of the shows that they’ve seen fit to release officially.

And then, situated between “So Many Roads” and “Corrina,” there’s “Samba in the Rain,” a song with lyrics by Robert Hunter and music by Vince Welnick. There weren’t many Welnick compositions in the mix for Dead setlists during his tenure with the band, and – with all due respect to the former member of the Tubes – the few that did make the cut were never terribly well received by the fans. Although the song was never recorded by the Dead, nor has it turned up on any official concert releases, Welnick did release a version in 1998 with his own band, Missing Man Foundation, but as it’s not available digitally, we can’t include it even if we’d wanted to.

So, no, we haven’t been able to present a playlist featuring the complete set list from Jerry Garcia’s last show with the Grateful Dead. But we’ve come as close as the officially-released material will allow, so hopefully you’ll still find yourself enjoying plenty of fond memories from Jerry’s days with the Dead.