Where was the Grateful Dead’s final show?
It was clear to anybody who went to a live performance by Grateful Dead in the first half of 1995 that something wasn’t right with the band’s figurehead, Jerry Garcia. In fact, he’d relapsed into heavy drug use, as long-standing addictions to heroin and cocaine reared their ugly head again. The chronic diabetes that had caused a coma was worsening, affecting his ability to play the guitar.
Still, nobody believed that when they took to the stage on July 9th, 1995, it would be the last time the Dead would ever perform together as a band. They opened the show’s first set with their only real mainstream hit of note, ‘Touch of Grey’, and fittingly ended their final encore with fan favourite ‘Box of Rain’.
In between, Bobby Weir and Garcia exchanged guitar licks like old times on the first-set highlight ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’. Garcia also nailed his lead vocal on ‘So Many Roads’ in the second set. But it was a rare sweet spot in two and a half hours of songs that struggled to come together, with the rest of the band working around their main frontman’s limited capacity to play and sing.
In fact, Garcia didn’t even make it out for ‘Box of Rain’, finishing his music career with a pained performance of his lonely ballad ‘Black Muddy River’. It proved to be a fittingly tragic end to a monumental 30-year run performing with the Dead, which was cut short before Garcia could end it on his own terms.
Days later, Garcia checked himself into rehab to try and fight off his drug dependency one last time. Sadly, it was to no avail, as his heart gave out on August 9th. A month to the day that the Grateful Dead played their final show.
So, what was the venue?
That show took place at Soldier Field in Chicago, the stadium for the NFL team, the Chicago Bears. The Dead had played there every summer since 1991 and played on successive nights every year from 1992, including for their fateful final gigs in 1995.
An incredible 69,000 fans came to see Garcia’s last-ever performance, a record for the stadium which was only broken 20 years later. Fittingly, when 70,000 people turned up to see Bobby Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart come together on the 20th anniversary of that final show, reviving the Dead for one last time on the 50th anniversary of the band’s creation.
Garcia would have loved seeing yet another whole new generation of Deadheads so enamoured with the little psych-rock group he started in Palo Alto all those years ago. But he had an amazing run of his own, leading the group through over 2,300 shows across three decades. That took a hell of a lot of heart. Sadly, it was just too much in the end.
