There's another reality in that the ultimate responsibility for the audience rests on the sound system. It was such a screaming-meemies scene that I had to stay on top of it. “But we were stuck at the soundboard for basically 36 hours,” Healy says. Healy mixed sound for all three bands, a rare pleasure, in addition to presiding over the public sound check the day before. “They were probably drawing the Hard Truckers ,” Healy says fondly.įor Healy and his wife, Patti, the Watkins Glen International racetrack-the site of one of this year's competing “Woodstock 50th-anniversary” festivals-was a serious battlefield. One shirt is the official model the other, an early Dead bootleg shirt, features a homemade hippie approximation of the band's already legendary P.A. Two different shirts represent the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, the July 1973 mega-concert with the Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band an estimated 600,000 fans and an on-site pirate radio station-the largest festival of the original festival era.
One would hardly know: The Lyceum shows would yield half the music on the triple live LP. “The duty at that point was probably trying to stay upright,” he says. Perhaps celebrating the tour's end, perhaps draining their acid vials over the four nights before heading home.
“We were so stoned on acid at the Lyceum,” he says. "I Heard the Grateful Dead at the Lyceum '72," the shirt reads, though Healy recalls nothing about the shows. One unusually worn-out piece was imported from London and commemorates the conclusion of the arduous two-month-long trek across the Continent that would be featured on the Europe '72 live album. Healy's collection is loaded with sartorial souvenirs from moments that can be tough to remember. The tee for the band's spring 1984 tour, around the time they scrapped a studio album but continued building an audience on the road. It transformed it from a bunch of monkeys on typewriters to educated people making music. Maybe LSD, maybe peyote, maybe mushrooms. And so it was probably because of the psychedelics. I saw the whole, complete picture, the entire scope of exactly what it needed, what was missing. “But there was a moment when I flashed on what it was all supposed to sound like. “I guess you would call it a hallucination or a dream or a bolt of lighting that hit me between the eyes or wherever,” he says. Like the band, he had been seriously dedicated to his craft long before trying psychedelics, but the psychedelics pushed him further. Healy became obsessed with the Dead's sound. I don't really advocate that form of moneymaking, but it was a means to an end.” But my goal was to do the sound system, and I was pretty much willing to do almost anything short of horrible treachery to get it to happen. “I didn't even really smoke yet, and I hadn't taken LSD yet, either. “I sold pot and acid,” he says, laughing. Doing that required renting some new speakers, and to raise the necessary funds, Healy invoked what might be called hip economics. Whenever anybody was singing, the words were just completely garbled.” After the show, he politely challenged the Dead's Jerry Garcia over the state of the concert's sound, and Garcia politely challenged him to do better. sound was just so horrendous,” he recalls. Healy fixed the recalcitrant amplifier but was still bothered by what he heard. “The dream was there, the model of sitting in your living room in front of the world's greatest stereo, smoking the fattest, biggest jay you can and listening to the most fabulous music over an incredible sound system, for each and every person at a concert.”