Reflecting on the Grateful Dead’s history in Las Vegas
Won't be the same, but it will have to be close enough.
They probably say that in every city visited by Dead & Company, the latest iteration of the Grateful Dead. And we won't stop them.
But we know it's true in Las Vegas. Fine as it may be to see John Mayer onstage this weekend with three of the "core four" — Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart — two key differences go beyond the obvious absence of the late Jerry Garcia and the living Phil Lesh, the bassist who made last summer's "Fare Thee Well" shows an official reunion/farewell.
1. No one will blink at the sight of tie-dye in a casino, this time the MGM Grand Garden on Friday and Saturday. Not so when the Dead played the Aladdin in the early '80s, an era much closer to the paranoid spirit of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
2. The indoor arena won't be a city unto itself on the edge of the desert, as Sam Boyd Stadium was for a memorable five-year run in the early '90s.
This weekend may reassure fans that the band will always carry on in some form (The summer stadium shows included Trey Anastasio and Bruce Hornsby. This weekend's band includes keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and bassist Oteil Burbridge). But we'll use the occasion for a year-by-year look back at the shows where the chilly winds don't blow.
The Ice Palace
The Grateful Dead is one of rock's most well-chronicled bands, thanks to obsessive fans and an open policy toward recording shows and swapping tapes in the pre-Internet era. So more is known about the Dead's show in the Ice Palace in Commercial Center than those of other legendary bands, such as Led Zeppelin, who also played there.
You can find audio of the March 29 show online, and a poster for the gig reportedly fetched $2,599. But the coolest symmetry of the evening was the opening act: a young band called Santana.
"It was scary because you could feel what people who lived there thought about long-haired people — they weren't letting hippies get anywhere near the casinos back then," current Las Vegas resident and recurring headliner Carlos Santana recalls in his memoir, "The Universal Tone."
The show was promoted — and the early Santana spotted — by Dick Lepre, who commuted back and forth between Berkeley and Las Vegas for his job. "The only negativity I found was that the convention center wasn't willing to do it," he says.
Instead, about 2,000 people stood or sat on plywood that covered the skating rink. "Las Vegas had a reputation as a place where you couldn't put on a successful rock concert," Lepre says. "In the sense that I didn't make money, I guess I tried and failed also, but we helped to lay the ground ... . It was just a cultural change. We were probably just a little too early for it."
The Aladdin
The concert hall once connected to the Aladdin still exists. It's now The Axis at Planet Hollywood. But everything beyond its doors has changed.
The theater was down a long hallway to the main casino, where Wayne Newton was the resident showroom headliner. The hallway had outside exit doors, allowing the Aladdin to send concert audiences straight to the parking lot for many all-ages shows to follow.
That first Dead concert, on Aug. 31, 1981, "was the one and only Vegas show where they exited the crowd from the show into the casino. A Vegas casino had never seen thousands of trippin' Dead Heads," a Dead.net user named Valerie Stevenson noted of the show.
"It was an incredibly weird juxtaposition," Dead historian Blair Jackson remembered a few years later. Aladdin officials were "pretty horrified."
Remember, these were hippies, genuine dirty hippies, in the Reagan era. "The Preppy Handbook" had been published the year before. "Family Ties" with Michael J. Fox as young Reaganite Alex Keaton would debut the next year.
No wonder the Dead's first song was "Feel Like a Stranger." Other fans on Dead.net remember hearing band members paged to the white courtesy phone (pages were near constant in the pre-cellphone era) and spotting Weir at the slot machines. Another remembers Garcia having to be helped off the stage but returning to get a second wind.
Perhaps the band felt less like strangers when it returned in March 1983 and April 1984.
Silver Bowl/Sam Boyd Stadium
Things changed for the Dead in 1987 when its "In the Dark" album went mainstream. The traveling fan caravan was reenergized with a younger audience that romanticized the hippie era, and the following swelled until the Dead became a stadium act.
Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham came to Las Vegas to see Frank Sinatra, and wondered how many Dead Heads would visit Las Vegas. The challenge was to "try not to be factory-ized" and "to come up with different kinds of ideas," he explained in 1991.
But Pat Christenson, then director of the Thomas & Mack Center and underutilized Silver Bowl, had been talking up the stadium for years. "We had 'em at hello with the stadium," he says now. "It was outside of the city" — then close to the edge of developed suburbs — "and a lot of their problems were because of the Dead Heads being around neighborhoods. And they loved the mix ... you were playing Vegas, but you really weren't."
The two shows in April 1991 sold out 39,000 tickets well in advance, making it the first time the stadium ever reached capacity and the largest entertainment event in Nevada history to that date.
"Two such extreme parts of Americana coming together," Jackson noted. But somehow it clicked. For five strange years. If the band wasn't always at its best, and you had to squint to see them under the shaded stage, the crowd was its own show and the opening act was a headliner in its own right.
1991: The opening act was, symbolically enough, Santana. The Dead was joined by Bruce Hornsby on piano, while it helped break in new keyboardist Vince Welnick.
From our pages: "But nothing went terribly wrong in Las Vegas' first stadium show in a decade. And long about 6 p.m. — when the sun finally dropped below the west rim of the stadium to even out the shadows within, the wind had died down to a cool breeze, and the Grateful Dead broke into 'Uncle John's Band' — things seemed mighty right indeed."
1992: Things went so well the first year — fans even "cleaned up the field for us," Christenson noted at the time — the party expanded to three days at the end of May, with the Steve Miller Band opening this time.
1993: Sting, at the height of his "Ten Summoner's Tales" album, nearly stole the mid-May shows. Nearly, because that honor went to a downpour and lightning strike in the parking lot. "I turn around and see this guy flying through the air. He got hit by lightning," Christenson recalls. "It hit the car he was on ... . They hauled him away and the band was really concerned. It turned out he was OK. They brought him back for the next day's show."
1994: "Dead at Night" was the hook for the first of the Sam Boyd Stadium shows (by then it had been renamed) to start at 7:30 and use video screens. Good thing, as it was late June and the band came on at the end of a 112-degree day. Fellow psychedelic war veterans of Traffic played in the worst of the heat.
1995: Call it the "Ripple" effect. By 1995, the Dead's popularity had spilled into a new force dubbed "jam bands." One of them, the Dave Matthews Band, became a million seller by the time it opened the Dead weekend in mid-May.
"The amount of fans who didn't have tickets became a problem," Christenson remembers. "I would guess the last year we had 20,000 or 25,000 outside the stadium."
But it all came to an end when Garcia died that August. Or did it?
The legacy continues this weekend on a Strip where a Dead Head won't turn a head.
"Those shows were really a turning point in Vegas getting touring acts," said Christenson, who now heads Las Vegas Events. "I remember taking that picture (of a full stadium) and sending it to all the agents. It was how we ended up with the Eagles and U2. We had demonstrated Las Vegas could draw stadium-level concerts."
Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.
