The Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast - All Episodes

[Music] The Good Old Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mayan with Jesse Jarno, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the Curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 11 of the Good Old Grateful Deadcast. I'm your co-host, Rich Mayan. Thank you so very much for tuning in. In this episode of the good old Grateful Deadcast, we continue our exploration of the upcoming Grateful Dead box set, Enjoying the Ride. A limited edition 60 CD box set celebrating the Grateful Dead's 60th anniversary with unreleased performances from 20 legendary venues across the country. Up today, part two of our look at the shows and enjoying the ride from the dead's home turf, the San Francisco Bay area. With the exception of a few tracks from earlier releases, virtually all of the music on Enjoying the Ride is previously unreleased, spanning more than 450 tracks and over 60 hours of music. Of the 20 shows in this collection, 17 are presented in full with some featuring additional material from the same venue. The remaining three, Filillmore West, Filillmore East, and Boston Music Hall, are curated from multiple performances at each venue, capturing key moments on those legendary stages. This 60 CD box set is limited to 6,000 individually numbered copies. ALAC and high-res flak downloads will also be available on the same day of release, which is May 30th. You can pre-order your copy now exclusively at dead.net. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not smoking mirrors. We're down to less than 300 copies left. So, if you want one, now's the time. Also available on May 30th, the music Never Stoppped, which distills enjoying the ride into a shorter route through the band's Diamond Anniversary Celebration. Featuring at least one song from every venue in the deluxe set, it offers a briefer but no less illuminating journey through the music that shaped the Grateful Dead's live legacy. It will be available on May 30th from rhino.com on three CDs, six LPs, and digitally. Make sure to visit dead.net ET for more info on both of these nottobe missed releases. Head on over to dead.net/deadcast and check out all of our past episodes of the good old grateful Deadcast including complete seasons 1 through 10. And you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, where, and when you like to listen. Please help the good old Grateful Deadcast by subscribing. Share us with your friends on social media. Hit the like button and leave us a review. Thank you very kindly. Do you have a great tour story you'd like to share? Well, do it over at stories.dead.net and record yourself telling about that epic road trip, best show you ever saw, just the funniest thing you ever saw while on tour. You may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.net. net/deadcast-index and check them out. Friends, did you ever peek at the Greek? Get lost at the Frost? Maybe your first show was at the Coliseum in Oakland. We all love a great tour story, and we've got some doozies for you today. Strap in and get ready to travel to the San Francisco Bay area to groove on the Grateful Dead, doing what they do best right in their backyard. Here's your friendly neighborhood Jesse [Music] Jarno California knocking on the golden door like an angel standing in a sh of light rising up to paradise you shine for many successful veteran bands who spend long careers on the road their hometown Towns can often become just another stop at the beginning and the end of tours. The brand new Enjoying the Ride box set focuses on the classic Grateful Dead venues and underscores the extent to which the Grateful Dead remained an absolutely local Bay Area band at every point in their 30-year career. Last episode, we focused on the Dead's home venues around Palo Alto and in San Francisco. Pack your bags, kids. Today, we're headed all the way to the East Bay. [Music] With the closure of Winterland in 1978, the dead lost their most comfortable San Francisco home and started spending more of their local playing time on the far side of the Bay Bridge. Grateful archavist and legacy manager David Lemieux. Winterland was the perfect place until it wasn't and it held 5,000 or less than six. So it was a very small arena. But then thankfully they they found the Oakland Auditorium Arena/Kaiser. The dead found a new home in what was then known as the Oakland Auditorium Arena built on the shores of Lake Merritt in 1915 and which became known as the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in the mid1 1980s. Most Bay Area heads just call it the Kaiser. Please welcome Golden Golden Road co-founder Blair Jackson. It was a great place. It was it was definitely the the successor to Winterland in every conceivable way. From the ramps going up to the second floor to the upstairs to just the vibe of the place. It felt very much like Winterland. I went to Winterland many, many, many, many times and I went to Kaiser many, many, many times. You know, they're definitely of a piece. We're listening to music from November 21st and 22nd, 1985. The band's third three show run of the year at the newly recristened [Music] Kaiser's got an [Music] angsh fall down ashes ashes all fall out. It was a cool place to hang out. It was again it was like its own little world. We'd wait for hours and try to get the good seats. You wanted to at least be in the lower balcony or on the floor or there was also a little mini thing under the overhang downstairs and that became our place for a number of years for several serieses of shows there where I would get in early and save for all my friends. He said he said guilty. Our late friend Steve Silverman loved shows at the Kaiser. Once I got out to the Bay Area where I moved in part to see the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia band a lot, I started meeting dead heads regularly at particularly places like Kaiser. There were shows at Kaiser and Cal Expo that were not sort of widely publicized. Like everybody knew about the so-called high holy days at the Greek and the Frost, but those little shows in the off nights, those shows were for dead head lifers. They were for the people who moved here to the Bay Area to see shows a lot. Some shows weren't advertised in the local papers. They were only for dead heads who knew the special number. Thank you for calling the Grateful Dead hotline number. This is a new message. As of 24th, the mail order for all four New Year's concerts at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center on December 27th, 28, 30, and 31st is over. We have received almost 30,000 letters postmarked November 4th from all over the country. That is more than enough mail to sell out all four concerts. The mail order office is still filling these orders. The break was always really fun in the same way that Winterland was always fun when you're kind of stumbling around the upstairs and people like kind of careening down the ramps high. It's kind of a switchback thing to get up to the top to get up to the second level. Yeah. It's almost almost like you'd see at a some baseball stadiums like where they have a thing that where you get out and you kind of go down ramps, go down ramps and this ramp turns here and it turns there and it turns here and it turns there. So it was this it was like this thing that was hilarious sort of everybody going up or down or you know sideways. you would recognize your friends who were at all the Bay Area shows, the Greek and Frost shows and also the Kaiser, kind of those smaller venues. You'd see the same people year after year. I mean, eventually we all saw each other grow up, get gray hair, have kids, you know, get married. So, you felt like you were part of this story. The Kaiser shows in 1985 on the box are very close to the actual 20th anniversary of the date when Jerry Garcia pulled the name Grateful Dead out of the dictionary at Phil Le's house in PaloAlto. And at least to my eyes and ears, the set lists are filled with throwbacks to the Warlocks. [Music] David Lemier. What they were doing in 85 was clearly a throwback to that old era 20th anniversary thing um of the dead. A lot of the covers they were bringing in which was the kind of thing the Warlocks used to do. Going to wait till the midnight hour out. Till my love come tumbling down. Going to wait till the midnight hour out till there's no several years back. The great dead scholar light into ashes put together a post for the crucial dead essays blog called songs the warlocks played which pulls together eyewitness accounts as well as quotes from interviews over the years. We've linked to it at dead.net/deadcast and it convincingly assembles more than two dozen songs that almost certainly appeared at Warlock shows. We mentioned this because it's relevant to the Kaiser gigs on the new box set. To celebrate their 20th anniversary of Phil Lesh joining the Warlocks in June 1985, the Dead hung a banner over the stage