Dead at Sphere 2

Set One: Old Farts at Play

I have mixed feelings about Sphere. Even on-line it is spectacular, maybe too spectacular to my mind, which can recall a rowdy band in flannel shirts and blue jeans with a sometime singer appropriately named Pigpen. WWJD? I think Jerry would have thoroughly enjoyed exploring what Sphere offered because he was a visual artist as well as a musical virtuoso, and he always seemed one to embrace technology throughout his career. He would have had a shit-eating grin for sure just tuning up in that place. As for the “Elvis-ness” of it all, likely not so much. And as for the money-grabbing aspect of their Sphere runs, hell, early bandmembers were giving free concerts and saving the rainforest long before they had money. More power to them so many years later. I consider a Dead and Co ticket to be a contribution to the “just be nice” charity this country so badly needs.

My other reservation about Sphere could also be said of our country, of humanity itself, and whether the dancing bears are due to become boiling frogs before too long. How many Hoover dams power this place, how many rivers of fossil fuel are soaked up by one proper Dead crescendo? (The Wall of Sound alone must have put a smile on Saudi lips.) It’s probably just me, but venues like Sphere now give me existential guilt, especially in a place where it’s 115 degrees in the shade. I’m uneasy. I have read Cormac McCarthy. I know where all this is headed.

But I digress. We were discussing the new and different challenges an old boomer faces just getting to these shows. Count on black swan events like the femur I broke on Friday 13, last September. Just a simple walk with my wife, Susan, around the block on a hot Tampa afternoon—no big deal, watch your step, tough neighborhood! —and a few hours later I’m on an operating table screaming “GIVE ME THAT STUFF MICHAEL JACKSON LOVED SO MUCH, PLEASE!” (True story. In fact, Michael Jackson has been my go-to operating room icebreaker for my past two cancer operations. My sincere advice is to always pass out to the sound of laughter, what with the odds of waking up and all.) So now I am learning to walk with my state-of-the-art titanium infused bone canal and dreading the prospect of steps such as one might encounter at a rock concert. What a wonderful incentive to heal, though: got to make it to a Dead concert at age 73. High class problems if there ever were.

Michael Jackson is losing currency now. I can assess this from my last few procedures. I think Michael is going the way of my story about my first Dead concert, which used to be a real stemwinder to folks who followed music: “The first time I saw the Dead, Jimi Hendrix was the headliner.” That used to be good for a few “oohs” and “aah’s,” but now? Not so much. Too bad for them. For me they are the salad days, the days of wine and no diabetes. Unquestionably, youth is wasted on youth.

I remember a clear Spring afternoon of music in Temple University football stadium, May 16, 1970, Philadelphia. Most had come for Hendrix, me for the Dead, who would precede him on stage. and all had come for an afternoon of intense frolicking characteristic of the time and place. We lay on beach blankets fifty yards from the stage spread out over a finely manicured football field. The acid was yellow. The sky was blue. Steve Miller had not become a radio sensation yet, so his band put out some fine music. In the distance, the bands were puppet-like, but their decibels were strong. Hendrix had his usual stack of Marshalls set up behind the Dead’s gear, but their tie-dyed racks could really kick ass, too. Given barely an hour they ripped off all kinds of Workingman’s Dead stuff, including a Pigpen rave for good measure. By the end I burned for more. This led to the Fillmore show in July, which would not just be one more Saturday night for me, oh no, but the Saturday night of a lifetime.

And what about Hendrix? I am not the one to ask, probably because my expectations were a bit jaundiced from his show of the prior year. Not his fault—but jeez! Here’s one for rock and roll historians to mark: the time, April 12, 1969. The place: the Spectrum, Philadelphia, a new arena designed around basketball and hockey, Wilt Chamberlain and Bobby Clark, not for acoustics, and certainly not for the dumbasses who had the nerve to denigrate poor Jimi and his fans with—I must say, this show was repressed in my memory until awakened decades later by a scene in Spinal Tap—whatever they fucking thought they were doing with a rotating stage. It was a massive merry-go-round, and it made an organ grinder out of one of the twentieth century’s greatest musicians. It was a clusterfuck for the ages—they put Jimi, they put that incredible trio down on the floor in the center of the still wet concrete of the Spectrum, and they rotated them on a revolving stage stacked high with amplifiers, yes, but amplifiers pointed in only one direction. So it was

Purple haze all in my brain

Lately, things just don’t seem the same

Actin’ funny but I don’t know why

‘Scuse me while—

Wait! Jimi, wait! Too late, the rotation was immutable, the wheel was turning and it wouldn’t slow down and Jimi kissed the sky on the other side of the stadium. He then ripped off a nice solo. I know this because I caught the very end of it on the next go-round. Spinal Tap is not a fictional movie.

My Jimi Hendrix experience was spoiled right out of the box. Tickets were big money for me. I probably spent three or four dollars for my seat. I flipped burgers, made sandwiches, sold records for god’s sake (that movie Vinyl only shows the glamorous side of the record business). I could not afford to waste money on half-assed spectacles. Personally, by the time Temple Stadium rolled around, I think Jimi was showing a lot of wear and tear from the road and from too much purple haze. He channeled an incredible Red House that woke bluesmen from their graves, but for me his amp fucking and guitar burning had grown tiresome, and probably for him, too. Time to beat the traffic. Now, had I known he was going to join the “27” club in a few months and that every precious note he played would henceforth be hunted down for pleasure and profit, yeah, I would have treasured him as I should have. As I said, youth is wasted on wasted youth.

By the time we reach the Fillmore, Bruce and I have long since passed through the gateless gate into an acid trip. First comes a little tickle in the gut, Day-Glo butterflies down deep, then a sort of panicky but exciting realization that there is no going back, then the delightful ascent or terrifying descent into Wonderland—all at the mercy of external circumstances. Somehow, we make it despite the daunting hills and deep valleys of New York City, the unusual July snowfall, and of course, the snakes, everywhere the snakes, sparkling with their fangs of chrome. No question, Bruce and I are fully reaping the solipsistic whirlwind of LSD-25.

I don’t want to sound like the old fart I am, but I must. Where once my Dead preparation amounted to ferreting out quality illegal substances, simple enough, I must now tax my wits assembling—let’s see now, there’s diabetes, thyroid and keep-your-head pills, tiny aspirin to thin my blood, an inhaler for COPD, drops (and cannabis vape, ha ha) for my glaucoma, supplements of every stripe because, God knows, things like co-enzyme Q10 sound essential and I am certain my body is short of it, and so forth—let’s say sixty pills for our four day trip to Vegas. My new cane—oh what a bittersweet Christmas gift, not candy but wooden to hold me up! —these were not necessary for my early Dead shows. Yes, we’re going to need a bigger boat to get to Sphere.

I look in the mirror and I don’t like what I see. A scarred depression marks my pale skin at the top of my forehead, the result of a procedure to dig out some cancer. On the positive side, there’s some bald-pated Jack Nicholson about it. On the bad side, it’s Jack after he had that lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I hope I make it to the show.