Grateful Dead

I bought 24 tickets and sold them to kids I went to school with. I went with three women and had another time of my life. Thanks Dixie, Pat, and Laura

We were too poor to buy tickets, so my friends and I begged to get stage crew jobs from the student concert commitee. We worked all day: some of us set up thousands of chairs in the arena, while others pulled the neatly packed stage components and lights out of semi-trailers and assembled them under the official crew's patient direction.

The band stayed out of the way in rooms behind the stage. Late in the day we could smell the aromas from the amazing dinner that their cook had created for them. Later we got to listen to the sound check - Jerry seemed to be particularly happy, and played a stanza of Cream's "Spoonful" for us.

The student crew mostly didn't get backstage passes and didn't have assigned seats either, so we mingled with twirley dancers and wandered through the crowd. The concert was very excellent, and the encore, 'Saturday Night', was a balls-out boogie with Bob screaming his heart out.

After the show, many of the student stage crew were toasted to a crisp. The few of us left standing struggled to dissasemble the stage and then pile the parts back onto the trucks.
I think I slept for two days afterwards.

http://www.archive.org/details/gd1977-10-29.mtx.hansokolow.98032.flac16