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June 15th, 1995 was the day I graduated from Carleton University, obtaining my Bachelor of Music degree. Though convention would have had me attending my graduation ceremony back in Ottawa, I could think of no better way to celebrate this milestone than seeing Bob Dylan open for the Grateful Dead in Highgate, Vermont, so that’s what I did.
It’s too bad I had to miss my graduation; the host/emcee of the ceremony was either Chris Rock or Dan Aykroyd*, so the ceremony probably would have been pretty fun, but not as much fun as a Bob Dylan/Grateful Dead concert just a couple of miles across the border.
I think everyone I knew was there, well maybe aside from a few classmates. I had extra tickets to the show and sold them early on in the day. I’ll never forget it.
I saw a big dude holding two fingers in the air along with a $100 bill and I offered him my pair of extras at face value. The guy asks if he can see the tickets.
No problem, I say, handing over the tickets. Then the guy takes out a lighter and starts setting my extra tickets on fire.
“What are you doing!???!?” I screamed, lunging forward with my eyes popping out of their sockets. Big dude just brushes me aside.
“What, you ain’t never seen this before?” he asks me.
“This is how you tell if Ticketmaster tickets are fo’ real,” he says, holding one of the tickets over his lighter. As soon as the paper got near the flame it instantly scorched black.
“These tickets are just fine,” he said with his big dude smile. “I’ll take ‘em.”
Live and learn.
He seemed like a nice guy but I bet he wasn’t smiling about three hours later when so many fans without tickets started hopping the fence into the venue that security simply opened up the gates and made it a free concert. If only dude had been patient he would have saved himself eighty bucks. The show was outdoors in a field in Vermont; it’s not like he wasn’t going to find a ticket.
Live and learn.
It was a beautiful, sunny day. Nothing but blue skies above. And Bob Dylan. Opening up for the Grateful Dead. And no more essays, reading lists, or performance exams. Just a vast, beautiful musical planet sitting before me, barely a dollar in my pocket and not a care in the world. This was the stuff of dreams, and I enjoyed every single moment.
Oh freedom, oh liberty.
This was the beginning of my second and final little runs seeing Jerry Garcia play music. As Jerry stood up on stage that day singing songs like Touch Of Grey, Standing On The Moon and He’s Gone the man had less than two months left on this Earth. I would have just two more shows with him, several days later at Giant’s Stadium.
Oh, that there could have been more.
In so many ways I was just getting started but Jerry was just wrapping things up. What a shame. Of course if I had known I would have done everything I could to have seen all the shows he had left in him.
Live and learn.
*I ended up with three degrees from Carleton but I didn’t go to any of the grad ceremonies. I know Aykroyd and Rock hosted two of them; odds are the third (where I would have accepted my BA in religion) was hosted by someone much more appropriate and much less memorable.
Todd Man Out 