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| Sunshine Daydream, the cd from the Grateful Dead's legendary performance on August 27, 1972 at the Renaissance Fairgrounds in Veneta, OR |
The Grateful Dead began in San Francisco, and staked out their first beachhead in Manhattan. Over the decades, the band was popular in some places, like New Jersey and the Southeast, and weaker in others, like Texas or Los Angeles. I would suspect, however, that on a population-adjusted basis, the Dead's greatest success was in the state of Oregon. Until relatively recently, Oregon was thinly-populated and not a major economic engine. It was a pretty place between Northern California and Seattle, with laid back people and lousy weather.Yet the Dead's connections to Oregon go far beyond a reliable concert booking no matter the day of the week, or the time of the year:
- Ken Kesey, whose LSD evangelism was a big part of the initial Grateful Dead ethos, was from Springfield, OR. The Dead's only out-of-state Acid Test was in Portland, OR.
- Thanks to Kesey, and fellow prankster Mike Hagen, the anchors for the Grateful Dead road crew came from modest cattle towns in Eastern Oregon. Ramrod (Larry Shurtliff), John Hagen (Mike's brother) and Rex Jackson were from Pendleton (Rex) and Hermiston (Ramrod and Hagen). The "Workingman's Dead" Marin County Ranchero look of boots, ponchos and big hats came directly from the Oregon crew.
- Since Portland and Eugene were in between Seattle and San Francisco, the Dead played regular gigs there whenever the band played Seattle or Vancouver. These gigs both kept the band afloat while boosting the nascent rock scene in Oregon.
- Not only did Oregon's location ensure some good bookings, something about Oregon lead to some truly epic performances there. The most legendary such show was the Springfield Creamery Benefit for the Kesey family dairy on August 27, 1972, but there were plenty of other great shows.
- When the Grateful Dead undid their "hiatus" and returned to live touring in 1976, they needed a stealth warmup, and could have played anywhere. They chose Portland. The Dead played lucrative shows in Oregon ever since, and played great music, too.
This post will review the arc of the unique relationship between the Grateful Dead and the state of Oregon.
In the early19th century, Oregon was vaguely and jointly administered by the English and American governments. It was mainly a source of furs and other resources. While Native Americans had lived in Oregon for centuries, the first permanent settlement by Europeans was Fort Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, established in 1811. There were a few other settlements, such as Fort Vancouver, established in 1825 on the border of what is now Washington State and Oregon (on the Washington side).
There was not even a government in Oregon until 1842, when meetings were
held to form provisional government that began in that year. The Oregon territory was annexed by the United States in 1848. The Oregon Territory included all of the present-day states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, plus parts of Montana and Wyoming. The Southwestern part of the Oregon Territory became the state of Oregon in 1859.
Oregon has always been intimately connected to California, and particularly San Francisco. The Oregon Trail was initially the principal route for California-bound settlers, going back to 1842. Legend has it that when gold was discovered in California in 1849, most of the Oregon population headed South, and the town of Portland was left with only three people. Generally speaking, Californians have been returning to Oregon ever since.
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| A map showing the state of Oregon ca. 1859 (lower left). The balance of the Oregon Territory became the Washington Territory, which included the modern-day states of Washington and Idaho, as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming. Washington became a state in 1889, and Idaho in 1890. |
Seattle and Portland
Portland has always been the biggest city in Oregon, and though it is 120 miles inland, it is largely a seaport town. The Columbia River is navigable all the way to Portland, so lumber and other resources were easily shipped out to the Pacific and down the coast. The Columbia divides the states of Oregon and Washington. Californians, and others, often treat Seattle and Portland as a single unit, but historically that has not really been true. Although both cities were principally seaports, they were economically linked to different regions.
Seattle, WA was the Western Terminus of James Hill's Great Northern Railroad line--Deadheads will recall the Hunter line from "Jack Straw," "Great Northern, out of Cheyenne, from sea to shining sea"-running from Seattle to St. Paul. Seattle was the link to Asia, and St. Paul was the link to the Midwest and the Great Lakes, so commodities and manufactured goods could indeed be shipped all over the world.
Oregon, however, was linked by rail to California, via the Southern Pacific. The Transcontinental Railroad, following the path of today's Interstate 80, went from Oakland to the Sierras via Sacramento. Right before Sacramento, there was a junction at Davisville (now Davis, CA), and trains could head North to Oregon. Thus, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Oregon's crops and commodities were shipped South to California and from there to the middle of the country via Southern Pacific.
The Columbia River kept Seattle and Portland in separate economies throughout the 20th century, initially because of railroads, which in turn created separate economies. Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington, beyond the reach of the Columbia, had a more integrated economy (the Great Northern reached California through Eastern Oregon, but the Grateful Dead story is more about Portland than the more rugged Eastern part of the state). Oregon, and particularly Portland, had been economically tied to California since the mid-19th century, in a way that Seattle would never be. So in that sense, some of the seemingly random synergy between the Grateful Dead and Oregon was not random at all.
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| An aerial view of the Vanport, OR flood in 1948. Young Robert Burns could be in the photo, maybe. |
VanPort
During World War 2, coastal cities all over the country became industrial boomtowns, building merchant ships. East Coast shipyards were working flat out building Navy warships, so other places were built up to build much simpler transport ships that were needed in greater numbers. On the East Coast, places like Mobile, AL and Wilmington, NC became big shipyards. On the West, transport ships were mainly built in the San Francisco Bay Area and in greater Portland, OR. Workers moved from the Midwest and Southeast to the West, many of them African Americans. The Bay Area shipyards (in Oakland, Richmond, Hunters Point, Vallejo and Marin City) caused a huge music explosion as a byproduct.
Less well-known, but nonetheless prominent were the shipyards just West of Portland. The Kaiser company, prominent shipbuilders in Oakland, set up a shipyard in the Columbia River. The workers, mostly newly-arrived, many of them African American, mostly lived in shoddy new housing at a place called Vanport. Vanport was so named because it was between Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA, which was just across the river. Vanport boomed with well paid workers during the war, and Portland did too.
After the war, however, when the shipbuilding went away, Vanport declined. The already weak housing stock was not improved. During the war, Vanport had a population of 40,000 (40% African-American), making it Oregon's second largest city. By 1947, the shipyards had closed but there were many returning WW2 veterans, so the population was still 18,500. Vanport had been used as emergency housing for the war effort, so everybody had ignored the fact that it was built on a flood plain. In May 1948, heavy rains caused the entire community to flood, and many already poor families lost pretty much everything. The family of young Robert Burns, for example, then just 7 years old, was abandoned by his father. Young Robert lived with foster families for a few years, but returned to live with his mother when he was 11. He took his mother's new husband's name as his own.
Robert Hunter didn't forget the trauma of the Vanport flood. He wrote "Here Comes Sunshine" as an homage to the relief he felt when the floods finally subsided.
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| Many of the Grateful Dead road crew came from Eastern Oregon cattle towns like Hermiston (pictured above, from a vintage postcard). It wasn't Berkeley. |
Ken Kesey and Pendleton
Oregon is a larger state than most people realize, but there aren't many people in most of it. Coastal Oregon is rugged and beautiful, but there isn't really any economy and few people live there. Eastern Oregon, by contrast, is flatter but not really that hospitable, either. Resource extraction, usually in the form of logging, has always been a big part of Oregon's economy. Even before the railroads, the various rivers allowed Oregon lumber to get to the Pacific Ocean for export. Cattle ranching came later to Eastern Oregon, when railroads allowed the otherwise inhospitable land to be used for profitable ranching.
The Oregon that everyone is familiar with is a comparatively thin strip in the middle of the state. Portland, the largest city, was at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. It wasn't huge, though, having a population of around 370,000 throughout the 1960s. Eugene, the site of the University of Oregon, is 100 miles South of Portland, and while not really the center of the state. it was accessible from all directions. In the 1960s, Eugene had a population of just about 60,000, hardly even a city. In between the two was the state Capital at Salem, with about the population of Eugene. Aside from these three cities, there weren't any other major population centers in Oregon.
Ken Kesey's family came from Springfield, just outside of Eugene. Kesey had graduated from the U. of O in 1957, followed by going to Stanford University on a writing fellowship. His debut novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, was published in 1962 and was an instant success. With Kesey already in Palo Alto, and participating in LSD experiments, the Merry Pranksters and Acid Tests weren't far behind.
Kesey was a University graduate and a writer, but his family were Dairy farmers, so Kesey was on the cusp of both the intellectual world and an agricultural one. While many of the Pranksters were wayward intellectuals, at least one of them, Mike Hagen, was from a ranching family in Hermiston, OR, near Pendleton (from where we get the checkered Pendleton work shirts). Through Hagen, one Larry Shurtliff came down from Oregon to join the Pranksters in Mexico in late 1966. In 1967, Kesey recommended Shurtliff, whom he had christened "Ramrod" (for Pranksterish reasons). Shurtliff (b.1945-2006) would anchor the Grateful Dead crew until the very end of the line.
The Kesey/Ramrod connection extended the Eastern Oregon population to include John Hagen, Joe Winslow and Rex Jackson, along with several others. The Oregon crew members mostly came from either Pendleton (Rex Jackson and Joe Winslow) or the nearby cattle ranching town of Hermiston (Ramrod, Hagen and Sonny Heard). When the band members moved out of San Francisco to more rural addresses in Marin County, it was the crew members, that had grown up ranching, who knew how to fix fences and ride horses. Now, sure, not much ranching probably took place, but the crew members were comfortable out in the country, building fires and shooting off guns.
With the frame of Oregon's history in mind, let's review all the times the Grateful Dead and its members played Oregon in the band's first decade of existence.
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| Although this photo from August 1963 is from Camp Meeker, CA (near Yosemite), it was probably typical of the mass folk ensembles like The Bay City Minstrels (JG 2-r, David Nelson far right) |
Prehistory: The Bay City Minstrels in Oregon, 1963
It is symbolic, if not really significant, that Jerry Garcia's first performances outside of California were in Oregon. At the time, folk music was popular among college students, although not the type of old-timey and bluegrass music favored by purists like Jerry Garcia. One compromise was to form fairly large ensembles to perform easy-to-digest folk songs, while allowing sub-groups to perform some more specialized numbers. Groups like The New Christy Minstrels and the AuGoGo Singers were popular acts, touring around, recording and appearing on TV.
One such little known ensemble was "The Bay City Minstrels." It appeared to be about 10 performers who did a few numbers together, probably at the beginning and end of shows. In between, it seems that the performers did numbers in smaller groups, and possibly solo as well. One such sub-group was The Black Mountain Boys, with Jerry Garcia, David Nelson and Eric Thompson. Presumably, the trio provided the musical backing for the ensemble numbers, and did their own bluegrass set (or sets) somewhere in the middle.
The ensemble toured the Pacific Northwest in Fall 1963. Fellow scholar Brian Miksis has tracked down two of the dates.
November 2, 1963 Eugene Hotel, Eugene, OR: Black Mountain Boys (Saturday)
(Garcia, Nelson, Thompson; Bay City Minstrels evening hootenanny performance following SJSU vs. U. of Orgeon football game; also Sherry Snow and Songdivers)
November 3, 1963 Auditorium, Medford High School, Medford, OR: Black Mountain Boys (Sunday)
(Garcia, Nelson, Thompson; Bay City Minstrels afternoon hootenanny performance; also Sherry Snow and Songdivers; Medford Times article)
January 1 (?), 1966 Beaver Hall, Portland, OR: Portland Acid Test
The Portland Acid Test definitely happened, but when it happened is another issue. Following Prankster logic, it would seem that it would have been on a Saturday night, but that would make it either Christmas 1965 or New Years Day 1966. It could even have been as late as January 7 or 14, but then you have to make sense of the Matrix dates around that time. Everyone seems to agree that there were snowy conditions in Portland, and that points towards New Year's Day. Keep in mind that all of the Grateful Dead/Pranksters crowd had no real family connections, so being out of town for the holidays was no big deal. The exception may have been Ken Kesey, but of course his family actually was in Oregon.
Beaver Hall was a small room at 425 NW Glisan Street that could be rented fairly easily. It was used occasionally for local Oregon rock shows in the later 60s and into the 70s. I did find a reference, however, that said the Portland Acid Test was at a different Beaver Hall on the other side of town:
Many of you will fondly remember Beaver Hall on NW Glisan. But, did you know there was once another place named Beaver Hall near SE Hawthorne around 1510 SE 9th Ave? And, it was at this Beaver Hall that Ken Kesey's Portland acid test took place. City directory listings back up several memories of the event. I love research projects:
From George Walker: "Well, for starters, there was only one Portland Acid Test, in December '65. I don't know the exact date, but I don't believe it was on Christmas."
From Joe Uris: "I was at the famous Acid Test. In fact, I hold the original acid test poster. It was at an upstairs hall, I think off of Hawthorne in a place I’d never been before or since. In those days, in order to have a dance with underage people, you had to have a matron. And they had this black woman who was a very nice lady but she had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. And they had spiked various things with LSD which I thought was not responsible. The Warlocks which later became the Grateful Dead were there and the movies were playing endlessly."
Once 1965 turned into 1966, the Warlocks turned into the Grateful Dead, and Acid Tests aside, they started looking for paying bookings. Initially, like any band they started out locally. The group moved their headquarters to Los Angeles in February and March of 1966, but they did not take a true road trip until July, 1966. The Grateful Dead went to Vancouver, British Columbia and played a three-day weekend Trips Festival (July 29-31), followed by a Friday night concert (August 5). In between, they played their first free show in the park (in Stanley Park on August 3), inaugurating an important Grateful Dead tradition. The band flew to Vancouver, however, so they did not stop anywhere on the way home.
July 13, 1967 Pacific National Exhibition Agrodome, Vancouver, BC: Grateful Dead/Daily Flash
July 14-15, 1967 Dante's Inferno, Vancouver, BC: Grateful Dead/Collectors/Painted Ship
July 16, 1967 Golden Gardens Beach, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead (afternoon free show)
July 16, 1967 Eagle's Auditorium, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead/Daily Flash/Magic Fern
By mid-1967, the Dead had released their debut album on Warner Brothers, and were nationally infamous. Relatively few people outside of San Francisco had heard the band's music, but they were known. The band had already played Manhattan, and now they had a chance to play the Pacific Northwest. The group has Thursday, Friday and Saturday night bookings in Vancouver, and a Sunday night show in Seattle. The band shared some dates with the Daily Flash, Seattle's leading psychedelic guitar band. Being the Dead, they also played a Sunday. afternoon free concert on Puget Sound. I'll just say--the Dead have ruled Seattle ever since.
A word about the structure of this post--in order to understand the dynamics of Grateful Dead shows in Oregon, I have to list many other Pacific Northwest shows for context. To keep this post manageable, however, I won't talk much about the economics of shows in Seattle and Vancouver.
Portland had a thriving music scene in the 1960s, of a sort, but the economics were very much at odds with anywhere else on the West Coast. For one thing, music was not allowed anywhere that alcohol was served. So--no bar bands in Portland (apparently this was a legacy of the rather wild years of WW2). This also meant, however, that it was tough for bands to make a living in Oregon. Throughout the Pacific Northwest in the 60s, there had been a teenage rock and roll dance scene, generally centered around Tacoma, WA. Groups like Paul Revere and The Raiders and The Wailers were very popular nationwide. But Portland was just a satellite of the Tacoma scene.
Original music in 60s Portland mostly folk music, played in coffee shops. When bands started to form, they played in coffee shops, because they were not allowed to play in bars. Thus, on one hand the Portland scene wasn't driven by the need to play Top 40 hits for drinkers, but on the other hand there was no upside to being an electric band in Portland with no steady paying gigs.
Paradoxically, by 1967 Portland had a thriving, if tiny, psychedelic ballroom scene. If you wanted to play or hear live, electric rock and roll, you couldn't go to a bar. In one way, that was fine since most rock fans back then weren't even of drinking age. But coffee shops were simply too small to sustain the economics of a rock band requiring even minimal equipment and transport. A folk singer can hitchhike with his guitar, but a four piece band needs at least a station wagon to transport some amplifiers, trap drums and electric guitars.
Back in '67, numerous tiny venues in Portland put on rock shows, with weird posters and bands playing "folk-rock." Once in a while, a traveling band from California or Washington would play one of these gigs, since CA-to-WA was a multiple day drive, and they would spend a night in Portland anyway. Why not try and pick up a meal, some weed and a few bucks when there was a chance? Thus Oregon's rock history in 1967 is largely insular, with the unexpected insertion of some well known rock bands. Almost always, the Portland shows were in conjunction with another booking in Seattle or Vancouver.
The Masonic Temple was built in 1925, at 1119 SW Park Avenue at SW Jefferson Street. The Masonic Temple building is now part of the Portland Art Museum (the address is 1219 SW Park). The 4-story building still includes the Grand Ballroom, which is probably a remodeled version of the Ballroom used for rock concerts in the 1960s. The current capacity is about 1000 (per the site), so perhaps up to twice that many could have been squeezed in.The Masonic Temple was a regular, if intermittent venue for Portland rock concerts in the 60s. I do not know if a specific promoter controlled the lease; more likely, the hall was simply for rent.
In particular, the Masonic Temple had a number of high profile Fillmore-type bands in the Summer of 1967, exactly when the Crystal Ballroom was at a low ebb since its founding partners (Mike Magaurn and Whitey Davis) were in absentia that Summer. There seems to have been intermittent concerts throughout the end of the 1960s, but our information is spotty. In this case, the Grateful Dead made their formal Portland debut on a Tuesday night, partway back from the Vancouver and Seattle shows.
The Grateful Dead's true invasion of Oregon began in early 1968. The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service were booked for 7 dates in the Northwest, two in Seattle and five in Oregon. The weekend of shows at Seattle's Eagles Auditorium was in fact the big booking. Eagles Auditorium, at 1416 7th Avenue (at Union St) in downtown Seattle, had been built in 1925. Remarkably, apartments surrounded the ballroom. Eagles was Seattle's Fillmore-equivalent, and the Dead had played there the previous summer (see July 16 above). Now they were back, with Quicksilver in tow. This would have been a lucrative gig, but they needed to get home, so paying shows in Oregon made good sense.
January 29, 1968 College Center Ballroom, Portland State College, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service/PH Phactor Jug Band (Monday)
With a week between relatively big weekend bookings in Seattle and Portland, the Quick and the Dead played some smaller college venues in Oregon. However small some of those college gigs may have been, the bands would have had the same expenses in any case. The Crystal Ballroom in Portland was the major venue, but it was too casually run to have (or to enforce) non-compete clauses at nearby places. The PH Phactor Jug Band, though not a major musical group, was a crucial fulcrum in the social network of
January 30, 1968 EMU Ballroom, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR: Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service/PH Phactor Jug Band/Palace Meat Market (Tuesday)
Eugene was about 112 miles South of Portland, a quick two hours by freeway. Now, of course, we all think nothing of driving two hours to see rock bands we like, but that wasn't a likely scenario back then. Thus Eugene was a separate concert market than Portland. This show was the band's Eugene debut, a city where the band would go on to play many legendary shows. Palace Meat Market was a Portland folk-rock band. There were rock shows at the University of Oregon, of course, but by and large there wasn't really a "rock scene" in Eugene, just in Portland.
The various breaks in the schedule (after Seattle, and then after Eugene) mean that the bands had to stay somewhere. By this time, Ramrod and John Hagen were part of the crew, so they had plenty of Oregon connections. Did any of the band stay with Ken Kesey? Did they all go to Pendleton? Some remarks by John Cipollina in an old Golden Road suggest that they did. That would have been pretty severe culture shock for suburban beatniks like Garcia, Lesh and Weir. Few people inquire what the Dead members did between shows, but in those days they would have had no money for hotels.
February 2-3, 1968 Crystal Ballroom, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service/PH Phactor Jug Band (Friday-Saturday)
The Crystal Ballroom, at 1332 W. Burnside (at NW 14th), played a peculiar role in Portland rock history, as it was the highest profile venue in the city, but it was run on a shoestring basis. When the Crystal was functioning well, however, it provided some of the great memories of 60s Portland rock. When the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver tour hit the Crystal on a Friday and Saturday night, all the stars were aligned. After a few smaller shows at Portland State and U of O, hip Portland was primed for the shows at the Crystal.
According to Toody Conner, who was one of the volunteers who helped run the Crystal (per Tim Hills' book), there were lines around the block, and there was so much money in gate receipts that they had to borrow an equipment case to stuff it into, which she sat on during most of the show. The Crystal had had financial struggles throughout its entire existence as a psychedelic venue, but for this weekend, with the audience ready and the Dead firing on all cylinders--not to mention the formidable Quicksilver Messenger Service--everything happened the way it was supposed to, if only for a weekend.
We know how well the Grateful Dead played, too, because they taped it. Partial tapes of Dead sets from both nights circulate —the only live tapes I know of from The Crystal—and one track was released on a Grateful Dead vault cd in 2009 (“Dark Star” from 2/2/68, as a bonus track on Road Trips Vol. 2 No. 2: Carousel 2/14/68)
February 4, 1968 Gym, South Oregon College, Ashland, OR: Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service (Sunday)
The "Quick and The Dead" Northwest tour concluded with a Sunday night show in Ashland, OR at the Gymnasium of South Oregon College, 290 miles South of Portland. South Oregon College (today Southern Oregon University) had been founded in 1926. This was the Dead's only appearance in Southern Oregon, as their increasingly popularity in Oregon ensured that they played the larger population centers around Portland the two largest State Universities for the rest of their career.
I assume the Dead and Quicksilver played McNeal Pavilion at 1250
Siskiyou Boulevard, since it was opened in 1957. The Pavilion was
renovated in 1990, doubling its capacity to 1,400. Thus the Dead and
Quicksilver played a tiny gym with 700 seats--and no doubt some people
on the floor. Did they get to dance? No information or tape has ever
surfaced about this interesting event, to my knowledge.
[update] Commenter IM tells us that the concert was actually in Britt Hall, not McNeal Pavilion. There are some further details about the show
As the Grateful Dead got bigger and bigger in Oregon, they had less need to play outlying areas. This Sunday night show was the only time the band played Ashland. Ashland is very far South, not too far from the California border. Once the Dead became big in Eugene, which would happen in about 18 months, there was no thought of playing a small place South of it.
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| The first Sky River Rock Festival, on a farm in Sultan, WA (August 31-September 2 1968) created the blueprint for all the huge outdoor rock festivals in 1969 |
August 31-September 2, 1968 Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fare, Betty Nelson's Organic Raspberry Farm, Sultan, WA: Country Joe and The Fish/Pink Floyd/Muddy Waters/Peanut Butter Conspiracy/Santana/ Kaleidoscope/ John Fahey/ HP Lovecraft/ Steppenwolf/ Youngbloods/ (Grateful Dead unbilled)
The 1968 Sky River Rock Festival was held at a farm East of Seattle. From this distance, while Sky River seems like the typical story of hippies in the mud listening to noisy rock with few clothes on--which is accurate--the Festival was still a profoundly important event in rock history. I don't know how many hippies from Oregon went to Sky River, probably a fair number, but the important thing was that every Oregon hippie must have heard about it, from friends or the news or the grapevine.
The Grateful Dead played at Sky River, but burnishing their legend, they were not billed, and simply flew in and played on the last day. To the people there, the appearance probably seemed like a magical benediction, as at the time the Dead were bigger than almost all the bands booked at the festival. That, too, would have gotten down to Oregon and the underground telegraph.
In 1967 and '68, there were numerous multi-act "Rock Festivals" all over the country, modeled on the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds. The Monterey Pop Festival had been modeled on the Monterey Jazz Festival, held annually at the same venue since 1959. 60s County Fairground Pope Festivals are largely fondly remembered by fans, and lots of great music was played.
Unfortunately, it was an unprofitable business model. Usually these shows took a big arena (like the Philadelphia Spectrum) or an outdoor pavilion (like any County Fairgrounds) and booked numerous bands. The idea was to spread out the risk of who was hot and who was not. The problem was that if a lot of people came, the venue would be overrun and the municipality--and the cops--would be very upset. If the crowd was manageable, that often meant that there weren't enough paid admission. In any case, long-haired rock fans wanted to smoke weed, carry on and dance to loud music, and County Fairgrounds weren't really the place for that.
Sky River was different. It was held on private property--the organic raspberry farm of one Betty Nelson--so the music could be loud and long, and the cops really had no jurisdiction. A smaller, predecessor event had been held on April 28, 1968 at Duvall, WA (just East of Seattle), featuring Country Joe and The Fish (it was known as "The Piano Drop," since the featured highlight had been dropping a piano from a helicopter). A few thousand attended, and the decision was to go all-in for Labor Day weekend. The chosen site was the farm in Sultan, WA, an hour Northeast of Duvall.
The Sky River Rock Festival was an epic event, well-covered on the Internet if you Google. The festival was booked by the former organizer of the Berkeley Folk Festival (John Chambless), so the event was heavy on Berkeley and San Francisco performers. But there were some touring acts, too, including then-unknown Pink Floyd, a rising band from LA called Steppenwolf, a hip comedian named Richard Pryor, legendary bluesman Muddy Waters and numerous others. On the same weekend, there was a "typical" three-day rock festival at the Palace Of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The event was held, and the Grateful Dead were supposed to headline the last day (Monday, September 2).
Even without modern technology, word had come down from the Northwest--it was happening at a farm a few hours East of Seattle. The Dead abandoned the Palace of Fine Arts gig and flew to Seattle, then headed East. At the show, Fender had a tent full of equipment, and each band could choose what they wanted to use. The band was asked "which amps do you want to use?" Famously, the Dead--I suspect soundman Owsley Stanley here-- said "all of them." They were the last act, so why not?
Something like 20,000 people had showed up at the raspberry farm. It had rained, and there was mud everywhere. Also lots of hippies, many of them girls, not wearing clothes. Somehow, however, everyone got fed, there was no significant violence and everyone had a great time. The last set on Labor Day, apparently, was the unexpected Grateful Dead, playing through every available Fender amplifier.
The rock world took notice. Rock festivals at the County Fairgrounds were passe from then on. For the Summer of '69, there was a new model: private property, unlimited attendance and a massive tower of amplifiers that could be heard for miles. No cops. Let it rock. This was the model for the Seminole Pop Festival in Florida in May, the Atlanta Pop Festival in July and finally Woodstock in August. Regardless of how many Oregonians went to '68 Sky River--it was probably a fair number--the word was out. This was how it was done, and it wasn't a real festival without the Grateful Dead.
November 15, 1968 Gill Coliseum, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR: Grateful Dead/Mint Tattoo/City Blue (Friday)
In November of 1968, the Grateful Dead had booked a Saturday night show in Vancouver (November 16) and two shows at Eagles in Seattle on Sunday (Nov 17). It made perfect sense to book a show in Oregon, on the way North. Oregon State University, the Agricultural School counterpart to the University of Oregon in Eugene, was in Corvallis. Corvallis was midway between Eugene and Portland, both of which were about an hour away.
