Venues That Shaped the Grateful Dead: Ice Palace and Aladdin

In 1971, the Grateful Dead played the Ice Palace in Las Vegas and then the Aladdin, before they grew big enough to fill Sam Boyd Stadium.

The Ice Palace

When it comes to live music history and Vegas, there is little I can’t report on. I found nothing on The Grateful Dead at the Ice Palace until I ran across a column by Mike Weatherford. Here is the entire column:

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.”

-Mike Weatherford

The Aladdin

In 1986, the Dead had been playing the Aladdin for five years. Promoter Bob Barsotti described the first year they performed: “After the shows, the fans made a beeline for the casino table games: It was a sea of tie-dyed Deadheads.” The next year when the shows ended, the fans were shown directly to the parking lots. It became the policy for all rock shows at the Aladdin.

The Aladdin 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.

The 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 later returned.

Fueling the band’s popularity was their first hit “Touch of Grey,” which attracted a younger demographic.

Road to Sam Boyd Stadium

My trips to the Aladdin became annual events in which I asked Bob Barsotti the same question: “Are the Dead ready to graduate to the biggest building in the market, Thomas and Mack Center?” They were very particular about the venues they played, usually choosing to underplay the market. Still, considering their popularity, we believed TMC would be the next logical step. Unfortunately, they found it cavernous and sterile.

But then, in the late ’80s, the Dead were having a hard time finding venues to play in Los Angeles. Many of the band’s problems were caused by Deadheads overrunning commercial sites near the venues. They camped on private property, relieved themselves in the open, littered, set fires, and created traffic jams.

That gave us the idea to pitch the Sam Boyd Stadium. Bill Graham was skeptical, but he sent a production crew to check it out. They were immediately entranced by the contrast of the mountainous terrain surrounding the venue. In addition, the location, eight miles east of the Strip, separated the Deadhead scene from the city.

The most tickets the Dead had ever sold for a show in Vegas was 7,000, for one night at the Aladdin. For the Sam Boyd shows to make financial sense, they’d need to sell out two 30,000-seat performances, nearly 10 times the previous sales.

Unfortunately, Vegas’ overall concert track record wasn’t much of an endorsement: The biggest concert up until that time had sold 15,000 tickets. But Bob Barsotti had a good feeling about the stadium. He just had to convince Graham and the band.