For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: The Dead Do Dallas in '78 (and '72 and '69 and ...)

By Robert Wilonsky Fri., Feb. 19 2010 at 6:08 PM

Categories: Music

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I'm not much of a Grateful Dead fan, if I may end the week with an understatement; I pretty much start and finish with American Beauty, depending on the hour and the herb, though the missus was once known a long while ago to follow a tour or two. Lord knows it ain't hard to turn up a Dead bootleg; I was, in fact, hoping to find a decent version of the Who's '67 Memorial Auditorium show for this week's weekend adios, or at least something from the Texxas Jam that sounds better than this Boston offering.

But I'll offer this instead: the Dead at the Dallas Convention Center Arena in 1978, a mediocre audience recording that gives me an excuse to link to Jeff Liles's Echoes and Reverberations acid flashback from December of '08 in which he recounted his trip to this very show. ("Why are all of these people barefoot? Do they not own shoes? Do these people drink their own pee?")You'll find better Dead Dallas concerts -- and, look, that '72 Memorial Auditorium gig and the '69 show on the SMU campus sound awful good, if that's your box of rain -- but now you can tell Jeff you were there too.

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I saw more than three dozen shows* between '85 and '95, in venues all over the country and in fact all over this and neighboring galaxies. Believe me, Big Bob, you have no idea what you missed. West Coast shows were the best. ___________________________________ * A fair number, for a Texan, and debatably enough to qualify me as a Deadhead; in, say, Oregon or Massachussetts, however, even your run-of-the-mill frat boy (of my age, more or less) saw more.
I saw them a lot in the mid- and late-80s and the quality of their shows were decent. Also saw a few shows in the 90s, but the quality had degraded and the scene outside the arena was very tightly controlled. The worst show was when my straight laced boss invited me to a concert. Was stone cold sober. And thus ended my interest in the GD. I always wanted to make and market "Peanut Butter and Jerry Sandwiches" and sell them for a premium at the shows. The younger and Gutter 'Heads would have ate that up with a spoon, and deviant me would have had a good laugh.
What did one Deadhead say to the other when they ran out of weed? "Hey man, this music sucks!" Actually, on a Dead-love meter, I'm with Wilonski. I start and end with American Beauty.
Saw them once in 77. Got there at 2:00 AM w/ 500,000 other folks for the show... 24 hours of wandering around w/ no more than a dozen airbrushed Jerry Garcia t-shirts I had made to see if I could. Sold and traded them all away to eat drink and be merry. Smoke / Drink, Jam Jam Jam etc, it was okay. Got out of there at 2:00 AM the next day. Received a call a few hours later at 10:00AM saying Patti Smith was doing a free show under the bridge in Philly. Now that was amazing.
Robert Your wife seems far too cool and classy to be called a "missus". Can you come up with something better when you refer to her?
I love all kinds of music but I never got in the Dead even though a lot of my favorites draw from them. Love Los Lobos version of Bertha for example. I do appreciate their contributions to music and the community that arose around them.
I always liked the Dead. Saw this show and another at Moody in the 70's. I wasn't prepared to drop out of college, eat a bunch of paper and follow them around the country, but I liked em'.
I saw them in St. Louis on July 5th & 6th 1995, aka the next to last shows w/Jerry Garcia (Chicago being the last). Hadn't seen them before but was working at a Deadhead owned/operated bakery in Norman OK. My birthday is the 6th so I got lots of gifts from folks: a Jerry shirt from a guy named Cosmic Charlie, a handful of fresh 'shrooms from a girl from Philly, even my boss dosed me w/some liquid lsd... I was surprised at the vast diversity of the crowd from gutter hippies (Drainbows) to the folks in the box seats drinking Chardonnay. Overall, a great time.
I went to this concert in 1978. I was barely 17 and didn't know who they were at all. My boyfriend took me and all I remember was being bored to tears at this concert. Dummy I know. I still have my ticket stubs. A few weeks later I was watching SNL and I see the same group on SNL. I told mom that was the band I saw a few weeks ago. I guess they're big though because they're on SNL!
for a week that included Roky Erickson, Johnny Boudreau and the Texxas Jam, the Dead seem a logical choice to end the week.
I went to this show in 78. Not really much of an atmosphere seeing them in Memorial Auditorium/CCTheater. The place to see them during that period in Texas was at their Manor Downs (horsetrack) shows outside of Austin.
You know, the last time I saw them was at Reunion. One of the fonder memories of my youth (pockets full of mushrooms, seeing police with dogs, trying to freak out quietly and then getting into the show). Every time I drive over the viaduct and past the crater I chuckle to myself.....
Sounds like another concert in need of a high-powered hippie drill... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hippie,_Die