According to Graham, Jerry refused the offer. If Graham's timeline was remembered correctly, it would have had to have been in August of 1973, when the Dead were recording Wake Of The Flood at the Record Plant.
I first heard Graham tell this story at a free lecture in Berkeley in 1976. In general, the Grateful Dead were in the best financial condition they had ever been up until that time.īill Graham had often retailed the story that in 1973 he called the Grateful Dead in the recording studio, asked for Jerry Garcia, and offered the band a New Year's Eve show at the Cow Palace. Also, the band was a more popular concert attraction than ever, so concert receipts were improving at the same time. It wasn't a giant hit, officially selling about 400,000 copies, but the band was receiving four times as much money (supposedly $1.22 vs 31 cents for each album sold, per McNally), so they were doing well.
The Dead had released their new album Wake Of The Flood on their own label in October of 1973. Initially, things had gone pretty well, financially speaking. This post will examine the events leading up to Garcia's appearance with the Allman Brothers on New Year's Eve 1973, and put them into an historical context.Īt the end of 1972, with their Warner Brothers contract expiring, the Grateful Dead had surprised the record industry by refusing to either re-sign with Warners or sign a new contract with another label, choosing instead to go it alone and start their own independent record company.
At the same time, it turned out to be the end of an era not just for the two bands, but for a certain aura in post-60s rock, none of which seemed obvious at the time. At the time, Garcia's appearance seemed to cement a synergistic relationship between the two bands that became enshrined in rock history. Yet there was a paradox-wasn't San Francisco's New Year's Eve now the exclusive property of the Grateful Dead? Whether or not New Year's Eve in San Francisco required the Grateful Dead, the paradox was resolved to a national FM radio audience some time after midnight when Jerry Garcia and Bill Kreutzmann joined the Allman Brothers Band onstage. Given their status, when the Allman Brothers chose to play New Year's Eve in the San Francisco Bay Area at the Cow Palace, it was a benediction indeed, since they could have played anywhere. However, earlier in the summer, the Dead and the Allmans had packed RFK stadium in Washington, DC, so it was no fluke. The most legendary of those crowds was the event at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Racecourse on July 28, 1973, when the Allmans, the Dead and The Band drew an estimated 600,000 people, at the time the largest outdoor rock concert ever. In particular, when the Allmans were paired with the Grateful Dead, they drew some large crowds indeed. Now, it's true that during that year neither The Rolling Stones, nor Bob Dylan nor any member of The Beatles mounted any American tours, but with that caveat aside, the Allmans drew huge crowds like no one else. An ad from the DecemHayward Daily Review for the New Year's Eve Allman Brothers concertīy the end of 1973, the Allman Brothers Band were the most popular touring band in America.