Legend of 1977 Grateful Dead show at Cornell lives on
ITHACA, N.Y. — The Grateful Dead performed thousands of concerts, none acclaimed quite like their May 8, 1977, show at a Cornell University field house on a freakishly snowy night.
Revered by Deadheads and honoured by the Library of Congress, the Barton Hall show is back in the psychedelic spotlight on its 40th anniversary. On Monday, “Grateful Dead Day” will be rung in, literally, with Dead tunes played on chimes in Cornell’s clock tower. There’s a new book on the show, “Cornell ’77,” by Peter Conners. And a remastered recording titled “Cornell 5/8/77” is being commercially released to complement the bootleg tapes that have stoked the reputation of the show for four decades.
“It was just an exceptional show from the get-go,” said Mark Nathanson, who as a 19-year-old drove to the show from Toledo, Ohio. “You could tell that the environment was right, the band was right, the crowd was right. All the combinations that are required for one of those magical shows were all there.”
The Dead played an estimated 2,300 shows over three decades from their 1965 birth in the San Francisco Bay Area through frontman Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995. Their shows were famous for their length, counter-cultural vibe, improvisational style and wide-ranging musical vocabulary ranging from bluegrass to psychedelic rock.