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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]
[9:31 PM lights down; band out at 9:33 PM]
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!).
Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2015 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2015 event list! ☸ On to the next event!