reading 20 years so far and brought back the full that's it for the other one. But the real throwbacks happened at the Kaiser shows in November. The November 21st show at the Kaiser features nearly a half dozen songs from the Warlocks repertoire through the doorway. Bad as he could [Music] be around. [Music] That was the show opening Big Boy Pete. originally by the Olympics, the first since 1978 and the second since 1970. This next tune done by the Warlocks was written by Willie Dixon, but like so many was also in the Rolling Stones early repertoire. In the early days, Pig Pen sang it with Garcia and Weir. This is from December 31st, 1969, posted on the taper section blog. feet hit the ground, yell and scream. Then he took his heads and had him flee the sea. If you could ever down on the corner, down on a walking tall street. Don't mess around. And during the second set, they pulled out a Dylan cover that Bob Weir sang in the Warlocks, but was reclaimed briefly by Jerry Garcia in 1985. She's got everything she's an artist. She [Music] don't She's got everything she needs. She's an artist. She don't, [Music] babe. She takes the dark out of the night. The day. [Music] Near the end of the show, they played another mid60s classic that they maybe wish they'd played in the '60s. But Phil Lesh and Brent Midland's version of the Spencer Davis group's Give Me Some Loving is a false flag for our game. Not released until late 1966 and not turning up in the Dead's book until the 80s. Doesn't mean it's not awesome. I don't know what you got, but you better take it easy now. So, give me some [Music] love. Give me some love. Give me some love. Give me some. But it was back to hardcore warlocks for the encore, including the midnight hour that we heard before and what would be the final ever dead version of Rufus Thomas' Walking the Dog. Walking the dog. Just walk in the [Music] door. If you don't know how to do it, I'll show you how to walk that door. [Music] That was a weird song back in the day. This is from 1966 on Rare Cuts and Oddities. [Music] show you [Music] how in 85 you get Big Boy Pete. Uh you get Walking the Dog at at this show, you get those two in particular. And then not only that in terms of bringing these these older songs, these covers, these weird covers, but very classic for the Grateful Dead, they also messed with the set list a lot, which I love. If the Kaiser 85 shows looked to the past, they also look to the future in their own way. We told this story in our long strange tech episodes, and it happened at these shows. This story isn't on Enjoying the Ride, but we'll tell it anyway. Please welcome back from the Grateful Dead Hour and many other places, David Gans. A deadhead friend of mine, Mary Eisenhart, was the editor of Micro Times magazine. Micro Times was started by BAM using the same model, a free paper, advertiser supported that was doing quality journalism on this burgeoning field. So I was aware of what was going to be the internet a little bit. She was very much into being excited by all this new stuff that was going on. And it was in I think it was the November 85 Henry J Kaiser shows. She had been talking about this stuff. Let my inspiration flow. I'm talking rhymes, suggesting rhythm that will not for sing till my tail is told. And I was sitting in the balcony a few rows away from her and another dear friend of hers, Bennett Faulk, uh, who was, you know, there was I was part of a social circle that included these people. And she we had been talking about this stuff and the three of us wound up at a party after one of those November 85 shows. And we had all gotten the same idea, like, wow, wouldn't it be great if the dead heads could talk online? Inspiration move me brightly. Light the sun with color. [Music] And she had thought this and Bennett had thought this and I had thought this and we all sort of came to this party with the same idea and she said, "Well, you know, Stuart Brandis started this thing called the well and they're giving away free accounts to people with interesting ideas. We had originally thought we would start a computer system for dead heads. She said, "Why don't we try it over there?" The Dead Head Conference on the Well became a model for one of the very first cohesive online communities. Though there had been some dead heads online for a decade, like Les Nest from the Stanford Lab, who we heard from last episode. [Music] [Music] Another one of the Kaiser's features was Peralta Park, which became the cradle of the earliest recognized iterations of the mobile community that was starting to follow the band around over the New Year's 1979 1980 shows. Blair Jackson Kaiser is sort of where the beginnings of the whole vending scene started. Really the first time I ever saw it and we were going to, you know, almost kind of all the California shows at that point in 82 83. You almost never saw people outside shows selling stuff. I remember at the Hulk Center in Eugene being kind of amazed. Oh wow, there are like 10 guys selling stuff and but Kaiser is is really where it happened. This ain't got no [Music] heart. The street is dark. It would take a while longer for the vending scene to earn the name we now know it as. The Oakland Trabune dubbed it Jerry Land that year, but eventually it became Shakedown Street. be the heart of town. This town ain't got [Music] no what constituted a small Grateful Ed venue began to shift again in the late 1980s. David Lemieu, it was small. It was 7,900. And the problem for the dead is it was around a neighborhood. Dead heads kind of overran it. And that's why they got asked to not come back. So when they played there in February '89, they had three shows scheduled in March, right before the spring tour. The spring tour started at the end of March, but they were scheduled to play the Kaiser again, and those shows got cancelled, unfortunately, and the dead never returned. Over the course of the 80s, without a hit record or a record of any kind, the Grateful Dead's popularity kept growing and growing. The Bay Area had always been a stop on the Hetty Highway, but it was even more so when the dead were around. If you didn't have your own wheels or enough money for airfare and weren't down with hitchhiking, there were other ways to get to San Francisco. Robert Nyber left us this great story about getting to the New Year's 85 shows in Oakland, a month after the Kaiser shows we were just visiting. December 29th, 1985. I'm 19 and I'm a passenger aboard the Green Tortoise headed southbound on I5 from Seattle to Oakland for the Grateful Dead's annual New Year's run. The Green Tortoise was an alternative travel company that had a fleet of converted buses that acted both as transport to various destinations as well as offering organized travel tours. I rode it to and fro many Grateful Dead shows in the Bay Area in the 1980s. While enjoying the ride that night, Dylan's self-portrait version of Quinn the Eskimo came on the bus's hi-fi. [Music] Some are building monuments, others down low. It was a song with a deep connection for Robert. Inspired by their two years in the Peace Corps in India a few years earlier, my parents adopted a 2-year-old Native Alaskan boy. It was 1970. I was 4 years old and living in western Massachusetts. My parents were Ian and Sylvia fans and they had an album of theirs where they did a version of Dylan's Quinn the Eskimo. My parents would often pull out the album and play the song for me. It would become my brother's theme song before and after his arrival. Everybody's out there. But when the Eskimo gets here, the bitch's going to run him. Well, come on [Applause] without any. I was of course reminded of my brother as well as other memories. I regailed my fellow travelers with tales from my childhood inspired by the song and of my parents embrace of the cultural changes brought forth during the 1960s and 1970s. With only two shows scheduled, it was the shortest New Year's run in many years. We arrived in Oakland the morning of December 30th. The first show of the run was that night. To the surprise of me and my cohorts, we were blessed that night with the boys debut cover of Quinn the Eskimo to open the second set. Synchronicity at its finest. Come on. Come on within. You'll not see nothing like a might. When the dead were in the Bay Area, the dead head population swelled visibly, perhaps more than the hate ashberry or anywhere in San Francisco proper, Berkeley still felt properly underground in the 80s. David Lemieu and we also went to Berkeley a lot. We didn't know where the Greek was. I never saw the dead at the Greek, but we loved Berkeley. We knew from the counterculture movement and all the protest and the people's park. We were enthralled with Berkeley and we went and didn't seem like a lot had changed. This is 88 89. And when all this stuff was going down, it was only 20 years earlier or less. So it it seemed like a very welcoming place to dead heads. The man finally stomped down on People's Park last year. Boo. And it