The Grateful Dead Say Farewell: The View From the Balcony
In 1968, only three years into their long, strange trip, the Grateful Dead came up with a radical idea for sharing their already singular, performing alchemy. Instead of taking their live experience to America city by city, they would bring the multitudes to the mountain. “We used to fantasize about the rock & roll satellite,” bassist Phil Lesh told me in an interview last year “We had a tech guy whose father was involved in the nascent communications-satellite industry. Bob’s dad would build us a satellite, put it in orbit, and we would sit in one place and beam the music up, to the world at large.”
That fantasy came to Earth, for me, at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York on July 3rd, the first night of Fare Thee Well, the Dead’s sayonara run at Soldier Field in Chicago. Previously scheduled travel plans meant that I couldn’t be on the ground, so I attended in the same way many of those shut out of the action – by circumstance, price or the record-breaking demand for tickets – did: via the satellite broadcast to movie theaters, concert venues and living rooms across the country.
I was luckier than most of those outside that stadium: I had a front-row balcony seat at the Capitol, an iconic hall in the live-Dead story. The band made legendary stops there in the Seventies, including an especially fabled six-night stand in February 1971 during which the Dead debuted important new material: Seventies gig pillars such as “Bertha” and “Playing in the Band,” both present and still vigorous at Fare Thee Well, in the opening-night set list. It didn’t take a great stretch of imagination to think of that massive screen perched over the Capitol stage, flanked by a full-show-strength PA, as a portal into something longer and richer than just fond, formal goodbye.
The Wheel Goes ‘Round Again
You know the running order by now: the way the Dead’s surviving members – Lesh, guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, fortified with Nineties alumnus Bruce Hornsby on piano, organist Jeff Chimenti and Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio – addressed the massive absence in the air by opening with “Box of Rain,” the last song they performed with founding guitarist Jerry Garcia, at Soldier Field two months before his death in 1995; the high-times focus on material from the early and mid-Seventies, including nearly all of 1975’s Blues for Allah; the unexpected drop of sweet, melodic acid, “New Potato Caboose” from 1968’s Anthem of the Sun, in a long, playful “Space”; an unusually trippy passage through “Playing in the Band”.
For those who still doubt the viability of any Dead without Garcia, here is a vital statistic: So far, over three nights including the two “warm-up” stadium shows in Santa Clara, California, this band has played 55 songs and no repeats. Even on glory-road tours like Europe in 1972 and the great spring of 1977, the Dead rarely went 72 hours without a replay. As for the online grumbling about slower tempos and uneven vocal blends in Santa Clara, I found no evidence of a diminished return in Chicago. This Dead sounded rehearsed and determined to leave with their legend not just intact, but enhanced. When Anastasio stepped on the gas, harder each time, in his solo choruses during “Scarlet Begonias,” the rest of the band jumped in rhythmic temper with him. It’s a familiar ascension – Anastasio does it all the time with Phish. But punching out of that Capitol PA, spiced on the screen with close-up shots of the eye contact between the guitarist, Lesh and Weir, that kick upstairs looked and felt like new life, a freshly cut road to a reassuring peak.