The Grateful Dead in Springfield

 

Here are the 10 shows the Grateful Dead played in Springfield, with some links to the actual concert recordings:

• October 2, 1972
• March 28, 1973
• June 30, 1974
• April 23, 1977
• May 11, 1978
• January 15, 1979
• October 24, 1979
• September 3, 1980
• March 24, 1985
• March 25, 1985

The floor at the Civic Center for the 1977 show

 

I first saw the Grateful Dead in 1980 in the Springfield Civic Center. Back in high school, between my brother and my friends, all of us had a policy regarding the attendance of the multitude of concerts that occurred at the arena in the late 1970s and 1980s: if we had liked around five or more of the band’s songs, they were probably worth seeing.

 

So my brother and I bought tickets, but we couldn’t convince any others to go. No problem—we’d make the drive down State Street and probably run into somebody we knew there. Wrong. “Who are these people?” we wondered. “Where are all the Cathedral and Classical kids?” The crowd was older. They must have come down from UMass, we said.

 

I saw a big old sheepdog—its paws were up on a railing, hanging out nonchalantly, as if this were its hundredth show. Then a guy in the same row, wearing an Uncle Sam hat, took off the hat, and pulled a mini Dinkelacker keg out of it, and put in a tap. This was, for sure a “different” crowd.

 

We thought the Dead show was a good one, but not “incredible.” We were into bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Blue Oyster Cult. Jerry Garcia simply didn’t “rock out” like our guitar heroes Ted Nugent, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, and Tony Iommi. Where was the feedback? The wah-wah pedal?

 

I gave the show very little thought after that, but when I went to college the following fall, A LOT of people were into The Dead, including my roommate. He played the badly recorded Dead bootleg tapes constantly, and often when I went to my room after class, I could hear the familiar “boink boink” of Jerry’s guitar playing as I ascended the stairs and walked down the hall. I knew the source of the tunes came from my room, and was resigned to the fact that I could not blast my music until he was done listening to The Dead. Which was fine. I could tolerate Jerry’s noodling.

 

But the Grateful Dead grew on me. That is not true of everyone. Believe me, I know. When my friends and I saw Ted Nugent in the New Haven Coliseum in 1980, the PA announcer listed upcoming concerts, and when he mentioned the Grateful Dead, we cheered—and 90 percent of the audience booed loudly. This hard-rocking crowd DID NOT LIKE the hippy dippy Dead and its Deadheads. This perplexed me for a minute, and then I remembered that rock music was definitely splitting into factions.

 

In college, I saw The Dead in Worcester, the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, at the Broome County Arena in Binghamton, at the Glens Falls Civic Center, and at SPAC in Saratoga—and two 1985 shows at the Springfield Civic Center. In Syracuse and at SPAC it dawned on me that The Dead following was growing, and the mellow scene that I saw in Springfield in 1980 was morphing into a bigger, rowdier crowd. In Syracuse, as soon as the lights dimmed, hundreds streamed down to the floor, creating a crush in front of the stage. At SPAC, there was a rush for the bandshell, both at the ground level and on the pedestrian bridges that led to the balcony. There was more obnoxious behavior, which we attributed to what we called the “professional partiers”—drunks who were just looking for an environment and an excuse to get loaded. We were amused by this phenomenon—at first. We just couldn’t believe The Dead was getting this popular!

 

In 1985, the scene for The Dead’s two shows in Springfield was so much more different than it was five years earlier. The masses had gathered in Court Square and didn’t really congregate much beyond that area because downtown Springfield had lacked open areas, and most of the crowd was unfamiliar with the city.

 

The Civic Center’s security operation lacked crowd control—including gate crashing prevention—so on the first night someone kicked in a plexiglass window and we watched bemused from the inside as hundreds streamed inside before the tide was stemmed by guards.

 

It was a great show, but for some reason my friends and I wanted to get out of there when the Dead went into what I knew would be their final song (not including the encore): Not Fade Away, which was always a set-ender. When we got into the outer hallway that encircled the Civic Center—where the concessions stands, bathrooms, etc. are—and we found that a ton of Deadheads hand joined hands and were dancing counterclockwise in a gigantic oval. I had never seen this before—just smaller versions of this linked-hands dance at weddings and certainly not surrounding an entire arena! The only real way to get through them was to join hands with them, become a part of the moving oval for a few seconds, and then let go. We left before the encore, which turned out to be U.S. Blues—someone had furnished us with an audience tape the following day. I yelled at my friend (who shall remain nameless) that we had missed one of their best tunes, but what the hell—we were going to the second show anyway. In retrospect, I believe we wanted to get a head start on hitting the bars—probably the Bar Association—before they got swamped with fans.

 

On the next night there was much more of a police presence in the area, and there had been a general outcry in the Springfield newspapers over the Deadheads taking over downtown, camping out overnight, and being a general nuisance. A concertgoer fell off the Forbes & Wallace parking garage and died, and another fell off an I-91 entrance ramp and was critically injured.

 

While it’s true the Dead’s crowd had become much larger and more unruly over the years, it was interesting to see how much the establishment was freaking out over the band coming to town compared to their uneventful show here five years earlier. Two city councilors, Frank Keough and Brian Santaniello, recommended a review subcommittee to OK concerts before they were booked at the Civic Center. I remember Keough scoffing about a bunch of losers wandering around looking for the 1960s.

