Grateful Dead 1988 Spring Tour

Getting concert tickets before the internet was around was not always an easy prospect, especially if you wanted to get tickets for an out-of-town show.  The Grateful Dead tried to make it easier for their fans however by selling a large portion of the tickets by themselves directly to the fans.  After listening to the Grateful Dead hotline for ’88 Spring tour info, carefully filling out all the 3x5 index cards with separate envelopes and post-office money orders for each city, we eagerly waited a few weeks until all of our tickets arrived.  My girlfriend Lona and I were going to six shows and we could not be more excited!  Then after the mail-order was over we got word that the Dead had added a 3^rd show to Chicago, so I quickly called the ticket office down there and got seats for that show as well.  I had only seen the Dead 13 times prior to this so adding 7 more shows was huge and we were looking forward to the road trip.  We would see the first four shows of the tour and the last three.

3/24/88  The Omni - Atlanta, GA
3/26/88  Hampton Coliseum - Hampton, VA
3/27/88  Hampton Coliseum - Hampton, VA
3/28/88  Hampton Coliseum - Hampton, VA
4/13/88  Rosemont Horizon - Chicago, IL
4/14/88  Rosemont Horizon - Chicago, IL
4/15/88  Rosemont Horizon - Chicago, IL

I was about to turn 22 years old, in my 4^th year of college in Minneapolis, and spring break was the week of Monday March 21^st through Friday the 25^th.  With the first show on the tour being Thursday the 24^th in Atlanta we had a few days to do whatever we wanted before then.  So Lona and I packed up my 1977 Toyota Celica that I had recently bought for $220 and decided to drive down to New Orleans for a couple of days before heading over to Atlanta to start the tour.

We left Minneapolis on March 21^st and arrived in Louisiana on the evening of the 22^nd.  We had stopped somewhere on the way to buy a large grocery bag full of fireworks, as they were illegal in Minnesota and it seemed like a good idea at the time.  After two long days on the road we decided to camp at Fontainebleu State Park on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.  We got up the next morning on the 23^rd and got on the crazy long Causeway Bridge across the lake down to New Orleans.  We knew absolutely nothing about New Orleans other than its reputation as a fun party-town, so being the good young partying tourists that we were we headed straight to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter.

We wandered around, people-watched, bought some souvenirs, had a few drinks and marveled at the fact that we could just hang out in public with alcohol in hand…we were in heaven!  We decided to get some po-boys for lunch and I got something different like alligator while Lona got something normal like ham.  I loved mine and she hated hers.  We spent the afternoon watching live music while sipping Hurricanes and then we headed back to the campground.  We stopped at a liquor store on the way for some wine.  I ended up talking to the friendly owner for awhile and for some reason he gave me a free large beer.  We went to bed fairly early, excited to be seeing the Dead the next day in Atlanta!  Well rested and awake with the sun, I noticed a small blob stuck to the outside of our tent.  I got up to pee and it turned out to be a sweet little green tree-frog.

We packed up and drove the 6 ½ hours to Atlanta, arriving on the afternoon of the 24^th.  It was total chaos downtown, so we found what looked like a nice and somewhat secluded street to park behind The Omni arena where we would sleep later.  It was a fantastic show with the ‘Looks Like Rain’ and its trippy rain/thunder sound effects being my highlight.  After the show we made our way through the sea of hippies and eventually found our car down a dark lonely street…the area looked completely different in the middle of the night from the way it did in the bright afternoon sunlight.  We got in the car, locked the doors, leaned our seats back and hunkered down for a restless night of sleep in downtown Atlanta.

We got up the next morning on the 25^th with a day off from the Dead and started our 9 hour drive up to Hampton, VA.  That evening during a stop for gas I noticed a huge wall of 6-packs stacked along the back of the gas-station.  Upon closer inspection it was a clearance sale on Dixie Beer…$1 per 6-pack!  Being somewhat low on money I decided to gamble and spend most of the rest of our money on beer.  We could sell it in the parking lot at Hampton!  The look on Lana’s face when she caught sight of me wheeling the first of several dollies full of beer out to the car was priceless.  I bought almost every 6-pack they had and filled every square inch of our car with beer.

