The Stub Project: Grateful Dead – Hartford Civic Arena – 10.15.1983
I can’t help but wonder how much more unreliable memories of a Dead show are 27 years after the fact than they are after, say, the next day. This was my first show. And, for what little it’s worth, I remember it somewhat better than many of the others that would follow. I had just turned sixteen years old and was a sophomore at a boarding school less than a half hour away from Hartford. The Dead were easily the favorite band of the student body, making us no different than every other prep school on the east coast. With the perspective of my disillusion, it would be easy for me to say that we all thought we were quite rebellious being into the Dead, but in the end we were just like everyone else. It didn’t feel that way at the time, though, and everybody knows that when you’re sixteen, the only thing that really matters is how you feel in the moment.
In our small world, this was the show to see and it being that it required several hoops of permission to get off our campus, I was lucky that a kind day student invited me to come along and spend the night at his house … although as I think about it, I probably begged him to invite me and had to pay for his ticket. And beer. And maybe for his gas, too. We would become real friends later, I think, but that night I was just a means to an end. Which is okay, because I was going to see the Dead, the world’s greatest live band and even I knew the only way to experience the Dead is to be there. So while I’d heard some bootlegs that my brother had brought back to Ohio when he had gone to the same school, I had no idea what I was in for.
Naturally, the gateway to any Dead show is the parking lot and this one was no different. It seemed like the entire student body from our school was there, smoking pot, dropping acid and drinking beers. It was all out in the open, the cops didn’t seem to really care. It was mass civil disobedience and I was in awe. But more than the hippies and the open drug use, I remember being embraced by people who hadn’t given me a second glance in the last six weeks. Older, popular kids. Now, they were offering beers and tokes and asking if I was going to the big party after the show. A cynic (i.e me now) would say, for the price of a couple tickets and a tie-dye I’d bought myself entry into a world previously just beyond my reach. A teenager (me then) thought it was all just about the most fun he’d ever had. And the music hadn’t even started.
“You know it’s going to get stranger, so let’s get on with the show!” Bobby Weir sang to open the proceedings. Although I’d drank a few beers, the fact is: I was completely sober. I didn’t smoke any of the pot in the parking lot. I didn’t drop any acid. I was a pretty straight kid.
my facebook shot at my new school, taken 6 weeks earlier
The newness of it all was more than enough to snap my synapses. Whether it was a good show or not, I couldn’t say. I would later come to realize that The Dead are largely beyond criticism; they are simply as good as you feel. And for me, that night in Hartford felt great, eventually becoming epic in my mind. After all, it was my first show. And like a good convert, I would go on to listen to a recording of that concert until the tape disintegrated. Like so many of their shows, there was a time when I could have rattled off the set-list in the same way I used to be able to recite batting averages and ERAs.
While it would be easy to get lost in false memories of that show, I still remember the moment when I realized something special was happening, when the synergy between band and audience reached its climax. The band was meandering through the listless psychedelic noodlings of “space” – an exercise which clearly requires an elevated infusion of psilocybin – when Jerry broke into “St. Stephen” and with those first few notes the crowd lost its collective mind.
I knew the song, but I had no idea what it meant – later I would learn it had been seven years since they played it! … well, except when they resurrected it at Madison Square Garden a few days before. But still. And the fact is, it was awesome. It truly was. The band and the crowd swirled together in perfect synchronicity, inspiring one another to reach higher and higher. For one of the first times in my life I felt a part of something bigger than me. It was fun. It was jubilant. And everyone was dancing crazily, but somehow in unison. Including me.
I’d go on to see the Dead some thirty more times. Most of the stubs survive, but fear not, I won’t write about every show. However, there is still much more to say about my generally embarrassing relationship to this band, a band with which I broke up long ago, but still can’t help but (kind of) love.
lonesomebeehive 