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06-24-84: Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga N.Y. ……..……..… (SUN)

Set 1:
Dancing in the Streets, Dire Wolf, Minglewood Blues, Candyman,  Me & My Uncle> Mexicali Blues, Ramble On Rose, Hell in a Bucket> Deal

Set 2: I Need a Miracle> Bertha> Playing in the Band> China Doll> Samson & Delilah> Drums> Space>  The Other One> Wharf Rat> Sugar Magnolia

E. (I can’t get no) Satisfaction> It’s All Over Now Baby Blue

Last “Dancing in the Streets”: 07-07-81 (203)


http://www.archive.org/details/gd1984-06-24.sbd.miller.27449.sbeok.flac16

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Hi I’m George, a shy young looking 18-year-old kid growing up in Northvale, New Jersey, a small suburban town located fifteen miles due north of the George Washington Bridge. It’s the early nineteen eighties and I’m currently living with my parents and two younger brothers. We have a spacious four-bedroom tri-level featuring a 25’x 45’ built-in swimming pool with diving board and slide that’s the envy of the neighborhood come summertime.

I stand about six feet tall with a modest build, fair Irish-German skin and a thick brown haired mullet that I spike up to stay in style. Some girls have told me I remind them of Steven Tyler, but I don’t necessarily see it. I own parachute pants, white Capezio shoes and plenty of trendy sleeveless shirts. And although raised on The Beatles, Kiss, Stones, Doors, Rush, Southern and even some Acid rock, I find myself captivated by music television and the new bands being shown on it. I’m buying new albums from new groups weekly and my friends and I are regulars at some of the hottest clubs in Manhattan, with names like “The Peppermint Lounge”, “Danceteria” and “Starbuck’s”, where we get down to new wave, drink strong cocktails and innocently party with the drug of the day until eventually arriving home just before light. MTV’s overwhelming popularity has set a huge shadow on the grassy fields of Woodstock and the free love generation, to the point where those days seem unobtainable, unlikely to ever return.

Well those were my happening days of senior year, class of 1983. Everything changes when I leave for Lynchburg College in Virginia at summers end. I make friends there, but feel out of place with all the preppies and their plaid cloths dominating the scene. I don’t do well either, ending my first semester still a virgin, on academic probation. When I get back to Jersey for Christmas break, everything snaps back to the way it was before, and I’m happy once again. After the extended holiday I vow to concentrate and get better grades. It wasn’t

I’m expelled by the end of the week.
It was a whole fucking thing. The bottom line is that I was lazy during spring break on my lame trip to Atlanta with my roommate Ray to see his parent’s new house where I never read the book. I looked at the Cliff Notes when I came back and allegedly lifted a line or three. I would have gotten away with it too if not for some other student who handed his paper in weeks after me with the entire page plagiarized. I went to academic court with nothing more than two character witnesses and one of them was my dad. They threw the book at me. Allowing me to come back after a year but that seemed like forever to me at the time.

When I arrive home in mid-May of eighty-four, I’m feeling surprisingly good about myself, despite my scholastic tragedy. A major factor is my acne, or lack of.
Pimples that plagued my appearance for years miraculously cleared up after taking an experimental drug called Acutane during my whole last semester at Lynchburg. The drug truly helped me out of my shell, enabling me to view the world from a far more positive perspective. Another thing playing a role has to be my new marijuana habit. I was told by doctors not to drink any alcohol while taking Acutane, so after months of sexless sobriety I needed a release. I just couldn’t handle being straight, surrounded by a completely drunken and sexually active student body anymore. A couple of guys from Cherry Hill, NJ named Ron and Bill and other from Connecticut got me into it. While in high school I rarely smoked because it made me paranoid. It seemed to make my buddies happy though and I remained curious about it. Away at school I had nothing to be worried about in terms of being caught by my parents, so it worked. It took the place of alcohol, and with no hangovers. Haunting nervous feelings from the past were replaced with a sense of freedom and privilege.
Now back in Jersey I’m interested to know if things will change since I’m smoking pot nearly every day now, just like my friends are.

Tom has been my best friend since 1979.
He stands about 5’ 10” with
some noticeably flabby weight to him, something he’s very conscious of. He has flat brown hair that flows down just past the ears and collar to frame his puffy cheeked Irish face.
Picture a young Meat Loaf. He’s more of an Oscar than a Felix, meaning for instance he likes to wear his beat up Army jacket everyday, drinks regularly and pulls no punches. And like Oscar, Thomas has a soft side, preferring laughter to a fight any day.