An hour later we pulled our weighted-down car into a gas station in Virginia Beach for cheap food and directions.  As I was about to go in I held the door open for a guy coming out and it happened to be our friend Joel Ruthin from Minneapolis!  He was on tour selling tee-shirts and it was nice seeing a familiar face on the road.  He told us about a campground that he and some other Minneapolis friends were staying at and we told him we would catch him there later.  We did not find the campground that night so we slept in our car at a rest stop, ready for our 3-night run of shows in the awesome Hampton Coliseum.

We got up the morning of the March 26^th, filled our cooler with fresh ice and headed over to the Coliseum to begin my new profession as a beer vendor.  The going rate for beer those days was usually $1 for domestic beers and $2 for imports.  I decided to undercut everybody in the lot and sell my beer for 50 cents apiece.  So I put a cardboard sign on my cooler, cracked a beer and kicked back for a few minutes.  First one person came by, then another and another and another…word got out that some dude was selling beers for 50 cents!  Before long I had a line at my cooler.  I could not keep the cooler full because they would get bought as soon as I put them in there.  I put a 4-can per person limit on the beer but within a couple hours I had sold out.  I made a few friends, made a ton of Deadheads happy and I tripled my money.

Wandering around the lot we had run into our friends Joel and Mark Smith and Christy Russell from Minneapolis.  Christy had a great homemade sign to help her find tickets, and it worked.  It was a fun day but by the end of the afternoon I was a tad drunk on Dixie and it was time to turn our attention to the real reason we were there…to see our 15^th Grateful Dead show!  The show in Atlanta two nights ago to start the tour was smoking and we were excited to see what Hampton would bring.  Lona had never taken acid before and decided it was finally time to give it a try.  What better place than at a Grateful Dead concert in the hallowed grounds of the Hampton Coliseum.  The Coliseum was like the east coast version of the Oakland Coliseum in that it was all general admission seating and the shows there were usually great.

So we dosed about an hour before the show and headed in to find a spot.  As would become our norm in the years to come in Oakland, we picked out a nice spot in the lower level, side stage on Jerry’s side.  It was a very good, long show that included a humorous attempt at Bob Marley’s ‘Stir It Up’ early in the 1^st set.  It took a few seconds to figure out what the heck they were doing but when we figured it out the crowd roared and reacted in kind with everyone lighting up.  Lona was a little nervous tripping but I helped her through it and we had fun at the show.  The next step was to try and safely get to the campground that our Minnesota friends were staying at.

After finding Joel’s car earlier that day he said we could follow him to the campground, but that was easier said than done.  It was pouring rain out and there were a bunch of cops on horses galloping around the lot yelling at everyone and telling them to get the f*ck out of there.  Normally we would have either slept in the car or at least waited for the acid to calm down a bit but the cops left us no choice, we had to go.  It was extremely traumatic trying to stay right behind Joel and not lose him in the sea of merging cars in the blinding rain while tripping and being yelled at by the scary horse-cops.

I stuck right behind Joel hoping not to run into him, but eventually we made it out of the lot and 15 minutes later we were at the camp ground…huge sigh of relief!  The rain had stopped but everything was soaked so we decided to forgo setting up our tent in the mud and just sleep in the car that night.  We were still feeling the acid and could not sleep yet so we had a few beers with our friends, and then I remembered the fireworks.  Fun!  So I grabbed a pack of bottle rockets out of the grocery bag, pulled one rocket out of the pack, carefully placed it in the muddy ground, lit the fuse and backed away. 

