Over two days of trying (first day: VIP and Travel packages, second day: Ticketmaster), I failed to score any tickets for the Grateful Dead’s farewell shows in Chicago. There were well over 300,000 mail order application, over 500,000 trying via Ticketmaster, apparently, so I’m not really surprised, and it was obviously going to get even more expensive with flights and hotels. I’m still disappointed.
Of course, a lot of the tickets are now on the secondary market, via StubHub, for example. My favourite offer is the one for seats behind the stage, with no view whatsoever. The cost to you, for three consecutive nights of looking at a giant screen from Row 9 of Section “Middle 249, No View”: $1,160,004.99. Makes the GA Pit tickets (right in front of the stage) at $1,160,004.09 look reasonable by comparison. Of course, there are better value offers out there: GA Pit tickets start at $15,000… the lowest price out of the 750 3 day passes on offer is $1,339.25, the lowest with a view(!) are $1,899.99 each.
Somehow I’m glad I’m not going to be part of this disgusting circus. A sad way for a band to end their career.
seem to remember reading somewhere the pre-sale alone was oversubscribed threefold.
Bargepole will await the dvd !
Deadheads watching breadheads.
I don’t understand what happened to our love.
For all of us not attending the Chicago shows, we can console ourselves with this one undeniable fact:
If there’s no Jerry, it ain’t the Dead.
got to agree – JG was the heart and soul of the band and it’s hard to see how the others can recapture that spirit.
Not that anyone attending will care – for them it’s the brand name and the occasion that matter.
You’d have to pay me that to sit thru a Dead show.
I wonder how many ticket holders actually own a Dead album.
I suspect many of them will have a t-shirt.
The Jerryless Grateful Dead carried on as “The Other Ones” and then imaginatively called themselves “the Dead”. People sought to relive their misspent youth (or middle age) at these shows too, with satisfactory consequences for all those making money out of the attendees. Far be it from us to grumble about heritage bands flogging a dead horse in this context (I’d be there like a flash to see Patrick Moraz and Jon Anderson rejoin Yes for some “Relayer” shows), and many of us have seen heritage bands on comeback/ pension-plan tours. So what is it we find sticks in our craw? The cost of tickets? the rampant commercialism of an ostensibly hippie band? That the Grateful Dead were dull as dishwater? I’ve listened to the recommended bootlegs and been in an open-minded state when I tried. Nope; not a glimmer. Not a patch on the “Flying Teapot” trilogy.
Yup! I still don’t hear or see it beyond the album covers and t-shirts.
OK – now here’s a provocative view. The US didn’t really get psychedelic and progressive music as much as Europe, and that which emerged was correspondingly more conservative. Their psych/ progressive music was mostly based on folk-rock and the blues. The British music scene had this too, but the music scene was dense and based in a small country. Nor was there the colour-bar that hindered American musical development. British psychedelia (and later, progressive) bands also grew out of mod and dance-bands with lots of funk, or were influenced by same. Someone put some LSD into the mix, and the art college influences brought in random stuff, as did the jazz scene. There were simply more influences on british psychedelia, and the music grew from pop music rather than protest, so had more tunes and pizzazz. There were American acts with more vim (I’m thinking Steve Miller Band, Santana) but they were spread more thinly (it’s a big country, and outside the cities not much happened), and the audience outside small markets were suspicious of more sophisticated sounds; there was no TOTP for half the nation to see “Hole in my Shoe” (as I remember when I would have been 7). So their psychedelia was more conservative. As for progressive music – well, barring Zappa (brilliant in everything) and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia (and one or two college bands – Starcastle’s photocopying Yes/ ELP, for example), they never really got it. Boogie and rock remained more of their thing, and this was manifest even in their ostensibly progressive acts like Styx or Rush. So the Grateful Dead tried hard, but lacked aptitude – but they were important sociologically in drawing a tribe that liked the clothes and attitude.
[Cue a deluge of counter-arguments.]
The Dead were great and I would go, even if I expect there would be some, um, lulls in concentration.
But if anyone thinks they were all peace n love, heck, who remembers Jerry Garcia suing ben & Jerry for a slice of their Cherry Garcia royalties?
So they allowed home taping at shows: doesn’t seem to have stopped Dick Picking, and they ain’t cheap.
But Man are still gigging, Bargey, at a pub somewhere near you, I expect………
Dick stopped picking when archivist Dick Latvala died in 1999 (after Dick’s Picks 36). Then there was the Road Trips series, and for the past few years David Lemieux has been at the controls, in the form of the cunningly named Dave’s Picks. Four times a year another wonderful 3CD live set turns up in the post for us subscribers – normally taken from the golden era of 1969-80.
Do I want to hear yet another version of Playing in the Band, Eyes of the World, Morning Dew or Scarlet Begonias? Welll … erm, yes, I probably do.