was a few blocks from there to the UC Berkeley campus where you can enter through the Saw Gate, birthplace of the free speech movement in the mid1 1960s. There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. And nobody ever got in trouble for free speech on college campuses ever again. And from Sathergate, it's a short walk to the William Randph Hurst Greek Theater, opened in 1903. The Dead played there a few times in the60s on larger bills, but didn't make their home there until the 1980s, outfitting the giant columns behind the stage with different backdrops, including massive works by tie-dye master Courtney Pollock. We'll be honing in today on the July 13th, 1984 show included on Enjoying the Ride where the stage was adorned with a rainbow festoned with dancing skeletons. The work of your left hand monkey. The Greek had a vibe all its own, which we'll describe a little before we get into the specifics of the July 13th show. Taper Doug OD loved it. The Greek at Berkeley is beautiful, but it has a particularly characteristic sound. The the bowl shape, you know, definitely affects the the sound, especially on the low end. Of course, the other nice thing about is in the daytime, you look through the crowd and you see all these smiling faces or friends you've known or met along the way. So, that's another unique characteristic, you know, of the Greek, that visual aspect of it. Blair Jackson. The Greek was always 753 as far as I can remember. 7 o'clock on Friday. So that's when you get the lights. 5:00 you get the first set mostly in daylight although they're augmenting it with some lights. And then you get the second set in the darkness and then Friday would be kind of all dark. And welcome back Tyler Roy Hart aka Mr. Completely who only caught the last of the Greek shows in 1989. It's a small bowl and and and steep. And so I had the classic progression. Like the first day I didn't know, I didn't plan. And so I ended up stuck up on the [ __ ] lawn, which is you're probably better off watching the show from outside from the hill outside the venue than from parts of that lawn because it's so steep. And so like there's only this one little part of it where you could really see and hear. Though apparently they've actually redone that this year. I I haven't talked to anyone who's been at the since they I guess they terraced out the the lawn at the Greek, but the Greek's a wild place to see shows, especially as soon as you start getting down into the bowls. And then the second night I was kind of high around Phil side but in the bowl and it was great. And then the third night I got in early enough that I was more kind of in the center third again hillside about halfway down. But to real Bay Area heads that's some noobness right there. So we would have our blankets and we would have a section at the Greek where we we would always get there as early as we had to get to there to get uh a spot to the left of the soundboard at maybe three or four rows up in the bowl, you know, right to next to the soundboard. And we got there pretty much every time. Bay Area Dead Show crowds could just hit you with a telepathic vibe like nothing else I've ever experienced. And that was like one of them was like, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. Maybe don't try and crash your way to the front like you might at some random East Coast place. Last bad hill in the country. [Music] Last bad deal in the town. [Music] But you go money where your love is, baby. Of course, the dream would be to be in one of those throne seats. For anyone who hasn't been there, there's this kind of like little almost concourse that runs at the bottom of the terrace seating and there's these big stone seats. The stone in that place does transmit bass in a different way than I've ever heard. Just super resonant where you really do feel it in your bones. [Music] [Applause] [Music] David Lemieux. The Greek was clearly on our list of 20 shows for this box set. It was pretty clear that the the 713 was going to be given high consideration a because it's a great show. phenomenal and two uh it's a popular show and and you know popularity is good and we want to you know please people who want certain shows. The Greek 84 shows had a lot going for them and July 13th 1984 especially became a classic tape. The dead were nearly 20 years into their career and shows were collisions of people who'd been seeing them for those whole two decades as well as people seeing them for their first time. One person who made their way to Berkeley that weekend was an LA high school student named Mark Pinkis, who you may know now as our fearless leader, the president of Rhino Records. Please welcome to the deadcast, Mark Pinkis. My buddy David Sapperine and I, we were both interested in looking at Berkeley and both ended up going to Berkeley. I don't know what I told my parents, but I'm like, we're we're going up to Berkeley. I made it sound more like it was about Berkeley than the dead. And we had no tickets, but you could do that back then. We're like, we'll figure it out. We brought our sleeping bags. We jumped into my car. We drove up from LA to Berkeley about 5 hours. We got there on the 12th, the evening of the 12th. Didn't know where we were going to sleep. You could do that then, too. Or rather, people did that then. So, we went we parked as close as we could find a spot to the Greek, which wasn't very close, and figured out where it was. Then went looking to see if there was a motel or something, and all that's really on that college avenue right below there are fraternity houses. There was a place playing Grateful Dead music. And we said, "Can we sleep there?" And they're like, "Five bucks." And we're like, "Five bucks for a night." They're like, "Five bucks for the weekend and you can have as much beer as you want." And we're like, "Okay." So, literally, that's where we stayed. We'll check back in with Mark momentarily. But around the time that Mark and his buddy were getting to Berkeley, another story began to unfold across the country, leading to one of the all-time feats of Deadhead Daring Dew. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, the co-founder of Dupree Diamond News, Johnny Dwark. On a beautiful starry-filled night in Amherst, Massachusetts, July 12th, 1984, I found my 24 yearear-old self wandering back home from a free outdoor concert featuring the great late Baba Ola Tunji. [Music] As I reached my doorstep, I looked up at the moon, which was one day from being full, and I remarked to a friend that for once in my life, it seemed as though I was the only one who wasn't being emotionally affected by the wondrously powerful glowing moon. Everyone else in my circle of friends was most definitely revved up and possessed with some sort of crazy lunar energy. I said good night. I went inside and I started to prepare to go to bed. Little did I know that I had just put my foot in my mouth in a very big way. When we tell the stories of legendary dead shows here at the Deadcast, we try not to spoil their surprises until we start to run them down. But this is one of the very rare cases in Grateful Dead history where the band had a plan and somebody caught wind of it. At approximately 11:00 at night, the telephone rang. Greetings, said David Phillip, a college buddy calling from California. I'm at Mickey Hart's ranch and we just called to thank you for the research. I'd recently been in the library doing research for David, who was at the time Mickey Hart's main research assistant for uh Mickey's as of yet to be published book on drumming and its role in spiritual and mystical rituals throughout human history. Thank yous were conveyed and then as if to slay my earlier thoughts of mine having been the only one in Amherst not affected by the moon, David and Mickey nonchalantly whacked me in the head with the news that in less than 24 hours the Grateful Dead were most definitely going to play Darkstar on stage at the Greek theater in Berkeley. Holy [ __ ] When we previously spoke with Johnny on the Deadcast, the topic was the August 27th, 1972 Darkstar, which became a spiritual doorway for Johnny, ultimately leading to the creation of what is still known as the First Church of Thun. Fumbling for my checkbook, I cursed out loud as I realized I only had like $160 to my name. To make matters even worse, I was scheduled to start three straight days of 9 to 5 work in less than eight hours. Never mind that nothing short of a series of back-to-back miracles would or somehow get me to the church on time. My heart sunk. However, sensing that my situation was hopeless, I picked up the phone and I called another infamous New York City area deadhead, Big George. And George was also another dark star freak like me. and he was prosperous enough to fly to the Bay Area on such short notice. George, I said, waking him with the momentous news. I heard it directly from the Lion's mouth. It's going to happen. They're going to play Dark Star, but I don't have the funds, so