I was in college, living up in Seattle as a short experiment, away from California. My boyfriend and I scraped and sent away for our tickets, but as a back-up, I also asked my mom, who lived in the East Bay suburbs, where I grew up, to go into Berkeley and stand in line for us. In those days, there weren’t really any Deadheads over 40 or so, so when a kind suburban mom showed up to stand on line — I want to say at Banana Records? — she chatted and chatted and eventually all the kids passed her up to the front of the line — “hey, this is a mom of some Deadhead who’s out of state!!” Thus, she got us two tickets. And then, of course, because karma is beautiful, we also got that wonderful envelope from Stinson Beach.
My dad said, “hey, that was pretty good music. Now we get it!”
So, as one did in those days, we walked the line around the building before the show (if you walked counter-clockwise, you’d usually run into Uncle Bill a few times) and found someone looking, and sold them our two extras at face value. So, in we went, volleyball with Uncle Bill’s crew, sprawled on the floor to watch The Blues Brothers movie, and on and on all night. When I got home the next day, I found out my parents, who were great fans from the Great Generation of swing bands and Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, had watched the whole show on channel 13, the local public TV station. My dad said, “hey, that was pretty good music. Now we get it!”
~ Ann Henstrand