There were no hassles, no impatient lines, no pushing or shoving.
These shows were too important to leave some things to chance! A nice man near us up close to the stage told us he’d been taking “huge quantities of drugs” all weekend (he was tripping at the time) and hadn’t really felt a thing - the whole atmosphere was already so high!Įntering the arena on Friday, red rose in hand, a guy coming in beside us quipped, “When have you ever been among 70,000 people who were all this happy?” That statement stayed with me all weekend, because it was true. An aging blonde Cali beauty from Humboldt managed to fly in with her homegrown stash intact. Freaky conversations with crazy-eyed folks from all over the country, the “too high” guy who has to be helped out of the crowd, etc. The circus was indeed in town.Įvery aspect of the Grateful Dead concert experience was on display in Chicago. Sweet smelling smoke wafting from every corner. From about 17 to about 70, the spectrum was wide and, uh, high, everyone flyin’ their tie-dyes one last time - face-painted, Merry Prankster-costume’d, Uncle Sam top-hatted, barefoot, guitar-strumming, scarves and bandanas, rings on their fingers and bells on their shoes. It was easy to spot the Heads among the passengers on my flight. The festivities started, for me, at Newark Airport on Thursday. In some ways The Dead and their music had a hand in shaping our world-view about so many of these things, so these Chicago shows seemed the perfect confluence to meet up and continue our ever-evolving conversation. We talk about life, love, youth, aging, music, art, world affairs, and our evolving hopes and desires for ourselves and our families. We cut our teeth together on Grateful Dead music in the early 70s, and decided to meet in Chicago for the shows and an extended hang together. I was attending these shows with my three dear high school buddies, now scattered across the USA. Grateful Dead 50th Anniversary: All Our Coverage Recently I’ve renewed my acquaintance with their story a bit, and I was ready to climb back aboard the bus one last time. But I saw them quite a lot in their 70s heyday (first show: Nassau Coliseum, March 1973 - the same month original lead singer Pigpen checked out), back then before the darkness began creeping into their scene, both onstage and off. By then, I’d long left the fold, swept up in the tide of punk and beyond. I suppose a large percentage of their audience - the massive throngs that they attracted from the mid-80s on - saw them mostly in places like this, huge outdoor venues (there were plenty of kids at these shows who weren’t old enough to have seen them at all). 'The Masked Singer' Makes Major Format Changes for Season 8
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