Two from the Vault is a three-CD live album by the rock band the
Grateful Dead. It was recorded at the
Shrine Auditorium in
Los Angeles, California on August 24, 1968. The event was left unreleased for nearly 25 years, before being mixed down from the original multi-track reels and released on
Grateful Dead Records in 1992.
Recording
The concert was recorded on a then-state-of-the-art, one-inch
8-tracktape machine that was supplied by the band's record label,
Warner Bros. The record company also insisted on supplying
engineers who turned out to be unfamiliar with the
close miking technique involved in recording
rock music. Consequently, each of the eight tracks contained significant
leakage from all of the other instruments in the band, resulting in severe
phase cancellation problems.
Almost twenty-four years later, Don Pearson and producer Dan Healy solved this problem by employing a
B&K 2032
Fast Fourier transform (FFT)
digitalspectrum analyzer to measure the delay in time between the different microphones, using the track of
bassistPhil Lesh as the time centerpiece. The delay times were fed into a TC1280
stereo digital
delay, which, along with careful
mixing, resulted in a nearly perfect stereo image.
Releases
An expanded edition of the album, with a third CD, was released in 2007 featuring the three songs (from August 23, 1968) previously released as bonus tracks on the 2003 reissue of Anthem of the Sun .[2]
"Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)" (Grateful Dead) – 11:30 →
"Feedback" (Grateful Dead) – 4:01
Notes:
While both the back cover and booklet list disc two, track one as "That's It for the Other One", the CD erroneously lists it as simply "The Other One", credited to Weir and Kreutzmann.
"(Walk Me Out in the) Morning Dew" ends abruptly as the power in the venue was cut off due to curfew.
The bonus disc features performances from the previous night. These tracks are also included in the bonus material for the 2001 reissue of Anthem of the Sun.