A friend sent me a link to Dead.net, a website devoted to all things Grateful Dead. The current posting on that site reads:
“We’re kicking off Dave’s Picks 2014 with a visit to the Wall Of Sound era. Dave’s Picks Volume 9 features the complete show from May 14, 1974, at Adams Field House at the University of Montana in Missoula, the Grateful Dead’s only appearance in the state of oro y plata.”
I’m just wondering if anyone else was at the show. I was, more or less.
I was a freshman at the University of Montana, living in Duniway Hall. I didn’t buy a ticket for the show because A) I wasn’t really a Dead fan, though of course I was familiar with their music and B) it was quite an accomplishment in those days if I could drum up 75 cents, which was enough to buy a quart bottle of Lucky Lager from Freddy’s Feed and Read.
But by the day of the concert there was so much excitement on campus that I was overcome with the desire to attend the show. The show was sold out by then and I didn’t have any money anyway. That’s how a friend and I found ourselves over at the fieldhouse trying to sneak in. This was very bad of us, I know, but in those days sneaking into a rock concert was somewhere on the low end of the scale between a white lie and a venial sin.
We tried everything we could think of — walking through the turnstiles backward, so it looked as though we were leaving; trying to squeeze in behind an accordion gate; trying every door and window within reach on a complete circuit of the fieldhouse; cajoling security people and hangers-on, etc. At one point I remember coming upon a fellow lying unconscious in the gravel behind the fieldhouse, his pants unzipped and urinating on himself. Ah, the carefree ’70s!
Anyway, I swear we worked at it for at least an hour and a half before finally giving up. We got some Lucky Lager from Freddy’s to drown our disappointment and returned to Duniway Hall. Half an hour later, a guy from down the hall, who was from Thompson Falls and was famous on our wing for once having drunk more tequila than any of us would have thought humanly possible, came strolling in. He had been working the Dead show for the student outfit — ASUM? — that provided help for those kinds of things, but after two hours he’d had enough.
Saying which, he produced his official pass and offered it to us. What the hell, we figured. We tore it in two and marched back to the fieldhouse, each clutching half a pass. Somehow the mutilated pass got us in, possibly because the people working the gates were as stoned as everybody inside the fieldhouse.
So there we were, in what would be the only concert the Grateful Dead ever performed in Montana. I wish I could give you a detailed description of the music and the crowd and what affect the whole thing had on me, but I remember only two things. For one, in retrospect the music seemed to consist of one very long song. Man, those guys liked to jam! I always wondered if I hadn’t been exaggerating how long the Dead played that day, but if you look at the set list on the website above, it shows 23 songs, with a total length of well over three hours. Now mix in all the fiddling and tuning and messing with equipment and it’s quite possible the show stretched out to four or even five hours.
The other thing I remember — and here’s where I’d like somebody with a better recollection to fill in the details — is that somebody in the audience threw something, maybe a Frisbee, a light stick, a bong, whatever, and hit Bob Weir, who was in the middle of an intense guitar solo, right in the head.
The band stopped briefly, Weir uttered an obscenity into the microphone and the show continued.
And that’s it. That’s all I can tell you about this unique, incredible, historic, mind-blowing show. If anyone else has more to add, I would love to hear from you.
