By May 1973, the Grateful Dead were operating at a level of collective telepathy that still astonishes listeners half a century later. This was the golden age of the five-piece band — Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan had just lost their founding keyboardist in March of that year, and Keith and Donna Godchaux were now fully embedded in the lineup, having joined in late 1971. Keith's rolling, jazz-inflected piano work added a harmonic richness that pushed the band's improvisational language into new territory, and the spring of 1973 found them deep into one of the most exploratory periods in their history. They were road-testing material that would appear on *Wake of the Flood* later that fall, but in the meantime the setlists were long, loose, and hungry. This was a band at the height of their powers who had nothing to prove and everything to explore. The campus stadium at UC Santa Barbara isn't the stuff of legend the way Cornell or Winterland is, but there's something fitting about the Dead touching down in this sun-drenched coastal college town. Santa Barbara sits in a corridor of California that the band passed through regularly, and an outdoor stadium setting in the May warmth of the central coast would have given the evening a particular openness — the kind of setting where the music breathes differently, expanding into the night air rather than bouncing off a theater ceiling.
What we have from this show in the database is "The Other One," which is all the invitation a serious listener needs. By 1973, this Bob Weir composition had evolved into one of the band's great improvisational frameworks — a churning, relentless machine that the band could accelerate into abstraction or drop into eerie, spacious drift at will. The 1973 versions are especially prized because the Godchauxs had fully integrated into the ensemble, and Keith's piano could function both as rhythmic engine and melodic counterweight during the deeper jams. Phil Lesh was at his most adventurous during this period, treating his bass as a lead instrument, and Garcia's guitar work in "The Other One" context often hit a kind of concentrated ferocity that he reserved for few other vehicles. The crowd at a show like this would have felt that electricity in real time. Recording quality for this show may vary depending on what's circulating — worth checking the lineage notes before diving in — but whatever the source, a 1973 "The Other One" is always worth the journey. Hit play and find out where they took it.