I'm out of the picture. But you're in New York and you're connected and you've at least got a fighting chance. George, you got to go. There was a very long silence on the phone. George is well known for his long sentences. I can't make it, he says. But you're going to go as my eyes and ears. But but George, I said, I told you I don't have the funds and I have to work all weekend and I don't live anywhere near an airport and I don't have tickets to the show. Look, he said, you set it up and I'll pay for it. Let's make the reservations. You do whatever you have to do. Just be there. Big ups to Big George. In the heady days of airline deregulation, it was somewhat cheaper to just hop on a plane and go. He had a travel agent at the time who was also a dead head. And somehow they managed to figure out schedules for planes leaving from Hartford to New Haven, New Haven to Chicago, and then Chicago to Oakland. The travel agent was able to book me on the first leg of the flight and told me that by flying standby with no check-in luggage, I would at least have a shot at. As I finally hung up the phone with George, a surge of paranoia came over me. Was this not the most fooly and impetuous thing I had ever considered doing? I looked over at the clock and it was 2:13 in the morning. Now, I shouldn't have to tell you that for any red-blooded dark star freak, this was as strong a numerological omen as there could ever be. I had no choice. I was going allig [Applause] [Music] By the count of this dark star freak, it could have also been 211, 214, 215, 218, 227, 228, or a few other times depending on what tapes were in circulation. But no matter, Big George wired Johnny money, and Johnny arranged for a car to get him at Western Union, and we proceeded without hesitation to drive directly into rush hour traffic. I got to the Hartford airport just in time to do one of those old 100yard dash television commercials over the chairs and through the crowded terminal. And mere minutes after tipping the limo driver, I found myself strapping into my airline seat, the first of the day, completely drenched in sweat, shaking. Johnny's trip took him from Amherst to Hartford, Hartford to Newark, and Newark to Chicago, where it seemed like the standby tickets weren't going to be standing by. I began to experience, you know, that empty pit in your stomach feeling that one gets after too many hours of worrying. But then three minutes before the last plane that could possibly get me to the bay on time was scheduled to depart, a boarding gate stewart informed me that there was one last minute no show on a fully booked already seated 747 and that that last seat was mine. I swear I nearly fainted. So, as fate seems to lead me on, on that day, it took no exception. The seat they gave me was located directly next to Dave Phillip and my old college buddy Andre Kurthers who was of course going to the show and even had a ride waiting for us at the Oakland airport at this point. Even airlines food tasted great. Well, Johnny's Airborne. We returned to the story of Mark Pinkis already in progress. We went up to the venue, found a guy. We were looking for tickets and a guy said, "I've got two tickets, but man, I need face value for them." Which is crazy. I've been thinking about it in this day and age of how much people get over face value. We're like, "What's the face value?" He goes, "1750. Do you have quarters?" Like, "No." So, we both reach in and give him a 20. And he fished out. He goes, "I can only give you $2 back." So, we said, "Thanks." And we had our tickets for July 13th without a problem. Literally, we found this guy right away and he was apologetic about selling it to us. And then only later it just because at the Greek is supposedly a famous place for people getting true miracle tickets where if you really got an extra, you'll pass out the extra. So it put the guys but but having somebody apologize for selling it to us at cost. Johnny Dwarf also needed a ticket and arrived a bit closer to showtime. Keep in mind these were pre-touch of grade days when showing up without a ticket wasn't the big deal that it would later become. We showed up outside the Greek theater with about a half an hour to showtime. Without a hesitation, I walked right up to the central plaza outside the amphitheater and you know there's these sort of stone columns right near where you enter. I was able to get up on one of those and holding my airline ticket above my head, I announced with great gusto, a brief synopsis of my adventures over the previous 24 hours and then asked an obviously beused audience whether any of them might be so kind as to sell me a ticket. Immediately, some gentleman walks up to me and asks to see my airline tickets to verify my wild story. And then with an all- knowing glimmer in his eyes and a deeply conspiratorial smile, he hands me my miracle ticket. Holy [ __ ] And on into the Greek. I hopped. I skipped. I jumped all through the crowd, adrenaline flowing through me, and I searched around until I found my fellow Bay Area Deadhead friends in our usual spot right in front of the soundboard. Having told all but one of them several days before that there was no way that I was going to make this run of shows at the Greek. They were all very surprised to see me. When they asked me why and how I managed to come, I told them all never mind. But if you were planning to open your minds this weekend, that I had very good reason to believe that this was the night on which to open your minds and go deep. To some, the night began in perhaps hoham fashion. When the band took the stage, the craziness of the whole day finally hit me. The first set went by without much that's worth noting, except for the 15-minute power nap that I managed to sneak in during the set break. Don't you come around here anymore. You're more [Music] But for others, it was the first entrance to the dead. Mark Pinkis. At that stage, all I had was Skeletons from the Closet, which is the oddest, greatest hits ever. But I really liked it. We both really liked it. And we got into that July 13th show. And we weren't high. Just for the record, we weren't high. We weren't drunk. And I remember just being mesmerized the entire show that we were kind of dancing, but we were just taken by the crowd, by the [Music] scene. Come riding up on the [Music] quarantine. His buzz was jingling. The door was a [Music] jar. His buckle was silver. His man was bold. I asked him to come on in out of the cold. We were so blown away. I guess there's a lot of people that see The Grateful Dead for the saw him for the first time and didn't know what to expect. But we were huge music fans. Our first shows were 81, Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stones. It was that type of thing. And so seeing this in ' 84, we were big concert goers and just had never seen anything like it. The Greek show would become an instant tape trader classic for a few reasons. And we're going to time shift this story slightly to the story of when the tape arrived in the hands of teenage David Lemieux a few years later. I'm sorry to keep having to say don't try this at home. This trick only works if you're attending high school in Canada in the 1980s. I remember the first time I heard this show. It was in 86 and I was in law class. Mrs. Costach, the gym teacher, also taught law. That's high school in Canada, I guess. And I remember I had pretty long hair, long enough that it kind of would cover my ears a bit. And I always wore a baseball cap and long hair. And I remember the kind of earphones I had with my little cassette Walkman. You couldn't see them under the hair. So I'd be in law class with the Grateful Dead blasting in my ears. And Mrs. K stash had no idea. I will dance on your grave. If I'm able to dance, I'll still crawl across it. If I'm able to dance, I'll still [Music] I remember this beautiful day. I remember looking out the window, little headphones on under my hair, and Scarlet Beonius comes on. I'm like, "Oh, great. Scarlet Beonia is great. I' been right out the way. Once in a while you can get shown the light in the street if you look at it [Music] right. It's a peppy Scarlet. They hit the peaks. Jerry's sounding great. I'm super stoked on this. Scarlet's going along. I can't wait for this Fire on the Mountain. And I always love the transition jams. Even when I was 16 and didn't really know what I was listening to, I love those transitions into into Fire. And they're going and then all of a sudden out of nowhere comes Touch of Gray. [Music] [Music] [Music] I was like, "What the hell is this?" And then oh my god, it's touch of gray. Super speedy touch of gray. So that's crazy. They just did scarlet touch. That was the coolest thing ever. Must be getting early running late morning look so funny and then touch a gray ends and then they go into fire and my mind is blown like I want to tell someone except for I'm in class and that this mustache was lecturing. I love imagining teenage David Lemieux accidentally acting out a classic Simpsons scene. 