Then there’s Kevin, a friend since 82. He’s a rare character, smart and full of personality.
He loves rock music and knows a lot about it. Kevin’s around 5’ 9”, with a good build, slight cleft lip and dirty blond curly hair. Cunningham came out as a bi-sexual to us about a year ago.
He keeps it mostly to himself and gets more girls than all my friends combined, so it’s mainly overlooked. Occasionally my buddies and I will try to bust his chops, but Kevin has a strong outer shell and takes the ribbings well. In fact, he usually has quick and witty comebacks about our weak sex lives that shut us right up.

Next is Kevin. He’s already a legend in Tom’s eyes before I’ve ever seen him.
Apparently this guy was racing his 73’ Camero on the Garden State Parkway one night at speeds of over 150 MPH with police in hot pursuit. Something out of the “Blues Brother” movie from the way Tom describes it. He would get away and hide in a stranger’s driveway, but the cops were right back on his tail as soon as he tried to leave and make it back home. He ultimately crashed making a right hand turn into a telephone pole nearly maiming his cousin Victor in the passenger seat. The police came close to beating Beamen to death for leading them on the multi-township chase, then fought over which municipality would get to arrest them.

I first met Kevin at one of the Who shows in Shea Stadium during October of 82’.
Turns out he’s a good guy with a great wit. He stands 5’ 9”, has a thin build, large nose, long dark Italian hair and all the body hair that goes along with that.
He’s really into chicks and to his credit is having the first real relationship out of any of us with a girl worth boasting about.

One random night Cunningham brings up the Grateful Dead.
He says, “They’re playing in Saratoga, about 3 ½ hours away this Sunday and my brother’s going.”
“Does anyone want to go?” I ask, “Are they still around?” The words Grateful Dead sound so from out of left field to me. I imagine a small oldies revival show for ex-hippies turned corporate mouthpieces, lying on blankets or sitting in lawn chairs sipping wine out of plastic cups, while their new BMW’s await them in a nearby parking lot. Cunningham has credibility though. The year before he asked me if I wanted to go check out a band called U2 at the Capitol Theater in Passaic on the same night of the show.
I said, “You Who”? “It’s a school night?” “I don’t know?” But with a little persuasion he convinced me to make the effort and what a pay-off. U2 blew the roof off the former vaudeville theatre and I left knowing I’d witnessed rock history in the making. With that in mind I agree to go and the rest of the guys follow.

The six of us are in the Northvale Shop-Rite parking lot at high noon on the fateful day.
It’s overcast in the low seventies. Kevin and his brother Mark have volunteered to drive their cars. Mark’s a bigger, older version of Kevin, with darker hair and no cleft lip. He’s a seasoned deadhead who seems excited about being our tour guide.
So with coolers packed and anticipation mid to low we hit the road.
I’m in Mark’s car with Beamen and Tom. On the way up the Thruway Mark talks about the Dead experience and plays bootleg tapes that sound horrible to me. This “Sugar Magnolia” from one cassette is just hissing, rendering it barely recognizable, nothing like the studio version, which is awesome. Mark insists we wait to light up until we reach a certain bridge just past Albany.
He says we need to pace ourselves for a long night.
We wait and arrive stoned.

We drive up to what looks like the entrance to a lush green state park at around 4:00 PM.
We pay a few bucks and proceed past this big Saratoga
Performing Art Center sign then roll down a long and winding road lined with these huge tall trees. It’s enchanting, but dark and ominous like Hansel and Gretel’s forest. We continue driving for a while until we come across a small remote grass lot with woods surrounding it.
here are only about 20 other cars in here.
I guess it will be a low turn out.
Mark leaves us within fifteen minutes to look for friends.
I stay around the car playing Frisbee with Tom and Beamen while Kevin and Tom’s younger brother Matt or “Matty” go for a walk. Matt’s only sixteen, tall with long straight blond hair, a trim build and an easygoing personality. The girls like him. He also just happens to have a young 60’s rebel spirit about him and hates MTV. He’s actually really looking forward to this, and I’m not sure why. I mean the 60’s are over, right?

