The Closing of the Fillmore West, Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 7-2-1971, Part 3: The Grateful Dead | Albums That Should Exist

Now Paul has been posting a whole series of the closing of the Fillmore (West) concerts go check him out here ATSE and he is right, since Bob’s death we have been listening to him quite a bit . . . . so this is the Dead at their peak and I love this set list

 The Closing of the Fillmore West, Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 7-2-1971, Part 3: The Grateful Dead

Paul says: Here's the third (and final) set from the third day of five days of concerts that closed the Fillmore West venue in San Francisco in 1971. (See my write-up on the Boz Scaggs set for general information about the closing.) This set features the Grateful Dead.

I had created all these albums in this series a year or two, but never got around to posting them on my blog. The recent death of Bob Weir (I'm writing this in January 2026) gave me the motivation to post them sooner rather than later, mostly so I could get to posting this set. Finally, here it is. But there's a lot more to come, with two more days of the series of concerts still to be posted.

This is a fitting tribute to the passing of Weir, I think because it's a good show of the band in their prime. In my opinion, they had many great years, but their absolute peak was probably 1970 or 1971.

This is a typical Grateful Dead concert for the era. It's long, at nearly three hours. (As is usual for Dead concerts, there was a lot of dead air between songs, but I generally cut that out.) And it consisted of two sets. The first one consisted mostly of shorter songs, often acoustic, while the second set is where the band got spacey and jammed a lot more. 

Some of this has been officially released. Two songs were released on the "Fillmore - The Last Days" album: "Casey Jones" and "Johnny B. Goode." Then, in 2021, many more were released when the "Skull and Roses" live album from 1971 was rereleased in an expanded edition. There were ten songs from this concert on the extra disc (tracks 15, 17 through 22, 25, and 26). However, all those together make up about an hour and fifteen minutes. So that still is less than half of what's here.  

This album is two hours and 41 minutes long. so a short set from the Dead . . . . . ahem!

01 talk by Bill Graham 
02 Bertha 
03 Me and Bobby McGee
04 Next Time You See Me 
05 China Cat Sunflower
06 I Know You Rider 
07 Playing in the Band 
08 Loser 
09 Ain't It Crazy [The Rub] 
10 Me and My Uncle 
11 Big Railroad Blues 
12 Hard to Handle
13 Deal 
14 Promised Land 
15 Good Lovin' 
16 Sugar Magnolia
17 Sing Me Back Home 
18 Mama Tried 
19 That's It for the Other One 
20 Drums [Instrumental]
21 That's It for the Other One [Reprise] 
22 Big Boss Man 
23 Casey Jones 
24 Not Fade Away 
25 Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad 
26 Not Fade Away [Reprise] 
27 talk 
28 Johnny B. Goode

Paul notes : The cover photo of Jerry Garcia is a screenshot taken from this exact concert. It's from the "Fillmore" movie. Given Bob Weir's recent death, I wanted to use a photo that had Weir in it. But the only one like that I could find would have been very tricky to colorize. Plus, I'm not completely sure if it's from this exact concert or not. But here it is anyway. If nothing else, it's good way to help imagine the ambience of the concert, since it shows the audience too.