DEAD RECKONING #1

SHOW: Newcastle City Hall, April 11, 1972 EYEWITNESS: Dave Henderson

CARLISLE IN the early 1970s wasn’t a destination for bands. And, having been turned on to The Byrds and the Grateful Dead by a schoolmate’s older cousin, Alan, that was a problem. We’d borrowed the albums and created our own narrative about the bus queue on Workingman’s

Dead, marvelling at the band’s exotic names and facial hair. It was a world we wanted in on.

When the tour dates for Europe ’72 were announced it only took us a couple of months to persuade our parents that a 120-mile round trip to Newcastle was essential. After all, we were both nearly 16, and Alan was a responsible adult who was rarely to be found in the city’s head shop.

The faded grandeur of Newcastle City Hall wasn’t an ideal place to see anything, but as it was our first gig who were we to know? Having fallen in love with American

Beauty’s acoustic grandeur, we just weren’t ready for the Dead live, for the interplay between Weir and

Garcia, the euphoric wash of sound, the nod to the blues, the extended middle-eights. We were new to this.

Reprimanded for talking between songs – “We’re taping this, man,” said the guy in front – we were in awe of the band’s dexterity, and when Casey Jones concluded the set we were astonished to hear that it was merely an intermission. Returning, they stretched out on an epic Truckin’ – which stumbled into a drum solo – and what we learned later was The Other One, a 20-minute wig-out that was completely alien to teenagers nurtured on three-minute pop singles.

Of course, we only just caught the last train home, frantic parents in the pre-mobile era worried we had been abducted by Americans. In many ways, we had.

Dave Henderson compiles MOJO’s cover-mount CDs and has worked at Glastonbury Festival for the last 25 years. He remains distraught that all bands don’t play for four and a half hours.

“We just weren’t ready for the Dead live, for the euphoric wash of sound.”