Live Chills Pt I

I have been writing far too much non-fun stuff in here lately. I was watching some live music stuff on Youtube recently and it got me thinking about live shows I have seen. I have seen tons of shows from different genres through the years, and could write reviews of every single one of them if I had to. Well, not really but....I want to talk about the ones that gave me that feeling of...hmm. I don’t know what to call it without sounding all new age. I'll do more posts like this over the next week or so as I think of shows.

Grateful Dead - 10/16/89 Brendan Byrne Arena, East Rutherford, NJ
This was my second Grateful Dead show, and although the first one a few months earlier was great for a first experience, this one was great for a host of reasons.

This was my first concert that was also a road trip. I would take many more of these throughout the next twenty years and still probably will again some day. My friend and I got a hotel room “near the venue” which turned out to be four miles or so away. We had to literally walk on the New Jersey Turnpike for a good part of the walk to the arena. The band was playing six shows at this arena, which is part of a big complex next to Giants Stadium. We found out later that a young man had been murdered by security guards or so they think. The case has never been solved. I have to think we walked through where this may have happened as we were in some pretty remote areas of this gigantic parking lot.

A week or so before the show we saw the band played a “surprise” show billed under their early name, The Warlocks. They were also playing songs they hadn’t played in years, including the elusive “Dark Star” which was sort of the crown jewel of songs you could see the band play. They hadn’t played it in over ten years and before that it was pretty rare. Early versions of the song contained long exploratory segments, sometimes reaching over forty minutes.

The band opened the second set of the show with Dark Star and used it as bookends for a long set of improvisation and fan favorites like Uncle John’s Band and Playin’ in the Band. I had a live recording of this show for years on tape and then at one point the band released it as an official release called Nightfall of Diamonds. There is a moment captured on the recording where the crowd seems completely silent right before Jerry Garcia plays the opening guitar line to the song. This still gives me chills when I hear it. There was always something about seeing them live when he walked on stage that gave you this moment of excitement and nervousness that can only come when seeing an iconic presence such as “JERRY”. Granted part of it was just thousands of people fucked up on booze and drugs excited to see the guy who sang "driving that train, high on cocaine", etc. It was a little more than that though. I am not someone who gets flustered in the presence of celebrities; I mean I get a little flustered, but not like this. It's hard to explain with words what it was like that split second when he would come on stage, but you felt it. This would happen years later with Tony Iommi who I stood ten yards from during the Heaven and Hell tour. Like "holy shit, the dude that arguably invented heavy metal is right there. Sick."

This picture was taken the night of this show. I was 19 years old and would be 20 two weeks later, so this could be the last picture of me as a teenager take. Heh. The shirt says "Jamin with Jerry" Whoever made the shirt missed an M.