The "Dylan And The Dead"/Bob Dylan & Grateful Dead Together & Alone Tour

There was certainly something to be said for getting a (relatively) current tape in the mail and not having a clue what the set list was! Or the challenge of getting tickets for shows that were outside of one's immediate area (or even knowing that those shows were going down). The Dead had the hotline and mail-order tickets, Dylan had "you're on your own pal".

 

I must admit I haven’t given the album a proper listen. I believe I own it, but then again, most people here probably believe they own it. ‘It’s here somewhere’ - right? It’s probably badly recorded, mixed, sequenced, selected contract-filler (and that’s just Dylan’s opinion of it). The cover is a good excuse to print up some t-shirts. Part of the problem was that it only came out some time after the fact - February 6, 1989. That's an eternity in the Dead universe and nine months in Dylan's. The timing of the release was a little off, otherwise it probably would have had more of an impact. Maybe not. It still went gold, so it can't be all that bad an album...
It really was a 'you had to be there to appreciate what it was really like' kind of scenario. It's like watching an animal being born on videotape years later; it's just not the same.


John F. Kennedy Stadium
Capacity: 102,000
Opened: April 15, 1926
Location: S Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19148
Demolished: September 19–24, 1992
Closed: July 13, 1989

Dylan and the Dead were my first Dylan concert (second Dead concert of four) It was in July of '87 in Philly (07/10/87). (I have the show somewhere off dimeodoz. and it's as great a show as I remember it.)

But I remember the folks I trekked to the show with. One guy actually wanted to kill himself, throwing a young-adult tantrum, because some of the others didn't want to drive all the way to Philly from their sleepy summer college town hiatuses and hit the road to the city more than 300 miles away ("I'm not goin' all the way to ****in' Philadelphia. Screw that"). They didn't want to hit the north, the crowds and combustion, the interstate thruways, the dying industrial infrastructure, the decayed post-colonial social complexities. Then there was having to dodge VW vans full of daytrippers veering over the median and back again, and the parking lot navigation through island streams of gypsies, tramps, and thieves, the vendors, "dude", the all-night partying, etc.
I can't blame them. It's easier to just sit around collecting solar ray energy or tweaking air-conditioning levels ahead of composing one’s next meal.

(I must confess... I had only gotten into Dylan around a year and a half before the show, initially through Greatest Hits, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde, Biograph, Infidels, and a girlfriend who had Blood On The Tracks, Desire, Greatest Hits II, Budokan, Dylan, Self-Portrait, Basement Tapes, Nashville Skyline, Planet Waves, and New Morning – the ones I can remember, at least; she likely had many more screened behind the others. Quantity-wise, she had me beaten... but I had the albums she didn't have, and vice versa, so it was a favorable match. It's funny how Blood On The Tracks, an album about bittersweet breakups and remembrances of blisses past and anguish present, can represent something especially romantic and soul-stirring to young lovers who've just learned to drive; it's as if it is an itinerary for any romance that ends in a breakup - from start to finish, it's all there. But I digress...)

Well, we went to Philly nevertheless, the four of us leaving that night, and around seven hours later we were adrift within the outskirts of the southern side amidst long/straight slate-gray avenues of semi-post-industrial, residential low-rise neighborhoods near dawn. We were lost, but an old stadium (JFK) made of brick or stone is always easy to find, as it was happened upon eventually by daybreak, in what looked like a swampland surrounded by utility plants and factories. We spent the whole day hanging around the sweltering parking lot scene which filled up more and more each hour, hooking up with long-lost friends from up north who were archetypal touring Deadheads with lots of different medicines ('liquid'), dreads, a sheltering van, and tie-dyes.
At the appointed time we filed like a herd of livestock towards the floodgates and into the stadium, people even 'mooing' to get into the groove of it - shuffling into an neoclassical edifice renamed in memorial to a president who had gotten blown away in broad daylight in Dallas, TX once upon a time. Ain't that America?

