Before the show and after it there was always the parking lot: grilled cheese sandwiches, veggie burritos, somebody's tapes
playing out of a van, people holding up one finger because they needed a ticket. You'd meet folks out there and swap stories, and
the first thing anybody ever asked you was "what was your first show?"
So that's what this page is. Since I started it, people have been writing to tell me about their first ones. I trimmed some of
these down a little and fixed a few typos, but the words are theirs. They're in order by the year of the show. If you want to
add yours, write me at [email protected].
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1967 · San Francisco
I went to Golden Gate Park that January for the poets, if you can believe it. I was a graduate student and very serious. There
was a band playing at the far end of the field that I'd never heard of, and a friend said they were the Grateful Dead and they lived
on Ashbury Street, and I said what kind of a name is that. I stayed for the poets and I came back for the band. Thirty-two years and
I don't know how many shows later, I still think of that cold, bright afternoon whenever somebody says "San Francisco."
— James McElveen, Sacramento, California
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1969 · Bethel, New York
My first Dead show was Woodstock. Everybody says "wow" when I tell them that, and then I have to be honest and tell them that it was
not their night. It had been raining, the stage was soaking wet, the sound kept going out, and they played one very long song that I
couldn't make heads or tails of from where I was, which was very far away and up to my ankles in mud. I didn't see them again until
1972. But after that I didn't miss many. You don't always fall in love at first sight.
— Harriett Hauser, Kingston, New York
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1970 · New York
The Fillmore East. I was nineteen and had come in from Paterson on the bus. It was one of those evenings where they came out and
played acoustic guitars first, sitting down, then the New Riders of the Purple Sage played, with Jerry on pedal steel, and then the
Dead came back and plugged in, and when I walked out onto Second Avenue it was getting light. I had no idea a concert could last
all night. I teach high school chemistry now. My students do not believe one word of this.
— Stephen Godbey, Montclair, New Jersey
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1972 · Veneta, Oregon
The benefit out in the country west of Eugene, for the creamery. It was about a hundred degrees and there was no shade where we
were, and people were pouring their water jugs over each other's heads. I was twenty-one and I'd driven down from Portland in a Volkswagen with no
second gear. I got the worst sunburn of my life. My nursing school roommate peeled my back for a week. Worth every bit of it. I still
live in Eugene, and every August when it gets hot I think of that day.
— Nancy Weston, Eugene, Oregon
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1978 · San Francisco
New Year's Eve, the night they closed Winterland. I was seventeen and told my mother I was sleeping over at a girlfriend's, which
was technically true by the end. The Blues Brothers opened. The Dead played till the sun came up, and then they served everybody
breakfast, right there, in the building. I ate a bowl of cereal at seven in the morning on January 1st with five thousand strangers
and I've never felt so at home anywhere. Mom found out in 1985. She laughed.
— June Pacheco, Daly City, California
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1987 · East Rutherford, New Jersey
OK, I'll admit it, I came in on "Touch of Grey." I was eighteen and I saw the video on MTV and the next thing you know I'm at Giants
Stadium in July with Bob Dylan and seventy thousand people. Some of the older guys in the lot gave us a hard time that summer. Not all
of them. A man with a gray beard let me and my buddy share his cooler and told us which songs to listen for. Steve, it wasn't you,
was it? Anyway, thanks to whoever he was. I went to thirty-one more.
— Brent Greear, Edison, New Jersey
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1988 · New York
Madison Square Garden in September, the benefit for the rain forests. I was a freshman and I didn't even have a ticket until a girl
on Seventh Avenue sold me her extra at face value because, she said, I looked like I needed it. I did. The whole Garden was dancing,
the hallways, the stairs, the bathrooms. I had never seen grown-ups that happy. I'm a social worker now and some days I think about
that girl on Seventh Avenue and try to be her.
— Eva Sherrod, Yonkers, New York
|
1989 · East Troy, Wisconsin
Alpine Valley, which turned out to be the last summer they ever played there. It's a ski hill, so the lawn is basically a cliff, and if
you dropped anything it was gone forever. I dropped my sandals. I danced barefoot on a ski slope for three hours and walked a mile
back to the car on gravel and I'd do it again tomorrow. My dad was furious about the sandals. He came with me in 1991 and bought his
own tie-dye.
— Todd Cartwright, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
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1989 · Oakland
New Year's Eve at the Coliseum Arena. At midnight Bill Graham came down out of the rafters dressed as Father Time, and balloons fell
from the ceiling, thousands of them, and the band went right into the next song like it was nothing. I was twenty-three and had just
moved to California from Kansas and didn't know a soul. By one in the morning I knew about forty. Ten years later three of them are
still my best friends, and one of them is my husband.
— Sandra McCay, Oakland, California
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1990 · Mountain View, California
Shoreline, in the summer. My big brother had been going for years and finally decided I was old enough. He made me wear a hat and drink
water and he wouldn't let me out of his sight, which at the time I thought was the most embarrassing thing in the world. When they
played "Bird Song" he leaned over and said "this one's for Mom," and I didn't understand until later that it was her favorite. I
write software test plans for a living now and I listen to that show while I do it.
— Anne Wolfgram, San Jose, California
|
1993 · Las Vegas
At the Silver Bowl, which was hot enough to cook on. I was nineteen and drove over from Phoenix with my cousin. What I remember most
isn't even the music, it's the people: a lady from Ohio who was on her two-hundredth show and gave me a peanut butter sandwich, and a
guy selling grilled cheese who wouldn't take my last dollar. Everybody looking out for everybody. I didn't know that's what it was
going to be. I kind of thought it would be scary. It was the opposite.
— Jorge Chasteen, Tempe, Arizona
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1995 · Chicago
Soldier Field, the Saturday night. My first show and, as it turned out, my only one, because a month later he was gone. My dad took
me for my eighteenth birthday. He'd been going since 1974 and he cried in the car on the way home, and I thought it was because he was
happy, and maybe it was. I'm glad I got one. When people find out, they always say "only one?" and I always say, one is a lot more than
none.
— Matthew Monson, Naperville, Illinois
|
Thank you, all of you. Keep them coming. And Brent: no, the guy with the cooler wasn't me. In July of 1987 I didn't have a gray beard
yet. I do now.
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