The Grateful Dead Bid
‘Fare Thee Well’ to California
by Daniel Nussbaum 30 Jun 2015
SANTA CLARA, CA – The Grateful
Dead were in top form for their final performance in California, but to
many fans in attendance at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday night, the quality of the
music was almost beside the point.
Sunday’s concert offered California Deadheads (and those
unable to take the big financial hit of attending the July 4 three-show
extravaganza in Chicago) a chance to pay their last respects to a musical
institution unrivaled in its scope of influence on the Golden State.
The show’s best musical moments – from the early, booming
first riffs of ‘80s-era “Feel Like a Stranger,” through the heartfelt favorite
“Row Jimmy” and the haunting, spacey “Wharf Rat” – were, as always,
transcendental in nature.
But, more than simply a musical performance, Sunday’s
concert put a capstone on five decades of the Dead’s legacy in California,
which endures to this day.
After Saturday night’s show featured a set list culled from
the band’s early material, expectations were sky-high for Sunday’s finale.
And the band delivered, for the most part. Phish lead
guitarist Trey Anastasio, recruited by the Dead to fill the Jerry Garcia role
for all of the band’s final five “Fare
Thee Well” performances, played the band’s music dutifully and
respectfully, rarely jumping out in front as he is required to do with his
other jam-heavy outfit.
Instead, Anastasio hung back and let the rest of the Dead’s
“Core Four” – guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, and drummers Mickey Hart
and Bill Kreutzmann – power the musical spectacle.
Weir was particularly good on Sunday night. While he has
struggled to recall lyrics in recent performances with side projects Ratdog and
Furthur, he remained on point throughout this show, delivering particularly
rousing vocals on “Black Peter” and “Loose Lucy.”
The second set’s “Eyes of the World” gave Deadheads the
exploratory jamming they’ve come to expect from their favorite band, while
“He’s Gone” conjured up bittersweet feelings as the band sang the refrain
“Oooh, nothing’s gonna bring him back.”
Other highlights included an electric “Alabama Getaway,”
Weir’s exclamatory vocals on “I Need a Miracle” and the show-closing
crowd-pleaser “Sugar Magnolia.” The band encored with the obligatory “Brokedown
Palace,” which contains the line “Fare thee well, fare thee well, I love you
more than words can tell.”
And then the concert was over, and with it, the band’s
tenure in California. The 65,000 plus in attendance streamed toward the exits
and the darkness of the labyrinthine parking lot.
The Grateful Dead, then known as the Warlocks, cut their
teeth in the Bay Area in the mid-60s, from playing Ken Kesey’s early “acid
test” parties to playing free street festivals during San Francisco’s “Summer
of Love” in 1967.
Fronted by spiritual and creative leader Jerry Garcia, the
Dead quickly became one of the most popular bands to emerge from the
hallucinogenic-soaked streets of San Francisco. They played Woodstock in 1969,
and then, shortly after, the country, taking on sold-out amphitheaters and
stadiums from coast to coast.
The live history of the band is well documented, but it is
sufficient to simply say that their performances became legendary. The concerts
were musical marathons, often lasting over three hours, in which the band drew
from every genre of music imaginable: rock, folk, country, jazz, blues,
psychedelia. Shows usually included a segment in which all of the band members
left the stage, leaving drummers Mickey Hart and
Bill Kreutzmann behind for an extended “Drums” solo. The “Space” segment that
followed in later years allowed the band to stretch out and explore ambient
noise for the benefit of the usually well-lubricated Deadheads.
The band’s innovation extended far beyond its musical
output; in 1974, Dead sound engineer Owsley Stanley, known affectionately as
“Bear,” built a “Wall of Sound” speaker system to accompany the band’s
increasingly complex live performances. The band members themselves controlled
the speakers, rather than a front-of-house engineer, and the setup was
reportedly so elaborate that each of Phil Lesh’s four bass strings was assigned
its own speaker. The system was a significant achievement in live production,
though it ultimately became too costly and impractical to haul around on tour.
Marketers have written books about the band’s legendary
business acuity. When “tapers” began bootlegging Grateful Dead concerts in the
late 60s, the band could have fought them off, as others did. Instead, they
embraced them, setting up “taper sections” so that fans with expensive
recording equipment could have more space. In doing so, the band created a
tape-trading network unparalleled in modern music. Diehard fans brought their tape
collections to concerts, trading them for other fans’ tapes.
It is easy to underestimate the significance of this
development in the Internet era, when thousands of the Dead’s concerts can be
found on a single website. But the
band’s loose taper policy had a major impact on its marketing, helping to build
the increasingly mythical nature of their live performances.
The original incarnation of the Grateful Dead officially
ended with Garcia’s death in August 1995, though keyboardists Pigpen, Keith
Godchaux and Brent Mydland had passed away before then. The founding members
continued on to side projects; guitarist Bob Weir fronted
Ratdog and bassist Phil Lesh tours with a rotating cast of musicians in a
project called Phil Lesh and Friends. Drummers Hart and Kreutzmann founded the
Rhythm Devils.
