My First Grateful Dead Show
My first Grateful Dead show was in Pittsburgh in April 1989, although the story really begins the day before, when I climbed into a yellow Volkswagen bus with three friends — Jason, Dave, and Doug — and headed west from Ocean City, New Jersey.
Pittsburgh has always been a city I loved. In fact, for years I’ve said, “Pittsburgh is the only city I would live in.”
Why? I don’t really know.
I’m a die-hard Steelers fan, and I lived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for a number of years, so maybe some of it comes from that. But I don’t think either one completely explains why I’ve always felt connected to a city I’ve only actually visited a handful of times.
Maybe it started in April 1989.
More specifically, maybe it started on April 1, when I climbed into a yellow Volkswagen bus with three friends — Jason, Dave, and Doug — and headed west from Ocean City, New Jersey, toward Pittsburgh to see the Grateful Dead.
I was fifteen years old.
The drive was probably five or six hours, and the excitement seemed to come in waves. The farther west we went, the more real the whole thing became. We listened to the Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan, and the other music that came out from that time period. We smoked, talked, watched the scenery go by, and debated what the Dead might or might not play the next night.
Coming from Ocean City, everything was flat. Then western Pennsylvania started rising in front of us.
That poor yellow VW bus was not built for climbing mountains.
I can still picture us crawling along Interstate 76 at something like 35 miles per hour while traffic flew past. Inside were a bunch of long-haired teenagers rocking forward and backward as if somehow our combined body movement might help push the bus up the mountain.
It didn’t.
Eventually the road leveled out and the VW picked up speed again.
As we got closer to Pittsburgh, the skyline appeared in front of us. Naturally, being teenagers on our way to a Dead show, we made what seemed at the time like a perfectly logical decision.
We dropped acid.
The reasoning was simple: by the time we got there, we would be ready.
And we were.
The Night Before the Show
We had deliberately arrived the day before the concert. By the time we reached the Civic Arena area, it was early evening and there was a Penguins game going on.
The parking lot was already transforming.
People were arriving in brightly painted vehicles, Volkswagen buses, vans, cars covered in colors and stickers — the rolling collection of Deadheads that followed the band from city to city. People were setting up to sell clothes, food, handmade things, and whatever else might find a buyer once the crowd arrived.
By this point, the LSD had fully kicked in.
One of the clearest memories I have from that first night is sitting inside the bus with Jason and watching Penguins fans come out of the arena. Through the windshield, it looked like a movie.
On one side were hockey fans who had apparently expected to leave a normal Penguins game and walk back to a normal parking lot. Instead, they were walking into what was quickly becoming a temporary hippie village.
On the other side were the Deadheads, happy as could be, setting up shop for the next day.
The annoyed hockey fans and the happy hippies moved past each other while Jason and I watched from inside the VW.
On acid, it was endlessly entertaining.
I eventually set up a tent on a little patch of grass between two light poles. I had a pillow, a blanket, and whatever else I thought I needed.
What I had not planned for was the temperature.
It got much colder than I expected.
Fortunately, this was a Grateful Dead show. If you needed something, there was a good chance somebody on Shakedown Street was selling it.
I went looking for a blanket and found a heavy gray Mexican-style falsa blanket, woven with blue, white, and black stripes and a small red-and-yellow design in the center. I didn’t know what the style was called at the time. I just knew it was warm, and I needed it. Thirty-seven years later, I still have it.
What makes it interesting now is that I still have it.
Thirty-seven years later, it is worn around the edges and has clearly seen a lot of use, but every winter it still comes back out. Of all the things I could have brought home from that first Grateful Dead show, somehow that blanket survived.
I don’t remember whether I actually slept much that first night. That is where the memory starts behaving like an old record with a scratch in it.
Skip.
Skip.
Skip.
Then suddenly another part of the story begins.
April 2, 1989
The next thing that comes back clearly is walking into the Civic Arena on April 2, 1989, for my first Grateful Dead show.
My first Grateful Dead show.
Our seats were pretty decent. We were higher up, but we had a clear view of the stage, and being farther away didn’t take anything away from the experience.
Then the band came out.
Jerry Garcia. Bob Weir. Phil Lesh. Brent Mydland. Bill Kreutzmann. Mickey Hart.
And off we went.
It felt like getting strapped into a roller coaster.
We were also still tripping. We really hadn’t stopped since arriving in Pittsburgh.
