Glacial Errata, No. 34

One: On the Day That I Was Born…

Wednesday is my birthday, and also the 48th anniversary of the largest Grateful Dead concert ever held: Raceway Park, New Jersey, on September 3, 1977. While the Dead were famous for blowing big events (no one ever talks about their Woodstock performance), the Raceway Park show, with over 107,000 people in attendance, has gone down as one of their best shows from one of their best years.

At the time, it broke the record for the most-attended concert by a single headliner. To create the makeshift concert venue, railway cars were stacked end to end to form barriers.

Two

Jerry Garcia once said of the Dead and Deadheads: “We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.” Which is to say, if you’re not already into the Grateful Dead, there’s a good chance you will never be. This music is honestly often quite awful! There’s something broken in my brain that brings me back to it so often.

But if you want a taste of what that night was like and why it’s so well regarded, the first set’s “Mississippi Half-Step” is a great place to start. The show was commercially released as “Dick’s Picks, Volume 15” (the series named after their first tape archivist, Dick Latvala), so it’s available on the streaming service of your choice if you’re curious in checking it out.

If you already know the Dead and what you’re getting into, on the other hand, then you probably already know that the second set “Eyes of the World” ranks as one of their best performances of that song ever, and that the final hour of the show—the blistering three-song closing of “He’s Gone→Not Fade Away→Truckin’” followed by the encore of “Terrapin Station”—is ‘77 Dead at their absolute best.

Three

Drawing so many people to the relatively small hamlet of Englishtown, NJ created a unique spectacle, even for the Dead. A few years ago, someone unearthed this local broadcast documenting the scene. As the anchor (I haven’t been able to track down his name) says at the top of the segment:

“Piles of garbage remain to be cleared, but the concert featuring the Grateful Dead will leave a much longer lasting impact on the residents of Englishtown Raceway. A three-day traffic jam getting too and from the concert finally cleared up late this morning. Cars had been parked everywhere possible up to ten miles from the concert site.”

Paul Springle, the reporter on the scene, continues:

"Who would be in that audience down there? The Grateful Dead band goes back to the mid 60s with a hardcore following that used to call themselves Deadheads. How many of the half million souls who soaked up the sunshine, smoked the pot, tripped out on the music, and left behind their garbage at Woodstock would show up here—perhaps as middle-aged, somewhat potbellied, stretch-marked senior hippies?”

“But when you look at the faces in the audience they’re almost all too young. Too old to have been totted in a Woodstock backpack but too young to have been there on their own, not by any stretch members of the original Deadheads.”

The rest of that segment is a lot of fun; it has a great interview with Bob Weir, interviews with locals who made hundreds of dollars turning their front lawns into impromptu parking lots, and a bunch of footage from the show.

Four

There were fifty drug overdoses that day, one of which was fatal. It was one of two deaths that day—the other in a traffic accident.

Two babies were also born that day, their mothers airlifted to the hospital by the fleet of medevac helicopters on call for the day.

I was born 3,000 miles away, in Stanford, California, at about 5:06 Pacific time. I’m still trying to figure out if I can track down the start times for the concert, to see if I can pinpoint what they were playing when I was born.

 Five

Researching this show the other day, I came across this LinkedIn post, about how listening to the 9/3/77 “Not Fade Away” can help you CRUSH your professional goals!

Look, on the one hand, I think it’s fine if soulless business guru types enjoy The Grateful Dead. It’s nice to see them get into music that is often off-tempo or out-of-tune, consisting of cacophonous train wrecks just as often as it does of exciting segues and new directions, performed by musicians who famously stopped rehearsing after awhile, were prone to near-constantly flubbing the lyrics, were encamped in warring factions of acidheads and cokeheads. People who listen to this shit and make blog posts about it on LinkedIn, who can only think in terms of monetization and productivity, should really learn to chill the fuck out and to appreciate the aesthetics of the half-assed and the broken. The kintsugi of music, so to speak.

Surrendering yourself to the “Not Fade Away” from that day is not about putting together an action item list. Its essence is not found in bullet points. It’s a raucous, chugging jam that takes time to build, nearly falls apart at multiple intervals, is deeply repetitive to the point of absurdity, and enthralls precisely because of its refusal to be anything but itself.

It’s good because it sucks, and there aren’t any lessons to be learned from that.

Happy birthday to me.