CHICAGO -- And now the Grateful Dead belong to the ages.
The band beyond description bid a final goodnight to its fans on Sunday with an up-and-down show at Soldier Field, capping a three night "Fare Thee Well" run on the same grounds where the band last played with Jerry Garcia.
After two blazing nights in Chicago the Dead still had several major set pieces to dispense with -- and they got around to most of them. The first came right away with show opener "China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider," and they delivered another with a late second-set "Terrapin Station," the highlights of a finale that was otherwise strangely subdued.
Another high point was a tightly wound "Sampson and Delilah," a Dead Sunday favorite through the years, and "Estimated Prophet," the Bob Weir paean to the Dead's home state of California.
In keeping with the "Fare Thee Well" tour's theme of dredging for deep material, the Dead also put a punchy "Built to Last" into Set 1, while Phil took vocals on a spacey "Mountains of the Moon."
The second set began with a bonus fireworks show to Saturday night's post-show spectacle, and then the Dead laid right into "Truckin'," the song that gave them an early hit and a catchphrase that would never fade. It was a loud, strange chorus with the stadium in full throat, ready for the one last set that would cap the portal once and for all, ending 50 years of a cultural phenomenon that grew out of Ken Kesey's mid-1960s Acid Tests to become a worldwide touring juggernaut.
With so vast a catalogue to plumb and limited time, the band pulled out some odd choices for the crowd's last chance to dance: "Unbroken Chain," an impossibly tricky song to play that was first attempted live by the Dead in 1995, got Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio (filling in for Garcia) briefly off track during key passages. And soon after came "Days Between," a clunky, melancholy and ponderously long space-out that Garcia liked to play in the Dead's final tours, but never did much to ignite the crowd.
Perhaps that was a built-in breather, since the second set with Buddy Holly's booty-shakin' rave-up "Not Fade Away." It was brisk and rowdy and, as it always has done for the Dead, inspired neverending repeats of the refrain from the crowd.
As they echoed "Love is real, not fade away," the band briefly left the stage and readied itself for the final encore. And of course: It was "Touch of Grey," easily the band's biggest radio hit and a presumed necessary part of this farewell finale, if nothing else for its hopeful and defiant "I will get by/I will survive" refrain.
But that was just the first song; we knew this encore was going to be a double. They ended on "Attics of My Life," an elegant if plaintive ballad from "American Beauty," carried by strong harmonies a wistful final stanza:
In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me
The band gathered up for a group hug, and drummer Mickey Hart left the crowd with final instructions: "The feeling we have here -- remember it, take it home and do some good with it. I’ll leave you with this: Please, be kind.”
It was the end of an intensely bittersweet weekend for Deadheads, a growing tribe 50 years strong that was gathering for one last moment in the presence of its beloved leaders. And they got some to see some truly great stuff, with the band focused and in top form, from two shows in Santa Clara, California, on through to this historic three-night run that set attendance records at Soldier Field.
With Anastasio on lead guitar and Jeff Chimenti and Bruce Hornsby on keys, the core four -- Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Hart -- had eased into the West Coast shows and put it on full blast in Chicago, the last place the Grateful Dead played with Garcia, 20 years ago, and just weeks before his death in 1995. The last song they played, "Box of Rain," opened the Chicago run on Friday night where the boys punched out a classic rock 'n' roll first set and never looked back.
Saturday night -- the 4th of July -- was an emotional ride, from the opening wah-wahs of "Shakedown Street" to the coulda-called-it encore: "U.S. Blues." After Weir got in his first cowboy tune of this tour with "Me and My Uncle," the band went down a slinkier, more Phish-inflected path, with a "Friend of the Devil” (a rarity in that it was played at album speed); a touching "Foolish Heart" with Anastasio on vocals; and an early first-set appearance of "Liberty," the defiant stomper that was one of Garcia's last original songs with Robert Hunter.
But they also uncased some lush beauties, with a "Birdsong" that unfolded like a crystalline landscape, leading right into a surprise appearance of "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)," from the Dead's first studio album, a song they haven't played since the 1960s.
Though Soldier Field holds just over 70,000 people, by some estimates Chicago was hosting three times that many Deadheads who came for the shows. That was evidenced by the overrun restaurants, bars, sidewalks and hotels around town; fancy brunch spots and highfalutin cocktail bars have never hosted so many people in tie-dyes and flip-flops.
Three times over they crushed into Soldier Field and back out again, the last leg of a long, hard slog to which Deadheads have become accustomed: Score tickets, push through travel snags, fight crowds, dance and sing all night, scrounge for late night food (not an easy feat in Chicago at 2 a.m.), recover the next day, repeat.
One last march. #FareTheeWell pic.twitter.com/wkrcZFDSlU— Josh Lincoln Dickey (@JLDlite) July 5, 2015
On Sunday night as they piled out of Soldier -- where a large chunk of the crowd had just seen a third or fifth show in succession -- it was evident that the Grateful Dead had given them all they could handle. Aside from a rousing "Not Fade Away" reprise going on in a pedestrian tunnel, with 'heads banging on garbage cans and giving the night one last howl, the tribe was shuffling away deeply footsore, weary and seemingly satisfied.
Goin home, goin home
by the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul
Fare thee well.