Grateful Dead

I’ve been asked many times through the years about “the best” Grateful Dead show I ever attended. With 365 concerts spanning 1970 to 1995 to choose from, that’s an extremely difficult choice. “Best” in what way? Some supposedly objective evaluation of the music? Good luck with that. “Favorite”? Even that is completely loaded. I’ve had unimaginable fun at shows that I know were not that spectacular, and I’ve had so-so times at shows that were revealed later to be magnificent.

Last week we talked about the sometimes onerous and unpleasant task of trying to turn friends on to the Grateful Dead. The consensus seemed to be that it’s often not worth the effort, and that maybe it’s better to let folks find the Dead on their own. Quitters! (Just kidding.)

No, not that way. That’s a topic for another time, for sure. But this week I want to talk about the challenges, perils and triumphs of trying to turn friends on to the Grateful Dead.

For the past week-plus, I spent my brisk, daily, hour-long walks around Lake Merritt here in Oakland digging the three mid-February Phil & Friends concerts from the unfortunately named 1st Bank Center in Denver. The shows were fantastic! I had worried that having three lead guitarists—Warren Haynes, John Scofield and Jackie Greene—might make for too thick a stew.

I’m writing this the morning after RatDog’s (1/25/12) reunion show at Bob Weir’s TRI Studios complex in San Rafael, Marin County. I haven’t scoured the Internet to gauge fan reaction to the free webcast and I have no idea what it looked or sounded like out there in the real world.

It was nearly four years ago—April 24, 2008, to be precise—that the Grateful Dead announced at a press conference at the Fillmore in SF that the group was donating its archives and assorted memorabilia to the University of California at Santa Cruz and would reside in that sylvan campus’ McHenry Library.

This could verge on the sacrilegious, but I’ve been thinking for some time that Jeff Chimenti may be the best all-around keyboardist to have played with the Grateful Dead or the post-GD bands. This guy can play anything: from raucous rock to convincing jazz to delicate melodic whispers. He is a magnificent pianist and a beast on the B-3. He’s assertive without being a hog.

What a wonderful year it was for the various Dead-connected bands crisscrossing the continent. So many good shows in venues ranging from tiny clubs to cool old theaters to arenas to festival grounds … to our computer screens!

What does it mean that I can clearly remember every New Year’s Eve I spent with the Grateful Dead or post-Dead bands, but can recall almost none of my other December 31sts? I know that in the years after Jerry died, there were a couple of midnights spent with friends, dancing at midnight to a grainy VHS bootleg of the “Sugar Magnolia” from the ’78 Closing of Winterland concert.

Even though I was a rabid Dead Head when I moved from New York to the Bay Area back in the fall of 1973, I didn’t make it to a Dead New Year’s Eve show until 1981-82.