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When the surviving members of the Grateful Dead announced a weekend of concerts in Chicago to mark their 50th anniversary m’lady and I knew that the celebration/reunion was going to be a pretty big deal. And considering that Trey Anastasio would be playing with them for the run (along with Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti) we knew that we would be going, and we did.
With a nod to their olde-schoole pre-internet ticketing mayhem, the band decided to reintroduce their chaotic and archaic mail order system, a hoop-jumping hippie-sieve that involved hard-copy postal money orders, #10 envelopes, secret mantras, and the touching together of magical healing crystals. If I’m not mistaken, they even re-hired their former ticket manager who promptly started stuffing hundreds of thousands of envelopes into Rubbermaid containers, stacks of which quickly filling the spare bedroom of her bungalow.
Classic Dead, and still months before a note was played.
Not to be outdone, m’lady olde-schooled right back at ‘em, hand-decorating both of our ticket request envelopes with super-awesome art. On one she drew the ocelot from Trey’s guitar tussling with the tiger from Jerry’s guitar and on the other she traced the Chicago skyline, with Soldier Field (the venue for the concerts) featuring prominently. We both pulled GA floors for all three shows.
I’d like to say that our level of excitement well-exceeded m’lady’s crushing disappointment but I don’t think that would be true. What disappointment, you ask? Well, the Dead eventually announced that they would be preceding the Chicago weekend with a two-nighter in Santa Clara, and I told m’lady that there was no way I was going to California for them. It’s something we still don’t talk about around the house.
I spent the week between runs steadfastly avoiding everything to do with those Santa Barbara shows. I didn’t check the setlists, I didn’t listen to a single note or watch any youtube videos…heck, I would leave the room if anyone started talking about them. I knew that Trey had been working for months to integrate himself into these old songs and I wanted to experience it in its entirety for the first time live, in person. It made for a difficult week, but I made it.
So, following a wonderful Ottawa Canaday (evidenced by the fact that the fête escapes my memory entirely) m’lady, myself, and our good friend Kyla drove a dozen or so hours from Ottawa to almost-Chicago where we hunkered down for a Duty Free nightcap, a budget sleep, and a cellophane-wrapped breakfast. And so it was that on July 3rd, 2015 we pulled into Chicago nice and early, absolutely champing at the bit for the weekend to get started.
I think we drove downtown first. Kyla was in the coffee biz back then and there was a certain coffeeshop she was hankering to visit so we went. I distinctly recall an eye-opening dearth of available parking, such that independent entrepreneurs operating free-roaming valet services ultimately became our only option. I crossed my fingers and handed some dude my keys.
Was this the time that I visited the Bean? I recall the huge amorphous mirror-sculpture being basically across the street from our destination. Whether it was this trip or one to see Phish a couple of years earlier, I loved it. Who doesn’t? Rare is it that a piece of art is so undeniably and universally engaging that it can’t not be a hit, but the Bean (the piece is actually called “Cloud Gate”) is exactly that, easily fitting in alongside such achievements as Jeff Koons’ “Rabbit”, Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, and the Hollywood-esque sign that Jimmy Kimmel erected on the hill that looms above the town of Dildo, Newfoundland.
There were cool fountains too, and lots of fun things for kids to do. I noted lots of tie-dyes and smiles.
We had a double room booked at the Hyatt basically next door to Soldier Field. We pulled up and found the entire hotel staff decked out in Grateful Dead t-shirts. The lobby was piping live shows through a beefed-up speaker system and they had booked Dead-themed bands to play at a number of free pool parties over the course of the weekend. The staff was very, very happy to see their hotel overrun by hard-partying hippies and they were showing it.
Amazing how much had changed. It used to be you brought street clothes to wear specifically for checking in to hotels.
After settling in we headed out, discovering that it was a walk through the park to get from the hotel to the venue. A long walk, sure, but through nothing but park the whole way. I bee-lined to the poster booth and was excited to see about a half-dozen excellent prints for sale. I hummed and hawed between a realistic skeleton on a ghost ship by Justin Helton and a cartoonish Uncle Sam riding his chopper into the horizon drawn by Mike DuBois. I went with the ship and I still can’t believe I didn’t just grab both of them. Although investment-wise it seems I chose correctly; as of this writing the Helton is selling for around $650US while the DuBois last sold for precisely $76. My Helton is on the wall, enveloped in a rather pricey frame-up job. I can see it from where I’m sitting.
I don’t remember if I ran the poster back to the hotel or not but regardless, after a bare minimum of merry-making in and around the lot outside the show it was soon time for us to make our way in.
Somehow, some way, we weren’t where we were supposed to be when the music began. I had spent a week running out of rooms with my hands held over my ears specifically so I would be on the floor a few dozen feet from the stage when I heard Trey playing with the Grateful Dead for the very first time. As it was, the band kicked things off with Box of Rain and there I was stuck halfway up the stands in a wristband fiasco staffed by shoulder-shrugging teenagers who were so overwhelmed in every regard that their only efficiency seemed to be bottlenecking every possible entry to the floor. Did I mention that there were over 70,000 people there? Matter-of-fact, according to wikipedia, with 70,764 people through the gate this concert set attendance records for the venue that still stand today. But back to me standing in a useless line well out of sight of the stage during the first few minutes of the concert:
I was freaking out, like jumping up-and-down with nerves. I still hyperventilate when I think about it. Give me a second…I just have to breathe…breathe…
I made it to a solid patch of floor just in time for the second song – Jack Straw – shaking my astounded head free in exasperation. By the end of the song I was fine. Trey sang the next one (Bertha) and another later in the set, both of which got an enthusiastic roar from the crowd and were really great. I always find it funny when they end a set with The Music Never Stopped and they did here. The ascent off the floor during setbreak rivalled the human dam that got us down there in the first place, as tens of thousands of us made for the stairs at the same time. M’lady and I got squeezed into a friend of a friend from back in Canada. “Hey Darren…it’s Todd…you know, friend of Dave’s back in Ottawa…yeah, that’s right! Cool man, have a great show.” Small world.*
Eventually we spilled up the stairs, filled up on concessions and spilled back down again. The rest of the show was super-fantastic – my gosh the music was just so freakin’ great – and they sent us out of there with an acoustic-tinged Ripple that saw the vocals getting thrown around the stage between Phil, Bobby, Trey, and even Bruce Hornsby (who calmly understated his role as probably the best musician on stage for the entire weekend).
Back at the hotel it was all yes-sir, no-sir, how-was-the-show-sir as post-concert revelry poured out of every available nook and cranny. Hours later from our room I was amazed to see that the city en masse had dedicated its skyline to our cause. Every skyscraper was lit in the Dead’s colours: Red, white and blue. The fact that we were several hours in to Independence Day by the time I lay myself down to rest for the night had completely escaped me.
*There’s not a single solitary way that I agree with the sentiment “small world” and I don’t here either, but it scans well in this instance so I used it. To my mind this is not a small world by any perceivable metric. Even (especially?) from space the place looks huge. Not that I’ve been to space, but I’ve seen the pictures. In fact, when people say “small world” what they really mean to say is “what a coincidence!” but sometimes the coinciding elements just aren’t worthy of exclamation, you know? So you get “small world.”
To which I invariably respond: “You might not have been expecting to see me here, but that doesn’t make this Lilliput. Buddy.”
Todd Man Out 