49 yd field goal into the wind. Make it. Make it. Make it. Make it. Oh, please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Toledo. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good to see you all in church. Please be seated, Homer. Mark Pinkis had no idea what was going on. We didn't even know that that Scarlet Touch Fire was something spectacular. So much of my knowledge and appreciation came afterwards cuz that was a crazy thing. The drums in space segment of the show was and still remains one of the spaciest and most interesting I'd ever witnessed the dead play. [Music] [Music] As the band left the stage, all of my tripping friends turned around and looked at me with the same frown that the little boy who cried wolf must have received. However, just as another wave of panic began to sweep over me, Phil Lesh came back out on stage alone, stepped to the microphone, which was a rare occurrence in those days. Have a little patience for perhaps five or 10 more minutes. We're going to try a little something special tonight. [Applause] Yeah, right. Be patient for a few. No problem. Understandably, a surge of electricity shot through the crowd. On Q, my friends all turned to me in utter slack jaw belief. I didn't even have to spell it out. I just shook my head as they all silently mouthed the words dark star. With a [ __ ] eating grin on my face, I sat back. I closed my eyes and I breathed in the sweet smell of eucalyptus that the Greek theater is famous for. and I looked up at the star-filled sky. The glorious full moon was in full view and many other folks were taking note of that. The word was passed that an honest to God total lunar eclipse was scheduled to occur in just a short while. Someone even had a newspaper to prove it. And it's true, there was a lunar eclipse that night, but at least on land, it was only visible in Australia and Asia. I've always noticed this strange and uniquely different type of silence on stage just before the dead would play Dark Star. And this night was no exception to that rule. Just then, an even more cosmic event occurred. Something that almost everyone in the theater saw. As everyone sort of quieted down as the band was tuning up, a shooting star, huge and bright, went sailing across the sky right above and behind the stage. A huge shiver went through all of our bodies and we were all instantly covered with goosebumps as I am now telling you this story. The silence was broken by a solitary cry from a fellow member of the audience. Dark star [Music] Everyone in the theater collapsed into each other's arms. Tears flowed freely. Many shrieked in orgasmic delight. Mark Pinkis. We had no idea what Dark Star was. All we know is that when they came back for the encore, which took a little longer than a normal encore would, but nothing is normal at a dead show and all a sudden they started it and the place is going absolutely nuts and we have no idea what's happening and then they go into this wild song which if you don't know the Grateful Dead and you're hearing Dark Star for the first time and everybody is flipping out. It was the first Dark Star in years. It was the first Dark Star since 1981, the second since 1979, and the sixth since 1974. [Music] Crashing. [Music] Part of what Johnny had been tipped off about involved something special happening with a pair of projection screens mounted on either side of the stage. And now those screens glowed to life. Phil had supposedly gotten several unusual slides from some of his buddies at NASA. Phil was known as a NASA freak. It seemed that some scientists who were reviewing new mappings of the surface of Mars sent back by the Viking orbiter were amazed to find what looked very much like a stone giant stone face and several pyramids on Mars. The theory was that there was once a race of beings on Mars and they knew that we were here on Earth and they wanted us to know that they were there. Then it would make sense if they created a giant image in the likeness of themselves that we might see through a telescope and recognize as being like us. [Music] This theory of course was highly disputed, but there were all sorts of strange coincidences. If you determined when these objects would have been built and then you stood on the nose of the face of the pyramid during that time that the pyramids and the face would all line up with the sun on the equinoxes, etc. Anyway, to make a long story somewhat shorter, had apparently talked the band into agreeing to play Dark Star while these slides of the face in the pyramids on Mars were projected behind them. There were all kinds of wild things you could do in the 80s, as we've discussed, like tell your parents you were off to Berkeley for the weekend, or talk your bandmates into reviving Darkstar while projecting slides of Martian faces. Another thing you could do in the 80s happened about 6 weeks before this when the CIA hired a psychic to teleport himself to Mars in 1 million BC and describe these pyramids. We've included a link at dead.net/deadcast. Anyway, strange things were a foot at the Greek in 1984. [Music] [Music] [Music] Now, regardless of how they ever played it, Dark Star is the closest thing that many a hardcore dead head like me would ever get to experiencing heaven on earth. Especially in the band's latter years, it felt like they were opening an old ancient doorway, like they were checking back in with a very deep and personal part of their core inner selves. [Music] [Music] The mid80s were a fraught time inside the Grateful Dead in many ways, and a look inside their own psychedelic hearts was a welcome reprieve. [Music] You and I while we [Music] can. You [Music] transf. And when it was all over, the band left the stage. And Bill Graham, sensing the rarity of this event, allowed the crowd to hang out inside the theater for over 50 minutes before asking us to leave. Everyone agreed that this was like New Year's Eve in July. Even sound engineer Dan Healey and lighting director Candace Brightman hung out and talked to the crowd. It was obvious we had all just shared something rare, special, and truly magical. And when the show ended, we just looked at each other. were like, "We're going tomorrow night." And that was it. It wasn't until I hit the street and called Big George that the biggest cosmic joke of the day hit me. This marvelous day, complete with a full moon, lunar eclipse, shooting star, and a dark star with a light show was also Friday the 13th. And to think that 24 hours before I had been silly enough to tell someone that I was the only one I knew who was not being affected by the crazy energy of that particular full moon. [Music] Around the dead were not only pockets of genuine anarchy, but a wide variety of flavors. And we're going to let that thought lead us to today's detour adjacent to the shows on enjoying the ride. Our next guest was witnessed to the full spectrum from self-organizing support systems to chaos makers. He was at the Greek in 842. Please welcome from the hog farm, Kevin Schmevin. There was a Greek theater show where they did a dark star and I was just being introduced to the hog farm. So I was outside with all the people. They called themselves street people and they were a street commune and they called themselves the masses. They lived outside and so we were all outside and I had a ton of leaf for some reason and I was rolling big fat joints of leaf and just lighting them and passing them and lighting them and passing them and I was stupid. I was sitting on the UC Berkeley campus doing this right outside the Greek. The cops popped me. I got a a traffic ticket for marijuana possession. It was a hard-learned mistake, but one better made in the People's Republic of Berkeley than in most other places in the country in 1984. Earlier that spring, Kevin had been invited up to the Hog Farms new land in Mendescino, where he gradually assimilated into the community established in LA in 1966 by Hugh Romney, aka Wavy Gravy, and his wife Janara. The hog farm would become an important part of the dead's history in the 1980s as well. The dead all had kids and production people all had kids and they all needed to watch their kids during the concerts. So the hog farm ran a kids room which was off limits to most of the freaks to protect the kids. It was backstage and it was lightly catered and it was lightly attended and Wavy played bingo for prizes with all the kids. full clown gear and entertaining kids and getting right down on the floor, eye level with them and playing with them. But the hog farm's roots gave them an unexpected and even stronger connection with the dead. The hog farm was a mobile commune. They lived on buses and uh that's what set him apart from most of the communes that popped up in the 60s. When they were mobile, the mechanics were kings and the bus drivers were kings because if they couldn't keep the things moving, then the commune was just a bunch of broken down vehicles. And then