If you’re reading this, chances are good that you have friends that you have acquired because of musical interests in music. Many times those shared musical interests overlap broadly – for instance, if you both like the Dead, you may well both like groups like Hot Tuna and the Allman Brothers. In college, one of my best music friends was Jeff E., a fellow UCSC student and Palo Alto resident who was also a DJ at Stanford Radio Station KZSU. Jeff’s and my musical worlds overlapped tangentially. His favorite group by far was the Who, but he had eclectic tastes spanning people like Bowie, the Kinks, the Move, the Beach Boys, and so on. He had next to no use for the Dead or most of the 60s San Francisco bands. Nonetheless, we bonded over music fandom, and saw quite a few shows together, including the infamous 1973 tour opener for the Who at the Cow Palace where drummer Keith Moon collapsed on stage twice before being replaced by an amateur drummer from Monterey who did quite a creditable job of helping them finish their show. We also saw musical comedian Martin Mull several times at his gigs at SF dinner club the Boarding House, several years before Mull became a TV actor on Fernwood 2Nite.
In the fall of 1976, a terrifically excited Jeff called me to give me a heads-up to a remarkable confluence of our musical worlds. He breathlessly announced “Your favorite band and my favorite band – together at the Oakland Stadium!” He also alerted me to Bill Graham’s latest way of springing this massive double bill on the world. Graham posted ads in the Chronicle on a Sunday in late August simply stating “Watch the Skies at noon on Friday!” Since I did know what to expect, I was at the local BASS tickets outlet at the Saks Fifth Avenue store at Stanford Shopping Center at noon the following Friday, when an airplane towing a big banner circled the Bay Area announcing the two shows with the Grateful Dead and the Who that were scheduled at the Oakland Coliseum stadium on October 9 and 10, 1976. The Oakland Stadium held a lot of folks, so these shows did not sell out immediately (I’m not sure if they ever stopped selling tickets), but we were among the first people to get tickets.
The Dead had worked back into touring through the summer and fall of 1976, initially playing multiple nights in small capacity theatres in Portland, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and San Francisco and then doing a run of east coast and Midwest venues, mostly small ballparks and coliseums, in August through early October. The Two Oakland Coliseum shows were by far the biggest venues they had played so far that year, and this was the first time other than Woodstock that the two bands, both strong draws in the Bay Area, had shared a bill.
The Who had most recently played two San Francisco concerts in March at Winterland, after a 2 ½ year gap of area shows following the 1973 Cow Palace gig. Tickets for the Winterland shows were by lottery and many folks, including me, were shut out. Therefore, the Day on the Green gig was a big event for Who fans as well as for the usual suspects who were just looking for a big outdoor rock festival.
We rolled into the stadium early in the morning, and ended up with a decent spot about 1/3 of the way back from the stage. Since starting the Day on the Green shows in 1973, Bill Graham Productions had continually upped their ante in terms of production and set design. For these shows, the crew prepared an elaborate stage set that had a London skyline on the left, one of San Francisco on the right, joined by a bank of fog above the stage proper. The stage itself was oddly outfitted with a bunch of flower beds in front of the monitors (the Dead crew must have loved that) and potted trees in the back that partially obscured the rear bleachers, the scoreboard, and the backstage area.
I had seen the Dead at the stadium once before, on 6/8/74, but this was the first time they had opened a show at what, for them, must have been the ungodly hour of 11 AM. I brought my camera and, as the band took the stage, I worked my way up near the rail to take some pictures for the first few songs. I was used to being up front at smaller shows, and Dead audiences were pretty congenial and relatively loosely spaced in those days at places like Winterland, but the large crowd, the mixture of Who fans, Deadheads, and those just looking for a Day on the Green made the experience more harrowing than what I had experienced previously. As they did so often, the Dead kicked the show off with “Promised Land”, and the gyrating bodies in close quarters made for an adventurous photo expedition. I stayed up front through “They Love Each Other” and managed a few different angles, but the forward position of the grand piano and the flowers made it challenging to get decent pictures. The first set was pretty standard fare for the time, ending with an extended “Sugaree.” Although the Dead did not have the Wall of Sound for this gig at the Stadium, the sound was really fine, and the crew had somehow remedied the echo off of the back wall of the stadium that plagued the 1974 show that did feature that imposing sound system.