Gill Coliseum was the basketball arena. The Grateful Dead were not nearly a big enough draw to come close to filling the arena (capacity 9,600), but that wouldn't have been the economic driver. Universities in those days had entertainment budgets, so some hippies probably got on the appropriate committee and got the booking agent to sign up the Grateful Dead. The basketball arena was the venue that would be used, and I assume only the floor was open, not the upper decks. It also meant that even with a good crowd, there would have been room to dance and hang out. Also, I think Corvallis on a Friday night back in '68 wasn't that exciting, so a lot of undergraduates probably just showed up for the hell of it. Think about it, seeing a band you'd barely or never heard of in your college gym--many of us did that, right?--and stumbling on to the 1968 Grateful Dead, burning it up with "The Eleven" or something.
Opening Mint Tattoo was a Bay Area based band featuring Sacramento musicians, guitarist Bruce Stephens and organist/bassist Burns Kellogg (plus drummer Gregg Thomas). Mint Tattoo released an album on Dot in 1968, and then Stephens and Kellogg joined Blue Cheer in 1969. As for City Blue, they were a local band, and guitar player Marshall Adams recalls the event:
"Big City Blue came together for the Grateful Dead Concert at OSU Gill Coliseum in Fall Term 1968. We were to open and Mint Tattoo was to also be featured. We had one set of material with Jimmy Hibbs doing most of the vocals and rhythm guitar, Jim Knight on Bass, Ron Leach on drums, and Marshall Adams on lead guitar and folk flute. Well we opened and it went quite well.........35 minutes later we went back on and did our set again. Seems that Mint Tattoo was busy out in the parking lot doing whatever bands would do in a parking lot."
November 16, 1968 Erb Memorial Union Ballroom, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR: Grateful Dead (Saturday)
I wrote about the Friday night Corvallis show over a decade ago. At the time, the poster circulated, but the Corvallis date didn't appear on most databases of Grateful Dead performances (Deadlists, Deadbase, etc). My post helped rectify that oversight. In the post, and in the Comment Thread, I speculated about the open date on Saturday night (November 16). If the Dead were playing Friday night in Corvallis, Sunday night in Seattle and Vancouver Saturday night had been canceled, where were they. I speculated about the idea that maybe there was a stealth show we didn't know about, and the most likely location was Eugene.
FAKE BOMB ENDS UO ROCK DANCE
A fake bomb planted near some amplifiers brought an early end Saturday night to a University of Oregon concert and dance by a rock group known as the Grateful Dead.
Eugene police said someone attending the dance noticed the "bomb" - consisting of seven wooden sticks, painted red to resemble dynamite, an alarm clock, battery, and wires - and reported it to Anthony Evans, night manager at the Erb Memorial Union, where the concert and dance were being held.
Even though one of the band member[s] held up the "bomb" and indicated it was a fake, Evans decided to clear the Erb ballroom at about 11:40 p.m., police said. Police were called, took possession of the "bomb," and were still investigating Monday.
November 17, 1968 Eagles Auditorium, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead/Byron Pope/Easy Chair (two shows 3pm and 9pm)
May 30, 1969 Springer's Hall, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead/Palace Meat Market (Friday)
May 31, 1969 McArthur Court, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR: Grateful Dead/Palace Meat Market (Saturday)
The band returned to Oregon in the early Summer of 1969. This trip was the only one for many years that did not include a swing to other parts of the Pacific Northwest. The Dead also began a pattern of alternating between Portland and Eugene. In this case, they played Friday in Portland and Saturday in Eugene, which in fact was a very rare combination. Palace Meat Market was a Eugene band with a horn section, and they opened both shows.
Springer's Hall, usually called Springer's Ballroom on posters, had an interesting history. It is in what is now Gresham, OR, a suburb about 12 miles East of downtown Portland. In the early 20th century, Springer's seems to have been the terminus of the Portland Traction Company (Springwater Division Line Railroad). It appears the Inn, with the associated ballroom, was a destination for Portland residents. The line closed in 1958, but the old Inn and ballroom seems to have been run-down but intact. For many years Springer's Ballroom was apparently a popular venue for big band swing and country music, so opening it up for rock groups made good sense.
Although Gresham is part of the suburbs now, at the time it was just countryside. The various posters don't even have an address: they just say "take Powell Street to 190th, turn right," and that was apparently sufficient (scholarly commenters have determined that the actual address is now 18300 SE Richey, Gresham, OR 97080). The Dead had been playing at the Crystal Ballroom, but the Crystal had closed in mid-68. In Portland, like most places, live rock music first became popular in bohemian underground neighborhood, but the audiences were out in the suburbs. So an old ballroom in the quiet countryside had fewer neighbors to bother. Apparently Springer's was a pretty fun joint.
In Eugene, the Grateful Dead were playing at MacArthur Court, the basketball arena. McArthur Court, built in 1926 with a capacity of nearly 10,000, remained the home of the Oregon Ducks until it was replaced in 2011 by the Matthew Knight Arena. In any case, when the Dead headlined McArthur Court on May 31, it was one of the biggest rooms that they had headlined up until that time. The show appears to have been scheduled for the track stadium (Hayward Field) and moved indoors, but in any case it was a sign of the Dead's status in Oregon. I don't know how many tickets were sold--it probably wasn't nearly sold out--but it was still a big booking for Oregon.
Ken Kesey and his Prankster pals were having some sort of Prankster reunion this weekend, and Kesey, Ken Babbs and others were in attendance at these shows, and may have appeared on stage in some capacity or other. Apparently it was a wild time, just another in a long list of memorable Oregon shows for the Grateful Dead.
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| Aqua Theater in Seattle, at Green Lake, 1961. Does this seem like a good idea? |
August 20, 1969 El Roach Tavern, Ballard, WA: Grateful Dead (Wednesday)
August 21, 1969 Aqua Theatre, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead/New Riders of The Purple Sage/Sanpaku (Thursday)
The Grateful Dead's next trip to the Pacific Northwest had a bizarre schedule, made even stranger by what ended up occurring. There were huge rock festivals in every part of the country--Woodstock was the weekend of August 15-17--and the West was no exception. The big event planned for San Francisco was The Wild West Festival. All the San Francisco bands were going to play a three day festival at Golden Gate Park. There were three big nights scheduled at Kezar Stadium, in the Park, the football home of the San Francisco 49ers, on the weekend of August 22-24. At the same time, there would be free concerts in the park throughout the whole weekend. The Grateful Dead were booked at Kezar for Friday, August 22, along with Janis Joplin and Quicksilver.
