Show Details


University Of Buffalo

Buffalo, NY

USA

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Set List

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  • Jerry Garcia guitar

  • Howard Wales
    keyboards

  • Roger Troy (aka Jellyroll)
    bass

  • Jerry Love
    drums

  • Jim Vincent
    guitar

Additional Acts:
  • Mahavishnu Orchestra


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3 Comments

User avatar

James McManus | Thursday, February 8th, 2024

Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales opened up the show. It was laid back and interesting music easy to listen to primarily because it was one of the first concerts I ever attended.It was at a college venue University Of Buffalo and was very cold and snowy. We were from Geneseo NY and maybe smoked some weed. After Hooteroll Mahavishnu Orchestra started playing after John McLaughlin was sort of praying or meditating being very quiet sort of like everybody in the band come together as one and then he unleashed the incredible barrage of sound that just moved along like a bullet train. The breaks in between songs were non existent and one song flowed into the next and he talked very little and when he did he was extremely quiet with a very meek sounding voice. Holy moly they seriously cranked and the energy was overwhelming. The Mahavishnu Orchestra played a lot longer than Hooteroll and kicked some serious ass. I think his only talking was when he introduced the band and like I said he spoke in a very soft voice. WOW. The sound was really awesome and it just hit you like a wall of sound.

User avatar

Joe Silverman | Sunday, April 10th, 2016

The concert was likely sponsored by UB but took place in an old movie theater downtown Buffalo, The New Century Theater. Mahavishnu was incredible and I (and most everyone) had never heard anything like it. I think it was not easy for Jerry & Friends to match that level of intensity.

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Bruce Kaufman | Saturday, November 21st, 2015

I was at this show with my good friend Simon Salz. Ah, Buffalo, what a night of snow and ice. This was actually the first time seeing any member of the Dead, and it would be yet another fourteen months before seeing the actual Grateful Dead, and so I was eager to go and hear for myself what I’d been picking up from records, including Hooteroll. I knew little about the band opening, however. But that was about to change.
My friend Simon had already been listening to Miles Davis, and knew of John McLaughlin’s work with him, but at sixteen I had still yet to discover Miles. Still, even Simon wasn’t quite prepared for the sonic intensity that assaulted our ears when we encountered Mahavishnu Orchestra for the first time. Holy double-neck Gibson! The Nepalese fingerhash beforehand didn’t help, I’m sure, but what an incredible wall of sound those guys out out: McLaughlin, Billy Cobham (later of Bobby’s Midnights), Jan Hammer (of later Miami Vice soundtrack fame), Jerry Goodman on violin, and Rick Laird, formerly of Family and Blind Faith, on bass. Indian Celtic Jazz Rock fusion on eleven melted me in my chair, and by the time Garcia and Wales came out I could barely function. The music, unfortunately, made no impression beyond the fact that I heard echos of that Hooteroll work, and Howard Wales seemed a really animated player, really working that B3 with a lot of passion. But In couldn’t keep going back in my mind to whole sensory gestalt of the Mahavishnu, waves of thunderous, apocalyptic sound ripping from McLaughlin’s mysterious, undulating figure at the center of it all, hair cut short, wearing all white. Man that guy can play. Even after going back and listening to Bitches Brew I don’t see how that could have prepared anyone for what he cooked up with the Orchestra.
Anyway, finally in March 1973 the Dead came to Buffalo, and I got firmly on the bus.