RIP, Jerry
By John Cole August 9th, 2011
August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995:
“If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously. “
Gone but not forgotten.
Posted in Music
Seconded. Thanks for the tunes and the memories, JC.
August 9th, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Didn’t Rush insult Jerry at some time in the past?
Prolly jealous.
They don’t make them like the Grateful Dead anymore.
August 9th, 2011 at 9:53 pm
I was at 6/14/91. RFK Stadium. Still miss you jer…
August 9th, 2011 at 9:54 pm
someone (forgot whom) said after jerry died, “i miss him like a middle finger.”
August 9th, 2011 at 9:54 pm
This being the last day of Jerry Week, it’s nice to see and hear these tunes. Thanks so much.
August 9th, 2011 at 9:56 pm
Some of the best people I’ve ever met I met at shows.
August 9th, 2011 at 9:58 pm
March 23, 1995 Charlotte with Hornsby. The Warf Rat gathering at intermission was only alcohol support group I ever did. It worked.
August 9th, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Sixteen years, amazing. I still remember the exact intersection where I was stopped for a light when I heard the news on the radio—and to this day, have a little flashback every time I take that route home.
August 9th, 2011 at 9:59 pm
@SiubhanDuinne: The Atlanta shows in 90 were the start of my midlife crisis!
August 9th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
Love the Dead. Too young to have gone to any of the shows, but I love their music. It’s always bugged me how they get the tag of music only stoned people listen to. They wrote some great songs.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
I’ll always remember that day. I was pregnant with my first child and started to go into labor shortly after hearing the news. Just by coincidence, my soon to be sixteen year old son turned out to be the musician in the family.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
You want to talk Murkin Exceptionalism? :-)
August 9th, 2011 at 10:05 pm
If you have heard not The Pizza Tapes do yourself a favor. The Dawg, Jerry and the great Tony Rice,
August 9th, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Was at Highgate less than two months before he died. We took the kids who were 10 and 13, and we camped in North Hero the night before to get a jump on the traffic and madness. We got such an early start that the parking crew put us at the beginning of Shake Down Street, and had the amazing experience of watching the entire circus unfold. The van next to our pickup truck sold nitrous balloons and all night long we had to listen to balloons pop cuz they overfilled them. The van left at about 4 in the morning, and there was an outline of the van made out of pieces of latex. It was hard to explain to the kids that those balloons weren’t for kids, and not to eat anything from the vendors.
Good times.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:10 pm
@Cat Lady: very nice
August 9th, 2011 at 10:12 pm
“Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead did as much for mankind as any president.”
—Grace Slick
August 9th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
@Cat Lady: I saw em in St Louis at the Fox in 71. . .
August 9th, 2011 at 10:15 pm
All those day-glo freaks who used to paint their face
They’ve joined the human race, some things will never change
August 9th, 2011 at 10:18 pm
I only attended one show in Foxboro, Mass in 1989. Had such a good time. I was 18 and that seems like 1000 years ago.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:26 pm
Grateful Dead? I couldn’t get more than thirty seconds into any of those videos before I started nodding off.
Wow, you like really boring music.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:26 pm
So we got into the venue so early that we set up near the front, but about halfway through Dylan the hordes started to overrun the back chain link fence. The first wave came over the top of the fence, and hundreds of half naked kids started running towards the front, chests all blodied from the sharp tips on top of the fence. About a half hour later, the fence came down completely, overrun by people who were climbing over the TOP OF THE PORTA POTTIES THAT WERE AGAINST THE FENCE AND KNOCKED OVER, DOOR SIDE DOWN! Thankfully, that wasn’t us. Good times!
August 9th, 2011 at 10:27 pm
JC,
Wake up to find out that YOU are the Eyes of the World, so don’t murder me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCy9k_RWlvA
Long Live The Grateful Dead
August 9th, 2011 at 10:39 pm
I wish I knew then when they played He’s Gone, he would be soon. Unlike Amy Winehouse, he shouldn’t have gone to rehab.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Tonight is Grateful Dead night at AT&T Park.
Lesh & Weir sang the national anthem with Giants coach (and Deadhead) Tim Flannery.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:45 pm
I saw them in March 1973 at the Nassau Coliseum, about a week after Pigpen died. (He had been too sick with biliary cirrhosis—paying attention, Cole?—to play with the band for about a year and Keith and Donna Godchaux were new to the band.) Great show, first general admission concerts at the venue. Found out later that the Nassau County Police busted a lot of kids for drugs but was probably too wasted during the show to have noticed.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:55 pm
I saw Jerry with the Grateful Dead and the Jerry Garcia Band more times than I can count. At a show in Chicago in the early 70’s, when Bart Starr was freshly retired from quarterbacking the Packers, some guy in the crowd kept screaming out a request for Dark Star. After what seemed like the 20th time, another guy started yelling “Bobby Douglass”, who was the Bears quarterback at the time. Possibly my favorite show was at Cobo Hall in Detroit in the mid-70’s. The last time was at the Palace in Auburn Hills Michigan in the early 90’s- my wife and I brought our two kids, now 31 and 28. They weren’t into the Dead’s music then like they are now, but they were both wide-eyed at the experience (my daughter pointed out it smelled like Uncle Robert’s house) and now they appreciate the fact they got to see an American icon.
Quite by accident, while hitch hiking across the country in 1972, I ended up at a campfire in Colorado getting high with him and about a dozen other people. It was a pretty big fire.
August 9th, 2011 at 11:03 pm
@SiubhanDuinne: fond remembrances are bittersweet. I was waiting tables and asking customers if they heard that Jerry died. Most of them said “Jerry who?”.
August 9th, 2011 at 11:05 pm
I will never forgive myself for missing all the Dead’s performances in Highgate back in the ‘90s.
August 9th, 2011 at 11:10 pm
Where were you?
I was in Yankee stadium, a day game. Heard from a deadhead friend.
August 9th, 2011 at 11:11 pm
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
I find “The Pizza Tapes” a difficult listen. Garcia is so out of his league there.
August 9th, 2011 at 11:55 pm
Hippies!
Here’s some damn street cred for you though:
First time I saw the Dreadful Grate was at Golden Gardens Park in Seattle, 1968. A free concert, they played from the back of a flat-bed truck. Stood right next to ol’ Jer pre-concert, he was just hanging around, no such thing as a back-stage area.
And I was young enough to have danced so hard my love beads broke.
Of course, that’s when they were still good, mostly doing blues covers.
August 10th, 2011 at 12:02 am
One out…one in. Miss E came into my life on this very day just before midnight. A great day for me.
August 10th, 2011 at 12:50 am
Please don’t dominate the rap, jack, if you’ve got nothing new to say. If you please, don’t back up the track this train’s got to run today.
I spent a little time on the mountain, I spent a little time on the hill. Act, some say “Better run away”, others say “you better stand still”...
One way or the other, this darkness got to give…
RIP Jerry…
August 10th, 2011 at 12:59 am
Saw them only once, in Santa Barbara in the mid-70s at some football stadium. The lasting memory was the sound system. They had the wall of speakers and the sound was just as crisp and crystal clear at the far end of the stadium (where I could afford to sit) as it would have been in your living room.
And loud, did I mention it was loud?
August 10th, 2011 at 1:03 am
@nepat:
Amen to that—at least in my lifetime. And I am, for better or worse, getting old.
August 10th, 2011 at 2:08 am
Was at the Giants game tonight: Grateful Dead Night. Jerry’s daughter threw out the first pitch, and Jerry must have been smiling down on us, because we smoked the Pirates 0-6.
August 10th, 2011 at 5:33 am
Saw my first show in ‘79 and never looked back. A wide eyed naive, insecure and dorky 18 yr old. The music hit a nerve that stayed with me for the rest of my life. But, the crowd so impressed me. It was like I’d found the family that could accept me regardless of my shortcomings.
And more so than the music, it was the sense of family that kept me coming back.
In 2001, I moved away from my hometown of Rochester, NY to a job in the middle of nowhere, N Central PA. Potter County, population 16,000. And even here, in this extremely rural setting, that same family found me and I’ve hooked up with a circle of like minded friends who have a private get together every 4th of July weekend with 3-4 days of music, camping, feasting and merry making.
The music will live on in perpetuity, not because it’s exceptional (some of it is, some of it isn’t), but because it has become a family. A family that encompasses the whole world.
My family here in Potter Cty allows me to record the music from the weekend, and I share that with the world through Youtube. I share this acoustic set from Friday night at the barn with you now, my Balloon-Juice family…
http://www.youtube.com/playlis.....ABDE399CA7
Also, check out these 13 year olds from TeaNeck, NJ to see for yourselves how following generations are picking up where we leave off…these kids really are amazing!
http://www.youtube.com/user/LeadHeads555
Be well my Balloon-Juice family and enjoy
August 10th, 2011 at 6:55 am
What a wonder sentiment, indeed. Even if it DOES come from someone who spent his entire life avoiding the responsibility he advocates.
August 10th, 2011 at 8:09 am
Should have a video of ‘St. Stephen’. I read somewhere that Jerry said it was his favourite song. They played it at his funeral.
August 10th, 2011 at 8:58 am
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: That sound came from fellow Kentuckian, the late Augustus Owsley Stanley.
August 10th, 2011 at 9:04 am
@Cat Lady: I was at that show. Lots of bad shit going down, assholes crashing the gate, etc. Quite a contrast with my first show in ‘87 at Alpine Valley.
August 10th, 2011 at 9:22 am
Didn’t see this thread until this morning cause I was celebrating my birthday with a few friends last night. We played Jerry all night in his memory… on my turntable.
My 2nd Dead show was at the closing of the Winterland, New Year’s Eve, 1978 just a few weeks after moving to SF from NY. Scalped tickets, the Blues Brothers lead off at 8, NRPS followed, then Bill Graham riding a joint down from the rafter at the stroke of midnight. The band played until 6AM followed by breakfast for the whole crowd. Good, good times.
August 10th, 2011 at 12:53 pm