April 4, 1976 Page Auditorium, Duke University, Durham, NC: Jerry Garcia Band

( the entrance of Page Auditorium at Duke University by night--photo February 11, 2011)

The Grateful Dead were one of the first bands to define the modern rock touring circuit beyond the confines of California. Groups like the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat and Iron Butterfly crisscrossed America with their amplifiers and light shows, carving out a path for future rock and rollers in old dance halls, Municipal Auditoriums and College gymnasiums. Although many of the venues they played became bigger and newer as time marched forward, groups like the Dead helped create those rock markets one concert at a time.

As the Dead got larger in the 1970s and expanded their reach, a peculiar pattern emerged. Jerry Garcia started to tour with his own aggregations, and to a large extent Garcia climbed the same ladder the Dead had built, playing smaller places in familiar territory. As Garcia became an attraction in his own right, the venues got larger and the territory got wider. However, Jerry Garcia's early National tours are surprisingly thinly documented, just as the early days of the Dead were. Often tapes circulate, but little is known about the actual concerts and the circumstances surrounding them. One such "lost" show was the Jerry Garcia Band appearance at tiny Page Auditorium at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina on April 4, 1976. Although tapes of both the early and late shows have endured, almost nothing else seems to be known about this evening. This post will look at the Page Auditorium show as an indicator of how the Garcia Band was replicating the Grateful Dead's touring strategy of the early 70s, and will speculate on just how much the Duke show was at the outer frontiers in long ago 1976 (update: amazingly, a Commenter has discovered that this show was videotaped by the student-run TV station, and remains archived in the Duke library. I wonder if the video has been seen since it was shot?)

Duke University and Durham, North Carolina
Washington Duke and his family became staggeringly wealthy through the ownership of American Tobacco. The operation was centered in Durham, NC, a city invented in the 1850s as an intersection point for several railroads. With American Tobacco as the centerpiece, Durham was an important financial and industrial city in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Duke family invested heavily in textiles to make cotton bags for their tobacco, and in turn invested in electric power to drive the mills (Duke Energy is a direct corporate descendant), and they had a wide corporate reach in other industries as well.

Washington Duke had encouraged Trinity University to relocate from rural Randolph County to Durham in 1892. In 1924, his son endowed a substantial amount of money to the school, and the institution changed its name to Duke University. Thus Durham, American Tobacco and Duke University were always intimately connected. However, various factors, including anti-trust laws and the Depression caused American Tobacco and Durham to decline in importance from the 1930s onward. Durham entered a long, slow decline. While Duke University still had considerable resources, the school was far out of the mainstream for many years.

In the 21st century, Durham is one corner of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "Triangle," and a linchpin of Research Triangle Park, the Silicon Valley of the New South. Durham promotes itself as "The City Of Medicine," downtown Durham is new and exciting and the region is a desirable destination for relocating Northerners who like organic food. Duke University is a high profile school, with so many students from the Northeast that t-shirts around town say "Duke: The University of Southern New Jersey at Durham" and everyone gets the joke. Duke's aged basketball pavilion, Cameron Indoor Stadium, is a national shrine to the fabled Duke-UNC basketball rivalry, which in itself is a National event.

On October 15, 2010, Duke University hosted a performance of The American Beauty Project tour at Page Auditorium, where various musicians performed songs from Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. None of the pre-show publicity--and there was plenty--mentioned that Jerry Garcia had played the same auditorium 34 years earlier. For a region obsessed with it's own history, such an oversight was surprising. I believe the failure by Duke Performances to refer to the Garcia show at Duke was more simple--no one recalled it, because everyone who went to it has since moved on, and no one else even noticed. In one way, it's almost as if the show happened in an alternate universe, and perhaps in a way it did.

Grateful Dead Touring History 1968-74
The Grateful Dead were a commercial entity as well as an artistic one, even if their initial business model was closer to an 18th century pirate ship than a 20th century entertainer. Nonetheless, since the band made more money touring than recording in the early days, they had to find ways to tour profitably. The group's basic strategy was to perform in places where they were already popular while also taking the time to play smaller and financially riskier shows in places where they were less known, in order to create an audience.The Dead's initial strongholds were the West Coast and major Northeastern cities. Since their equipment mostly traveled by truck, however, the band tended to expand their territory across the county in order to effectively pay for their travel. This in turn created new markets for the band.

The Dead connected the two coasts by traveling along Highway 80, from Utah to Chicago and from Chicago to New York. While they played a fair share of cities not on Highway 80 itself, such as Denver, those cities were located in such a place that they could still follow the path to and from Chicago and New York fairly easily. In so doing, the Dead were replicating the route of the Transcontinental Railroad, whose principal arteries were the Southern Pacific route (from San Francisco to Utah), the Union Pacific (Utah to Chicago) and the New York Central (from Chicago to New York). The pattern of following the railroad is not at all a coincidence, but this Braudelian analysis is the subject of a different line of research. The Dead's only other transcontinental route was in the Southwest, from Los Angeles to Arizona and Texas, and then to New Orleans and Florida. However, this route (mostly following a different Southern Pacific route from Menlo Park to New Orleans) terminated in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing the band to fly North or return home.

As the Dead expanded their footholds in the early 1970s, they got farther and farther from Highway 80, but they were still financially tied to their most profitable touring destinations in major Northeastern cities. By the early 1970s, the Dead had started to work their way down I-95 and I-64, playing shows in Washington, DC, Williamsburg, VA and even once in Roanoke, VA (July 27 '74). By the 1980s, the state of Virginia was usually an essential tour stop for the Dead, but the band was still carving out the territory by playing small places in the early 1970s.