The Wild West Festival did not happen. Indeed, it was a famous debacle, and its cancellation ended up leading to the ill-fated Altamont concert, which was even worse (for a great evaluation of the Wild West saga, see Michael J Kramer's fine 2017 Oxford Press book The Republic Of Rock) . But the Dead's strange, tortured travel plans only make sense if we consider that they were planning to fly into and out of San Francisco for a big Friday night show at the 49ers football stadium. As a result, the Dead were booked to headline a show in Seattle on Wednesday (August 20), would then return for a Friday night show at Kezar (August 22), followed by headlining festivals on Saturday (August 23 outside of Portland) and Sunday (August 24, in British Columbia).
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| An ad for El Roach, at 5419 Ballard Avenue, from a 1969 edition of the Seattle underground paper The Helix. The New Loiter Blues Band is playing during the week, and on the weekend is Peece. It says "come boogie with the freaks." |
The week began with a Wednesday night booking at an outdoor theater on a lake, outside of Seattle. It got rained out. I mean, never mind the lake--what's the idea of having an outdoor theater in the Pacific Northwest? Incredibly, the Dead addressed the rain-out by going to a biker bar called the El Roach Tavern a few miles away and jamming the night away. The Dead, with the New Riders and Sanpaku in tow, returned to the Aqua Theater the next night (Thursday August 21), playing the last ever show at the venue. It would take numerous posts to explain the strangeness of the Aqua Theater and the quixotic trip to the El Roach. Fortunately, I have written the posts, with pictures and links. Either of the gigs would count as among the strangest ever in Dead history.
August 21-23, 1969 Bullfrog 2 Festival, Pelletier Farm, St. Helens, OR: Grateful Dead/Portland Zoo/Notary Sojac/Chapter Five/Sabbatic Goat/Searchin Soul/Trilogy/River/The Weeds/Bill Feldman/Sand/New Colony/Don Rose/Mixed Blood/Ron Bruce
August 22, 1969 Pelletier Farm, St. Helens, OR: New Riders of The Purple Sage/others Bullfrog 2 Festival (Friday)
August 23, 1969 Pelletier Farm, St. Helens, OR poster: Grateful Dead/others Bullfrog 2 Festival (Saturday)
Because the Friday night Wild West Festival booking was canceled, the Dead could go straight to the Portland area for the "Bullfrog 2" Festival. One sub-plot of the weekend was that the Festival booked for a "regular" venue, the Wild West event at a football stadium, got canceled. Meanwhile, the two Festivals booked for empty fields on private property (Bullfrog and Vancouver Pop) actually happened. This was the result from the success of the Sky River festival. Events on private properties didn't really need permits, and if they were in unincorporated areas, as most farms are, then there weren't likely ordnances that could be invoked to stop them. This didn't always mean that events were safe, or well-run, or that the sound was good. But they happened, and the cops couldn't interfere, which was a far bigger issue with a rock festival in the 1960s.
The Bullfrog 2 Festival--even I don't know anything about the first Bullfrog Festival--was a three day event on a farm outside of Portland, headlined by the Grateful Dead but otherwise exclusively featuring Oregon bands (you can look any of them up on the great Pacific Northwest bands site). The Dead showed up Friday night, however, so the New Riders actually played that evening. Apparently the Riders played on the back of a flatbed truck, illuminated by a few spotlights. The Dead played their scheduled show on Saturday. I don't know what the crowd was like. There wasn't a Bullfrog 3, but by 1970 the "Rock Festival In A Muddy Field" model was no longer viable, anyway, since fans rarely wanted to go to more than one of these events in their life.
August 24, 1969 Vancouver Pop Festival, Paradise Valley Resort, Squamish, BC: Grateful Dead canceled
The Vancouver Pop Festival saga is too long to tell here. The Festival was actually at the Paradise Valley Resort, near Squamish, about 60 miles (90 minutes) north of Vancouver. I believe the land was somewhat under the control of the Squamish First Nation, so it was insulated from police pressure. The multi-day festival actually happened, but the Grateful Dead did not appear. Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers manager Jimmi Seiter has an extensive description of the festival (the Burritos played there), and he mentions how the crowd kept expecting the Dead to show up, but they never did. I assume the band's non-appearance had to do with money, but in fact it was a chaotic weekend, and the exact details are unknown to me.
January 16, 1970 Springer's, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead/River (Friday)
January 17, 1970 Gill Coliseum, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR: Grateful Dead (Saturday)
January 18, 1970 Springer's, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead (Sunday)
The Grateful Dead returned to Springer's. The flyer just says "Springers," while other lists say "Springer's Inn" or "Springer's Ballroom." All are true names, more or less. The tape circulated widely many years ago, so--as obscure venues go--the place is now kind of known to Deadheads. The band returned to Springers on Sunday night, after a trip to Corvallis. Based on stage announcements from Sunday (parts of January 18 were released on the Download Series Vol.2), the crowd was very thin. Ticket sales for Friday must have been good enough to justify trying again on Sunday night, but it may have been a poor choice. As rock moved to the suburbs, one byproduct was that the younger, often teenage, audience was simply not able to attend rock shows on school nights. So weekend shows would draw well, but any other night was often unviable.
The Dead continued their two-part strategy for Oregon with a show in Portland and a show further South. In this case--and for the last time--the Dead played Corvallis (Oregon State) instead of Eugene (U. of O), but the concept was the same. I don't know if the Corvallis show was well attended. The Dead never played Corvallis again, so that might be a hint.
January 22, 1971 Main Gym, Lane Community College, Eugene, OR: Grateful Dead/New Riders of The Purple Sage/Notary Sojac (Friday)
January 24, 1971 Seattle Center Arena, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead/New Riders of The Purple Sage/Ian and Sylvia
The Dead had a big show at Seattle Center Arena, so it made sense to book a show at Oregon. This time they played a junior college in the same county as the University of Oregon. I assume there must have been a conflict with an athletic event at U. of O. Whatever the reason, I think this show was significant for the Grateful Dead's history in Oregon.
The Dead were playing Sunday night in Seattle, so they booked a Friday night show at a junior college in Oregon. Some interesting articles tell a surprising tale: not only did the show sell out, it ended up being oversold. Whether this was by accident, incompetence or crafty plan, the band got an idea of how many tickets they could sell. Apparently, there were 7000 people packed into the junior college gym.
July 25-26, 1972 Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead (Tuesday-Wednesday)
The Grateful Dead returned to the Pacific Northwest in the Summer of '72. Pacific Presentations, old friends from the Los Angeles days at the Shrine, promoted the shows. I have no doubt that Sam Cutler had told Pacific about all the ticket sales in Eugene. A group in the Northwest had started putting on shows in old movie theaters in both Seattle (Paramount Northwest) and Portland (Paramount). Seattle, the big market had the weekends, and Portland had the weekday shows.
The Paramount Portland Theater (now the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall) had been built as a movie theater in 1928. Located at 1037 SW Broadway, tt seated about 3,000. It had shown its last movie in 1972, when it was converted to a concert hall. I don't know exactly how many tickets the Portland Paramount shows sold. But guess what--I don't have to. The Grateful Dead returned the next year with the same promoters for the biggest venue in Portland (the Coliseum), so they must have done great on those school nights.
