Dead at Sphere 3

Set One: Old Farts at Play

Today I am a man who savors peace, whereas of old I confused peace with boredom. Back in the day, we literally slay dragons to get to a concert if the acid was strong enough. Ingesting voluminous quantities of powerful hallucinogens, in public, in a strange place in a big city, this is how it was done then, and assuredly still is to some extent. Deadheads of the 70’s through 90’s would say “no shit,” but I speak of those who paved the golden road to unlimited devotion, before the term “Deadhead” was even coined, folks who walked in anonymity, suntanned by a dark star.

Finally, late afternoon, we join a mob of people encircling the Fillmore entrance: the great unwashed, the washed and partially washed, beards and beads and buckskin, body odor and patchouli, scalpers and hustlers pushing tickets to the show and “tickets” to ride inside the show, drummers drumming, racks of t-shirts, not a bra in sight—what a great time to be alive! A friend buys me a sleeveless model spelling “Grateful Dead” in a smeared script made of mushrooms. We are passing through some sort of marketplace. Squatting along the grimy pavement in line to get in are many early travelers who even then heeded the call of the wild. They had dropped their nets and picked up their bongs to follow this band across America: Deadheads incarnate.

We round the corner and face a broad backlit white marquee, black letters, bright lightbulbs. On this day the black letters spell “An Evening with the Grateful Dead and special guest New Riders of the Purple Sage.” In the past couple of years those letters had been sorted into some magical names: Janis and Jimi, the Allmans, Tull, Zappa, every rock and blues act worthy of this time and stage came here to showcase themselves. The Dead have made it a second home. This will be their third run already in 1970—some of their greatest live psychedelia was born in January and February—and this is what I have come to hear. The herd is shuffling forward. My heart pounds.

The herd surges into what is to us a beaten up broke-down movie palace from another era. Cushy old theater seats, velour, well-worn after half a century beneath plebeian buttocks. Rock oracle Bill Graham has installed a renowned sound system into a 1926 Yiddish district relic and voila! —a music mecca for the ages. Those early immigrants had no idea their bricks would one day tremble to Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia. Above our heads in the balcony arches soar, vaults dance, and buttresses fly. Walls inhale, exhale, nervous clapping, piercing whistles. It is soon apparent that the Fillmore is packed with folks just as jacked up as Bruce and me.

We are approaching lift-off. Time to light a joint, oh boy—

“Hey you! Yeah, you. Put dat out. You wanna get ‘trown outta heah?

Graham has bouncer-like usher guys to enforce a no smoking ordinance. We’re going to raise hell all night, but we can’t smoke—seriously? Paranoia strikes deep.

“Bruce. Bruce! You doin’ OK?”

He leans across the movie seat, puts his right hand over his heart and says, “It’s pounding. I think it’s the speed”

Bruce is growing a shimmering blue beard, long and thick and active, which surges under the seats and out of sight. His pupils have swallowed his corneas in pools of purest black. He looks at me long and hard and maybe warily. “Don’t leave me,” he says.

I am about to panic when Bill Graham himself strides onto the stage. From this point on, smoking will not be necessary. His big baritone fills the hall:

“They’re not just the best at what they do, they’re the only ones who do what they do. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Grateful Dead!”

Huh? What’s this? Acoustic Dead? Jerry and Bobby are sporting Martins, Phil has his bass turned way down, Mickey and Bill man some light percussion and barely touch their kits. Pigpen sits to the rear on his Vox Continental, and he won’t even sing tonight. Word is, Pig has a sore throat and Bobby will sing his parts tonight. Could be interesting. Can Bobby pull off Lovelight? Doubt it. He looks like a sixteen-year-old hippie wannabe who lives in his mother’s basement. No way.

“Hey folks, how ya doin’ out there?” Jerry grinning from ear to ear inside that black beard.

The boys are excited. This is new stuff they’re going to play, and in a whole new way. Except maybe Pig, who sits out of the spotlight and does indeed look sickly tonight. He’s lost a lot of weight. The rest of the band are chattering like juiced monkeys. They seem so happy, stress-free, doing what they love in a place they did it best. Their Martins pitch and wave on high seas as they give them a final tuning. Microphones screech into safer levels. The show begins!

Having fought our way here through cops and killer pigeons, I have come expecting St. Stephen through serious amplifiers, not Monkey and the Engineer at a campfire hootenanny. I feel a trace of disappointment. This is like Dylan going electric at Newport—in reverse. Maybe they’ve given up on psychedelia. Workingman’s Dead had signaled a change, yes, but this band before me now is the full Monty of folk ballads and bluegrass, not Alligator and Dark Star.

No matter. Due to our pit stop with the law, Bruce and I are approaching places we’d never imagined, and much earlier than expected—because now I experience firsthand what the butterfly effect is. Its luminous flapping beams hollow body vibrations directly into my soul. Jerry plucks one silver string down there and a hall of two thousand plus people vibrate just exactly so. Nothing soothes the savage, paranoid breast like Jerry Garcia with an acoustic guitar. They play a new song, Friend of the Devil, and I learn that the power of this band is not in volume but in spirit. The crowd goes wild.

Oh boy. They’re sneaking in more electric instruments. At last, Jerry slings on a red SG and away we go into New Speedway Boogie. This is more like it. Phil keeps a lid on the volume. Even so his bass has an enveloping sound that penetrates and pervades this music, and now Jerry gives us just a taste of what he can do with an electric guitar. I am transported by a tease. This set is a teaser, I am convinced. It is a bridge to the Big Send-off come dawn. It better be. I’ve spent a good fifteen dollars on two tickets, serious change for a young man of my means, and here they are practicing harmonies for god’s sake—and yeah, they sound beautiful like a choir and everything, but jeez, two barrels of Sunshine and at its peak we get Appalachia? I say this, yet, as I hear the weeping harmonies of Swing Low Sweet Chariot, tears stream down my face.

