Remember those scenes from the documentary Woodstock of cars stuck bumper-to-bumper on the back roads leading to the famed 1969 music festival, with drivers joyfully abandoning their vehicles and trekking on foot the last few miles to what they knew would be a life-changing experience?
Attendees at Saturday’s Dead & Company concert at Alpine Valley Music Theatre now have a vague idea what that’s like, and there was nothing romantic about it. What’s more, we knew auto abandonment was not an option as we spent an hour behind the wheel crawling the last two miles to the gate. Indeed, actual crawling would have been faster.
Alpine Valley hosted the current mashup of members from both The Grateful Dead and Little Feat Friday and Saturday nights, with a separate-fee Dead Feat pre-concert concert squeezed in between on Saturday afternoon. Could any venue have been less prepared to handle a crowd that easily maxed out the hillside amphitheater’s 37,000-attendee limit?
But more on that later. Let’s talk about the music. Bringing together members of two legendary jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Little Feat shows more than a spark of creative genius. The Dead have a much greater following, of course, but Little Feat are not to be underestimated in their ability to ramp up the crowd to a party-level frenzy. Saturday night’s performance showed that none of the musicians had lost their edge.
The requisite beach balls sailed lazily through the air, while fans of all ages danced—or did something like dance—at their seats, on the steps and anywhere else they were free to move. One Milwaukee fan commented on the concert’s “good vibes,” and he wasn’t wrong.
Dead veterans Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann brought the 50-plus-years-old Dead legacy back in full force with a setlist that tapped both familiar tunes and rarities on both nights of the gig. “The Music Never Stopped,” “Alabama Getaway” and “Shakedown Street,” familiar Dead concert staples, were performed with comfortable energy on the part of both the musicians and fans who turned the event into one big singalong. Add to that “Sugar Magnolia,” “I Know You Rider,” a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Big River” and The Band’s “The Weight,” and the show offered a well-rounded playlist.
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But the evening’s highlight for most Badgers in attendance was certainly a first-time appearance by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who joined the group for three songs at the end of the first set. The Wisconsin resident, whose own Eau Claire festival comes up in July, sat in on “Big Muddy River,” “Friend of the Devil” and a soaring “Bird Song”—a performance that reminded us just how sublime the band can be.
But all that musical luster was dulled by Alpine Valley’s complete lack of crowd management. After our hour-long wait to park, 20-minute walk to the box office, 40-minute wait for tickets at two understaffed Will Call windows, lines at a woefully inadequate security screening and downhill trudge to our seats smack in the middle of one of Alpine’s 64-seat rows, our energy was largely spent. We left early (as did many others) in hopes of avoiding what we knew would be a hellacious traffic jam leaving the grounds. What a long, tedious trip it had been.