The ground was so muddy though that as soon as I backed away from it the rocket began to lean and fall over.  Before I could do anything about it, it shot off horizontally across the campground about 5 feet off the ground.  I watched in horror as it streaked away, heading right for a cop car about 200 feet away that was slowly patrolling the grounds.  ‘No way…no way…please don’t do this’ I thought…but sure enough it exploded right on the windshield of the cop.  His driver window was open and I could hear him scream.

Holy f*cking sh*t.  I had no idea what was going to happen next but I knew it could not be good.  I did not want to go to jail, especially down south 1,000 miles from home in the middle of the night while tripping.  I also did not want to lose my fireworks so I quickly put the full grocery bag in the back seat of my car, covered it with a blanket, and then put the small pack of bottle rockets on top of my car in plain view.  After a few seconds of shock the cop figured out where the rocket had come from and raced his car over to mine with the cherries blazing.  He was large, much older than us, and oh so angry.

I did not try to hide the fact that I was the guilty one as I just stood there saying:  “I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!” over and over again.  I was hoping he would pity me as I tried to look as clueless and pathetic as I possibly could.  He jumped out of his car, ran over to me, lowered his face down to mine and yelled:  “I don’t how they operate wherever you come from, but here in Virginia we do not try to blow up police officers!”  He asked me where the rest of my fireworks were and I pointed to the single pack of bottle rockets on the roof of my car. 

With a big swipe of his meaty paw he grabbed them off the car and thrust them onto my chest.  “Drop these into the mud!  Now!!”  After doing so he instructed me to stomp on them and grind them into the muck.  I did so, trying to look very disappointed like he was somehow hurting me in order to give him some satisfaction so he would leave.  It must have worked because he told me that I hoped I learned my lesson and he triumphantly drove off.  As soon as he got out of sight I chuckled with relief as I packed away the rest of the fireworks deep in my car.

The next two shows in Hampton were just awesome, with the highlights in night two being the debut of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, the rare ‘To Lay Me Down’ and the only ‘So What’ ever.  The whole 2^nd set was just killer.  The third night was an average setlist, but played extremely well with a crazy spooky ‘The Other One’ out of ‘Space’.  We loved Hampton, but it was time to go back to school for a couple weeks.  We were all packed and ready to go after the last show but it turned out that Mark and Christy needed a ride back to Minneapolis because their ride there was Joel and he had decided to head on up the coast for the rest of the tour.  So we crammed as much of their stuff into our car as we could and took off.  I was already behind in school as I would miss the first two days of the new quarter, so we drove straight through only stopping for gas.

After two weeks of college we packed the car up again and hit the road for three more shows in Chicago at the Rosemont Horizon.  The first night was okay, night two was better, and night three was the gem.  On night three they opened the first set with a surprising ‘Scarlet>Fire’ and it was onwards and upwards from there.  So much fun, and I remember thinking how glad I was that they had added that third show.  A couple parking lot notes.  As I had written about in an earlier blog (1/27/12 – ‘I’ve Been On Fire Three Times’), one afternoon while passing a bowl out in the parking lot an ember had blown into the loose sleeve of my Guatemalan poncho.  Without realizing it, it smoldered there for awhile before coming to life and someone had to mention to me that “Hey man, your arm is on fire.”

Another tidbit was the fact that before we had left for New Orleans three weeks earlier I had stuffed all of my tax forms in my car’s glove compartment with the intent of doing them on the road.  I of course completely forgot all about them until the mushrooms had started kicking in on the afternoon of the last day of the tour…April 15^th.  In my giggly state I managed to do my taxes and then wandered around for an hour trying to find a place to mail them.  I finally succeeded, went into Rosemont for a killer show and just like that Spring Tour ’88 was over.  It’s always a bit sad going home at the end of tour, but no matter…we already had plans for an epic Summer Tour ’88 just two short months away with 8 more shows to be seen!  You can read about the near-tragic end to that trip in my 5/11/12 blog entry ‘Crossing Into Canada’.