It starts raining after a while, prompting Tom, Beaman and I to jump in Kevin’s Dodge where we roll up a dry bone. We’re baked by the time Matty and Cunningham get back twenty minutes later. Kevin through a crack in the driver’s side window tells us he has some doses. “Doses, what’s “doses”?
I say. “Its acid” he explains, “Let’s trip!”
“LSD???” I’ve never done LSD before, nor did I think it even still existed. I’m very apprehensive about taking the legendary drug. I’ve heard some crazy stories of people jumping off highway overpasses thinking they could fly only to be smashed by the traffic below. I’m curious however, so with the rain pouring down, sitting in a friend’s car stoned, having no idea where anything is or what to expect, I decide to go along with the majority and drop.

After another thirty minutes of hanging out drinking beers in the cars we start walking towards the show. We have to trek a good half mile, through woods and over streams before getting to a clearing where hippies are gathering from every direction, creating what looks like a big wet mass of colorful confusion. The rain continues to stream down. People start yelling and howling. Butterflies take off up in my core like never before. I can feel the dose planted in me starting to sprout. Mark guides us through the entrance gate without a hitch
then down a sloping lawn that faces a huge brown covered pavilion with several thousand filled seats underneath it. I can see the stage at the bottom. We stop halfway down a packed lawn, stage left and wait for the show to begin.

The rain suddenly stops and the sun peaks through just as the band takes the stage. After what seems like a 10-minute tune-up they turn to the audience and slip into Martha and the Vandalia’s “Dancing in the Streets”, and with the lyric “Summers here and the time is right” everything is in motion. The music is much louder and clearer than I’d expected and the crowd is moving feverishly.
Nothing like I’d imagined.
Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir (the only one’s I know) and the rest of the band look right at home down there in their woodsy surroundings.

Next I look up twenty feet to my left and notice this striking beauty dancing fluidly on one of the bridges without anyone near her. She’s in an unforgettably sexy 60’s style sundress and the sun’s rays are shining through her long blond hair in such a way that it somehow transports me to a peaceful place I’d only daydreamed existed. Like discovering a world time forgot.
Seconds later the hard rain starts up again. I can tell we’re beginning to feel the hits by the way my friends and I are cracking up with laughter for little or no reason. Beamen is wearing an out of place looking red, white and blue floppy beach hat that’s keeping his head dry and we can easily see that he’s grown attached to it by the way he keeps tugging on it with both hands. Kevin Cunningham picks up on his love for this groovy-less lid-shelter and says something like, “That hat looks ridicules” and exuberantly liberates it off KB’s skull and wings it high and far in the air.
Locating it would be like trying the find a needle in a haystack. Needless to say, KB is not happy with KC.

With the band well into Dire Wolf, Tom, Beamen and I decided to go exploring.
It gets a bit blurry from here. I remember joking about the line in the song “Don’t murder me,” “I beg of you, don’t murder me”, then I would throw in a “Yeah because that would really suck” as we climb over people and tents on the way up to the rim of the lawn. Once on level ground I see more luscious grass that’s lined with grand old trees and deadheads that reach as far back as the dusky sky will allow.
The three of us start walking there.
We’re amazed at what we see.
People are dancing madly everywhere, up in trees and even in the very, very back of the place.
I think to myself, “This is nothing like that Billy Squire-Def Leppard concert I saw at the Nassau Coliseum last year.”

I have never seen so many hippies in one place.
It’s as if they’d come out of the woodwork of society to dance like they were extras in the movie “Hair”. It seems really peculiar to me and not real. “These people couldn’t be serious,” I keep telling myself. With darkness upon us, Tom and I find ourselves standing on a high traffic path with quaint park benches and wrought iron
lamp posts. Beamen keeps hiding in the moving crowd with a hooded sweatshirt tucked over his head before jumping out at us every few minutes trying to scare us. We are having a great time, I think?
After a while Kevin decides he’s going to go off on his own. Tom won’t hear of it, thinking there is safety in numbers or something.
After a desperate plea that includes a lot of shirttail grabbing, Beamen vanishes into the night. Kevin would ultimately wind in the balcony where he dried off and had the best time of his young life.

Tom and I will take another path. We first walk onto one of the four bridges that arch over the lawn and attach to the balcony. I just sit there holding onto the hand railing for dear life looking down at the crowd below, not feeling like I could fly. I’m so out of it I think the band is cranking away until Tom tells me it’s just the intermission music. Darkness sets in completely for the second set opener “I Need a Miracle,” a familiar favorite from the “Shakedown Street” cassette I had in 8^th grade.
By the songs end we’re getting ushered off the bridge and back onto the mud.
It starts pouring when the next song begins.
Sick and and tired of getting soaked with Tom just drifting, I decide to take the lead and seek shelter.

