By Pat Christenson
Vegas Event Insider is a weekly blog covering the history and stories about the Las Vegas event industry.
The Grateful Dead: Opening Acts
“Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been“
The Early Years: Growing the Dead’s Vegas Presence
The first year of the Grateful Dead’s success gave everyone the confidence to keep growing the shows. In the second year, a third date was added and the capacity increased to 32,500. Again, all tickets sold out by noon. Steve Miller was the first of the opening acts for the Dead. The desert wind blew the clouds away to reveal a night sky when Garcia played the first chords to “Attics of My Life.” Long after the shows, people were still dancing on the stadium floor and out in the parking lots.
The third year in 1993, Sting was the opening act, and all three shows had continuous lightning all around the stadium, but little rain and no lightning directly over the fans. Even more bizarre, I witnessed one fan’s obsession with the Dead during Sting’s set. While he was singing “Heavy Clouds No Rain,” a fan was sitting on a car just outside the stadium when the car was hit by lightning, throwing him 10 feet in the air and onto the blacktop. Paramedics tried to place him in an ambulance, but he refused; he had a ticket only for that day. Barsotti assured him that if he went to the hospital, he’d have a ticket for the last show. The fan not only received the ticket, but a backstage pass where he met the band.
Another story was of an even more mystical nature, common to the Dead experience. At one point, Mike Enoch, the stadium’s operations manager, was standing on the top of the press box with Bob Barsotti when a double rainbow synced perfectly on drummer Mickey Hart’s eyes. Barsotti turned to Enoch and said, “Bill did that.” Bill Graham had been killed a year earlier at age 60 in a helicopter crash in northern California; he’d been on a mission to promote a benefit concert for the victims of the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm.
Heatwaves, Parking Lots, and the Party That Wouldn’t Stop
Year four, with ticket prices up a few bucks to $30, was complicated by routing, which forced the dates into mid-June and the shows to start around dusk. To make matters worse, the high temperature each day reached 111 degrees, a couple of degrees off the record high. The early-evening winds kicking up in the parking lots made the searing heat even more debilitating. Of course, the heat stifled, but didn’t ruin, the party, as four huge onstage fans (the rotary-blade, not the tie-dyed, kind) cooled the members of the Dead, and Traffic, which opened the show.
The scene in the parking lots continued to grow. An estimated 20,000 fans without tickets created crowd-management issues for police, especially after the show when they were trying to empty the lots.
After the 1994 shows, Jerry Garcia took in Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage and met the two magicians. Garcia was impressed that fans of the illusionists came to them; they didn’t have to tour. Well-known for his drug addiction and failing health, Jerry found the idea of a residency attractive. He tried to convince the band to buy the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco so that the fans, not the band, had to travel. The band wasn’t supportive.
Garcia’s Passing and the Legacy Left Behind
In 1995, the dates moved back to May 19-21 where the high temperature was 20 degrees lower than the year before. More than 45,000 tickets were sold for each show. Dave Matthews Band was the first jam band to open for the Dead in Las Vegas. They were just breaking across the country and treated the 45,000 attendees to a different set each night.
Some fans in the crowd saw intimations of the end of the era—“bad vibes everywhere,” according to one. But the crowds continued the fun inside, at one point starting the “wave,” with a normally unflappable Garcia encouraging them, and later, tortillas and marshmallows were flying everywhere.
While the true Deadheads, the ticket buyers, were cooperative and friendly, we also had to plan for the close to 25,000 others who were now gathering early and staying late. The parking-lot scene was spiraling out of control with people who had little or nothing to do with the event. While most of the scene was harmless—vendors selling jewelry, clothing, T-shirts, sandwiches, and water—there was also an element that spawned bigger problems.
Sam Boyd Silver Bowl’s outer fence worked well as a first line of defense against gatecrashers. At the same time, the parking lots required as much security as inside the show. In fact, the unruly scene outside the stadium in 1995, the fifth year of the series, probably would have forced the Dead and city officials to reexamine the crowd management of the shows or discontinue them altogether.
But Jerry Garcia died in 1995, eight days after his 53rd birthday, having suffered a heart attack in his room in a rehab hospital. The Grateful Dead shows in Las Vegas, and everywhere else, were over.
In the end, the Dead had a huge impact on the city. They brought hordes of people to Las Vegas, almost like New Year’s Eve in the spring. And for the most part, Vegas could handle the Deadheads, all the unreconstructed-hippie hangers-on, and the crowd followers. But the most significant outcome was the way in which the concerts accelerated the pace of large touring acts playing Vegas. The success of the Grateful Dead gave Sam Boyd Silver Bowl credibility. We wasted no time promoting its newfound drawing power.
The aerial photographs of a sold-out stadium abutted against Sunrise Mountain was a great story to tell the live-music industry. We had a hook.
Coming Next Week:
The Grateful Dead Close Sam Boyd Stadium
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