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----- Original Message -----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 9:50 AM
Subject: GD at Wesleyan (Eyewitness) There's always one in every crowd, I
guess.
I was at the Wesleyan concert in May 1970, which
took place on a Sunday night (it was originally booked as a Sunday afternoon
concert, but the Dead got that wrong) and on the next day, Monday May 4, 4
were dead in Ohio. Yale University was on strike to protest the expansion
of the war in Cambodia, but Wesleyan was not on strike at that point. We
had traveled from central NY to the Yale protest rally held on the New
Haven green that weekend (there were tanks and plenty of military men in the
streets of New Haven on Fri nite and Sat), and then hitched up to Middletown
after we heard from our WU friends that the GD were going to be there on Sunday
afternoon....Because of the screw up in the time of the show, we were able to
meet and mingle (the area we're talking about on Wesleyan's campus is very
small) with Garcia, Pigpen, Bill the drummer...Lesh had driven over with
Mickey and stopped at Mickey's aunt's house on the way over from Harpur
College the night before (this Harpur show is a Dicks Picks
performance)....there were satchels of powder in that GD Ryder truck that
members of the band were visiting, and I remember GD manager Sam Cutler looking
at his watch as well at the co-eds while waiting for Mickey and Phil to
show....I also recall that Weir and Garcia hit the stage and did some
acoustic things while waiting for the rest of the band to show up, and I don't
know if that made this audiotape. At Wesleyan U, we are talking about a
small corner of the ball field/quads, a small stage that was not elevated, it
was a very intimate show that ended in the night, and as they finished, a man
grabbed the microphone and told all in the audience not to forget about Bobby
Seale, the Chicago 8, the war....the band split fast...
in 1994, when my son was on a tour at Wesleyan U as
a prospective applicant, the more-than-cool student leader who took us
around literally stopped dead in his tracks when I shared with him that the Foss
Hill site we were then walking past was where the GD played
one warm day in May 1970....the GD concert date was memorialized
in the "Wesleyan U calendar deskbook" they handed out to the parents as a good
will gift....i can go and on about this (but I won't), but I'm glad to hear that
a Wesleyan tape exists, and I would enjoy hearing it ...
now, if I can only find the March 1970 concert in
Buffalo with the Buffalo Philharmonic (memorialized in "Truckin'") which
also doesn't show up in the trading arena...I was there.....anyone know about
this one?
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