This post first appeared on the Phish.net Forum on September 26, 2024.
Fall. It simply oozes nostalgia and the fleeting threads of summer that got away. Here in Maine, there are plenty of mums, zinnias, black-eyed Susans, and dahlias splashing color beneath the final remnants of summer's green leaves to keep the vibe alive. While memory doesn't serve me well anymore, I recall frosts the final week of August or early-September when I was a kid. If that made for earlier foliage, I can't remember. Regardless, New England's fall air still retains that unmistakable crisp morning dew which can give way to Colorado blue-sky heat in the afternoon. It is bright and wistful; and when it comes to tour, this is, hands down, my favorite season.
Is my bias toward fall shows due to the fact that I saw my first Grateful Dead show in September? The sky was robin egg blue with lowland mist in fields when we skipped school for our big adventure. Portland, Maine's afternoon light cut at a low angle, and I still recall cracking that first, warm, brown-bottle Budweiser at about 1pm. The day unfolded like Dead shows do, something I was soon to learn more about. The short-order cook from York Beach who had alerted me to this event popped by to share a doob. High school friends wafted past; it all seemed so . . . natural. After the show, the once-burdensome jean jacket came in handy for the cold.
Living in D.C. during the fall of 1986 without a Grateful Dead tour on the docket, the time was a bit lonely and yet expansive (what would I do?). D.C. was more summer-like than anything in Maine, and yet it still conveyed that essence of change in light, even if cicadas still chattered and buzzed afternoons. Brent Mydland showed up with Go Ahead, but that was it. Stepping up my tape trading game at the time, a friend spun me the "must have" 9/25/76 from the Capital Center. I had yet to see a show there, but my imagination reeled down aisles of hockey-arena hippie stills, complete with '76 wedge haircuts and long plaid collars protruding from sweaters. Happening just ten years prior, the show's essence was like an older sibling's whisper about a college Halloween party you had missed, something evoking orange oaks shedding under street lights.
Listening then, though I had a budding 1976 collection, Landover stood out. It was a fluid, yet locked-in sound, thundering and delicate. Songs waned like long afternoon light. I knew nothing about the Travis Bean back then, but 1976 had a specific signature. When Jerry broke out the slide on Cosmic Charlie, for example, it was metallic, tinny but rich, fragile and strong, wandering but tight. It, for me, became a sound of autumn much like Portland '82's tuning up for the second-ever Touch. It's inexplicably autumn, like the hiss of tires on a cold, wet street. Half-Step ushering in a new season. Dancin' a capstone of the summer before, yet almost expressing relief at the temperatures subsiding.
It's striking how a tape collected in the fall from a fall tour can mesh so wholeheartedly with the essence of fall that it becomes an unshakeable element of the music in the listener's imagination. First set's Cassidy and Peggy-O embody this by never rushing their watery 1976 diminuendo. The second set drifts and dreams like the final floating of fuzzy seeds from Balloon milkweed. Like the season, fall tour was a routine I took for granted until the day Garcia died. There would be fall tour. Period. Disrupted in '86 and '92, it remained a fact of Grateful Dead life until my final fall run in 1993. After a friend helped me find Phil Lesh again in 2001, I rediscovered the autumn groove in Lewiston's Central Maine Civic Center. I declared it a beautiful dump. It was magical, running into friends absent for years. "What are you doing, here, man? Where ya been?"
Autumn is summer's sunset; and that's how I remember the shows. Donning a fleece for Furthur at Red Rocks; toasting the dimly lit smiles of TAB fans inside Fredericton's Molson Tent; spying Jupiter's moons through a telescope in Augusta on Phish's fall 2010 run; sleeping in my sister's truck on Philly lot in 87; seeing Furthur one November at the Cumberland County Civic Center before they changed its name (catching TABoose there, and in Lowell after exploring a former mill converted into breweries and shops); walking off Thanksgiving to the Dunk in Providence; the Warlocks; wading through a self-inflicted haze one October in Charleston; finding joy again in Worcester, 2013, fall is where I want to be.
It's easy to imagine similar emotional evocations from splitting wood, tailgating at football games, stoking fire pits after clearing brush, or catching glimpses of foliage under the stress of a penalty kick. For me, the skid of a leaf across sidewalk concrete will always suggest another chance to chase the sound and look for familiar faces beneath the barren brush.
See you out there.
Fall. It simply oozes nostalgia and the fleeting threads of summer that got away. Here in Maine, there are plenty of mums, zinnias, black-eyed Susans, and dahlias splashing color beneath the final remnants of summer's green leaves to keep the vibe alive. While memory doesn't serve me well anymore, I recall frosts the final week of August or early-September when I was a kid. If that made for earlier foliage, I can't remember. Regardless, New England's fall air still retains that unmistakable crisp morning dew which can give way to Colorado blue-sky heat in the afternoon. It is bright and wistful; and when it comes to tour, this is, hands down, my favorite season.
Is my bias toward fall shows due to the fact that I saw my first Grateful Dead show in September? The sky was robin egg blue with lowland mist in fields when we skipped school for our big adventure. Portland, Maine's afternoon light cut at a low angle, and I still recall cracking that first, warm, brown-bottle Budweiser at about 1pm. The day unfolded like Dead shows do, something I was soon to learn more about. The short-order cook from York Beach who had alerted me to this event popped by to share a doob. High school friends wafted past; it all seemed so . . . natural. After the show, the once-burdensome jean jacket came in handy for the cold.
