Remembering Grateful Dead’s 1977 Cornell show

Some may remember May 8, 1977, as a helluva party. Some may remember it as the time a riot almost broke out on Cornell University’s campus. The world will remember it as the night the Grateful Dead played one of the greatest rock shows of all time.

After five decades together, two without leader Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead are calling it quits, a half-century after Ken Kesey and the Haight-Ashbury acid tests brought them to the forefront of popular culture in the San Francisco Bay area. All will come to an end in a three-day run at Chicago’s Soldier Field beginning Friday, capping a brief run of five shows that started with a two-night stand in Santa Clara, California, on June 27 and 28.

Tickets for these final shows have reached $350 to $800 each, but one of the most memorable performances the Dead ever put on was a $6.50 show in Barton Hall, nearly 40 years ago, a night so legendary that May 8 is now celebrated in the City of Ithaca as “Grateful Dead Day.”

On that day in 1977, the crowd stretched from the front door and around the building, wind whipping around the hundreds waiting to pack into the on-campus concert hall. The day started out sunny and 70, but rain began to fall shortly before showtime, and those in waiting held blankets above their heads to shield themselves from the downpour.

“I don’t know how we managed to get in on time,” said R. Cooper, of Ithaca, leader of local band GoGone. “It was a beautiful day, so we didn’t mind waiting. I lost the concept of time that day.”

The band was at their peak then, their album “Terrapin Station” a few months from pressing, when John “Taz” Cannon, of Ithaca, drummer for Pete Panek and the Bluecats, heard the opening notes of “Minglewood Blues” bumping through the walls, the set starting before the crowd had even gotten inside Barton Hall.

“It was close to a riot breaking out,” said Cannon, a self-proclaimed Deadhead. “The crowd, when they heard the band playing, got pretty restless. (The organizers) did their best to get everybody in.”

A veteran of more than 40 Grateful Dead shows, Cannon remembers that night standing out above the rest, high praise for a group he said greatly influenced his style of playing.

“I remember getting very close during the show and being transfixed,” Cannon said. “I was blown away to be this close during their career. They were seasoned at that time, more than world famous, and Ithaca was a place that harbored a lot of Deadheads during the ’70s. It was huge for me.”

The band improvised their sets each night — yielding terrible performances as often as great ones — but that night, Cannon said, the band was on point, putting on a show that, even today, stands as one of the finest bootlegged gigs by the band on record.

“I knew they could be OK, great or awful,” Cooper said. “While it was going on, you didn’t have time to think it was great, but it was. But that night, they were playing together as one, and we were all together as one. This one always stood out as such a great set and a great show.”

Created well before the days when shows could be circulated with a click, that Barton Hall tape went on to be one of the most widely distributed bootlegs out of the 2,200 or so the New York Times said existed in 2009. Though the acoustics of the concert hall were notorious, the tape was significant for several factors — the quality of the recording, the improbable scale of its distribution and, most significantly, the testament it provided to a band at the top of its game.

“Barton Hall doesn’t sound so fantastic,” Pat Burke, of Ithaca, 17 at the time, said about the show. “The tape may have sounded better than the actual show did. Most shows there don’t sound too great, but they had that room tuned in.”

The recording was spot-on, considered by many to be the finest example of the Grateful Dead’s “on” nights of the era. Cannon said that night, other than the night a pregnant fan was flown out of an Englishtown, New Jersey, show or a riot that occurred after a show in Jersey City was canceled, as the most memorable show he had ever seen.

“The finale was ‘Morning Dew,’ and everybody kind of left on a cloud,” Burke said. “It was a relationship between the audience and musicians where you were all on the same page. It did feel like an ‘event.’ It’s like an auditory journal — if I listen to that old tape, it all comes back to me. Where I was, who I was with, I remember it all.”

After the show, Cannon stood within feet of Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, unable to say even a word, and carried the memories of the evening into a night where the weather went mad, snow falling just hours after he was waiting in line in sunny weather.

“I remember driving off the road afterward, there was so much snow,” Cooper said. “But having a VW bug, we just lifted it up and drove off.”

Cannon is unable to attend the band’s final shows, with the time needed for travel and the sheer cost of a ticket putting the experience well out of reach. And though the days of bootlegged tapes are long over, Cannon was still able to hear Trey Anastasio — the frontman of Phish — giving the band new life in Garcia’s stead over YouTube.

It may be difficult for many to accept that 50 years out of Palo Alto, the long, strange trip is finally coming to a close. And though some will pay thousands of dollars to see the end in person, the Dead will live on, especially in the hearts of those at Barton Hall that night in 1977, leaving an open-ended date beneath a fitting epitaph on the band’s headstone. As Cannon said most fittingly, “The music never stops.”

Follow Nick Reynolds on Twitter @IJCityWatch.