 

The truth was, the country had changed a lot in those five years. This was the anti-drug Reagan era, with little patience for sixties nostalgia among much of the nation. Today’s wide divide between Republicans and Democrats—two separate Americas, if you will—definitely had its roots in the 1980s, and you could see it playing out in Springfield’s reaction to the concerts. And I daresay that music was at its low point. Those of us who had listened to WCCC, WHCN, and WAAF during high school could not bear to turn on the radio in 1985—it truly sucked. MTV, in our opinion, had ruined the music scene, making the visual element of videos more important than the music.

 

The Grateful Dead, however, flew in the face of all that MTV bullshit. Their shows had endless jams, the band didn’t care how it looked, and they sure didn’t care about having a hit tune or an elaborately produced video. They were a throwback and we loved them for it.

1973

1977 in Springfield

 

1979 in Springfield

It was strange to watch Springfield’s reaction in 1985. Everyone was talking about the Deadhead invasion. I took my car to a car wash in the South End, and the worker there was describing in amazement how he was talking to a Deadhead chick from California. Evidently this sheltered townie had never met a Californian!

 

The Springfield Union-News struggled to define what a Deadhead was, explaining that they were “followers of the band, who affect the styles, mannerisms, and philosophies of the 1960s.” City Councilor Betty Montori commented that some Deadheads looked “kooky” but that police said the crowd generously was mild-mannered and easy to control.

 

I found it hilarious after I had listened to countless Dead bootlegs, had attended shows in cities that took it all in stride, and was a part of a subculture that was simply into enjoying good music and a good time, that Springfield’s newspapers had to explain this horrific hippie horde to its readers in layman's terms.

God! I wondered. What happened to Springfield, the town I knew and loved? Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart.

1973 in the Civic Center

 

Springfield’s reaction reminded me of Boston’s convoluted relationship with the band. When I lived there, the Dead played six nights in the Garden in 1991 and another dozen concerts there (six in 1993 and six in 1994), and I saw all of the shows. Boston is a progressive city with large pockets of conservatism, so both times the carnival-like atmosphere wore thin on many commuters and businesses in the North Station area after a few days—although the bar owners loved it. The police, with their Gestapo-style tactics, including huge motorcycle convoys, made it annoying for us to tailgate there. We were constantly looking over our shoulders.

 

In retrospect, the Springfield Civic Center was lucky to book the Dead in ’85. Most bands, including the Dead, opted to play the bigger arenas in Hartford, Worcester, and Boston in the early 1980s. But the Dead had an unfortunate incident at the Boston Garden in 1982: the crew was grilling lobsters on a fire escape, so fire and police officials responded by screaming at them and upending the grills over the railing and into the alley. This prompted Garcia and the boys to boycott the Garden after that (until 1991), which no doubt set the stage for their return to Springfield, a city they loved playing in, in 1985. I daresay it was their fuck-you to Boston. Springfield didn't seem to be on their radar, and all of a sudden they booked two shows in 1985.

 

I guess I have to be fair to any newspaper reporter unacquainted with the Dead who was trying to describe the indescribable qualities that made the band so appealing and the reasons it enjoyed a cult following for three decades. I could go on and on about their unique blend of musical influences—rock, blues, R & B, gospel, reggae—you name it. I could list song after song from their top performances in their heyday, such as Dancing in the Streets from Cornell in 1977. But I’ve found that people either love or despise the Dead—there seems to be little middle ground—so if you’ve read this far, you at least somewhat appreciate their gift, and can find their own favorite tunes and concerts online. You sure don’t need me to guide you. But many readers, upon seeing the title of the post, had already formed a negative opinion of the band, and will move on to something else.

As for my opinion of the Deadheads: well, as a whole, they were a fun-loving bunch, but there was certainly a sketchy element that showed up to every show without tickets, hoping for free admission in any way possible. These folks also felt entitled to ask fellow concertgoers for handouts: tickets, beer, drugs, food…anything. Come to think of it, this was the same kind of attitude that doomed the Haight and Ashbury scene in San Francisco in the 1960s! Rob Gostovsky, a guy from The Acres, and I will always remember on scraggly dude in particular in the Foxboro Stadium parking lot. We had been tailgating and got sick of people walking by and asking for free stuff, especially beer. We had a food cooler, which we had hidden in the trunk, and had a separate cooler for beer. The beer cooler, which we had emptied, except for the leftover water, was nasty. It had never been washed, and there was a film of scum on the inside surface.

After a while we kept the beer cooler open to show the masses walking by that we had nothing left to give. No beer. No food. That didn’t stop one Deadhead. “Do you have a beer you can spare, brotha?”

“No.”

“A bottle of water? Soda? Anything?”

No, no, and no. A thousand times no!

He hesitated and licked his lips. “Uh, can I drink your cooler water?”

Jesus. He was obviously getting dehydrated. Poor bastard. Probably had taken ecstasy and was parched.

“Be my guest,” said Rob.

He drank voraciously from the cooler spigot—he must have been a quaffing bits of dissolved beer bottle labels and God knows what other dregs that were in there from a million concerts and Sox games. Unkempt, dirty, and bedraggled, he was like Robinson Crusoe finally finding water after being shipwrecked.

For years, we’d mention the “cooler water guy” whenever we encountered a Deadhead who wanted something for nothing. Which was often.

Jerry rocks Springfield in 1979

Recently, upon finding a recording of the 1980 show in Springfield, I texted a link to my brother, reminding him that this concert was 42 years ago. Boy are we getting old! Well, at least we got to see the Dead at the Civic Center. At least Springfield played a part in music history with 10 performances of the Grateful Dead, a band beyond description.

Here are more photos of the Grateful Dead's shows at the Springfield Civic Center over the years: