There's no footage, as far as I'm aware, of the Dead's legendary 8 May 1977 performance at Cornell, the night the band delivered its stupendous and utterly mesmerising freight-train-grooved Dancin' In The Streets jam. If only someone had captured it on video....thankfully the audio at least was recorded for posterity (in high quality, courtesy of the highly-skilled recording engineer Betty Cantor-Jackson).
The next best thing is this black-and-white video of them playing it just a couple of weeks earlier.
Now, the version from 26 April is quite different. It doesn't have the same freight-train momentum of 8 May - mainly I think because Phil on bass adopted a unique and unusually energetic approach to it on 8 May. The rest of the band locked onto that powerful rhythm - Keith on piano and Bill on drums 1 in particular.
Jerry had signalled the good, exploratory mood he was in at the start of his 10-minute sublime solo, and you can tell that that inspired the others to crank things up, and he in turn became really motivated by the driving rhythm coming from them - him soaring to stratospheric levels of inventiveness over a solid groove.
Once the whole thing took off, it didn't ease up until Jerry eventually started running out of steam, having soloed relentlessly for ten minutes, complete with a bursting-into-new-universe crescendo, and finally decided the time was right to enter the descending chord progression coda.
So 26 April didn't have the same energy, or the solidity of groove as two weeks later, and Jerry was still on a journey building up to that 8 May zenith. But nevertheless, it is video from their May 77 peak and, what with it being another improvised jam of Dancin', of course it is of immense interest to see it actually happening. And completely fascinating to watch the band doing it, and especially to be able to witness, in some form at least, Jerry and his magic fingers actually producing this enthralling stuff.
26 April 1977:
8 May 1977: