This was the record biz, where the real money was: the suburbs, FM radio, and being a rock star. It's no surprise the house was sold out-tickets only cost $1.00, subsidized as a promotion for the local rock station. The house was full, mostly with suburban kids and twenty-somethings who hardly knew the Grateful Dead, much less the somewhat exotic Jerry Garcia Band, which only had only released one mostly forgotten album from a few years earlier. But here was Jerry, headlining a big concert in the suburbs, with two other bands. In the East Bay, the Jerry Garcia Band just played late night shows at the smoky Keystone Berkeley, packing the house for those over 21 and willing to stay up really, really late. The Garcia Band had played the Pavilion before, in a modestly attended show six years earlier ( October 17, 1975, with Kingfish and Keith And Donna), but this was different. On Labor Day, September 7, 1981, the Jerry Garcia Band played the Concord Pavilion, a 9,000-capacity outdoor venue in suburban Concord, just 20 miles East of Berkeley, but far away in cultural terms. Other futures were possible, but Jerry appears to have rejected them. Now and again, when we look at Garcia's history, we see brief glimpses of roads not taken. In the end, when the long-dated call was exercised, the payoff was huge, but the significant cost of carry often goes unnoticed. All along Garcia made decisions about his career, and the Grateful Dead's, often in the face of some financial risk. Yet the story was not written before it started. The decades of a dedicated clump of fans sustaining the Dead and Garcia until the larger culture caught up with them is now a great entertainment story in its own right. Not only did the Grateful Dead traverse the firmament from underground outlaws to rock stars, and then to dinosaurs, and finally to legends, but Garcia himself had his own separate journey from "underground upstart" to "great artist" that stands apart from the Dead itself. The arc of Jerry Garcia's career is now so iconic that it seems inevitable. It's not because the seat was "Obstructed View"-thanks to radio station KMEL-fm, all seats were $1.00. A ticket stub for the Jerry Garcia Band show at Concord Pavilion on Labor Day 1981.
0 kommentar(er)