they slowly became house dwellers. And then the people who took care of the buses, well, they kind of had to take a back seat. The Grateful Dead would bristle if you called them a commune. But not even counting the dead heads, they were unquestionably a mobile community. And sometimes mobile communities needed mobile support. My first show with the Hog Farm was Ventura 84. I was on the bus with people who called themselves the skeleton crew. What that meant was that they could do everything that needed to be done at a show with the least amount of people except for play the concert themselves. There used to be a slogan that was uh first in, last out. Good old Grateful Dead. First in, last out. And that's what the skeleton crew was with the hog farm. They were some of the first people in the parking lot. They helped set the lines to park the cars because if you don't start people off in the right direction, then you can't fit everybody in. And then uh we were handing out trash bags. That was the second thing we did because you got to keep the scene clean. And then we let everybody know that the bus over there was lost and found and security and first aid and a message board and all that kind of stuff that if there was anything in the parking lot that you needed, you come to that bus and we're going to help you out. Here's sociologist Rebecca Adams reading from the note she made in the late 1980s. There had always been a few dead heads camping in tens or sleeping in buses or vans, but the camping scene did not attract attention until July of 1982. At that time, about 500 dead heads who wanted to camp showed up at the Ventura County Fairgrounds and staff members of Bill Graham Presents and Grateful Dead Productions decided to let them camp in the back lot. It went well, so the practice was continued. Bill Graham and Grateful Ed Productions deputized the hog farm to help Kevin Schmevin. The hog farm is probably most famous for is um having that kitchen at Woodstock and being security at Woodstock. I think on the record they even announced that, you know, don't eat the brown acid. The brown acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good. Uh it's suggested that you do stay away from that. Of course, it's your own trip, so be my guest. But uh please be advised that there is a warning on that one. Okay. As soon as they did that at Woodstock, everybody who was on acid, you know, assumed that they had the brown stuff and now it was a bad trip. And the way it was explained to me was that the only way the medical community had to deal with that bad trip situation was like a thorazine and volume cocktail. And then after that, they kind of have to admit you because they gave you medication and then you have to be evaluated. By the 1980s, the hog farm had a decade and a half of experience talking people down. Check out our LA66 episode for Wavy Gravy's Tales of the Watts Acid Test. We've linked to it at dead.net/deadcast. What the hog farm had learned was that if you just talk to people that there's no real bad trip. It's just about turning a downward spiral into an upward spiral. What the hog farmers would do was spend time with the individual and talk to them and ask them a few basic questions until they come around to the answer of a few basic questions. You convince them that it's just a drug and it's going to wear off. Once it starts to wear off, people are kind of uh shy about the fact that they had to be helped through that experience. And because they're so shy, they're like, "Well, what can I do to help?" And you say, "Well, you see that guy right there? He's going through what you were going through a couple hours ago. So, why don't you try and do for him what I just did for you?" And the hog farm showed the medical community another way of dealing with a bad trip. And that's what we were continuing in the parking lot as the skeleton crew. And of course, if when the Grateful Dead came to if the psych units all fill up across town, that's not a good look. As we know, the situation was in charge. But attempting to corral the situation was the hog farmer known as Calico. Some might remember her from the Grateful ticket office where she went by the name Ruby. Others might remember her as Elizabeth [Music] Vander. [Music] Immigrating from the Netherlands in 1964, Elizabeth Vanderme was a fixture on the New York jazz scene, working for legendary labels like ESP Disc and Atlantic Records, contributing journalism to Downbeat, Kota, and other publications, and hosting Sounds of Today on New York's WBAI. We've been listening to Albert Eer at the Village Theater in 1967 just before it became the Filmore East performances she wrote [Music] about when the dead were around. It wasn't hard to find Calico if you knew who she was. And even if you didn't, she could often be found anyway. Rebecca Adams saw the dead in the late 70s at the Uptown in Chicago. I went to use the women's room during a show and there was a woman there giving out handfuls of weed and I I went back to the seat and got my husband's cowboy hat. We passed the cowboy hat down our row. I mentioned that to her once. Oh, I remember them giving weed out in the bathrooms and and she said, "Oh, yeah, that was me." In the 1980s, the skeleton crew could be found at virtually all of the West Coast shows promoted by Bill Graham. Bill Graham Alico seemed to be good friends with him. He had a little dirt bike that he used to ride around the campground because he was big man on campus. And uh he would make special trips out to see Calico and they would talk together in private and it was a good time to not want to bug Calico or Bill at that time because they seemed to be enjoying themselves. But there was at least one or two times a show you would see them laughing and and chatting and pointing and clicking. The members of the skeleton crew had their expenses covered, but like the crew themselves, it was skeletal. We had all made the deal that if you're going to be on the skeleton crew, then the money went towards the land fund so that we could hold on to this piece of land forever. The hog farmer had just bought a piece of land up in Mendescino County and they needed help paying for it. Somehow I thought that uh whoever was signing the checks, either Bill Graham or Grateful Dead Productions. They knew that the hog farm was trying to do a good thing with that land. So they were helping out old friends. This is where they could fit them in without making them a charity. The members of the Dad also supported the hog farm family in other ways. the legacy of the hog farm. It's why they have this piece of land is so that they can facilitate a summer camp for kids camp when a rainbow wavy gravies the hog farms performing arts circus camp up in Leightonville, California. They do ships for underprivileged people and they do an adult camp and Wavy is still involved and Johanny's wife is still involved. Hampling a rainbow 50 years this year. [Music] The hog farm used to have uh festivals up on that land. They were called picnics. And that all started with uh Electric on the Eel, which which wasn't on their land, but it was up in uh Humble County on the Eel River. And those I think those first couple shows were Jerry [Music] shows. That was the Jerry Garcia band at French's camp on the Eel River. from the first of three years that Garcia performed in Leightonville in 1987, 89, and 91, now collected as Electric on the Eel, and Acoustic on the Eel. If you think shows operated by the Hog Firm would be an idyllic place to see the Jerry Garcia band, you'd be right. Mr. Completely made it to the 1991 gigs. I heard about Eel River as like the the legendary like I like the last spot of the 60s. It was connected to Eugene that way. It was like, "This is one of the places you can go and still experience what that was." It was beautiful. It was by far the most naked people I'd ever seen, maybe outside of Eugene. There's a whole game going on with people trying to sneak in. Literally, the river is the border of the property and people are trying to bushwack in in ' 91. And it was a game of security trying to catch them without security ever working very hard because security were all kind of bros and they were just like and and so it was more like a game of tag than anything else and they would just sort of throw people out and they would try again from a different angle and like it didn't seem like like mean-spirited at all. Somewhere out there is a place that's [Music] cool. There peace in the balance of the [Music] room. Working for the future like some kind of mystic Jew and waiting [Music] for and waiting for like getting busted for weed in Berkeley. Getting caught gate or river crashing by the hog farm is probably a less serious offense. But by the early 1990s, mega chill Grateful Dead venues were becoming a thing of the past. We'll have another visit with the skeleton crew as our virtual tour moves east. Right now, before merging back with the new box set, we're going to