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| The Grateful Dead on stage at the Renaissance Fair Grounds in Veneta, OR, on August 27, 1972 |
August 27, 1972 Old Renaissance Faire Grounds, Veneta, OR: Grateful Dead/New Riders of The Purple Sage (Sunday)
Ken Kesey had returned to Oregon after his 1960s adventures. His family still had their Dairy. By 1972, there were some financial difficulties. The Grateful Dead agreed to do what was in effect a benefit for the dairy (the Springfield Creamery). For unrelated reasons, an old friend of Garcia's pitched a plan to make a movie about the Grateful Dead in concert, so the event was professionally filmed and recorded. The Dead, being the Dead, were comfortable in Oregon and played an epic show for the ages, captured on video and on tape.
The Kesey family dairy was in Springfield, several miles East of Eugene. The concert was held in Veneta, about 10 miles West of Eugene, on the opposite side of the city and University, but still in the same county, The venue was the site of the Oregon Renaissance Fair. Renaissance Fairs were a sixties artifact, somewhat outside of the scope of this blog (for a discussion of Renaissance Fairs, see Rachel Rubin's excellent book Well Met: Renaissance Faires and The American Counterculture).
The first Oregon Renaissance fair was held in Eugene over the weekend of November 1–2, 1969. It was promoted with the tagline, "come in costume." The fair began as a craft fair to raise funds for an alternative school, the Children's Community School. The event moved to its current location in Veneta, about 13 miles west of Eugene, for the fall fair in October, 1970, after having had a May Fair the same year on Crow Road about halfway between Eugene and Veneta. Renaissance Fairs, to put them in a modern context, were a chance for hippies to "cosplay," jousting (literally) over the favors of fair maidens or flagons of mead.
August 27 was a rare, 100-degree hot day in Eugene. The Grateful Dead drew a huge crowd, over 10,000 and maybe 20,000, to the Fair site. The show had to be the band's biggest attendance in Oregon at the time, and the University of Oregon wasn't even in session. The band had played two nights in a 3,000 seat theater in Portland the month before, but it didn't affect attendance in Eugene. Now, of course, we take that metric for granted, that fans went to as many Grateful Dead shows as they could manage. Back in '72, however, particularly outside San Francisco and New York City, that was a new concept. Oregon was not a rich, populous state in 1972, and here were the Dead putting on a huge concert just after playing twice in a nearby city.
In certain ways, the Renaissance Fair show was a hybrid of previous models. On one hand, the Fair Grounds were an existing facility, so there was water, power, restrooms, food and parking. On the other hand, it was private property in a rural area, so the police had little influence and no ordnances could block the concert. So the band had the benefit of a relaxed event with no threat of fans getting busted, yet with all the functions of a working facility.
The music was for the ages, and was captured on tape, cd and video, so I needn't discuss it. Even the New Riders fine set was released. Yet the Springfield Creamery Benefit had a much larger part in Grateful Dead legend than just being a successful concert. It was also a reunion of the Dead and the Pranksters, and it made Oregon seem like the perfect place to see a Dead concert. Word filtered out to both California and points East that there was something special about the Grateful Dead in Oregon.
May 3, 1973 Portland Memorial Coliseum, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead (Thursday) (rescheduled to June 24)
May 5, 1973 Pacific National Exhibition Coliseum, Vancouver, BC: Grateful Dead (rescheduled to June 22)
May 7, 1973 Seattle Center Arena, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead (rescheduled to June 26)
May 8, 1973 Churchill High School, Eugene, OR: New Riders of The Purple Sage/Old And In The Way (Tuesday)
May 9, 1973 Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR: New Riders of The Purple Sage/Old and In The Way (Wednesday)
Pacific Presentations booked the Grateful Dead for three shows in the Pacific Northwest in May of 1973, in the biggest arenas available. For some reason, the shows were rescheduled for June. The interesting detail was that the New Riders were booked for two shows in Oregon, with Old And In The Way as the opening act, right after the scheduled May shows. Since Sam Cutler booked the Dead, the New Riders and Jerry Garcia, this was no coincidence.
The Grateful Dead shows were rescheduled, but Garcia kept the Old And In The Way dates. Cutler replicated the Dead's strategy from before, booking one show in Eugene and one in Portland. He also booked the Riders into the Paramount in Portland, where the Dead had played the Summer before. Cutler regularly booked the New Riders into smaller theaters around the country where the Dead had played previously, taking advantage of relationships with promoters and fans that had already been established.
The Oregon Riders/OAITW sounded like a lot of fun. There are tapes of the Riders' sets, and they were joined by OAITW fiddler Richard Greene, an old friend of David Nelson's (as well as singer Darlene DiDomenico, another old pal). Old And In The Way played very few dates outside of Northern California, and it's yet another marker for Garcia and the Dead's affinity for Oregon that it was one of those places.
June 24, 1973 Portland Memorial Coliseum, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead (Sunday)(rescheduled from May 3)
June 26, 1973 Seattle Center Arena, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead
Pacific Presentations had booked the Grateful Dead for two Summer weeknights in 1972, and for the return engagement to Oregon the band played the Portland Memorial Coliseum, the biggest indoor arena in the state. Portland Coliseum (at 300 N. Ramsay Way) had been built in 1960, and was a typical multi-purpose concrete block of an arena. The Coliseum was the home arena for the NBA expansion Portland Trailblazers. The Coliseum had a capacity of 12,666 for sports, but it apparently could hold slightly more in a concert configuration. Elvis Presley had apparently drawn 13,000. Now the Grateful Dead were playing there.
The Portland Coliseum booking was a big step up for the Dead, but Pacific Presentations could read all the signs. By mid-'73, the Grateful Dead had released four gold albums in a row, and the band's songs regularly got played on FM radio. The Dead had done well in a smaller Portland venue, and then packed the Renaissance Fair Grounds in Eugene. Despite the modest population of Oregon, it was clear that Portland could draw Grateful Dead fans just as well as the larger cities of Seattle and Vancouver. I don't know if the '73 Coliseum show was sold out, but it obviously met the promoter's expectations, since the Dead were booked in the same venue the very next Summer.
May 19, 1974 Portland Memorial Coliseum, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead (Sunday)
May 21, 1974 Hec Edmundson Pavilion, University of Washington, Seattle, WA: Grateful Dead
Pacific Presentations bought the Grateful Dead back for the Vancouver>Portland>Seattle trifecta in the Summer of 74. By this time, the Dead's "Wall Of Sound" required concrete floors, so only sufficiently large venues could be booked. Also, the load-in/load-out took two days, so they could not play both weekend nights in separate arenas. Vancouver seems to have been the softest market, getting the weekend date and adding an opening act. The band then went to Portland, counter-intuitively, followed by Seattle. In Seattle, the Dead played the University of Washington basketball arena instead of Seattle Center, presumably because of a sports conflict (Seattle Center was the home of the NBA Seattle Supersonics).
