The week following internet ticket sales proved to be as flattering on Dead Heads as spandex on fat chicks as the Dead community showed its ass more frequently than a spinner in a miniskirt. The community has rapidly turned into its own microcosm of “haves” and “have nots”. The “haves” have been busy blowing cheerful sunshine into the bludgeoned assholes of the “have nots” as the mood across message boards is a mix between a wake and an Iron Maiden concert. It’s times like these you wish more people would’ve been hauled off into the middle of nowhere by bandaid wielding cultists that puddled naive wanna be hippies with Neosporin on the maroon bus to spend their days building furniture.

Hunted turned hunter, Paul Abdella, has now become the Kingpin of the Anti Scalping Task Force leading the charge in filling the underpants of scalpers with broken glass and scorpions. Paul has declared every day until July 6th “Flag Day” on Craigslist, ebay and any other site attempting to scalp tickets to this event. His lengthy posts are scattered all over the internet attempting to utilize passion and emotion while speaking to a bunch of ticket agents that don’t give a shit. When asked about Paul’s existence, a scalper named Dagma, without a doubt the ugliest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen in my life, said, “If he spent that much time getting another fuckin job he’d be able to buy his tickets within 2 or 3 weeks!” Paul and his faithful army of flagits move forward none the less in this battle of wills.

In an effort to apply some salve on the butthurt of thousands, a celebration honoring the music of Jerry Garcia was announced for May and seemed to make everybody happy for 10 minutes. Then somebody checked their calender and realized the show was on a Thursday, perfect only for people that live in D.C. or those that still don’t have jobs or young kids. It looks like everybody other than Trey will be there but ya never know… 86 of your favorite musicians are scheduled to perform. The backstage area will be as crowded as the men’s room at Phish concerts.

This event should obviously sell out in 10 seconds and leave everybody complaining until May. Why wouldn’t it, the same guys are gonna be there and the capacity is 1/3rd of Soldier Field and there’s only 1 night. I wonder why the hotels haven’t sold out yet. Ticket prices have been left to the imagination and are posted absolutely nowhere. Their inevitable unveiling should provide another fine round of insults aimed at all parties involved while .0001% of proceeds will benefit the Rex Foundation. Unless of course there’s a loss on the cooked books at which time the Rex will get about $75.

Deborah Koons, fresh off of vaginal rejuvenation surgery, was not invited. I know everybody is heartbroken about that but her spirit is alive and well and can be experienced through non stop bitching and chronic insane behavior on any of the Dead’s official pages. What the fuck happened to us? Didn’t we used to laugh our way around the country without a care in the world? If the attitudes displayed as of late were that way since the beginning, we wouldn’t be celebrating 50 years at all. We all went on Tour to live in a world free from the bullshit that it appears we’ve currently become. Where have all the people gone, my honey???

It was brought up on my Facebook Group whether or not I would have the same things to say about everything if I didn’t happen to score tickets through CID, the only officially licensed scalper of The Anniversary Shows. My response is this, I mail ordered for one set of shows every year since ’87, New Years Shows. Between The Grateful Dead and all the New Year shows Phish have played, I’ve mail ordered for tickets or entered the lottery for the past 27 years. I received my tickets TWICE… NYE ’89 and Big Cypress in ’99 (EVERYBODY got their tix to that one). Since tickets have been sold online through Ticketmaster, I’ve scored exactly ZERO tickets for New Year’s Eve Phish shows. That’s a pretty bad record for scoring tix in advance for the big ones. I actually don’t think in my history of more than 350 Dead shows (all with Garcia, offshoots don’t count) and over 200 Phish shows, I’ve NEVER had tickets this far in advance. I never cried about the band’s popularity. I never cried about scalpers. I never worried about any of it until the day of the show, usually once I woke up around 3:00 PM or so. I got shut out of New Year’s Eve once in 88. I was young and inexperienced in the ways of shows and didn’t really know anybody on the scene. Since then, not only have I scored tix for all the big ones, I’ve always had great seats.

Chill out y’all… There are tons of unreleased seats for these shows. They did a brilliant thing by selling all of the bad seats first. Nearly everyone I know that scored seats on Ticketmaster scored 3 day passes behind the stage. I don’t know a single person that got decent seats from Ticketmaster, do you??? Look on StubHub or ebay and all you’ll see is uppers, seats behind the stage, or directly across from it, both endzones, with little to nothing in between. The best way to keep scalpers at bay is releasing tickets the week of the show. Scalpers have too little time to deal with them at that point. Shapiro and the crew are pretty smart. There’s a lot of tix that haven’t been released. I’d wager to say that half of the seats have actually been sold. Be patient, spread love, trust in the process. Love you long time! Talk to y’all soon!

If you have an extra, sell one to Eric Schwartz. He’s a true contributor to the scene for a long time and hosts Lone Star Dead Radio out of Dallas, TX.

Video Journal of the experience can be found here:

Gratefully Deadicated,
Dean Sottile (pronounced SoTilly)

www.gratefuldean.com
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