Less than a year had passed since Jerry Garcia died.
On August 9, 1995, Garcia had died of a heart attack at a drug rehabilitation facility in Forest Knolls, California, at the age of 53. A few months later, the remaining members of the Grateful Dead decided to disband. There was no farewell tour, no final run, no proper goodbye. Just a press statement and silence. Thirty years of continuous music, simply stopped.
Bob Weir spoke for many of them when he told reporters they were going to take time and regroup and make an attempt to reinvent themselves.
That reinvention arrived, cautiously, in the summer of 1996 — in a converted minor league baseball park on the southern Maine coast, two miles from the ocean, with the smell of concession food in the air, mud under everyone's feet, and a crowd of Deadheads wondering what they were supposed to feel now.
The official announcement from the Grateful Dead family framed the Furthur Festival in the plainest possible terms: "Musicians must play, and Dead Heads must dance. It's time to move on — and hit the road."
The festival toured the United States that summer with performances by Bob Weir and RatDog, Mickey Hart's Mystery Box, Bruce Hornsby and his band, along with Hot Tuna and Los Lobos. The Flying Karamazov Brothers performed between acts, and an all-out Vendor's Faire set up on the concourse — the full parking lot ecosystem of the Dead touring world, transplanted intact. Wandering booth to booth brought back memories of the parking lot scene, and memorials to Jerry Garcia were erected everywhere. If any doubts or denials remained, they were to be confronted here and now.
The tour opened on June 20 in Atlanta and swung up through the Southeast, then the Midwest — Charlotte, Raleigh, Virginia Beach, Deer Creek, Alpine Valley, Tinley Park, Cuyahoga Falls, Clarkston, Darien Lake. Show after show in big amphitheatres, the tribe regrouping, feeling out what a summer without Jerry actually felt like. By early July it was pushing northeast — Saratoga Springs on July 6, Hartford on July 7.
And then, on July 8, the tour reached its easternmost point. Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Show number fourteen of thirty-one. The furthest the music had ever travelled from the Haight-Ashbury.
The Deadhead community came to Maine the way they always came to shows — by caravan, by pilgrimage. Some had followed the whole run from Atlanta. Others had driven up from Boston and Portland and points north, through the pine-bordered backroads of southern Maine, windows down. One fan who was there described it years later as "a whole lotta celebrating 'We Will Survive' — jams in the parking lots, great collabs." He called the Old Orchard Beach show awesome.
And then there was the mud.
Maine in July can go either way. Apparently in 1996 it went sideways. The Ballpark's outfield, repurposed as a festival floor, absorbed a summer rain and became what festival grounds always become in those conditions — a slow, joyous, unavoidable swamp. Deadheads, as a rule, do not mind mud. They have strong opinions about most things, but mud is not one of them. By the time RatDog took the stage that evening, there were people dancing in it, barefoot, spinning in slow circles the way they always had, the way they'd been doing in fields and arenas and parking lots since 1965. The setting had changed. The choreography had not.
The show itself ran for the better part of eight hours. Hot Tuna opened with a blistering 45-minute set — Jorma Kaukonen blasting out searing bursts of energy, Jack Casady thumping the bass line with his usual unshakeable steadiness. John Wesley Harding followed, then Los Lobos, then Alvin Youngblood Hart alone with an acoustic guitar in the late afternoon sun. Bruce Hornsby's set at the Ballpark included a Sugaree, Pastures of Plenty, Iko Iko, and Rainbow's Cadillac — Dead songs woven through his own material, the boundaries between them deliberately blurred.
Mickey Hart's Mystery Box came on as the light started to fail. Percussion forward, dense, incantatory — Hart rapping Robert Hunter poetry over rhythms that seemed to come from everywhere at once. At the Saratoga show two nights earlier, Hart had won the biggest crowd response of his set when he rapped about seeing some dead guys named Jack and John and Jerry. The crowd knew exactly what he meant. Then, at the end of Hart's set, Bob Weir walked out and the two of them played "Fire on the Mountain" together into the Maine evening — Weir and Hart closing Hart's set with the song, the way they had so many hundreds of times before, but now differently.
Then RatDog. The lineup that summer included Rob Wasserman on upright bass, Jay Lane on drums, Matthew Kelly on guitar and harmonica, and Johnnie Johnson — Chuck Berry's legendary piano collaborator — on keyboards. It was an improbable configuration, rootsier and looser than the Dead had ever been. Which was, perhaps, the point: something new, built from the same timber.
And at the end of the night, everyone came back out — Weir, Hart, Hornsby, Kaukonen, the Los Lobos players, the horn players, whoever was still standing — for the finale jam that had become the Furthur Festival's nightly ritual. All the musicians on stage at once, trading songs, chasing the feeling. The crowd in the outfield mud, dancing.
The Ballpark had opened in 1984, built for Triple-A baseball, the home of the Maine Guides. After the baseball left, it became a concert venue — SeaPAC — hosting Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Whitney Houston. A total of 75 concerts played there between 1986 and 1997. The music ended that final year after the neighbours complained about the noise, and the venue slowly fell into disrepair.
The Furthur Festival came back the next year, in 1997. Old Orchard Beach was not on the route. The easternmost Maine show had been a one-time thing — a single night when the whole caravan turned as far northeast as it was going to go, stopped at a baseball park two miles from the Atlantic, played in the mud until it was too dark to see, then turned around and headed back toward the continent.
Two days later, the tour was in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Then Jersey City. Then the long run back across the country to the West Coast, to the Gorge in Washington, to California and the desert, to Phoenix on August 4 — show number thirty-one — and then it was over.
Despite having only one Top-40 single in their thirty-year career, the Grateful Dead had remained among the highest-grossing touring acts in America for decades, built entirely on word of mouth and the free exchange of live recordings. Their world had never needed a famous address. A baseball park in Maine, a field of mud, a crowd dancing barefoot — that was exactly the kind of place the music had always belonged.
The stage remembers.