Grateful Dead

Eigth grade had just started and my friend Ed who was going into his senior year brought me. Lied to my parents. Now look at the state I am in........

My 18th Birthday! My 2nd show.

A friend from 2d grade and frat brother walks into the Lehigh U. Beta Theta Pi dining room on Thursday and yells, "Anyone want to work a concession stand at a Dead concert this weekend?" I was up in a flash; so began a mythical voyage. We both lived in New Jersey near Englishtown, so we packed the car with two other frat brothers that night and headed home. After some sleep, we took off with my younger brother and one of his buddies in tow, getting to the "stadium" parking in the late afternoon. None of us had gone to drag races there, but we knew this wall of long-haul trailers was not the drag track. We passed through an overlap and stopped in awe at the size of the open field before us. The relay towers were massive structures and the distance from the stage to the back wall looked like a mile. We checked in and were told our stand was the closest to the stage, on the right facing the stage. We spent all evening setting up, stopping for dinner in front of the stage to watch the bands run their sound checks. The Dead were last and they kept practicing Truckin' forever to get something right. We didn't understand the significance of them rehearsing that song. About midnight I stretched out in the back of a bread truck to grab some sleep, the gates were supposed to open at 9 AM.

At four in the morning, I was awakened and told that the gates had been opened and the truck needed to be moved. As I stood on the back bumper I looked toward the entry and already a sea of people had begun walking across toward the stage, only their heads and shoulders visible above the slight rise in the middle of the field.

It took an hour or more before anyone found us and much longer before anyone ordered anything. The heat started to pick up well before noon. When the New Riders came on we were thankful that we had a trailer full of ice behind us with the doors opening toward the stage. Each of us in the stand took turns on ice duty, standing in the open trailer chipping blocks of ice and watching the show in air-conditioned comfort.

As the day went on everyone who brought their own drinks ran out and we were getting mobbed with people needing hydration and refreshment. The hoses were nearby were the only source of water (this was well before the age of bottled water – we were only selling soda), making the area out in front of us a muddy field. The heat did not abate, the mass of people standing in front of us waiting got larger, people began throwing $20 bills at us and we were tossing 6-packs of cold soda out into the general area where the crumpled bill came from. Everyone on the ground in front of us was cool, but the pace was manic and those of us at the window kept looking at each other as we collected garbage bags full of paper money.

Then the Dead came on. We had been oblivious to how long they took after MTB wrapped their set, the constant press of the crowd had been going for almost 6 hours now. But the second we heard Scher introduce the Dead the energy of everyone in that space changed. With the first notes of "Promised Land" everyone was smiling and moving toward the stage as if being pulled by magnets. My recall of the next three hours is sketchy at best. We eventually ran out of anything liquid, the pressure to serve the next body at the window was relieved, and I was toast. I do remember that I had heard the Terrapin album for the first time just weeks before and hearing the first chords of it I immediately took a break and stood up high in the ice trailer to watch them close out the show in a magical way.

After the concert, we had to clean up, run the remaining huge bags of money to the Winnebago that was the office for the concessionaire, and make our way back across the bomb zone that was the now-empty field to find our cars. It took hours to get on the highway and we got home as the sun was coming up. What a long, strange trip *THAT* was!