After Garcia’s death, the so-called “Core Four” toured
sporadically under the name “The Other Ones” before changing simply to “The
Dead” in 2003. In 2008, Weir, Lesh and Hart reunited for the first time in four
years at The Warfield in San Francisco for “Deadheads
for Obama,” a fundraising concert for then-presidential candidate
Barack Obama.
* * * * * * * *
It is useful, on the night of the band’s final performance
just a few dozen miles from its old stomping grounds, to briefly examine the
Dead’s music and cultural legacy in the country’s most populous state.
The band’s early fans were comprised of Bay Area hippies,
many who of whom had migrated west to experience the heady early days of free
love and virtually unlimited drugs. The popularity of LSD literally dovetailed
with the band’s own momentous rise; Wall of Sound builder Owsley Stanley
manufactured hundreds of thousands of tabs of acid from his California home and
generously supplied the drug to both Kesey’s wild psychedelic parties and the
band.
The optimism was palpable. Legendary journalist and author
Hunter S. Thompson called San Francisco in the 60s a “very special time and
place to be a part of.”
“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were
doing was right, that we were winning,” Thompson wrote in 1973’s Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas. “And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of
inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military
sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point
in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the
crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
But the wave would eventually crash and roll back.
Like everyone else, the Deadheads grew up. Many of them took
teaching jobs at Cal State or started environmental nonprofits. Others entered
politics, becoming state senators in San Jose or Senior Aides in Sacramento.
Even some of the most dedicated acid freaks dropped out of the scene and became
used-car salesmen in Torrance.
But the culture never died. The Deadheads carried the
liberal spirit and unbridled optimism of that San Francisco summer of ‘67 with
them.
And now, California is largely, for better or worse, a
product of that progressive optimism, both politically and culturally. Where
liberal hippies in the Sixties were primarily concerned with pushing back
against the “normalcy” of society, today’s Left in California demands it.
The Irvine campus of University of California – the same
school whose Berkeley outpost was the site of the infamous free speech protests
in 1964 – recently attempted to ban the
American flag from a building lobby. State universities are rife
with anti-Semitic
sentiment, borne from liberal movements like BDS and the academic
boycott of Israel. “Safe
spaces” are on the rise at universities across the U.S.; comedian
Jerry Seinfeld won’t play college campuses due to political
correctness.
California public policy also suffers, due largely to the
rigid, left-leaning majority in the state Legislature. A glut of spending over
the past several decades, guided with what can only be assumed is the same
optimism the hippies felt in those early, heady days in San Francisco, has left
the state with massive unfunded liabilities and an inexplicable appetite for a
very expensive, bond-financed transportation
project.
And then, of course, there is the drought. California is in
the grip of a record water shortage, but the state’s gargantuan bureaucracy stifles
all attempts at rational water policy. Environmental organizations – the same
outfits founded by those old school, wide-eyed optimists – have grown to become
the most powerful entities in the state.
Of course, it is at best misguided, and at worst, unfair, to
place the blame for California’s current dysfunction entirely on the shoulders
of grown-up Deadheads. The state is in trouble for a lot of reasons. Deadheads
are overwhelmingly kind, open-minded individuals with a collective appreciation
for the art and passion of live music. They also have libertarian sympathies
with regard to governmental overreach.
But the Deadhead brand of liberal activism – borne out of
optimism and good intentions during those fateful California summers – has
endured in the state. And in the hands of a new generation, it has morphed
altogether into something more violent and, somewhat surprisingly, more
conformist.
Still, on Sunday night, issues of politics, legacy, and even
identity faded away. And as the Dead played their final set on a clear night in
California, tens of thousands of fans tapped, if only briefly, into that
relentless optimism, into the sense that everything, somehow, would be alright.
Grateful
Dead
Bob
Weir is the founder of the Grateful
Dead, and a member of the Bohemian
Club.
Note: Mickey Hart was a
drummer for the Grateful Dead, and is
a member of the Bohemian Club.
George H.W. Bush is a member of the Bohemian Club.
George H. W. Bush New World Order Quotes
Belizean_Grove
is the equivalent to the male-only social group, the Bohemian Club.
Sonia Sotomayor
was a member of the Belizean Grove,
and is a justice for the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Richard
M. Nixon was an honorary member of the Bohemian Club, and appointed Harry Blackmun to the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Harry A. Blackmun
was appointed by Richard Nixon, a
justice for the U.S. Supreme Court, and
wrote the majority decision for Roe vs.
Wade.
Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Is Another Roe v. Wade (LIBERAL
AGENDA NETWORKING OVER 42 YEARS)
Henry A. Kissinger is a member of the Bohemian Club, an overseer at the International
Rescue Committee, a director at the American Friends of Bilderberg
(think tank), and a 2008 Bilderberg conference participant (think tank).
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the International Rescue Committee.
George Soros
was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open Society.
Clifford S.
Asness is a director at the International Rescue Committee, and supported
same-sex marriage in New York.
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