SMM #16: September 3rd, 2021
A special Labor Day Weekend issue, focusing on my first Grateful Dead show.
Concert Notes & Reminiscences
Date: September 3rd, 1977 (44 years ago today!)
Act: Grateful Dead, Marshall Tucker Band, & New Riders of the Purple Sage
Venue: Raceway Park, Englishtown, NJ
Back in the early ‘70s when I first started seriously listening to music on the radio, the Grateful Dead songs “Truckin” and “Casey Jones” were in heavy rotation on local radio stations like WPLJ… I definitely liked these songs from the band’s back-to-back classic albums, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty (both amazingly released within six months of each other in 1970) but I never really dove into those albums or the Dead’s singular brand of roots music and psychedelic jamming… instead, I gravitated towards the “guitar hero” genre and artists like Eric Clapton, Santana, Hendrix, Jeff Beck and of course, my all-time favorite, Rory Gallagher (see SMM #3)… I also was a big fan of Southern rock and bands like the Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Charlie Daniels Band and the Elvin Bishop Group… but the Dead were not on my radar…
Fast forward a few years to the summer of 1977… I was working at the beach and my boss, who was several years older and a huge Deadhead, asked if I was interested in going to see the Dead at Raceway Park in New Jersey, Labor Day Weekend… he had the tickets and was doing the driving so myself, my brother and another friend joined him for the adventure… like I said, I wasn’t a Grateful Dead fan at all but this seemed like a pretty good deal! 1977 turned out to be a monumental year for live Dead shows… many of their consensus best shows took place in ‘77, including, Barton Hall/Cornell U on May 8, which is often considered their best performance of all time… overall, they had played 35 shows that year between late February and early June, but then took a break from touring while drummer Mickey Hart recuperated from a serious auto accident… so Englishtown was to be their only show during a nearly four month period (they started a 20 show fall tour Sept 28)...
We left bright and early on Saturday morning of the holiday weekend for the two hour trip down to Englishtown… we arrived behind a long line of cars and parked in the first available spot we found - which turned out to be several miles(!) from the concert site… we grabbed our milk crate of provisions and joined the procession to the show in the hot, steamy weather… I don’t remember WHAT provisions we brought outside of plastic jugs with water and orange juice & vodka since no coolers (and NO beer!) were allowed (although there were plenty of coolers in there, I assume minus any beer which was confiscated at the gate)... we also had pockets full of joints which was par for the course for that era and any Dead show! I have read that hot dogs and soda were for sale but I don’t remember vendors of any kind so I assume we brought some kind of food! Also, one thing I DO know I brought with me was my trusty 110 pocket camera as you can see via the photos accompanying this article...
When we arrived at Raceway Park, the crowd was massive, a sea of people enclosed by empty railroad boxcars rented by the promoter to prevent gate-crashing… gates opened at 6am(!) and the crowd was estimated to have been as large as 150,000 people although ticket sales totaled 102,000… we staked out a spot on the right side about halfway up to the stage… the people-watching was great with fans wearing skeleton costumes and other interesting attire... I definitely don’t remember specific times but according to accounts, the opening act, New Riders of the Purple Sage, came on around 1:30 and played for an hour… after an hour break, Marshall Tucker Band took the stage and also played a similar length set… although I was a big fan of the New Riders and LOVED Marshall Tucker, the only faint memory I have of their sets was walking to an area behind the crowd, sitting down on the grass and listening to MTB’s classic hit, “Can’t You See”... band leader, Toy Caldwell, was a major talent and one of the best, most versatile guitarists ever…
Finally, after another lengthy break, the Dead were getting ready to hit the stage around 6:00… at this point, we had already been there for over 6 hours and between the extreme heat, our jugs of OJ/vodka and the weed, we were feeling no pain! The band came out and opened with a Chuck Berry cover, “Promised Land” (Chuck Berry covers were a mainstay of Dead live shows) and went on from there to play a 20 song set that included three songs from their latest studio album, Terrapin Station... I know this NOT from memory but from the band’s excellent, HIGHLY recommended 1999 archival release of the show, Dick’s Picks, Vol. 15: Englishtown, NJ 9/3/77… per the album, the actual running time of the MUSIC was about three hours but my VERY foggy memories say the set ran 5-6 hours because of constant re-tuning of instruments between songs due to the excessive heat, broken strings, plus, their usual lengthy break after the first set… I am pretty sure we didn’t leave the show until around midnight… the end of a VERY long day!
I am admittedly a late-in-life Deadhead, but now I’m fully onboard… I saw them again in 1991 at Madison Square Garden and enjoyed the show but was not converted… then a younger co-worker in the early 2000s who was a HUGE Deadhead convinced me to go see the surviving members play as The Other Ones at MSG in 2002… I loved the show and came away thinking I had been missing the boat all those years… since then, I have seen Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart play the Dead’s music numerous times in various incarnations… I have also seen great Dead cover bands like Dark Star Orchestra, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead and Grateful Shred who tour nationally and, on a more local Long Island level, Half-Step and Tiger Rose do an excellent job of representing the Dead’s musical legacy...
So it was a long journey that took til this century but I finally agree that, even if it’s not the original band anymore, “there’s nothing like a Grateful Dead show!”
Recommended Listening:
Labor Day Weekend 2021 Playlist
And to accompany your holiday weekend, here’s a 50 song playlist with a theme of jobs and the working man and woman…enjoy! — SL