The Grateful Dead have shared a newly-remastered recording of “Bertha” found on 1971’s Grateful Dead live album (commonly referred to as Skull & Roses). The recording comes from the Dead’s 4/27/71 show at Fillmore East in New York, which will appear on the remastered Skull & Roses out on June 25th via RHINO.
As Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux notes in the video description, this cut of “Bertha” opens up the Skull & Roses double live LP. With the newly-remastered audio taken from the original tapes, Jerry Garcia‘s vocals come in as a crisp beacon of light, welcoming fans into the proceeding collection of choice live cuts taken from various gigs in 1971.
“Kicking off Skull & Roses, Bertha is the first official recording of a Garcia-Hunter song since the remarkably strong batch of 1970’s double bill of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, and it certainly keeps up the A-level songwriting from the previous year’s magnificent output,” Lemieux writes. “Bertha remained an important part of the Dead’s live repertoire, played consistently from 1971 to 1995, a testament to both how much the band loved playing it, and how much Dead Heads loved hearing it.”
Listen to the Grateful Dead’s performance of “Bertha”, taken from the band’s 4/27/71 concert at Fillmore East and featured on Skull & Roses. Click here for album preorder info.
Grateful Dead – “Bertha” – New York, NY – 4/27/71
[Video: Grateful Dead]