Aids Benefit (5/27/89) With The Grateful Dead

It was May of 1989, a month after my girlfriend Lona and I had gotten safely back from the trip that I wrote about in my 6/28/13 blog entry:  “1989 Grateful Dead Spring Tour”.  I was 23 years old and living in Minneapolis.  One Sunday morning I was perusing through the Classifieds section of the paper looking for anything interesting and I saw a roundtrip ticket from Minneapolis to Los Angeles for $100 for the upcoming weekend.  Awesome!  This was back in the day when it did not matter what name was on an airline ticket.  Anybody could use anyone else’s ticket and you could sell them in the newspaper want ads for whatever price you could get. 

 

I happened to know that the Grateful Dead were playing a huge all-day charity festival that next Saturday at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium on 5/27/89.  It was called the ‘In Concert Against Aids Benefit’ with a bunch of bands that were, in order:  Tower Of Power, Joe Satriani, Los Lobos, John Fogerty, Tracy Chapman, and then the Dead closing it out with two full sets.  My girlfriend Lona’d had her quota of the Dead on spring tour the previous month, but I always craved more and knew that the only shows I would be seeing until the New Year’s Eve shows were 3 nights at Alpine Valley in July.

 

I wondered if I could make this work.  Los Angeles is not too far from Oakland right?  I figured I would just fly in to L.A. and hitchhike up the coast to the Bay Area.  No problem.  Well I checked a map and realized it is a pretty full day’s drive, and my friend Sean Morrison who hitchhikes a lot made me realize that it would suck trying to get a ride out of LAX airport to the freeway heading north.  Discouraged but not deterred I called the airlines and found out that round-trip flights from L.A. to San Francisco were only $100.  Lona and I had already made plans to go to Greece the following spring and were trying to save money, so the $200 total cost was more than I wanted to spend.  I had already gotten the bug in my system though so I just had to do it.  I splurged on airfare but would make up for it by not getting a hotel.  I would fly out Friday morning and come back Monday night and only miss two days of school.  Perfect.

 

I called the newspaper ad and bought the ticket issued to a ‘Kelly Swanson’.  I was flying to L.A. as a girl.  That was okay…I had hair halfway down my back and they did not check ID’s back then.  So that Friday it was a beautiful, warm, sunny morning and I jumped on my motorcycle with nothing but a thin jean jacket and a little bit of cash for the concert ticket and food.  I parked my bike at the Minneapolis airport, boarded my first flight and started the weekend.  After a brief layover in LAX airport I got to SFO airport that afternoon and decided I would head over to Oakland on the ‘BART’ commuter train.  I would see what is up at the Stadium, figure out a place to sleep there and get ready for the next day’s festivities.

 

I got off the train near the Stadium and was not sure what to do.  There is nothing around there but highways and the Oakland Coliseum which is right next to the Stadium.  From previous trips I knew there was some hotels about a mile down the road, but I did not have the money for that so I decided I would just wing it and hopefully meet some cool Deadheads who would give me a place to crash.  So I started cutting through the Coliseum parking lot to get to the Stadium parking lot.  There were tons of cars in the Coliseum lot but I was not sure who was playing there that night.  This was not the usual ‘Dead-friendly’ lot full of VW buses and kind hippies milling around.  It was dark now and suddenly I heard some dude slowly mutter to his two friends:  “Hey look over there, it’s a f*cking Deadhead.”  And then they started chasing me.

 

I was a soccer player and there was no way they were going to catch me, but I had no idea where I was going.  I zig-zagged through the cars, put some distance between me and the three dudes, and eventually came across a 20-foot high hill that had a bunch of bushes circled around the base and a lamppost with more bushes sticking up out of the top.  I ran up there and figured I was safe because I could hide in the bushes and would be able to see/hear if anyone was coming up the hill.  So I abandoned my idea of finding any friendly faces and I hunkered down in the bushes to sleep for the night.  I used a loaf of sourdough bread that I had bought at the San Francisco airport for a pillow, but it was a bit cold with just my thin jacket for cover.

 

The next morning (Saturday) I got up with the sun, looked around, and I was on a hill between the two parking lots.  I walked down to the Stadium side of the hill and there were already some friendly tie-dyed Deadheads starting to spill into the lot and I was happy again.  I walked around, met some folks and got free food from some people who were cooking up breakfast.  A Grateful Dead parking lot back in the day was a big, friendly, traveling carnival...everybody partying and selling food and beer and clothing and jewelry and whatever else you could think of.  Eventually (and inevitably) I ran into some friends I knew.  Another thing about ‘back in the day’ was that it was impossible to go to a Dead show (it did not matter what city you were in) and you would always run into some friends.  So I ran into Tommy-the-Freak who used to live in Minneapolis but had moved out to the Bay area, and a few other people I knew and I was ‘home’.

