Return to tape listHampton Coliseum, Hampton VA, 10/9/89 The two nights in Hampton were only announced a week before the show as stealth shows featuring "the Warlocks" with tickets only being sold in person in the Hampton area. I was going to go to the first show, before I remembered that that would be Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. I switched my ticket to Monday, and drove down after services, abstaining from eating, drinking or taking in any other pleasures in the parking lot, waiting till sundown when the holiday would be over. By the way, if you haven't experienced it, it is quite a spiritual experience to attend a Dead show coming off a day of reflection and self deprivation.
The first set was pretty good, but mundane enough. My favorite song of the set was the only "We Can Run" I got to see live. Nice harmonizing. But it was not till after the set break that the magic really began.
Playin' in the band was a monster. Noisy and jammy. After a brief detour into an unexceptional Uncle John's Band, they neatly wrapped up the Playin', still one of my favorite renditions of it of all time.
Then a beat, then Jerry whipped out those four notes that every Deadhead knows. Then again. Then swooping into the intro into Dark Star after a 5-year hiatus, the longest the Dead ever went without playing it. As for the crowd, bedlam! You couldn't hear a thing for a minute. Nor again shortly after when Jerry stepped up to the mike and sang those first lyrics.
Dark Star was somewhat short, but rather jammy. For a moment, the percussionists were leading the melody. It had made everyone's night. How were we to know that two even more amazing moments still awaited us!
Then a noisy, monsterous feedback jam, followed by Drums and Space, leading into bliss. Death Don't Have No Mercy was played for the second time following its long absence, and the band nailed it. They were never so close to perfection. The vocalists sung soulfully. The musicians pounded out the notes in awesome unison. The music rushed over us in wave after wave. Brent, less than a year to live, shouted full defiance at the Grim Reaper, and then his organ sounded as if it was channeling a heavenly chorus. Jerry's last solo numbed the brain; for its effect, he could have been picking it with a scythe. The last verse was total desolation, yet resurrection (in the form of Mr. Fantasy) was just a few notes away. But how could anything that followed be less than anticlimactic?
It's a shame that it was. On any other night, the Dear Mr. Fantasy / Hey Jude / Throwing Stones would have been regarded as amazing. But on this night they were all but blotted out by what had come before. Finally, Good Lovin' was a true letdown. But nobody would begrudge the band for 90 minutes of some of the most amazing music they or anyone else had ever produced.
Oh yeah, the encore. The Dead had one more amazing surprise left into them, as they dug even deeper into the cobwebs of their bag of tricks and pulled out Attics of My Life, last played in 1971! Beautiful, even if the harmonies weren't quite perfect. To see the looks on everyone's face as we streamed into the parking lot. There was no doubt that we had witnessed history, and we had been touched.
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