On a cold, wet Sunday night in Ithaca, the Grateful Dead played Barton Hall, and somebody's soundboard reel became the most passed-around tape in Deadhead history. This crate circles that night: the old records the band reached back for, the ads flickering on dorm TVs that spring, the campus and the lake country around it. There's also a little Apple II program from the dawn of home computing, the machine family that would one day help put this tape on everyone's hard drive. Pull up a chair and start with Scarlet into Fire.
1
Hunter Seamons' matrix of the Cornell show blends soundboard and audience tapes and patches a flaw in the older source, so the Morning Dew hits as hard as the legend says. It starts the crate because nearly every Deadhead story about tape trading eventually passes through this one night in Ithaca.
2
Here's where the setlist came from: Marty Robbins' gunfighter LP with El Paso on it, a Hawaiian radio hour of Buddy Holly from the Not Fade Away box, and Martha and the Vandellas tucked into an oldies mix. Then a fan's tape of the Dead debuting their covers, so you can hear the borrowing happen in real time.
3
Lead off with a reel of ABC ads that aired January through May 1977, the very months before the show, then an Olds Cutlass spot that ran that March. Add a Cat Chow jingle and some roller-skating Pepsi kids, and you've got the static between sets.
4
The archive didn't turn up the 1977 yearbook, so this is an honest tangent: the Cornellian from 1883, the same student annual nearly a hundred years before the Dead arrived. It's the campus talking about itself, long before a field house full of tapers did the same.
5
A USGS sheet of Ithaca East, the snow-dusted Finger Lakes seen from the space station, a 1948 rider leaving the Cornell ROTC stables, and the old Cayuga ferries. To finish, the cover of an 1840 New York atlas, republished right there in Ithaca, N.Y.
6
A tiny Integer BASIC guessing game by Randy Wigginton, Apple employee number six, tucked onto the 1978 DOS system disk to show how disk files worked. It's humble and a bit sweet, the sort of program that taught a generation of future tape traders how to save something and share it.
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