 

I bought a $25 ticket and we all went into the show during the amazing Joe Satriani set.  Then Los Lobos had us all dancing and I was having a blast, but I was hungry so Tommy handed me a chocolate-chip cookie with a wink.  At this point in my life I had already quit smoking pot, but I did not care if the cookie was spiked with weed because I was starving.  It tasted awesome and I wolfed it down, but about an hour later things started changing.  I was giggling and floating and having the time of my life because I was hiiiiigh as hell.  But after awhile I was too high.  After quitting weed for a couple years I had forgotten how to be stoned and I got all paranoid and did not want to talk to people.  So I ditched my friends and started wandering around the huge crowd of 33,000 people and just enjoyed myself and my freedom and the music and the beautiful day.  It was general admission so I went up in the stands, on the grass, all over the Stadium.

 

The foul-mouthed comedians between sets were funny but it was a bit strange at a Dead show.  John Fogerty came on and his set with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Dead sitting in was phenomenal and I was starting to feel better.  Then Tracy Chapman came on and I got really mellow, soulful, introspective...and then just bored.  But finally darkness fell and the Grateful Dead came on with Clarence Clemons sitting in for most of both sets while I danced on the grass near the soundboard.  Not a great show by the Dead’s standards, but a good large-crowd festival-type show.  The ‘Fire On The Mountain’ without the ‘Scarlet Fire’ preceding it was a bit weird, but after seeing them 40 times at that point it was always cool seeing something weird just for the fact that it was different.

 

After the show I never did reconnect with my friends, but I was partying out in the lot and I met some cool people.  They let me sleep on the floor under the sink in their hotel room.  The next day (Sunday) I got up, thanked them and took the BART back over the Bay from Oakland to San Francisco.  My plane did not leave till Monday morning so I had 24 hours to hang out.  I went over to Haight-Ashbury, walked around for awhile, checked out all the freaks and then walked over to Golden Gate Park.

 

It was another beautiful sunny day and I walked around for a couple hours till I came across a bunch of people playing softball.  After watching them for a bit they invited me to play and help myself to their coolers of beer.  So I spent the afternoon playing softball and drinking beer and having a blast.  I am not sure why, but up until that day and ever since then I have never hit the ball that well in my life.  I am normally not that good but I was clocking home-run after home-run until at one point one of the guys from the other team tried to trip me as I rounded third base.  They were getting sick of me so I started hitting grounders.

 

Finally late afternoon they called it quits on the softball.  I thanked them and walked back up to the Haight and hung out for awhile to kill time.  I was a bit lonely but took comfort knowing that I would be home in my bed the next night.  When it got dark I jumped back on the BART and headed out to the airport south of the city.  I had a little bit of money left so I bought another loaf of sourdough bread at the airport and ate until the smell of it was making me sick.  Then I found a HUGE potted plant way down on the end of one of the terminals in a gate that was dark and did not look like it was being used.  I pushed the plant over to one corner of the gate and I slept on the floor behind it with what was left of the bread for my pillow.

 

The next day I got up, flew home, and lo and behold Minnesota was being slammed with a freezing-rain ice/sleet storm.  Armed with only my skimpy little jean jacket, tee-shirt and jeans, I found my motorcycle out in the cold dark lot, chipped the ice off of it and somehow got it started.  I was living near the University of Minnesota campus in Dinkytown, and to this day that was coldest I have ever been on that 45-minute trip from the airport to home.  I remember slowly, carefully going down the I-35W freeway with ice building up on my bare knuckles and my glasses.  Occasionally I would try to wipe the ice off my glasses so I could see, but they would immediately ice up again.  It was slow going and miserably cold but I eventually made it home and warmed up.  When it was all said and done it was a hell of a great weekend.  Here are the setlists for John Fogerty's awesome set and the Grateful Dead's two sets:

                JOHN FOGERTY

One Set: Born On The Bayou, Green River, Down On The Corner, Rock And Roll Girl, Centerfield, Proud Mary, The Midnight Special, Bad Moon Rising, Fortunate Son, E1: Susie Q, E2: Long Tall Sally

Lineup: John Fogerty, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir - guitar & vocals
              Randy Jackson - bass
              Steve Jordan - drums.

GRATEFUL DEAD

Set 1: Touch Of Grey, Greatest Story Ever Told, Althea, Walkin' Blues, Iko Iko*, Stuck Inside a Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again*, Bird Song*, Promised Land*

Set 2: Hell In A Bucket*, Fire On The Mountain*, Blow Away*, Truckin'* > Drums > Space > I Will Take You Home, The Other One, Wharf Rat, Lovelight*, E: Brokedown Palace*

* w/Clarence Clemons on saxophone.