As for the Dead's own opening set, I don't remember a thing about them specifically regarding songs, apart from that they were impressive in their unique way. They were just a build-up to Dylan, for me, for this particular show, at least. But I recall their massive, insane audience the most, probably mixed with many curious Philly rock fans and general Americans. They paused in the middle of a song to address seven people who were dancing on one of the small roofs over the last few seats in the rafters, cause they would surely plummet to their deaths whilst dancing on this metal roof with no impediment to anything whatsoever; one step from heaven, literally; 'We want you to have fun, but we don't want you to have too much fun'... People were so stoned that they thought that the earth was shaking, which it probably was.
'87 and '88 were possibly the peak of the Dead's "comeback" or mainstreaming. By '89 the scene had started to really deteriorate. (But '87-'89 was the only time I saw them, so what do I know...) But back then, Jerry was the lynchpin of a whole subculture, obviously (a whole nomadic spectacle in which Dylan was allowed to simply step into and render his own magic; it was like running away from his life and joining the circus.)

Set 1:

Iko Iko
Jack Straw
Sugaree
New Minglewood Blues
Althea
My Brother Esau
When Push Comes To Shove
Cassidy
China Cat Sunflower
I Know You Rider
Looks Like Rain
Terrapin Station
Drums
I Need A Miracle
Black Peter
Around And Around
One More Saturday Night

The Dead, however, were/are a absolutely underrated backing band for Bob. I'd put them only after the Hawks/Band, and perhaps tied for second with the Rolling Thunder I band, as far as my enjoyment of them goes. Heck, maybe they were just great that night. Dylan has had a few hotshot guitarist play with him on the NET, but it wasn't until Duke Robillard filled in for a segment of the NET shows in 2013 that Dylan had a guitarist approaching the same league as Jerry.
This was the same place that Bob had played a couple years earlier at Live Aid, mind you.

Bob came on after the intermission. I imagine it was dark by the time Dylan hit stage. He was dressed like a Venice Beach Guardian Angel, painter's beret overhead and some kind of silky shirt and satiny jacket abreast, and loose pantaloons to gird.

Set 2: Dylan & Dead:

Tangled Up In Blue
I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
Man Of Peace
Frankie Lee And Judas Priest
John Brown
Simple Twist Of Fate
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Stuck Inside Of Mobile
Chimes Of Freedom
Queen Jane Approximately
Gotta Serve Somebody
Joey
All Along The Watchtower

I thought 'Frankie Lee and Judas Priest' was an odd concert selection - but it worked like heck in a live setting, with its constant mid-tempo flow. The Dead looked very happy to have Bob there and be his support system. They lived for this kind of stuff.
The whole set was great, but "Joey" is the song I harken back to most, cause by "Serve Somebody" myself and the guy-who-had-threatened-to-kill-himself had managed to migrate from the left side area (fittingly, the two guys who hadn't wanted to attend the show at all stayed in the bleacher area the whole time) and made it down to the unseated front vicinity, and then ultimately wended and sliced our way to the first row by way of the left side, where people tend to leave the front points by cause 'it's too intense'. I guess I remember "Joey" because it was the best song of the night, and because it was then that I got a close look at the legendary what's-his-name thrashing his guitar and singing in bold, underlined, italixed letters (you could still understand every single word he sung back then if you listened close) - Mr. Bobby D., about ten feet away, the eye of the hurricane.

Encore: Touch Of Grey
(They should have named this "Ounce of Grey... I think Dylan sits out the song.)

After the show we got a flat tire in the parking lot when we ran over some glass, ending up with the "spare" tire on, which was no more than a 3/4-sized training wheel courtesy of Jeep. Back at a motel there was a full-scale party with some old Deadhead friends of one of our gang, which I slept through as it raged around. The friend who had earlier threatened to kill himself ended up sleeping in the car, getting baked by the early morning sun.

I saw Dylan again the next year with the G. Smith band at the beginnings of the NET, which wasn't as half a good show for some reason, except for the solo acoustic stuff; it didn't have quite the same carnival atmosphere as the Dead show, but what did? Plus, it was missing the Dead themselves. Or maybe it was because Bob could no longer sing in the bold underlined italics voice anymore. I saw my ex-girlfriend (the one with all the Dylan records) not long after she had seen a '88 NET show in Cinncinatti, and she had been glad to see him. I lightheartedly asked if she was going to be following Bob on tour, and she said, "Only if I want to follow a trail of misery and despair"... I think he donned a white suit at her show.

As for the friends I saw the Dylan/Dead show with, it was sort of the height of our friendship. By the time we made it home from the concert trek, a couple of the guys weren't speaking to each other - other than to grumble about the car-stereo music selections, and I haven't seen a couple of them in twenty-five years.
Anyways, you might fail to remember all the ones in between, but you never forget your first Dylan show, nor your latest (#3550).
Nor your second Dead show, for that matter.