Fare Thee Well, Grateful Dead!

The Grateful Dead brought the curtain down on 50 years of music-making with their farewell concerts this weekend in Chicago.  Actually, “music-making” doesn’t do enough justice to what they accomplished over a 50-year career. They were at the center of a whole counter-culture movement that started in the ‘60s and built a giant community of Dead-heads that followed them everywhere till the journey came to an abrupt end in 1995 with the passing of Jerry Garcia, the band’s leader.

The Grateful Dead aren’t the best at what they do, as the saying goes. They’re the only one that do what they do.

If there’s one band that’s emblematic of the ‘60s in America, it would have to be the Dead. Born in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, which was to become the hippie capital of the world, the story goes that the band took their name by opening a dictionary twice, and picking the first words they saw. Bob Weir, Jerry’s close friend and the band’s co-founder, recalls in his recently released biopic The Other One, how they met accidentally one day and immediately took a liking to each other. So much so, Bobby decided to quit high school and started the band. Others came on board soon.

I saw the band last in 2009 at the Rosemont Theater in Chicago. The band had changed their name to just the Dead, in deference to the departed Jerry. The sea of humanity and tie-die in the audience knew every word to every song that the band performed that night. The aroma of potent weed hung in the air – naturally – as the band, joined by guitarist Warren Haynes, went through a 3-hour set non-stop. There was no need for the band to speak to the audience. The connection was there. No one needed introductions. The vibe was powerful, unlike anything I had experienced in my concert-going experience.

On a perfect summer night this Friday in Chicago, founding members Bob Weir, Billy Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Phil Lesh brought back the magic in front of 60,000 people packed into Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears football team. Trey Anastasio from Phish wielded the guitar and stood in Jerry’s place. From the opening song, Box of Rain, to the closing song, Ripple, Trey left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he fit right in, down to the classic meanderings and LSD-influenced solos of their heyday, and the eerie Drums and Space, complete with psychedelic light shows. It was again a sea of tie-die T-shirts, flowers, outrageously colorful dresses, face paint, head gear, and every other form of expression.

Tickets for the show were sold in a typical Dead-like way. Earlier in the year, the Dead announced that they would be allotting a portion of the tickets directly to their fans and asked them to write in with their requests. Tens of thousands sent in lovingly crafted hand-written notes to the Grateful Dead HQ in a San Francisco suburb, immediately overwhelming the local post office that was ill-prepared for the deluge. A small staff from the Dead’s inner circle selected the most creative letters and mailed the tickets to them. I met a young couple of Chicago who had written in, but were not so lucky.

The rest of us had to rely on the secondary market for our chance to see the shows. On the day before the show, tickets were going for as much as $ 10,000.

The world is comprised of 2 kinds of people – those who like the Dead and those who don’t. It’s hard to explain why someone is a Dead-head. One thing is for certain. It’s much more than the music – it’s the community. As Bob Weir recalls, the Dead started noticing that the same fans would show up at their concerts, following them across the country on their tours. These fans would sustain themselves by selling “merchandise” at the concert venues in little makeshift markets that eventually came to be known as Shakedown Street, named after their 1978 album of the same name. In Chicago this week, city authorities, prompted by security concerns, had cordoned off a wide area around the venue, effectively shutting down any chance of setting up a Shakedown Street. Some things had to change.

The Grateful Dead’s appeal in the 60’s owed itself to a combination of their alternate lifestyle, the numerous free concerts, and their association with controversial free spirits such as author Ken Kesey, famous for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey and his Merry Pranksters held court in La Jolla in southern California, where Kesey’s friend Owsley Stanley concocted a potent form of LSD which drew the Dead and many others for regular “acid trips”, captured in great detail by author Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test. The Grateful Dead were to become the house band for the Pranksters, assuring them of a dedicated audience, albeit one that constantly lived in a state of altered consciousness.

For all their drug-taking, The Grateful Dead managed to craft a unique sound, one that was its best in live performances. Along the way, Jerry Garcia and his friend Robert Hunter became a formidable songwriting duo, one that would eventually vie for a spot in the rock pantheon alongside Lennon-McCartney and Jagger-Richards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0BznyjqEt8

Over the years, the Dead performed thousands of live concerts, many of which were free to the public. Their apparent lack of monetary motives was probably another endearing aspect that contributed to their growing popularity. The lack of business motive would also bring the band close to bankruptcy in the 80’s.

As the band became more popular, so did its charismatic leader Jerry, who by the late eighties, had reached demi-God status among his fans. However, the burden of being King of the Dead-heads and the constant drug-taking were taking a toll on Jerry’s health. His dependence on hard drugs and the onset of diabetes in his forties were bound to culminate in a health crisis. After a brief episode in the hospital due a diabetic coma, Jerry’s health would slide further. On Aug 9, 1995, fans heard the news they were dreading – Jerry Garcia was no more.

The band’s financial troubles were not completely behind them. The Grateful Dead machine supported a staff of over 300, and much of the touring in the late eighties and early nineties was mainly to provide a livelihood for them. Ironically the touring would stop only after Jerry’s passing.

The band toured in the 2000’s as the Dead, doing nationwide dates in 2004 and 2009. Phil Lesh and Bob Weir went about rediscovering themselves independently with new bands. Phil Lesh survived a health scare in the 2000’s by receiving a liver transplant. On Friday night in Chicago, he came out and acknowledged he was lucky to be alive, thanks to an anonymous donor named Cody, and urged the crowd to become organ donors.

When the final encore was sung this weekend, we saw the passing of another iconic band from public view. For many Dead-heads in the audience, it was a time to pass their own torch to the next generation, many of whom accompanied their parents in their own tie-die T-shirts.

Sociologists will continue to analyze the influence of the Dead long after they are gone. But for now, the band could not have wished for a final farewell in a more perfect setting.