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Hey now, and welcome.
My name is Steve Wolfe. I'm 45, I live in Ithaca, New York, and I fix furnaces and air conditioners for a living. I've had my own small outfit since 1982: one van, then two vans, and now me and two guys and the same phone number for seventeen years. Between the summer of 1973 and the summer of 1995 I saw the Grateful Dead 112 times, starting at the racetrack in Watkins Glen with about half a million other people and ending at Soldier Field in Chicago, one month before he died. I put this page up for the first anniversary in 1996 and I add to it every August. This is the fourth one. Four summers is long enough that my kids barely remember the Dead as a band that was still going, and short enough that I still catch myself in July looking at the calendar and wondering where they're playing. I don't think that ever goes away. I'm not sure I want it to. This isn't a sad page, or it isn't meant to be. Jerry gave me about the best twenty-two years of music any one person could ask for, and the right response to that is to say thank you. So: thank you. JERRY Jerome John Garcia was born in San Francisco on August 1, 1942. His mother named him after the songwriter Jerome Kern, and his father was a musician, a clarinet player and bandleader, so you could say he came by it honestly. When he turned fifteen he got an accordion for his birthday and talked his way into trading it at a pawnshop for an electric guitar and a little amplifier. I've always loved that story. Somewhere there's a version of the world where he kept the accordion. The banjo years. Before the Dead there was bluegrass, and people forget that. In the early sixties, down around Palo Alto, Jerry fell hard for Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe and taught himself five-string banjo the hard way, by slowing records down. He played in a string of little folk and bluegrass groups with names like the Hart Valley Drifters and the Black Mountain Boys, and in 1964 he was in a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, with a teenage Bob Weir and with Ron McKernan, who everybody called Pigpen. He never really left bluegrass, either. In 1973 he picked the banjo back up with Old & In the Way, with David Grisman on mandolin and Vassar Clements on fiddle, and that record is still one of the most played things in my van. The Dead. In 1965 the jug band plugged in and became the Warlocks, with Phil Lesh on bass and Bill Kreutzmann on drums, and by the end of that year they'd found a new name in a dictionary and become the Grateful Dead. Mickey Hart came in on second drums in 1967. After that it was thirty years of the road. They weren't a singles band; they were a band you went and saw, and no two nights were the same, and that was the whole point. I saw them play some songs fifty times and never heard the same version twice. 1986. In July 1986 Jerry went into a diabetic coma and nearly died. He was out for days. When he came around he couldn't play the guitar. He had to learn it all over again, and his old friend Merl Saunders, the keyboard player, sat with him and worked on it with him a little every day. By that fall he was back on stage with his own band, and in December he was back with the Dead in Oakland. I wasn't there, but a friend mailed me the tape before Christmas, and I sat in my driveway with the engine running and played the first ten minutes of it over and over. Touch of Grey. And then, after twenty-two years, they had a hit. In the Dark came out in the summer of 1987, and "Touch of Grey" went into the top ten, the only time that ever happened, with the video of the skeletons on MTV. All of a sudden we old-timers were standing in stadium parking lots with fifty thousand new friends. Some of the old crowd grumbled about it. I didn't, much. It was a song about getting older and coming through, and he'd just come through, and he'd earned it. The Jerry Garcia Band. On his nights off from the Dead, which weren't many, Jerry went out with his own band, from 1975 to the end, with John Kahn on bass the whole way and Melvin Seals on organ for most of it. It was a smaller, warmer thing: Dylan songs, Motown songs, old soul and gospel numbers, a few of his own, played slow and sweet. If the Dead was a big night out, the Jerry Band was like being invited back to the house. I saw them nine times. They're not in my count of 112; that's Dead shows only, and I'm strict about it. The neckties and the ice cream. Jerry painted and drew all his life, and starting around 1992 you could buy neckties with his artwork on them, which tickled me no end, because I never once saw him in a tie. Holly bought me the first one for Father's Day and now I have four, and every one of them has been to a funeral or a wedding or a Chamber of Commerce dinner where nobody knew what it was but me. And then there's Cherry Garcia, the ice cream, out of Vermont since 1987. There is a pint of it in my freezer right now. There always is. WHERE I WAS Wednesday, August 9, 1995. August is when we clean furnaces before the season, and I was out in a farmhouse in the hills west of town, upside down in a basement with my head in a cold oil burner. When I came up to the van to get a nozzle the radio was on and the man was saying Jerry Garcia had died that morning. A heart attack, in his sleep, at a clinic in Marin County where he'd gone to get himself well. He was fifty-three. I sat in the van in that driveway for a long time. The lady of the house came out to see if something was wrong with her furnace, and I told her, and she didn't know who Jerry Garcia was, and she went back inside and came out with a cup of coffee for me anyway. I've always remembered that. I finished the job. I don't remember driving home. My buddy Fred Salley, who took me to my first show, called that night, and a bunch of us ended up on a friend's porch on the north side of town with a boom box and every tape we could carry. We played Barton Hall. Of course we did. That Sunday there was a big gathering in Golden Gate Park out in San Francisco, and we watched a few minutes of it on the news. I'd seen him a month before, at Soldier Field. He looked tired that summer. I think we all knew it and none of us said it. AFTER On December 8, 1995, the band said it was over. They weren't going to go on as the Grateful Dead without Jerry. I was sorry and I was proud of them for it, both at once. Nobody could have stood where he stood. They haven't stopped playing, though, and here's where things stand in the summer of 1999, as near as I can tell:
MY 112 Every ticket stub is in a cigar box in my desk drawer, so this count is real and not a fish story. I only give the cities. I'm not going to list all 112 dates; there are guys on the Net who can tell you the setlist from every one of them, and I'm not one of those guys. Two dates I'll give you, because they're the bookends.
Barton Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca · Sunday, May 8, 1977 I was twenty-two and working nights, and the show was a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment, which is not a thing a Deadhead gets to say very often. There was snow on the ground, in May, which is Ithaca for you. Barton Hall is a big old field house where they drill the ROTC, with a dirt-and-wood smell to it, and that night it was packed to the walls and steaming. I stood about a third of the way back, a little left of center, next to Fred. When they went from "Scarlet Begonias" into "Fire on the Mountain" in the second set, the whole floor was moving, I mean the actual floor, and later on they played "Morning Dew" and nobody said one word the whole way through. I didn't know it was a famous show. You never do. It was just a great Sunday night in my hometown. Then the soundboard tape got loose in the trading world, and over the years it went everywhere, and now I'll meet some kid at a party in Syracuse who was born in 1979 and he'll know that show better than I do. That's the best part. Everybody gets to have been there. Soldier Field, Chicago · Sunday, July 9, 1995 Holly and I drove out for the two Chicago shows, our first real vacation without the kids in years. It had been a rough summer on the tour: too many people with no tickets, trouble at a couple of stops, and Jerry looking heavy and worn out on stage. But Sunday was a good, warm night by the lake, and the band played like they meant it. For the encore they played "Black Muddy River," which Jerry sang, and then "Box of Rain," which Phil sang, and then they walked off. That was it. That was the last song. Nobody knew. I remember Holly holding my arm on the way out, and I remember saying something dumb like "see you in the fall, boys." I'm glad I said it. I'd rather have said that than goodbye. TAPE TRADING: MY RULES The Dead let people tape their shows when nobody else did, and starting in the fall of 1984 they even gave the tapers their own section behind the soundboard. The deal was always simple: trade the music, share it, don't sell it. I've been trading since 1974 and I've got a little over 600 hours on the shelf. If you'd like some of it, here's how it works with me:
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