MUSIC: Thoughts on the Grateful Dead's "Fare Thee Well" shows in Chicago

Twenty-five years ago today -- half my lifetime -- I was driving from Pittsburgh to Raleigh to see the second of four Dead shows I would catch that summer. Ironically, this would be my first visit to Raleigh, where I now live.

Prior to the first night, I had met a college buddy, Josh, at a West Virginia state park for camping, then proceeded to Three Rivers Stadium the next day to meet some more friends who had driven out from Chicago. In those primitive, pre-cell-phone days, our plan for meeting up involved them calling my job on a 1-800 number, asking for my extension, and leaving a message on my voice mail. I could then dial in toll-free and pick up my messages. High-tech, baby. Somehow this worked, and we managed to meet up with our friends literally as they were leaving the meeting spot to head into the stadium.

The next day, Josh drove back to Washington to go to work, our other friends drove back to Chicago, and I drove on to Raleigh with a kid named Paul I had met at our campground, who needed a ride (his friends were skipping the Raleigh show).

In Raleigh, I met up with some other friends, saw the show, drove with Paul to Washington see another show at RFK Stadium, then headed back to Boston on my own to catch the Foxboro show (7-14-90) with another bunch of friends.

Flash forward to 2015, four nights ago. It's setbreak at the last Fare Thee Well show and I'm hanging out outside the "United Club" inside Soldier Field, waiting to meet up with one of my best friends from college, whom I haven't seen in person in 30 years. While I'm waiting, I strike up a conversation with a random head who sat down next to me.

Everybody's been having a blast. Everybody I've talked to has agreed that the shows have far exceeded expectations. At one point I said "You know what this means, right? This means we're officially nostalgic for the stadium summer tours of the 90s".

And like Royal Tenenbaum, immediately after making this statement, I realized that it was true.

I always used to complain about stadium shows, and, indeed, after that epic summer tour of 1990, I only ever went to see the Dead one more time in a stadium (prior to this summer). But thinking about it now, I realize that I saw a lot more stadium shows than I realized (eight total in six years) and that I enjoyed most of them immensely. One of them was my first transcendent Grateful Dead experience (7-4-86 in Buffalo, on the strength of the first half of the second set, and, boy, I spent years tracking down a good tape of that show) and one of them was the best GD show I ever saw (7-12-90 in Washington).

But even aside from the music, there was something amazing about the experience of seeing the Dead outdoors with 50,000+ other fans on a summer afternoon and evening. Of course, it was better to do so in a venue less oppressive than a football stadium (e.g. Oxford Plains Speedway), but living in the northeast, in the late 80s/early 90s, outdoor summer shows generally meant stadiums. And even standing on a spongy plastic mat covering the turf at Foxboro Stadium, when the band launched into "Uncle John's Band" or "Eyes of the World", your physical location no longer mattered, and it was possible to feel a connection to such epochal shows from the past as Elizabethtown '77 or Veneta '72.

That said, there were plenty of good reasons for skipping the stadium tours of the 90s as well. I think all of us remember how the scene started to go south in the 90s, as the Dead's reputation grew, and the number of people who showed up to each show multiplied. There had always been people who showed up without tickets, but in the past, I think, a lot of them would wind up getting into the shows if they wanted to, and even if they didn't, their total numbers were relatively small. By the 90s, the lot scene was starting to overwhelm the concert scene, and to overwhelm the cities who played host to the Dead. The band became personae non grata in a lot of the cities they had played for years (Providence, Worcester, Hartford, etc.) and the size of the unruly crowds made it hard for the authorities in the cities where they still played to turn a blind eye to the parking lot shenanigans.

By 94 and 95, the scene had gotten pretty awful, with gate-crashers and hangers-on galore, and to make things worse (much worse) Jerry was using heroin again to a degree that hadn't been seen since the mid-80s. He looked physically decrepit, and musically, he was often unable to remember the words or chords to his own compositions that he'd been performing for close to twenty years.

In the vernacular, it was a serious buzzkill.

Which is not to say that it still wasn't fun to be there, in the crowd, hanging out with all the groovy heads again. But musically, it just wasn't happening.

And that's part of what made these Fare Thee Well shows so amazing, and so satisfying. As I sat outside the United Club on Sunday, chatting with my newest friend, we both agreed that these shows were providing that overused concept of "closure". But it wasn't just closure on the whole "Grateful Dead scene", it was musical closure as well.

Because anybody who saw the Dead in their last couple years of Garcia's life saw a band that had already fallen off significantly (IMO) from their late-period peak of only a few years earlier (ca. 1989-1991). I always said that the most effective anti-drug program in schools would be to show a video of Jerry from 1990, followed by one from 1995. Scare those fucking kids straight.

When Jerry died in 1995, I was sad, but quite frankly, I wasn't particularly surprised, given his physical state. I didn't feel like I had lost a huge part of my life because for me, the magic had already died.