“Iko Iko” came early in the show, which was great news for Dave and less exciting for me. It was one of his favorites. At some point, I think either Dave or Jason — maybe both — left our seats and tried to get closer to the stage.
I stayed where I was.
Part of that was because I was perfectly happy with the view. Part of it was probably because the acid was beginning to turn on me just enough to make wandering around a packed arena seem like a bad idea.
I started getting little waves of paranoia.
Nothing catastrophic. Just strange feelings that would come over me, disappear, and then come back again.
Overall, though, I was having an incredible time.
“Tennessee Jed.” “The Music Never Stopped.” “Shakedown Street.”
Those are some of the moments I remember best.
“Foolish Heart,” “The Wheel,” and “Dear Mr. Fantasy” also stand out when I think about that night.
“Drums” and “Space,” on the other hand, never did much for me.
I understand what people love about them, and at a Dead show they could stretch that part of the concert out for what felt like forever. Personally, I would have happily traded some of that time for “Estimated Prophet,” “El Paso,” “Althea,” “Black Peter,” or any number of other songs.
But that was the Dead.
You didn’t pick the show.
You went along for the ride.
Somebody Was in My Tent
Eventually the show ended, and thousands of us started pouring out of the arena.
By then my head felt like it was spinning on a carousel. I had reached the point where I wanted nothing more than to get back to my tent, crawl inside, lie down, and have a little quiet time by myself.
I made it back to the tent.
There was only one problem.
Doug was already inside.
And he wasn’t alone.
He had met a girl.
Most of my friends from that era did considerably better with women than I did, but that is probably another life.log story.
At that particular moment, however, I didn’t care about Doug’s romantic success.
It was my tent.
I was exhausted.
I wanted in.
Doug was not happy about it, but I was adamant. Whatever plans he had made for the evening were going to have to change.
I crawled into the tent, lay down, and eventually managed to sleep.
Morning came.
It was cold.
I was very thankful for that blanket.
A Morning That Still Comes Back
There are pieces of that morning that have stayed with me in a strange way.
Even now, certain combinations of weather can bring me right back there.
It can happen when I walk outside on a chilly morning and there is a little fog in the air. Dew on the ground. Moisture on parked cars. A certain smell that I don’t even know how to describe.
For a second, I am standing in that parking lot in Pittsburgh again.
Not vaguely.
Clearly.
I can see it as plainly as I can see the keyboard in front of me while I’m writing this.
The cars. The damp ground. The cold air. The sounds. The smell.
Then the moment disappears and I go back to whatever I was doing.
It amazes me that after thirty-seven years, something so ordinary can unlock a memory that completely.
Then the record skips again.
My next memory is opening the VW bus to see what time we were planning to leave.
The smell that came out of that thing almost knocked me backward.
Full-body human stink.
Feet. Armpits. Everything.
Apparently somebody had offered a place to sleep to a guy who had been following the Dead for quite a while, and somehow everyone had spent the night inside that VW bus with him.
To this day, I have no idea how they did it.
Maybe some questions are better left unanswered.
The Ride Home
The next thing I remember clearly is being back on the road.
Before leaving, we all swore we would stay awake while Jason drove.
No chance.
One by one, we all fell asleep.
We were exhausted after something close to 48 hours of driving, music, acid, cold weather, a parking lot full of Deadheads, almost no sleep, and my first Grateful Dead concert.
Jason drove us home.
A few years later, Jason died.
He was far too young.
There are people from different parts of your life who slowly disappear from memory. Faces become harder to picture. Conversations blur. Eventually you realize you haven’t thought about someone in years.
Jason isn’t like that for me.
Whenever I think about that yellow VW bus struggling through the Pennsylvania mountains, or Penguins fans walking through a parking lot full of hippies, or a cold April morning outside the Civic Arena, Jason is there.
He is permanently attached to that trip.
And as long as I remember it, he is still riding in that yellow Volkswagen bus with the rest of us, headed toward Pittsburgh.
Grateful Dead — Pittsburgh Civic Arena — April 2, 1989
Set List
Foolish Heart
Iko Iko
Little Red Rooster
Dire Wolf
It’s All Over Now
We Can Run
Brown-Eyed Women
Queen Jane Approximately
Tennessee Jed
The Music Never Stopped
Shakedown Street
Man Smart, Woman Smarter
Foolish Heart
Drums
Space
The Wheel
Dear Mr. Fantasy
Hey Jude
Around and Around
Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad
Turn on Your Love Light
Encore:
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Grateful Dead Archive