I joined a streaming Grateful Dead party in Cambridge last week. I had lost track of the band since attending a live concert at the Stanford University Amphitheater in 1982. We looked up Trey Anastasio and discovered that he was in many ways a fitting replacement for Jerry Garcia, right down to the problems with drugs and the law (though Anastasio seems to have avoided becoming entangled with the alimony and child support system; the first paragraph of the core section (“Sixth”) of Garcia’s will begins with instructions for paying off former sexual partners; one of them described her payments as “salary” (SF Gate)).
Some waggish tweets notwithstanding, e.g., “Deadheads will be telling their grandkids about this show–when they see them next weekend,” we were surprised at how many young people were in the audience. Quite a few were barely out of kindergarten when Jerry Garcia died. How did they become fans of a band that hadn’t existed in their teenage or adult lifetimes?
As an incipient old guy myself I was thrilled to see so many turn out to see guys in their 70s up on stage. At the same time, when I got home and streamed down some 1970s Grateful Dead songs from Rhapsody it was hard not to agree with our Deadhead host’s admission that “no question that they were better then,” though he added “I was a lot more energetic then too.”
Separately, the economics of the concerts were interesting. At the announced face values of the tickets (i.e., ignoring the high prices in the secondary market), revenues from just two of the concerts would have exceeded, in nominal dollars, the original $13 million construction cost of Soldier Field. Can we also infer from the popularity of these concerts, both live and streaming, that the U.S. economy is in pretty good shape? You can’t fill a stadium like Soldier Field with one-percenters. The alternative to spending the money to buy tickets and travel to Chicago is to listen to a younger/better/intact Grateful Dead for free (or $10/month). If that many people chose to spend the big bucks does it not show that there is a lot of disposable income kicking around?
Related:
- “It Is Money Battles Like These that Make The Dead Truly Grateful” (1997 NYT article on the women collectively suing Garcia’s estate for $38 million (against total estate assets of $6 million))
I didn’t see the concert, generally stopped attending when ticket prices went over $20 (and not the Dead back then, anyway). But I did rapidly find the 10,173 free bootleg recordings at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead
Oh, I also decided that maybe the US economy was doing OK, after going to northern Michigan for July 4th. Thousands of dollars of fireworks were set off all around the lake. As they say, there is a lot of ruin in a country.
To be honest, I never really understood what the big deal was with the Grateful Dead. About the only song I know is “I will survive” which is a great song, but when I listen to the other songs I’m really left disappointed. I just don’t get it, and I’m the kind of person that will listen to many different genres. What other songs of theirs match the quality of “I will survive” ?
Also, that SFGate article about Manasha Gracia just boggles the mind. Some people are just unbelievable detached from reality it makes you wonder. All that money wasted… and talking like she was owed a rich life just for sleeping with the dude and having a kid. Child support payments of $8,000 a month! A salary indeed.
When I was in college, I was still a bit of hard core libertarian-type, and I thought myself to be quite practical about life and work. Being a libertarian (over time though I’ve gradually shifted into something of a mix between libertarian and socialist ideology) didn’t make me popular with the ladies in crunchy Vermont liberal arts college. Most of the women leaned heavily on socialist ideals and did not want to hear about wasteful government spending, etc. I was probably not compassionate enough from their perspective. I also didn’t “get” the hippie mindset, there were some Deadheads in college, rich kids pretending to be hippies.
In retrospect, I think a lot of young men play the socialist hippie card just to get chicks, don’t know if they really believe in it. Although, over time I have softened myself as well, and I don’t follow any particular economic or political ideology so strictly anymore. In fact, most of the the ideas from Adam Smith , Karl Marx, Hayek, Keynes, etc are too outdated now to be applied practically. We need new ideas, but I think that with things moving so fast nowadays, it might not be possible.
GermanL: $8,000 per month back in 1996 is equivalent to about $144,000 per year today (CPI-W adjusted). So that’s like a salary of $240,000/year pre-tax (ADP paycheck calculator). More than a two-career couple would earn if each parent were an attorney earning the BLS median income for lawyers (http://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm ).
The weather in Chicagoland was picture postcard perfect for the Dead’s last shows. I listened to the shows on the SiriumXM stream. I was never a dead nut but they really played a nice set of music. The promoter for these shows really lined things up on the ticket, merchandise and pay per view.
If you missed the shows, and don’t want to shell out $200 for the boxed set, you can hear them on the following link:
https://soundcloud.com/lindsay-jones-10/sets/gd50
There was good music during the set-breaks. Nice background music for work.
https://soundcloud.com/quinfolk/sets/breaks
Mickey Hart plays a beam during the Dead shows. If you want to hear the original inspiration for the beam. Check out Francesco’s Cosmic Beam Experience.
http://francescocosmicbeamexperience.com/