The Dead in the Desert

We were admittedly late to the party.

It took until the early 90s until me and my crew caught on to how much fun the whole live music scene, particularly everything one degree of separation from the Grateful Dead. There was so much going on all along, but somehow we missed most of it.

The Dead played constantly in the Bay Area in the 80s. Aside from tagging along to a Laguna Seca show where I may or may not have had an actual ticket, I’m ashamed to have missed every other show.

It was all around us. I remember being at Di’s house for New Year’s Eve on the last day of 1985. Her parents were out at their own NYE party, and ten of us ended up in Los Altos Hills at her place drinking what we could find, listening to KMEL’s live simulcast of the Grateful Dead’s show from across the bay in the Oakland Coliseum just 20 miles away as the crow flies.

I missed all 13 Grateful Dead shows in the eucalyptus groves in my own backyard at Frost. I lived on campus and still missed these shows. My parents went to one in like 1988, for God’s sake, where Evan was reportedly shaking quite the tail feather.

Around that same time, a year after high school graduation, a yet-to-be-enlightened group of friends blazed our way through the town of Angels Camp on our way up to Bear Valley. We felt pretty smug about having…