Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead with Trey Anastasio
2015-07-03
Soldier Field Stadium
1410 Museum Campus Dr, Chicago, IL 60605
7:00 PM, Friday, July 3, 2015

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2015 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2015 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

[7:22 PM Phil out, then the rest]

1. [7:26 PM] Box of Rain »
2. [7:32 PM] Jack Straw
3. [7:42 PM] Bertha (Trey) »
4. [7:49 PM] Passenger
   (pause for Robby Taylor to adjust Phil's mic stand)
5. [7:58 PM] the Wheel »
6. [8:08 PM] Crazy Fingers (Trey)
7. [8:18 PM] the Music Never Stopped
   [set ends 8:28 PM]

[9:31 PM lights down; band out at 9:33 PM]

1. [9:35 PM] Mason's Children
2. [9:42 PM] Scarlet Begonias (Trey) »
3. [9:54 PM] Fire on the Mountain (Bruce) »
4. [10:00 PM] Drums »
5. [10:13 PM] Space »
6. [10:17 PM] New Potato Caboose
7. [10:27 PM] Playin' in the Band » [10:41 PM] Space »
8. [10:44 PM] Let It Grow
9. [10:57 PM] Help on the Way (Trey) » [11:02 PM] Slipknot! »
10. [11:08 PM] Franklin's Tower
    [set ends 11:18 PM]
     
    Encore
11. [11:21 PM Donor rap; 11:23 PM] Ripple @
    [show ends 11:28 PM]

the Dead

• Trey Anastasio: guitar, vox;
• Jeff Chimenti: piano, Hammond B-3 organ, keyboards, harmony vox;
• Mickey Hart: drums, lead and harmony vox;
• Bruce Hornsby: keyboards, accordion, vox;
• Bill Kreutzmann: drums;
• Phil Lesh: bass, lead and harmony vox;
• Bob Weir: guitar, vox.

Got in line today around 2 pm, joining a small group of about 60-100 other crazies sweating it out before the show. Gotta be the early bird if you wanna get fresh worms, right? Well apparently I was late – according to the Chicago Tribune, there were at least a dozen folks in line at 7:30 AM!

I should been taking notes to mark the progress of the day and our line activities, but I got distracted by the excitement of the process instead. It's too late to say much about it now – but I recall that it was mildly stressful, like usual tummy-butterfly-generators go.

Still waiting, but everything is better now that we're inside – 5:41 PM and we're finally getting a bit of shade inside the pit, yay! We'll get a bit more radiation before the sun drops completely below the shell of the stadium, but the air is considerably cooler now, thankfully, and its breezy, another good thing!

6:30 PM – some sort of “welcome to the show” announcement is broadcast on the PA. This riles up a few folks, but most everybody hanging out in the pit ignores the news … no band members on stage? Nothing to get worked up about!

7:10 PM, the crowd is getting well packed in, but our section of the pit is doing well on the personal-space count. Lots of folks still sitting on their blankets, and even a few stretched out horizontally. The better to conserve energy before the show, right? The vibe around us is quite mellow – much less insane than the east-coast-energy I'd been expecting. Guess GDTS did a good job stacking the pit with the right sort of heads! While we certainly know a lot of the people around, it's by no means a California-based group, just a happy and relaxed tribe, getting ready to put on their dancing shoes for one more set of Dead shows!

And we score a good set-list tonight – much more to my liking than the Sunday set from Santa Clara! Hoo-rah! Might even want to listen to it again some day, or watch it on a big screen (and spy myself dancing away out there in the pit!).

The Chicago Tribune posted a sort of public announcement page offering assorted tidbits of information about the shows, as well as a healthy photo gallery from tonight's show. If the gallery was higher resolution, I could probably have picked us out in a few, but given that the crowd shots get pixelated before I can recognize anybody besides the better lit folks in the front couple rows, I simply gave up – no point in wasting effort there! Ting and her hot pink NTTH stickers made it into a few of the pre-show shots, I've reproduced the best one below.

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2015 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2015 event list! ☸ On to the next event!