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| Grateful Dead 10.9.76 Photo: M. Parrish |
By the start of the second set, the sun was starting to heat up the crowd, and the band played a memorably inventive medley, opening with St. Stephen, which weaved in and out of Not Fade Away, leading straight into “Help on the Way” and “Slipknot”, followed by a brief Rhythm Devils segment that led into an energized “Samson and Delilah.” Garcia continued with some free-form minor key soloing, followed by some unique conversation with Keith Godchaux’s piano that gradually morphed back into “Slipknot.” A brief reprise of the main “Slipknot” theme finally cascaded into a welcome “Franklin’s Tower.” The Dead were on the clock for an hour second set, so they plowed on into the set-closing “Saturday Night,” returning with a quick “U.S. Blues” for an encore.
During the lengthy set change, the field was getting hot, and we retreated to the stands at the rear of the stadium, which still afforded a good view and sound. When the Who came on, the large stage set kind of dwarfed the four musicians the quartet, who nonetheless succeeded in summoning enough raw energy to charge the crowd. Townshend jumped around the stage and Moon, in what proved to be his last Bay Area appearances, appeared relatively healthy and turned in energetic performances. The band’s set was pretty pro-forma, with a first half composed of tried and true numbers like “I Can’t Explain” and Substitute,” along with most of “Who’s Next” and two songsfrom their most recent outing, The Who By Numbers. They then went into an abbreviated version of Tommy, wrapping things up with a trio of other favorites, “Summertime Blues,” a long version of “My Generation (with a bit of “Join Together” in the middle), and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Despite lengthy clapping from the audience, there was no encore.
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| The Who 10.9.76 Photo: M. Parrish |
The next Day’s Dead performance was high energy from the start, opening with “Might as Well,” fueled by some boogie-woogie piano by Keith. Other highlights were rare mid-set versions of “Deal” and “Promised Land”(one of three repeats from the previous day), and the one-time-only set closer that comprised “Wharf Rat” embedded in a spacy “Dancin’ in the Streets” sandwich. The second set was more mellow, this time featuring an extended segment bookended by “Playing in the Band,” with “The Wheel,” Drums. “The Other One,” and “Stella Blue” as filling. They closed with powerful versions of “Sugar Magnolia” and, as an encore, “Johnny B. Goode.”
The Who’s set proved to be a near-carbon copy of the first day’s set, down to the jokes between songs, so I left near its end, leaving the Who fans to wrestle with traffic in the parking lot. They did manage an encore, allegedly in response to financial coaxing by Bill Graham, combining “Shakin’ All Over,” “Spoonful” and their limp take on “Johnny B. Goode” to wrap up the weekend. This was sort of the last hurrah for the who as the original quartet. Although they did record one final album with Keith Moon, had five more dates on their 1976 US tour, and played two ragged shows in London in 1977, Moon’s deteriorating physical condition precluded any of the long tours that had carried the band through the last decade, and the drummer passed away in September of 1978. For me, their performances were disappointing, particularly in comparison to the two spectacular performances I had heard from the band at the Fillmore West in 1969 and the SF Civic in 1971.
The Dead continued their relentless post-hiatus touring with a couple of shows in LA, the NYE show at the Cow Palace discussed here, and then a full roster of theatre and arena shows the following year, with Winterland, where the band played ten shows in 1977, returning as the band’s home base. The two bands did share the stage again in Essen, Germany in 1981 for a Rockpalast TV Broadcast, where Pete Townshend sat in for the last half of the Dead’s second set, gamely trying to blend into the Dead's well-oiled interplay.
So, did these shows make Jeff into a Deadhead? Definitely not, although he said that he appreciated their musicianship, it really wasn’t his cup of tea, and I don’t know that he ever saw them again. Still, it was great for us to be able to see our favorite bands together, and Bill Graham’s crew made sure that the two shows were memorably enjoyable events.
