Dead turns on wayback machine
Ticket fuss fades like smoke as beloved band, sans Garcia, starts truckin’
For a second, the Bay Area music event of the year was turning into a really bad trip.
Hours before the Grateful Dead were to take the Levi’s Stadium stage for the first of five farewell performances on the occasion of the band’s 50th anniversary, Deadheads were lining the sidewalks and driveways around the venue, desperately and unsuccessfully trying to unload extra tickets. The frenzy to win admission to these two local shows, added when the first three in Chicago sold out instantly, had driven some fans to buy extras and others to pay exorbitant resale prices. Two weeks
ago, the promoter suddenly put thousands of additional tickets on sale, online resale sites overflowed with hundreds at barely half-price, and those extras suddenly became worthless.
“I’ve just got to write it off in my mind,” said a Deadhead up from Los Angeles with two extras in her pocket. “Like a parking ticket.”
But the grumbling in the parking lot eventually gave way to the magic of the moment, the first chance in five years to see the reunited “Core Four” members of the band (Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart) and, if they are to be believed, the last time they will ever take the stage together.
And the legendarily devoted fan base, in all its furriness and Sixties finery, had made its way to Santa Clara from all over the western United States. Nobody seemed thrilled to be heading into a soulless football stadium, accustomed as they were to the Dead’s usual, more intimate Bay Area haunts (Shoreline Amphitheatre, Greek Theatre). And everyone conceded that without late leader Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995, they were seeing a diminished version of the band. But the consensus was that the magic would prevail.
“There’s no Jerry,” said Eric Inman, in from Denver. “But there’s still nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.”
That mantra, which graces bumper stickers and T-shirts, is not hyperbole to Deadhead Nation. The Dead made their name with marathon concerts that showed off the band’s lengthy improvisations and never repeated a setlist from night to night. Deadheads, fearful of missing even one of the band’s variations on a theme, would attend every show within driving distance, sometimes three or four at a time, and huge armies of them would follow the Dead from city to city.
Mining Dead data
In an era before the Internet, fans kept logs of every setlist, and every show was committed to tape. There are collections of books devoted to statistical analysis of the Dead’s setlists.
The only comparable scenarios in rock center around Dylan and the Beatles, but in those cases it’s mostly just the analysts who know the intricacies. With the Dead, virtually every fan can tell you when the last “Dark Star” was played (March 30, 1994), and location of the band’s holiest venues. (Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado).
As the countdown to showtime continued, Deadheads lingered in the preshow parking lot mini-community known for years on tours as “Shakedown Street” (after a Dead song title), bided their time shopping for themed shirts, jewelry and bumper stickers, and smoked lots and lots of pot.
The crowd was even more diverse than ever in age (not in ethnicity; this is the whitest crowd in rock) with a large cohort of veteran Deadheads taking advantage of the moment to check in on the band for the first time in years.
“I haven’t seen them since Jerry,” said a graying Mike Rose, sporting a “Grateful Dad” T-shirt and accompanied by his teenage daughter, “and she’s never seen them with Jerry.”
The 49ers’ high-tech new home was well-staged for a Dead show, with band iconography flying from flagpoles and adorning walls. Concertgoers were all handed red roses on the way in, and the video screens warmed up the crowd with arresting digital versions of the old Fillmore light shows.
The show got off to a late start, with many of the 83,000 in attendance still making their way off public transit or into the $60 parking lots. But as the sun started to slip behind the western scoreboard, the band launched into crowd favorite “Truckin’,” and all the talk of ticket pricing drifted away with the smoke.
The set continued with more of the favorites from the band’s deep catalog (“Uncle John’s Band,” “Cumberland Blues”), and mixed in were songs that had been so rarely played that few in attendance could claim to have ever heard them live. “Cream Puff War” and “Born CrossEyed” were last played by the Dead in 1967 and 1968, respectively, and before the night was out, they’d also slip in 1969’s “What’s Become of the Baby,” a song no incarnation of the Grateful Dead, with or without Garcia, had ever played.
As the show went on, with the crowd screaming its approval, it was clear the Dead were intent on playing a classic setlist, skipping the band’s lone Top 10 hit, “Touch of Grey” and anything else from the period after their two-year break in touring when Garcia’s diabetic coma and other health woes took some of the edge off their playing.
Aging stars
And the band, of course, has aged as much as its fans. Lesh is 75, a survivor of a liver transplant and prostate cancer. And Weir, the baby of the band when he met Garcia at age 16, is now 67 with a snowy white beard and walrus ’stache.
The elephant in the very large room was whether Trey Anastasio, leader of Phish, the second biggest jam band in the world, was the best choice to play the Garcia role for these last shows. The feeling on the floor of Levi’s Stadium was that Anastasio and this new version of the band did a pretty fair job of regenerating the kind of cosmic energy the original Dead was able to summon during its 30-year life span. But still, “he’s no Jerry.”
The bulk of the second set was lifted in toto from the landmark 1969 album, “Live Dead” and culminated in a thundering version of “Morning Dew,” the ’60s folk staple that was featured on the group’s first album and later transformed into a majestic show closer.
The final note, in an encore, was “Casey Jones” (from 1970) and its “Driving that train, high on cocaine” chorus echoed from every corner of the stadium.
By the time Lesh said good night, with a plea for organ donation, the band had played for 3½ hours and not touched a song written after 1970. And before the last note is played in Chicago on July 5, the band will likely have played most of the 60 to 70 songs it reportedly has rehearsed.
But if these “final shows ever” aren’t enough for some, it should be noted: Lesh will be back on the road, playing from the Dead songbook in a couple of months.
Tickets are on sale now.