(9/17/82 a night to "sort of" remember.)
It is convincing that this is what seared in me a deep connection to fall shows, but I can't be sure. It may just be habit. Each year thereafter, as summer faded into piles of pumpkins and parched corn husks, there was a recap of spring and summer tour. A toast. Deadheads, I soon learned, were spoiled. One could argue that a date like September 17 actually precedes autumnal equinox, while weather nerds will say, "But it's meteorological fall on September 1st." No matter which side of that argument one takes, change is in the air. Summer is passing, and school is in session. Whatever timeless float one felt during that last week of July, the calendar has been sweeping it away like fallen leaves trailing tailgates. And the Dead would tour.
Phish fans like Deadheads were once spoiled, too. I can still recall the unparalleled joy of seeing Phish at Thunderbird's on a cool October night. We wandered our New England brick city, feeling the need for a sweater or hat, shooting pool in the Old Port, bright red ivy on granite. A tinge of fish rot and salt used to permeate the air above Fore Street, mixing with cigarette butt cat piss apartment aroma, depending on the street. (Walking, walking, always walking.) Still finding sea legs after the Grateful Dead's fall tour, somehow, Portland, ME, and UNH the following night, evoked a deeper sense of fall. Few memories pop up in as much sepia as those tequila-twinged high-nights in early-October.
Phish fans like Deadheads were once spoiled, too. I can still recall the unparalleled joy of seeing Phish at Thunderbird's on a cool October night. We wandered our New England brick city, feeling the need for a sweater or hat, shooting pool in the Old Port, bright red ivy on granite. A tinge of fish rot and salt used to permeate the air above Fore Street, mixing with cigarette butt cat piss apartment aroma, depending on the street. (Walking, walking, always walking.) Still finding sea legs after the Grateful Dead's fall tour, somehow, Portland, ME, and UNH the following night, evoked a deeper sense of fall. Few memories pop up in as much sepia as those tequila-twinged high-nights in early-October.
(Did I really see Phish at the UNH Field House? Wow.)
Living in D.C. during the fall of 1986 without a Grateful Dead tour on the docket, the time was a bit lonely and yet expansive (what would I do?). D.C. was more summer-like than anything in Maine, and yet it still conveyed that essence of change in light, even if cicadas still chattered and buzzed afternoons. Brent Mydland showed up with Go Ahead, but that was it. Stepping up my tape trading game at the time, a friend spun me the "must have" 9/25/76 from the Capital Center. I had yet to see a show there, but my imagination reeled down aisles of hockey-arena hippie stills, complete with '76 wedge haircuts and long plaid collars protruding from sweaters. Happening just ten years prior, the show's essence was like an older sibling's whisper about a college Halloween party you had missed, something evoking orange oaks shedding under street lights.
Listening then, though I had a budding 1976 collection, Landover stood out. It was a fluid, yet locked-in sound, thundering and delicate. Songs waned like long afternoon light. I knew nothing about the Travis Bean back then, but 1976 had a specific signature. When Jerry broke out the slide on Cosmic Charlie, for example, it was metallic, tinny but rich, fragile and strong, wandering but tight. It, for me, became a sound of autumn much like Portland '82's tuning up for the second-ever Touch. It's inexplicably autumn, like the hiss of tires on a cold, wet street. Half-Step ushering in a new season. Dancin' a capstone of the summer before, yet almost expressing relief at the temperatures subsiding.
(Maxell XLIIs burned this into my DNA.)
It's striking how a tape collected in the fall from a fall tour can mesh so wholeheartedly with the essence of fall that it becomes an unshakeable element of the music in the listener's imagination. First set's Cassidy and Peggy-O embody this by never rushing their watery 1976 diminuendo. The second set drifts and dreams like the final floating of fuzzy seeds from Balloon milkweed. Like the season, fall tour was a routine I took for granted until the day Garcia died. There would be fall tour. Period. Disrupted in '86 and '92, it remained a fact of Grateful Dead life until my final fall run in 1993. After a friend helped me find Phil Lesh again in 2001, I rediscovered the autumn groove in Lewiston's Central Maine Civic Center. I declared it a beautiful dump. It was magical, running into friends absent for years. "What are you doing, here, man? Where ya been?"
Autumn is summer's sunset; and that's how I remember the shows. Donning a fleece for Furthur at Red Rocks; toasting the dimly lit smiles of TAB fans inside Fredericton's Molson Tent; spying Jupiter's moons through a telescope in Augusta on Phish's fall 2010 run; sleeping in my sister's truck on Philly lot in 87; seeing Furthur one November at the Cumberland County Civic Center before they changed its name (catching TABoose there, and in Lowell after exploring a former mill converted into breweries and shops); walking off Thanksgiving to the Dunk in Providence; the Warlocks; wading through a self-inflicted haze one October in Charleston; finding joy again in Worcester, 2013, fall is where I want to be.
It's easy to imagine similar emotional evocations from splitting wood, tailgating at football games, stoking fire pits after clearing brush, or catching glimpses of foliage under the stress of a penalty kick. For me, the skid of a leaf across sidewalk concrete will always suggest another chance to chase the sound and look for familiar faces beneath the barren brush.
See you out there.
