I saw my last Grateful Dead show thirty years ago today, in Pittsburgh. Of course, I did not know at the time that I would never see Jerry again, but it was a fitting end, and I will tell you why. The Dead, for me and my friends, was not just a musical act, the band, and all the attendant swirl around it, was, for a time, basically our lives. We traveled with the band up and down the East Coast and for me at least as far away as Chicago and Indiana. We ditched classes in college to go to shows, we jotted down set lists in little notebooks that themselves became part of the experience. We met strangers in parking lots and became friends, we had weird little interludes, passing moments that we probably did not appreciate fully at the time because no one thought it would ever end.
By 1995, we were expert at the arcane rules for getting mail order tickets and a friend of mine and I were able to secure two for Pittsburgh, a roughly three hour drive from our homes in the DC area. We had no real plan other than to leave in the morning, drive to the show and then turn around and drive back after the show was over. It would be a long day, but when you're young you don't really think about such things.
Three Rivers Stadium was a concrete mausoleum. Built in the era when multi-purpose stadiums were all the rage, it was a big donut-shaped monstrosity at the confluence of the Alleghany, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. After doing the standard loops around the parking lots we headed in to our seats on the floor. The show itself was unremarkable for the most part. We did see the band perform a cover of the Talking Heads song "Take Me To The River" (perhaps owing to the location of that day's concert) and they replicated (in part) the "rain" themed songs they had performed at the last show we saw at RFK Stadium just five nights before. A pre-drums Terrapin was .. fine, and a rare Gloria encore closed things out.
But that wasn't the real story. The real story was a quintessentially Grateful Dead experience we had at the show. To wit, in a stadium of I don't know, 60,000 people, when we got down to the field and to our seats, not fifty feet away from us was a guy we knew in high school who my friend had also went to college with but neither of us had seen in several years. Aside from the randomness of running into someone we had not seen in so long (I mean really, what are the odds?) even more fortuitous was the fact his girlfriend was from the Pittsburgh-area. We spent the show with them and then she graciously offered us a place to stay at her parents home so we did not need to make the long drive back that night.
Her family home was more like a farm, about 20 minutes outside the city and it was very welcoming. We showered off the "ick" (what I used to call the combination of sweat, stink, and general body odor that accumulated when you spent a summer's day at a show) and slept in something akin to a guest house. A full spread of breakfast was waiting for us when we woke up and our buddy and his girlfriend then led us back out to the interstate so we could head home.
It was that kind of kismet, those random experiences and interactions that I miss, almost more than the music. That day remains a cherished memory and I wanted to acknowledge it.