finish our detour to chill venues with a quick stop over in Sacramento. [Music] Sun [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Blair Jackson Cal Expo became kind of the last great place in the Bay Area in my opinion. We had fantastic times at Shoreline. It was very nice place. It didn't have that vibe that Cal Expo had, which was just also wonderful. You on grass, it's like 12,000 seats. Cal Expo was the last West Coast venue where Deadhead Heads could regularly go barefoot. It's all over Now, find your shoes is a skeleton key entry. A good line to sing along with when the band encoured with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Rebecca Adams. After the Greek run in ' 89, I bought a pair of Birkenstocks and David Gans took me. We didn't h they weren't available in North Carolina and uh I went and bought uh my first Birk Birkenstocks in Oakland and then I wore them to a show and I I took them off to dance barefoot and put them in a pile kind of back from the stage and they still had the little, you know, sticker on them. They were brand new. And at the end of the night, the only ones left in the pile in my size were real old beat up Birkenstocks. And so I thought, "Oh well, now they look used." You know, I took them home. The next day I put them in another pile towards the back of the venue to dance barefoot. And at the end of the night, my new ones were there. I got to take my new Birkenstocks back. I still have them in my closet. my my magic returnable birthing stocks. The dead managed to keep playing at Cal Expo through 1994, but the years after Touch of Gray were pretty harsh. David Lemieux. The Dead lost a lot of venues in ' 89. They lost three incredible Bay Area venues. They lost the Greek and the Frost and the Kaiser all in ' 89. All of it. He'll get you everything. He's got an extra extra ticket. That was Bob Ray Love's piece, Crowd Sculpture from Infrared Roses, recorded in part outside Henry J. Kaiser in 1989 and capturing the overflow around Post Touch of Gray Dead shows. By the end of the decade, the scene had grown out of hand. They had counted on older dead heads policing, not policing, but monitoring, let's say, or helping the younger dead heads find a kind way to do things. And all of a sudden, there were so many young people there and people who were clueless about how to behave and everything that I always thought that's probably why they developed the skeleton crew. My students called it dead head vigilanteism. Dead heads checking on other dead heads. Dead heads tried to organize. The New England Town Council was a loose, very loose organization, if you can call it that, of I guess you'd call them Grateful Dead elders who were determined to have people behave well in and around the venues where Grateful Dead shows were happening. And so they would uh sort of turn up early and they'd be outside maybe the venue or near the gates or whatever and and trying to look for bad behavior or make sure people were behaving socially okay. They put out leaflets, please clean up after yourself. It didn't quite work. The solution, if you can call it that, is also the answer to a trivia question. What venue did the Grateful Dead play the most during their career? The Grateful Dead will be playing at the Oakland Coliseum Arena in Oakland, California on December 15th, 16th, and 17th. There are still plenty of tickets available through all BAS ticket centers. All Oakland Coliseum mail orders have been mailed out. I do believe I I believe 66 shows there, which is more than anywhere. Oakland Coliseum Arena such an important venue for the dead because it was the big place they needed. They found the Oakland Auditorium Arena/Kaiser and then that was still too small. But fortunately they had the Madison Square Garden size venue 16,000. It was not disruptive for them to play there because it was not in a neighborhood. It was in a parking lot they shared with the 60,000 seat Oakland Coliseum Stadium, the baseball football place. The Oakland Coliseum Arena was big, holding 16,000 dead heads. Across the parking lot was the Oakland Coliseum Stadium, where they'd played in 1974 with the Beach Boys and with The Who in 1976. The December 27th, 1989 show is on the New Box. I freaking love this show. It's one of the best shows I saw. Certainly one of the top five shows I saw. Boy, I love it. It was again entirely general admission whenever they played there. I saw the dead at the coliseum seven times and I just I loved it because you just kind of roll into that parking lot. It wasn't hard to get into because that parking lot and the infrastructure to get into it was built for baseball and football. So they they were used to getting 60,000 people there, 50,000 people. For 20,000 deadheads to show up, it was easy. So you park, you go in, the whole place is general admission. If you're taping, you go to the taper section. If you're not, you run to the best seats that were still available. You lay your blankets down. We often would go in where my crew was eight or 10 people and two of us would be designated to go and hang out and get in line and we'd bring a couple extra sweaters and maybe a blanket from the hotel and the two of us would get in line at 3:00 or 4 in the afternoon and then when the doors open we'd be in and we'd get generally if you got in if you got in line by 3:00 4:00 for a 5:30 doors open not that long a wait um you're pretty much going to get some good seats. Uh maybe uh 10 rows off the floor, center ice on Brent's side. So really good [Music] seats. Not every dead head was a fan of the new arrangement. To offer counterpoint, once again, Blair Jackson. We had it so good for so long. Frost and Cal Expo and and and you know Greek and we were so spoiled getting to see them in these magical places year after year after year. What they played nine times at the Greek, nine different runs or something like that and you know seven at Frost. I don't know how many they played across actually but but yeah we were very spoiled and so then Shoreline was the next one. That was still pretty good, but it was starting to head into that kind of not that magical of space. And then the Coliseum, you know, which is a basketball arena. It just felt like every other band that plays basketball arenas. But hey, even at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, it was still the Grateful Goddamn Dead. Well, I married me a wife. She's been trouble all my [Music] life. Running out in the cold rain [Music] show me out in the cold rain. I thought it was the perfect place for the dead. I loved going there. It was my first California show was there. New Year's 88 1228. the first night of the run and I had seen the dead a lot in ' 88. It was probably my 15th or 20th show that year maybe and I'd seen him at 87 six times all on the east coast and and Alpine and I remember how distinctly different the vibe was. Everybody was into it. Everybody seemed a little more knowledgeable. Everybody seemed a little more focused on the music but less rowdy. Everybody was dancing. Everybody was up. Nobody was sitting down. It just felt like a a mellow California vibe. The massive parking lot gave a flavor of the sprawling scene the East Coast had known for the past decade and change. It doesn't have much directly to do with the band, but Douglas Copelan's 1996 book, Polaroids from the Dead, abstractly captures a bit of the vibe. Deadhead sociologist Rebecca Adams was out west this week sometimes hanging out with her buddy David Gans and John Perry Barlo, Bob Weir and Brent Midland's lyrical collaborator. At some point during that run, Barlo and Gans and I interviewed people in the parking lot together. Uh Gans did the recording and Barlo and I did the interviewing. The interviews come from before the show on the 30th and we'll be peppering them throughout this segment along with some other Oakland Coliseum stories. Some from the 1989 New Year's run, some from other years. I think taping shows is all hat. I'm taping the parking lot. All right. Our three navigators took to the parking lot posing a variety of questions. For example, what's going on here? Dead man. Yeah. What's it mean? What's it mean? It means enjoying life as best possible while you're young. I mean, because you're eventually going to die. And when you die, there's no more shows. There's no more freedom. There's no more woods. There's no more ocean. You don't get to go out and do things that you want to do. How do you know so much about what is Yeah. Yeah. Chad Kroger left us this story about Oakland 1991. So, the year is 1991. I'm a senior in high school in Omaha, Nebraska. Had just gone to my first Jerry show at the Target Center in Minneapolis. Uh I think it was November. We get mail order tickets to go see the last New Year shows in ' 91. The second night, December 28th being my 18th birthday. The only problem, no tickets to New Year's itself. We have a VW bus. We traveled from Omaha all the way to San Francisco. It's got uh crystals coming up from the