Blue Dixie live at Trax, October 24, 1990

Perhaps you would like to hear more Blue Dixie?

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Blue Dixie is a band of guys who met in the college town of Columbia, Missouri and first started playing together 19 years ago this month. They have not played regularly since 1994, although they have reunited several times since then for gigs and private parties. I first heard them in 1989, at a 20th anniversary celebration of Woodstock that took place in downtown St Louis. They played (and still play) a mixture of original music, Grateful Dead, and other rockin' cover tunes. I REALLY dug their set, and did not realize during the show that a high-school friend of mine was one of the guitarists, but found out right afterwards.

My step-dad at the time was a classical guitar player, and he had purchased one of the very first DAT machines that came to the USA from Japan. Once I realized that my friend Brad was in the band, I asked my step-dad if I could use his DAT deck to record them, and he said "sure." So a few weeks later, I found out that they were playing a regular tuesday night gig at Cicero's (in it's old location on the south side of Delmar Blvd, in what has now been converted into the Blueberry Hill Duck Room, where I saw Cracker play just a few months ago!). At the Cicero's gig, Brad introduced me to the rest of the band, and I asked if I could record them some time. They were all VERY enthusiastic about it, and I made a few tapes of them that fall.

Come spring of 1990, they were ready to try to take it bigtime, and planned to move to Charlottesville, Virginia, to take advantage of the large number of college and universities. They invited me to move out there with them and mix sound for them, despite the fact that I had never mixed live sound before. We all knew I had an interest in making live recordings, so mixing their sets would be a great way to facilitate that.

Brad taught me the basics- at my first shows, he would help me through the soundchecks, and get me familiar with the mixing consoles ("desks" they are called in Britain!) and I learned a LOT from engineers at clubs and frat gigs out east. I also was able to attend a lot more Grateful Dead shows there than if I had still been living in St Louis. (The GD did not play in StL from 1982 until 1994, though they booked shows at the Fabulous Fox in 1987 that had to be cancelled due to Garcia's collapse just a few days before the scheduled dates) Anyhow, thanks to Brad from Blue Dixie, and Adam Roehlke, the soundman at Columbia's Blue Note, I got to meet GD soundman Dan Healy, and was able to pick his brain a little. Well, a little Dan Healy wisdom can go a long way! I learned how to make soundboard-audience mix recordings and strove to make my Blue Dixie tapes sound as good as possible.

Now, years later, archive.org exists, and we got Blue Dixie up there, so all that air that the band moved can be replicated by using the digital Dixie recordings to move today's air in a similar way!

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