By and large, however, the Dead's 70s fanbase was in not in the South. Whether or not the South of the 60s would have been friendly to the Dead--probably not--is a moot point, since the Dead rarely got near enough to make an attempt. The Dead did play a rock festival at the Duke University football stadium (Wallace Wade) with the Beach Boys on April 24, 1971, but they were clearly flown in for that, without their sound system in tow, so it was not part of any plan.

The one real Grateful Dead outpost in the South was the city of Atlanta. The Dead had flown there to play a free concert in Atlanta on July 6, 1969, and this gesture seems not to have been forgotten in Atlanta. Atlanta was probably one of the most productive instances of the Dead's willingness to play for free creating a paying audience. The Dead regularly played Atlanta throughout their entire career, in relatively large places. However, as I have pointed out numerous times, playing a show in a distant place often requires a show in between. As a result, a major show in Atlanta at the Omni, on December 12, 1973, presaged two shows in North Carolina, at Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke on December 8 and at Charlotte Coliseum on December 10. Since the prior show was in Cleveland in December 6, a brief glance at a map shows that North Carolina shows were prudent stops even if they didn't make financial sense. The Dead would return to North Carolina in 1976 (Sep 23 at Cameron Indoor) and steadily built the territory thereafter, expanding their Southeastern audience to the state.

Jerry Garcia National Tours
Although Jerry Garcia's first East Coast shows without the Dead were as a guest with Howard Wales, surprisingly enough his first real National tour was with Old And In The Way in the Summer of 1973. As JGMF has shown, Old And In The Way were actually booked at a bluegrass festival at Camp Springs, NC on September 1 or 2, 1973, 50 miles Northwest of Durham. However, fascinating as this must have been, while Garcia's name was advertised, the Bluegrass Festival would not have had the impact of a Garcia/Saunders performance. Exactly what kind of impact it did have remains unknown, but there is some hints that noisy hippies coming to see Garcia did not fit at bluegrass festivals (update: in any case, JGMF comments that Old And In The Way were advertised, but did not appear to have played).

When Garcia started to tour outside of California with his own bands, he followed the pattern established by the Dead. Most of the earliest shows in 1973 and 1974 were in the Northeast, in places like New York City. When the Dead went on hiatus and the touring got more serious, Garcia and Saunders generally stuck near to Highway 80. The one really striking exception to this was a three night stand at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta, where the Legion Of Mary played three nights (two shows each) from April 15-17, 1975. Given that the group clearly flew to the shows, they must have been profitable indeed.

By early 1976, Garcia had consciously commercialized his touring, as he needed the cash flow. His group was now named after himself, and he had a new album to promote (Reflections). While his Spring 1976 tour bounced around the Country, Garcia generally seemed to be sticking to places where a big following had been established. Garcia himself was a true rock star, but he had no real following as a solo performer, and he was hardly assured of sellouts in all but the most familiar places. Thus it is not surprising that the last show on the April '76 leg of the tour was April 5 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. There's every reason to think the Atlanta show was a relatively lucrative booking.

Since the JGB were playing Saturday, April 3 in Washington, DC, touring economics would recommend a show, any show, on Sunday April 4, at a place between DC and Atlanta. Durham is the approximate midway point between the two cities, conveniently located on I-85, just three hours South of Richmond. Which is how, I am fairly certain, the Jerry Garcia Band came to be playing two shows in sleepy Durham, NC on a Sunday night, in a tiny college auditorium. Not because there was a big audience, or any distinct desire to play there, but the band needed a gig and Duke University was conveniently located. Durham was nowhere then, with tobacco long declined, no minor league baseball team (the new Durham Bulls would not move there until 1980) and--whatever anyone tells you--no meaningful rivalry with the University of North Carolina basketball team (don't get me started--Dick Vitale and ESPN largely invented the rivalry in the early '80s).

 ( a view of the Page Auditorium stage from the lower balcony, stage right, February 11, 2011. The equipment was set up for the Wayne Shorter Quartet [who were epic, by the way, but that is for a different blog])

April 4, 1976 Page Auditorium, Duke University, Durham, NC: Jerry Garcia Band
All Page Auditorium shows are campus sponsored, so students would have gotten in very cheaply. In fact, the show may have been tied to some campus event. Duke University has never lacked for funds, so whatever the math of the attendance (1232 seats turned over twice), Garcia's fee may have been supplemented by University funds. Most of the people in attendance were probably Duke students, happy enough to see a rock star, but probably happy enough to have something to do on a Sunday night, and I doubt most of them were any kind of Deadhead (at least beforehand). Probably a few outsiders got in, since we do have a tape, but I suspect the fact that there are no known press reports or advertisements suggests that the Garcia Band show was a Duke event, not really directed at the community.

Page Auditorium is a very narrow, deep building, with a steep balcony covering most of the main floor seats. The rows are only 30 seats wide, however, and with the very high ceiling the building has a very intimate feel. The building seems to have been built in the 1930s or so, and is more reminiscent of a church than a dry modern auditorium or a converted music theater. It's a great place to see anyone, with a great sound to the room, and the Jerry Garcia Band must have lifted that place into orbit

A bunch of Duke students probably had a great time on April 4, 1976, and a bunch of other ones probably had at least a memorable one (not counting those with no memories at all). However, they all graduated (I hope), and Duke students rarely stick around Durham, certainly not in those days. Thus somewhere out there in America are some Duke students with warm, if fuzzy memories of seeing the Jerry Garcia Band in a tiny campus auditorium. However, they aren't around Durham anymore, so there is no local memory of the show, and indeed no National memory either. Durham is a different place now, more than willing to celebrate the music of Jerry Garcia, not realizing he already passed through, one Sunday night long ago.