bottom and skeletons sliding down the crystals. And we've got our little double tape deck listening to the local radio station about to record the the show for the night. And the whole time we were in Oakland, everybody's been saying, "Oh my god, we've never met heads from Nebraska. Never met heads from Nebraska." So we're sitting there and this woman walks up to the van and it turns out to be Calico. Two bodyguards. She goes, "Are you guys really from Nebraska?" We're like, "Yeah." And she's like, "Do you guys have tickets?" No. Buy tickets from her, still have the beautiful ticket going to the New Year's show. Have no credit card, no money the next day, and can't get home. But we made it into New Year's show, which was amazing. Goes along with being a dead besides loving dad. Well, it's just the music, the peace that it creates, and the fact that uh we we're harmless folk just trying to get together and bump heads together in a peaceful way. The one thing I remember about going around with Barlo is whenever he bought something in the parking lot, he wrote a check. I kept saying, "Why don't they cash? You know, they could use the cash." He said, "Well, no, I always pay with Jack." Well, actually, what often happens is they take my check, but they never cash it. They got lots of different takes on certain nights like that the band really has nothing to do with what's going on at all. Like at certain points they're really no more to do with it than you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like they're just doing what they're doing. They're nothing special really. They're just people. Even wilder. Deadcast co-host Rich Mayan traveled up for the 1989 New Year shows. Oh, hey Rich. We drove up from LA. I had a Toyota four buys were really popular in California at the time and I had one with the extra cab and the bed was just long enough to put a futon in in the back so I could sleep in the truck. I didn't have to worry about accommodations or finding a place to crash because as long as I had a safe place to park I was cool. But it was really cold man after the shows were over. You know that that Bay Area kind of like marine cold that seems to go right to your bones. But it was it was fun. the parking lot scene was happening. David Lemma, when we started the Dave's Pick series, that was a daunting task. And we're very happy with the the Richmond 77 show, but the three shows that were the final three candidates for Dave's Pick Volume 1 back in 2012 was Richmond 52577, which became Dave's Pick One. Hartford 73174 came a very close second became Dave's Pix volume two and the other one that we put a lot of work into because we wanted to think about different eras was this show was 122789. It's a really incredible show. [Music] The first set, forget about it. I mean, the cold rain through promised land, the bird song, the ala tom thumb blues. It's a good show. Now I started out on Hanakin, but I soon hit the hardest of. Everybody swore that they would stand beside me when the heat got rough. But the joke was on everybody. There wasn't anything or anybody. I'm going back to Sing. [Music] I've had enough. But the second set, you're going to hear Clarence Clemens on Io. Hey now, now [Music] over the course of 1989, saxoponist Clarence Clemens, then furoughed from the East Street Band, engaged in a musical bromance with the Grateful Dead and the Jerry Garcia Band. This show was the second to last of 16 times that the other big man jammed with the big man, turning up one more time at the Warfield with a Garcia band a few months later. I love how laser focused Garcia's vocals are here. [Music] [Music] about. [Music] The Playing in the Band is about as out there as any Playing in the Band I've heard from the 80s and 90s. [Music] [Music] This one it is so deep and you know Jerry started playing the MIDI in the spring of ' 89. So you get some of [Laughter] [Music] that. It's a lockedin show with one of the classic latter-day encore tunes. I will walk alone by the plan river and dream me a dream of my own. I will walk alone by the black muddy river and sing me a song of my own. Our final Oakland Coliseum Arena story takes place, I think, over the 1985 1986 New Year's run. Please welcome back from Sex Mob from the Millennial Territory Orchestra from Levon Helm's Ramble Band, our greatest living slide trumpet player, band leader, and arranger, Steven Bernstein. I saw Calico do some magic, too, at the end of the show where she like saved some like tripped out young hippie kids from some like cops. We're watching this altercation about to happen. like these kids are obviously the cops want them to leave and they obviously don't know how to do that, you know, and the cops are about to freak on these kids and Calico shows up out of nowhere and she was, you know, kind of a big imposing lady with red hair and she just gets in in between them and says, "I got this." And she takes, you know, puts her arms around these kids and says, "Come on, let's let's get going." And I was like, "Wow, that's this community everyone's talking about. This little magical community." I can tell by the old clock on the wall that it's time to wrap things up for the day. And we haven't even left the Bay Area yet for our tour, which today we're going to have to limit to the venues on the new box set and our few detours. Maybe someday we'll get to fully explore the left coast. From the Watts Acid Test to the Hollywood Paladium, from the beach at Ventura to the swing in San Bernardino, from Golden Hall to the Crystal Ballroom, from Bakersfield to the Emerald Triangle. We can of course direct you via dead.net/deadcast /deadcast to our Sunshine Daydream Extravaganza for a deep look at the dead's connections in the Eugene area. Oh, right, right. The kids tent for you guys that don't know about it. It's uh located down there at that. If you don't know about it, you don't want to. Gee, thanks. Weird. We're going to have to come to ground today with this story that Bill Graham's employee Bob Barers told us, which symbolically sets up a lot of what we'll be talking about in the upcoming episodes. In January of 1978, we did a little tour with the dead from the west coast. We started down in in San Bernardino and we worked our way up to Eugene in Oregon. It took about a week and a half, two weeks, played lots of little places. And that was the first time I went on the road with the dead. I'd done all the shows in the Bay Area, but I'd never been out on the road. For context, back at Winterland, this was going on. [Music] I was always out in front of the line dealing with people early in the morning dealing with the setup and stuff and then I'd do the show and we'd go to the next place. And after about the third date, I realized that the first 50 people or so in line every day were the same people. you know, they'd be in a different order. Among those faces was Steve Sberman. I had gone on a little mini tour at the beginning of the year to Stockton and Sacramento, which were accessible from the Bay Area. But I will say I was young enough to not come home on the day in between, and I slept on the steps of the venue uh in I think it was either Stockton or Sacramento. [Music] But after the first couple of days, I started to recognize them and they started to recognize me and we'd have conversations and and so by the time we're about halfway way through this thing, I went to Bill and I. I said, "Hey, Bill, there's something going on here. You know, there's this group of people following the dead around." And I've never seen this happen before. And he goes, "Wow, that's really interesting." So, he started coming out and talking to people the next couple of dates. And after a few dates, he came to me. He said, "You know what? From now on, when we're doing the dead, let's see if we can get the parking lot to open up the night before. We'll put some portagons out there, make sure there's water available. We'll get a security couple of security guys and we'll just put them out there and then if people show up early they can come in and they can camp there and we'll we'll allow them to come in and we'll accommodate them so they're not parked on streets creating problems in the neighborhoods where our shows are. I wonder what happened next. Stay [Music] tuned. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] We'll be back in a little bit. Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Deadcast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. David Lemieux, Ron Rakau, Kevin Schmevin, Mark Pinkis, Blair Jackson, Steve Silberman, Rebecca Adams, David Gans, Johnny Dwark, Tyler Roy Hart, Steven Bernstein, Robert Nyberg, and Chad Kroger. Extra special thanks to Friend of the Deadcast, David Gans for his ongoing contributions of audio from his extensive interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Deadcast, Mark Pinkis. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd, and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved. [Music]