We make our way towards the back of somewhere. It’s a blur. We pass a few rows of pine trees, down some hill to an oasis of Porto-Sans. That’s right an oasis of Porto Johns.
They are very far out of the way and basically unused. It isn’t as bad as you might think.

With the first chords of “Sugar Magnolia”
I spring up and out of the plastic box then attempt to dance under the florescent light provided.
They go into the Rolling Stones, “Satisfaction” next which rocks the box. Then into “The Last Time” no wait a second, it was “The Last Time,”now its Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”?

Following the song and final cheers of the audience, someone asks us, “Are you going to the next show in Maryland?” We answer maybe, but I knew we’d never make it right after this one. I needed time to digest what just happened. Too bad though, because Garcia would open the show with a rare “Casey Jones”, then tuck it away for the better part of a decade.

In the confusion of the crowd leaving, Tom and I just start following the flow towards the nearest exit. This will prove to be a big mistake. We wind up on a walking bridge 50 ft. over a stream that brings us into the main parking lot area by the box office. Everyone on the bridge seems to be murmuring at the same volume like a séance and it’s creeping me out. I feel way out of place.
None of
this looks recognizable either. We’re clueless, beside ourselves.
“Where do we begin to look?” I say to Tom. There are just woods, cars and zany people everywhere. We walk down one paved path with a small downgrade into a dark forest. Tom thinks we’re going to hell and we’d never find our way back.
We quickly turn around. We come across a dry blue wool blanket back near the box office and sit down on it for a long time, hopeless. Although I’m feeling super high, it’s hard to describe the feeling. Judging by the insane looking people around me I’m figuring they’re probably higher though. This is reassuring but “Who’s all driving here?” By 2:00 AM we’re cold, wet and I’m concerned because I need to be at my job in Bayonne at 7:00 AM, as the quality inspector for a major bottle manufacturer, on the Hellmann’s Mayonnaise filling line. I begin whining to Tom that I’m going to have to call my Dad on a payphone in the middle of the night to tell him I took too much LSD and can’t find the car. I really feel like I have no choice, since he’s my boss as well.

After Tom diverts my attention from calling home we start another walk around the emptied lot.
Finally a break, I make out a taxicab way off in the distance.
I start running towards it. Tom follows slowly, but can’t understand what I’m doing.
I yell, “The car is warm and dry and can take us around, let’s go.” We catch up, jump in and tell the driver to go to some lots in the area.
He says there are at least 40.
I don’t care and tell him to just go. We make a right out of the lot onto a two-lane county highway. Less than a half mile up, out of the corner of my right eye I notice the top of a familiar looking tree then have a daylight flash of the same tree. It computes to be the oak we played Frisbee underneath earlier.
I have the cabbie halt on a dime. We pay the shocked driver well for the brief trip, tell him to wait then run through thick bush, over a creek and right to our cars.
Thank God it wasn’t just a desperate vision. We waive the driver on and leap for joy as if we’d just made it out of the Congo alive, after being lost for months.
But wait, no one else is here. “Could they be lost too?” I exclaim.
Thankfully it doesn’t take long before everyone shows, including Beamen whose wearing that floppy beach hat. Everyone had problems finding the cars, but made it back hours before we did.
We briefly tell our war stories then get on the road.

During the drive home we catch up to the trucks that are carrying the band’s equipment going southbound on the New York State Thruway. On the backdoor of one of the trailers is this wild image of space that blows us away. We pass by the driver’s side door and see what looks like a “Fucker Brothers Trucking Company” logo painted on it.
Wow I think, “These guys are serious.” “This is no joke.”“The 60’s spirit is still alive and well, with The Grateful Dead firmly at the wheel.” Suddenly all those new wave bands like Men at Work, Duran Duran
and Flock of Seagulls seem fly by night to me, with no real depth.

I’m dropped off with just enough time to put my head underneath the downstairs bathroom sink, brush my teeth, say hi to Dad and jump in my car to get to the Hellmann’s line by seven. It’s a rougher day than usual staring at those white jars whizzing past me and I can’t stop trying to sort out the timeline of events from the night before. It’s an historic mess in my mind that I need to untangle. At the end of the day, after talking with the guys, it’s clear that Saratoga’s impact on the six tripping kids will last our lifetimes…

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