The music in Portland for both the 1973 and '74 was, of course, massive. So much so that the Grateful Dead released a 19-cd set of all six Pacific Northwest shows from 1973 and '74, a must-have. Thus, I don't any need to recap any of the music. It was clear that the Grateful Dead could play a weeknight in Portland's biggest arena any time they liked, with or without a new album.
The Grateful Dead went on hiatus in October, 1974, much to the dismay of their fans, so they didn't play Portland Memorial Coliseum any time soon after. Symbolically, however, on May 28, 1974, 9 days after the Dead show, the Portland Trailblazers drafted Bill Walton out of UCLA. Walton was the chief attraction at the Blazers home arena, leading the team to a title in 1976-77, so the Deadhead flag flew high in Portland, even if Bill was carrying it temporarily for Jerry.
December 14, 1974 Paramount Theater, Portland, OR: Legion Of Mary (Saturday)
December 15, 1974 EMU Ballroom, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR: Legion Of Mary (Sunday)
When the Dead went on hiatus, Jerry Garcia stepped up touring with his own band. His touring schedule was generally directed by John Scher, and Scher usually focused on lucrative markets in the Midwest and Northeast. This was no accident--Garcia and the Grateful Dead organization were hemorrhaging cash, so they had to maximize returns. Still, when Garcia played Oregon, you could see the proven patterns playing out again. For the late '74 Legion Of Mary tour, Garcia played a weekend in Seattle and Portland in the same theaters that the Dead had played a few years earlier. Scher slipped in a Sunday night in Eugene, too, also at a ballroom the Dead had played many years before.
Oct ?, 1975 Klamath Basin Potato Festival, Merrill, OR: Barry Melton with Peter Albin and David LaFlamme/Roadhog
Another minor but fascinating curiosity about the Grateful Dead in Oregon was that Robert Hunter seems to have revealed himself as a performer in rural Oregon before he ever did so in San Francisco. Starting around 1974, Hunter appeared with the band Roadhog, using the stage name "Lefty Banks." He was not billed as Robert Hunter until early 1976.
Nonetheless, a Commenter looked at the English magazine Dark Star, written in the October/November 1975 period (h/t JGMF):
The "Weather Report" column, p. 5, has this: "Barry [Melton]'s most recent appearance was at the Klamath potato festival ... also at the destival [sic] was the bluegrass unit Road Hog, featuring Bob Hunter on mandolin."I am guessing this is the Klamath Basin Potato Festival around Merrill, OR. This is a harvest season event, it seems, usually mid-October by what I have seen.
So, if this is right, for now it might be a 10/??/75 Klamath Basin Potato Festival entry.
At the top of the bill was Barry Melton's band featuring Peter Albin and David LaFlamme.
Merrill, OR is a tiny town in the Klamath Basin in deepest Eastern Oregon. Even now, news wouldn't get out from there very quickly. Hunter and the band obviously had little concern about letting the mask slip.
May 14, 1975 Lane County Fairgrounds, Eugene, OR Kingfish
Kingfish began a tour of the Pacific Northwest, playing some familiar places (thanks to scholar David for figuring out the OR/WA dates). The tour commenced on a Wednesday
May 15, 1975 [unknown venue], Seattle, WA Kingfish
Possibly Friday, May 16 (which would change the Portland date at Reed, below)
May 16, 1975 [venue], Reed College, Portland, OR Kingfish
May 17, 1975 Quad, U. of Oregon, Eugene, OR Kingfish daytime free concertThe band played a free concert to "make up for the bad sound at the Fairgounds" [on the 14th]. Date confirmed by eyewitness.
May 17, 1975 Gill Coliseum, Oregon State U., Corvallis, OR: Kingfish
Intrepid scholar David found this one. He can't pin down the date precisely, but this one seems the most likely. The remarkable thing was that he found a picture in the OSU Yearbook, which complained about excessive smoking.
Kingfish road manager Rex Jackson was from Pendleton.
[A Commenter on a Kingfish thread mentioned Bob Weir and Kingfish playing a few dates in Oregon colleges around 1975. He specifically recalls Reed College in Portland, but no other details have surfaced yet [they have now--see above]]
March 3, 1976 Auditorium Building, Lane County Fairgrounds, Eugene, OR: Jerry Garcia Band (Wednesday)
March 5, 1976 Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR: Jerry Garcia Band (Friday)
March 6, 1976 Moore's Egyptian Theatre, Seattle, WA: Jerry Garcia Band
The Jerry Garcia Band returned to the Pacific Northwest in Spring 1976. John Scher once again followed the proven path for Oregon, one show in Eugene and one in Portland. The Wednesday night show at Lane County Fairgrounds was (per the poster) co-produced by Springfield Creamery, so effectively the show was another sort of benefit for the Kesey family dairy. In Portland, the Garcia Band returned once again to the Paramount Theater.
June 3-4, 1976 Paramount Theater, Portland, OR: Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead returned to the road in 1976, never to leave it voluntarily again. The chose to return by only playing small theaters, and only selling tickets by mail to those on the Deadheads mailing list. This may have been out of concern that there wouldn't otherwise be interest in the band, but quite the opposite occurred. The Dead booked 17 shows in four metro areas (later booking six shows in San Francisco), with radio broadcasts in each region. The shows were instant sellouts, and created a huge buzz, as if the band had carefully planned it instead of just being lucky.
The Grateful Dead, being the Dead, of course had barely rehearsed, plus they had to rent a brand new sound system. The mini-tour would open June 9 in the Boston Music Hall, but after 17 months off the road, the band needed some warmup shows. After the mass response to the mail order, the Dead knew they could play anywhere there was a 3000 seat theater, and there were plenty of those. Of course, they wanted it to be where they were comfortable, and where the fans would like it no matter what. They could have played anywhere, and they chose Portland's Paramount Theater for a Thursday and a Friday night. Nothing more clearly marked the Grateful Dead's intimate connection to Oregon than choosing Portland as a re-entry site.
AftermathThe Grateful Dead played Oregon many times after 1976, and in larger and larger places. Jerry Garcia played many shows in the state as well. Oregon was a guaranteed financial winner for the band, and a guaranteed good time for anyone who went to the shows. By the 1990s, Oregon was no longer some rural backwater, but a thriving economic and cultural center. But the Dead had gotten to Oregon before the rise of Portland, and maintained their unique connection to the state throughout the life of the band.
Appendix: Pacific Northwest Demographic Comparison
1960 1,768,687 1960 2,853,214
1970 2,091,533 1970 3,409,169
1980 2,633,156 1980 4,132,156
Est. 2019: 4,217,737 Est 2019: 7,694,813
PORTLAND Population SEATTLE Population
1960 372,676 1960 557,087
1970 382,619 1970 530,831
1980 366,383 1980 493,846
Est. 2019: 654,741 Est. 2019: 753,675
