First Time I Heard The Dead
On the evening of January 20, 1968, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service played in my hometown, Eureka, California. That concert proved to be a signpost of change in my life.
To fully understand what it was like to attend that Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service concert in Eureka back in 1968, you had to appreciate what the local community environment was like at the time. It was still in a post-world war stage of conservatism, more like the 1950’s, than what it would become in the 70’s.
I’d grown up in Eureka. My family had been there since 1880. It was a timber based economy, with some fishing and ranching. My father was a commercial fisherman, my brother-in-law a rancher. A lot of people worked in the woods and the mills. It was before the underground marijuana industry got off the ground in the 1970’s in Southern Humboldt.
In 1968, I was a senior in Eureka High School.
My friend Rod had gone to Europe the previous summer, the first one in our class to see Europe. He came back with his hair growing over his collar and got kicked out of Eureka High School for his appearance.
No one in my family owned a passport. I played guitar in a dance band with a few friends called The Townsmen, Rod Iverson was the keyboardist. Robby Jarvis played bass, KC Smith drums, and Jeff Provolt lead guitar. We played popular cover tunes like, Louie Louie, House of the Rising Sun, Gloria, and songs by the Kinks, Beatles, Beach Boys and Ventures.
That was my musical universe at the time; whatever played on the local radio.
But before going to that first Dead concert in 1968, I did have one other major concert under my belt - the Yardbirds. In the fall of 1966, just after I’d gotten my first driver’s license, the Yardbirds toured through Humboldt County, playing in Eureka’s Municipal Auditorium and Arcata’s, smaller venue, the Lemon Tree. I opted for the Lemon Tree.
At first that seemed a real mistake. Jeff Beck was their famous lead guitar player. He’s the reason I wanted to hear the Yardbirds. He’d played the concert in Eureka, but when the band came on stage in Arcata, they announced that his throat was irritated and that he wouldn’t play in Arcata.
The air left the room with a big let down groan in the crowd. Instead, the band’s singer said the bass player would play lead guitar.
Right. the bass player. No way, I thought.
“I want my money back!”
The Yardbirds kicked off the first song. Jimmy Page was the bass player. He just ripped the room with a blazing guitar riff that left everybody stunned. It was like a lightning bolt had been turned loose. I would later see Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin on their first three concert tours in the San Francisco Bay Area.
At that Arcata Yardbirds concert, I was rocked, but still in this world with my feet on the ground. Which gets me to that first Dead concert. It was a life altering event.
The Dead in Eureka
I walked in the Eureka Municipal Auditorium that evening on January 20, 1968, with a $3 ticket in my hand and no expectations. I went by myself. I couldn’t get anyone else interested. The Grateful Dead’s music wasn’t on local radio. I saw a poster for the event that was kind of wild and weird looking. I didn’t know the term psychedelic, yet.
I’d also noticed all these flamboyantly painted and decorated old buses surrounding the auditorium, reminiscent of the ‘circling of the wagons.’ I’d never seen buses like that in Humboldt County before. And there were lots of them. These guys were definitely from out of town.
The whole vibe inside the auditorium was different than anyplace I’d ever experienced. From the moment I walked in there was a tremendous light show transforming the hall into a spinning kaleidoscope of colors, open fields with people spinning and twirling on the dance floor. Some people in the light show didn’t wear clothes. Some looked like Jesus Christ, with long hair and beards.
And the bands hadn’t even started. My first thoughts were challenged - where did these people come from? What’s going to happen?
Quicksilver opened the concert with a spacial type of rock’n roll I’d never imagined. Never heard before. It seemed to echo in a vast, metallic chamber, that refracted hard edged sounds. I was kind of dumfounded standing there on the municipal auditorium wood floor. I’d roller skated in this hall before, saw a big time wrestling match there, a boxing match, but never heard music like this.
But that was only the opener.
When the Dead came on stage there was no MC fan fare or introductions. Just some random tunings and all of a sudden we were led into a musical journey, an evolution of sound that had no obvious center, yet it was powerful and evolving, searching the outer perimeters of consciousness, beyond reasoning. At least that’s how I vaguely remember it.
I’d never, ever, heard any music that came close to what was happening that night.
They played for what seemed a few hours. I didn’t even remember songs having beginnings and endings, just evolutions, with spiraling melodies that seemed o disappear into the astral projections of the light show, only to re-emerge in another song, another place.
And I wasn’t even stoned. I’d never been stoned in my life at that point, though I would say the Dead’s sound induced me into my first altered state of consciousness. Months later I would read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
I walked out the doors of the auditorium that night with more questions than answers. I would go back to our dance band and play, but something that night had unhinged all my sense of music. Pop tunes no longer seemed interesting. They seemed simple and one dimensional. I actually stopped playing my guitar for a while to allow that concert experience to sink in.
Ironically, Eureka’s mayor at the time, made a public apology to the city that such a diabolical event had been permitted to perform in Eureka. He vowed on the front page of the local newspaper that it would never happen again. And it didn’t.
I bought the Dead’s next album - Anthem of The Sun - which came out in the summer of 1968 after I graduated from Eureka High School. When I read the album credits, some parts of the live 1968 concert in Eureka’s Municipal Auditorium had been layered into the studio mixings that comprised the album, though I couldn’t tell which.
In that summer of 1968 I also met a girl from Bolinas Beach, a small surf town north of San Francisco. She was a surfer there. She introduced me to my first toke of weed and we went to see the Dead in San Francisco. They sounded different there. They would sound different every time I’d see them over the next several years - in San Francisco, Eugene, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, wherever. Most often they played alone, sometimes they’d feature a guest like Bob Dylan or Tom Petty.
For years, I listened to Jerry Garcia’s guitar work, which influenced my own evolution as a musician. I finally had to unplug myself from that iconic sound to continue and find my own pathway, which evolved through reggae, African and world beat styles.
One thing for sure, my introduction to the Dead that night in Eureka in 1968 set off an evolving journey that in some ways, I’m still on today. And to quote Robert Hunter, the song writer who collaborated with Jerry Garcia and the Dead for decades, “… What a long strange trip it’s been.”
jhg - 1968