The Dead are getting through.

Today Susan bought me a new nub for my Christmas cane. There is no limit to her kindness. What’s a nub? The hard rubber piece at the foot of a cane. The old one had split apart, and she knows I will need everything in good running order if I am to challenge Sphere. It’s like a new set of tires when I practice on stairs now. I also marvel at how Modernity, by which we have progressed these many decades from Jaws to Sharknado’s, has left the cane unaltered in shape or functionality. This will be an old school ascent. Is it enough, though? I have a horrific vision of myself laboring up a mountain of steps and feeling a sharp twinge, losing balance, toppling backwards, the terror-stricken eyes of those who had impatiently followed me step by step, the Christmas cane flying high into the air, and then, horribly, I see myself cutting down a huge swath of stooped and fragile hippies. Sadly, for those caught up in this skittering hail of American carnage, it will surely be their last show.

The physical therapist sending me up practice stairs has a husband who happens to be a Deadhead, too. I learned this when she was working me out, when I told her I need to get up the steps of Sphere to see what’s left of the Grateful Dead. She then mentioned her husband, so of course I told her to tell him about her patient who yada Hendrix and yada the Dead.

“Oh, he’ll be quite impressed. He appreciates the really old stuff.”

Ouch. I have outlived my most impressive line. Same goes for the hearing-aid salesman we endured recently. “Are you kids ready to cut a rug,” he says. No, he shouts, because this Schlumpf must address his clients at unseemly volumes, and he also assumes we know what “cut a rug” even means. Then he runs us through the hearing-aid tiers like he’s selling BMW’s. Just to get out of there we ordered the cheap one, free with insurance.

Today’s shows are loud and clear and digitized and so forth, but back in those wild west analog days I don’t think there was a decibel curb, or one that was enforced, anyway. Thus, my recent brushes with the hearing-aid and health insurance industries. I guess being a few feet away from the Who in 1969 had finally come to a head between my wife and I recently. Tests reveal moderate loss in the right ear (I think that was when I sat directly in front of Led Zeppelin’s right stack of Marshalls at the Spectrum). Further tests reveal four times the loss in my left ear, and perhaps some scar tissue to boot. I attribute this to the Fillmore East, no doubt about it.

Anyway, doesn’t Sphere make crutches like hearing-aids and psychedelic drugs superfluous? Consider the components of this latest wonder of the world: 167,000 speakers, drivers, amplifiers and audio channels! I think that will get through, even if I settle for the cheap insurance hearing aid. The visual component is even more impressive: a wraparound 16K by 16K resolution display consisting of 64,000 LED tiles! Surely this will penetrate my glaucoma. Sphere is the successor to the system Owsley engineered, the Wall of Sound, that grew too big to haul around at 75 tons. Now they have a 200-ton behemoth at their disposal, no moving necessary—build it and they will come—no wonder they came out of “retirement” to give it a run or two or three.

The pressing question, then, for an attendee seventy-three years of age of failing mind and body, becomes: where in the world can I find a drug worthy of both Sphere and the Dead yet guaranteed not to contain fentanyl? At my age this is no mean feat. Yes, I have friends who moved south to Florida for greener and more cow-pie-ridden pastures—long, long ago. I can just see myself staggering through some innocent rube’s dairy farm, barbed wire still wrapped around my Christmas cane, hunched over cow shit with a keen, educated eye like a jeweler examining a fine diamond. No, I can’t see myself like that. Maybe I’ll just be patient and poke around Vegas for whatever has survived of Shakedown Street.

[I can go no further without commenting on something obvious: present times are not conducive to gonzo behavior. All that I write about here, the band, the music, my friends, yours truly—we would have died way back in the twentieth century. Thank God fentanyl did not exist in times of the Grateful Dead. As it was, keyboard players dropped like flies. Bastard chemists! What was once the adrenaline rush of risky behavior has now become a dance with death—what a pity.]

My dear wife Susan may not be happy that these tendencies of mine persist into old age, what with the femur and such. {The following statements in the remainder of this paragraph have been flagged for carrying the stench of bitter old Deadhead “ya shoulda’ been there” bullshit. She maybe has a point. We’re talking about a band who gave us thousands of “ya shoulda’ been there” moments for thirty straight years. My bad—but ya shoulda’ been there!} Sue is what I would call an “afterglow” Deadhead. Nothing wrong with that. She was simply born a few years too late to be irradiated by their late 60’s, early 70’s creative detonations. I would say, since so few are left to say it, that witnessing their concerts from the period of Live Dead through Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, Skull & Roses and out the other side to Europe ‘72 rivals those years that transformed a boy’s band into full-blown Beatles—creators of new, sophisticated and deeply influential music. If you were fortunate enough to experience the blast zone of those years firsthand, then you felt the primal burn. Sue has felt the afterglow, and she loves the Grateful Dead and Dead and Co. The afterglow alone takes many people to the promised land. Plenty of folks caught it—thus we have the sold-out Sphere as testimony. But I’m one of those who belong on a “Name That Tune” game show, the guy who can hear a few Bobby Weir chicken scratches and tell you the song, the era, the particular iteration of the band—you know the type. We are a dying breed, but, until dementia takes us all, we are legion.