Asked to name my all-time favorite Grateful Dead show, I typically respond, “Which year?”
“No, which show?”
“Okay, how about May 8, 1977 in Hamilton, New York?”
“Howcum?”
“Because it was just about perfect. The Dead had just finished recording the seminal Terrapin Station album and were unbelievably loose. They had been on a roll all spring with nary a bad note or an off-key lyric in the half dozen or so shows I’d already seen. The setting this particular night was Barton Hall, the Gothic Revival performance space at Cornell University. It was acoustically sublime. And incidentally, the show was voted the Dead’s best ever in a 2013 poll in, of all places, The New York Times.
“Anyhow . . .
“In typical Dead style, they took us to amazing places during a four-hour extravaganza, elevating us to great and then greater heights, and then bringing us down ever so gently at the end as they were wont to do when everything was clicking. And although it was May, snow was falling when we walked out of the hall. The perfect touch to end a perfect evening.”
THAT WAS THEN AND NOW IS NOW
Deadheads who believe it will be old times all over again, whether it be 1968, 1978 or whatever 8, when the Grateful Dead take the stage for five shows next Saturday and Sunday and early July in celebration of the band’s 50th anniversary, are likely to be disappointed.
That is not to take anything away from what are being billed as the Fare Thee Well shows, which the Dead say will be their last ever. The concerts at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on June 27-28 and at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 3-5 are bound to be great, but it’s 2015 and that’s where the heads of the “Core Four” — original band members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart — are.
Expect them and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio (whose band owes an enormous debt to the Dead), pianist Bruce Hornsby and keyboardist Jeff Chimentito to play many of the old favorites over those five evenings. The shows are to be webstreamed, simulcast on SiriusXM and shown in selected theaters for the many of us — hell, the millions of us — who don’t have tickets. But Anastasio is not Jerry Garcia, nor will he pretend to be. He certainly is likely to evoke the late, great Garcia’s magic and the entire aggregation certainly will evoke an extraordinary era in music, but that was then and now is now.
The concerts are to be enjoyed for what they are and not what the Dead used to be.
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http://kikoshouse.blogspot.com/2015/06/reflections-on-fifty-years-of-grateful.html