In Chicago, the boys brought the magic back. Far more than at any time since. For all the great shows I've seen in the last twenty years, by The Other Ones, The Dead, Phil & Friends and Ratdog, this was the first time I felt truly transported by something larger than life since the fall of 1991 (when my mother, at the Boston Garden for the final show of that epic run, described the Dead's music as Wagnerian).

In addition to the scene, in addition to the communal feeling of 70,000 heads grooving at once, the Fare Thee Well shows delivered the best Grateful Dead music I've heard since Jerry died. That was the true closure that they delivered. Because unfortunately, Jerry didn't go out with a bang, but with a whimper, a mere shadow of the cosmic heights he had been scaling just a few years earlier (heights that had seemed inconceivable just a few years before *that*). Last weekend, what's left of the Grateful Dead finally closed the parenthesis, finished the "Playing in the Band" (metaphorically speaking, since they actually left us hanging on that one), and delivered one more intense dose (or three, depending on how you count it) of Grateful Dead musical magic that we'd been missing for a long time.

And I have to give 100% of the credit for that to Trey Anastasio, and honestly, I can't think of a single musician alive today who could have filled that role better than he did. I'm not even much of a Phish fan -- I used to listen to their "A Live One" album a lot, but I only ever saw them three or four times in the 90s -- but that man has talent and creativity to burn, and more importantly (since the members of the Dead have played with dozens of talented and creative musicians over the last 20 years), he knows how to improvise in an open-ended rock context, and he knows how to lead a group improvisation.

Phish is conceptually (not musically) a carbon-copy of the Grateful Dead. Their whole approach is based on the approach that the Dead pioneered (but using their own formative musical influences and their own musical voices). And for all their talent, guys like Jimmy Herring or Warren Haynes or even John Scofield (who may be the greatest electric guitarist alive) don't have the instinctive ability to lead a rock ensemble like this that comes from 30+ years of experience.

They got the right guys for the job (got to give credit to Hornsby and Chimenti as well), and they didn't try to do anything more than they needed to. Which is to say, no special guests (who would have just killed the momentum -- these guys obviously had enough trouble just getting their act together among the seven of them), no opening bands, no sax players (sorry, Dave Ellis), no gimmicks, just two great sets of Grateful Dead music every night, with one brilliant guitarist leading the way.

We may wish that they were doing more shows, but leaving aside the question of whether Phil, Trey and Bruce would have even been willing to do so, I have to think that the results would not have been so magic if they had tried to spread this out over ten or twenty shows instead of five.

For one thing, it made the scene more magical, because there was only one "event" (plus the warmup shows). Instead of being spread out across the country, everyone who wanted to see the Dead came to either Santa Clara or Chicago. There was no temptation to wait until "next tour" (as I foolishly did when declining to see the Jerry Garcia Band in 1993).

And musically, having it all over and done with over the course of nine days and five shows meant that the band left nothing on the shelf. They gave everything they had in Chicago without worrying about saving anything for the next city.

The highlights of the shows were too numerous to list, but I do feel obliged to point out that "Standing on the Moon" and "Stella Blue" were absolutely devastating the second night. For the former, the number of wars that our nation has fought since Jerry last sang that song gave it a whole new depth, and Trey's delivery was perfect. For the latter, well, it's "Stella Blue". One of the most emotional songs Hunter ever wrote, given a heartfelt performance by Weir and another stunning musical performance by Trey.

Weir's vocals were surprisingly strong all weekend. Phil didn't insist on singing too many songs and did a decent job on most of them. Trey delivered the goods on guitar and vocals, again and again, and Bruce did a great job as well, once they gave him a little space.

In terms of setlists, while there are certainly nits to be picked (Built to Last? Really?), the selection was excellent overall, with many songs that seemed to reference the end of their career, even though they had been written 40-50 years earlier. Other than the obvious ones like Music Never Stopped and Box of Rain, I found a lot of lyrical resonance in Crazy Fingers, Mason's Children, Bird Song, Cassidy and many more.

For a band that seemed to make a habit out of shooting themselves in the foot, the Grateful Dead really got it together and delivered an amazingly satisfying coda to a legendary career. These shows were better than anyone could have expected (a refrain I heard over and over again over the course of the weekend), and even more spectacular for the fact that nine months ago, nobody could have even imagined them happening at all.

While it might be nice, in an ideal world, to imagine this band going on tour in the fall, it's hard to imagine them capturing the same lightning in a bottle night after night like they did in Chicago. In the real world, I can't imagine a better way to cap off the Grateful Dead's career, and I'm glad that I got the chance to go. I met old college friends that I hadn't seen in decades, old internet friends that I'd never met in real life, and new friends that I'd never met before. And for one more glorious summer weekend, everything was Just Exactly Perfect.