Bob Dylan's First Time Playing with the Grateful Dead (by Jesse Jarnow)

Volume 2: Rubber Bowl, Akron, Ohio, July 2 1986

Today, part two of Grateful Dead scholar Jesse Jarnow’s miniseries on Dylan and the Dead 1986 (here’s the first if you missed it). The short five-show Dylan-Heartbreakers-Dead run travels to Akron, Ohio.

Notably, this is the first show ever where Dylan actually sits in with the Grateful Dead—the first time he’s playing in the band, before he will full-time the following summer. They do three songs together in Akron: “Little Red Rooster,” “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” and “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.”

Here’s Jesse to break it down:

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Dylan and the Dead ‘86: Rubber Bowl, July 2nd

by Jesse Jarnow

No, really, these shows were Big Deals. People camped out in the parking lots to see Bob Dylan and the Heartbreakers share a bill with the Grateful Dead. Newspapers treated it as a generational soiree. The Deadheads were guaranteed to bring the party (and the acid) on an equally massive scale. The bigger venues also required promoters to sell many more tickets, which spiraled into needing to make ads like the above.

Local news not only dispatched crews to the parking lot of the Rubber Bowl for all-day coverage, but people cared enough to tape and preserve the coverage. There are several YouTube footage compilations like the one below, all with good larfs. Highlights of this reel include an interview with a young gentleman who figures it’s his last chance to see Dylan, a failed attempt to cut live to the concert from the news room, and a few minutes of Dylan and the Heartbreakers doing “Clean Cut Kid” while Dead roadie Steve Parish carries Jerry Garcia’s guitars onto the stage and glares at the crowd from just behind Tom Petty.

The two tours had briefly diverged after the Metrodome gig. Dylan and the Heartbreakers headed to Alpine Valley in Wisconsin for a Friday show, before the Dead took over the next afternoon for daylight shows at the same venue on Saturday and Sunday. They alternate headliners when the tours reconnect, and Dylan and the Heartbreakers go on first in Akron, playing to a less than sold-out crowd, but sounding fully enthusiastic. It’d been five years since Dylan toured the States, eight since a non-Christian tour, and over a decade since he’d played in the States like a normal large-venue rock act. Dylan and the Heartbreakers’ sets from Akron are only on cruddy audience tapes. Still sounds better than the Metrodome, though.

One thing the outdoor Dylan/Dead shows shared with the ‘60s festivals was that they became struggles for survival. And the heat got more intense as the tour progressed. “I hope the naked dude walking down the stairs got home OK,” reads one archive.org scene report from the Rubber Bowl. And many memories note what’s confirmed by the above video, which is that in deep summer heat, Bob Dylan takes to the stage in leather pants, fingerless gloves, a scarf, and a patchwork-adorned jacket of perhaps some genetic relation to the Hearts of Fire one. A few Deadheads posted memories about mistiming their LSD doses, thinking the Dead are playing first and finding themselves accidentally peaking as Dylan and the Heartbreakers run down “Band of the Hand” and other 1980s faves.

If I’d been hitting these five shows (and hadn’t mistimed my dose), I’d probably be excited about the half-dozen songs of turnover in Dylan’s set since Minneapolis, which is more than I’d’ve expected. There are three different covers: “Shake a Hand” (Joe Morris ala Little Richard), the final live version of “Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache” (recorded in the Never Ending era for a 2001 Sun Records tribute), and “That Lucky Old Sun” (which survived even into the standards era). The era-specific obscurities are all pretty fun. They do “Band of the Hand” (the only released Dylan/Heartbreakers studio collaboration) and add “Trust Yourself,” from Empire Burlesque. Some turnover in the Heartbreakers’ sets, too, for that matter, including “Don’t Do Me Like That.” But given the quality, it’s not a tape I’ll be going back to, honestly.

There’s a soundboard of the Dead’s sets, though. Veteran and well-informed Cleveland rock writer Jane Scott’s coverage confirms that, indeed, the two acts were running their own separate sound systems—and that the Dead’s was the winner. “The Dead’s sound system was at least 10 times better than the first one,” she concluded. One head said it was “like going from listening to music through a single-speaker AM radio to Dolby surround sound in a big movie theater!”

In one of the pre-tour interviews, a writer had asked Jerry Garcia about the possibility of playing with Dylan during the tour. “Dylan is one of those guys who I would never want to push in any direction, or even try to,” Garcia demurs. “I wouldn’t presume on him like that... He knows what his relationship with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is. They’re a good band, they work well with him and it might not be politic, you know, to play with us, too.”

But Dylan plays with the Dead tonight—for the first time ever—and, man, it’s pretty absurd.

Reported Mark Faris of the Akron Beacon Journal, “The three-tune set was arranged and rehearsed beneath the southwest grandstand during an 80-minute intermission following Dylan’s 150-minute show-opening set with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and, for the most part, sounded like it.” It is a fair, sober assessment: “the results were more emotional than artistic.”

But emotional can be an achievement, too. In deference to Paul Williams and/or not having video of the whole appearance, it’s hard to know wtf’s going when Dylan joins the Dead for “Little Red Rooster,” jamming along semi-audibly, another layer in the Dead mix. Not really a keeper.

On “Don’t Think Twice,” Dylan’s voice is slathered in echo and his guitar sounds pretty fuckin’ ugly. Until reading the Beacon Journal coverage of the rehearsals, based on the tape alone, I assumed it was the sound of the Dead learning “Don’t Think Twice” onstage, having never played the song, nor even thought of playing the song. The mix is weird, too, and what I think is distortion at first turns out to be Dylan’s guitar. Where the Heartbreakers are slick and sturdy behind Dylan, the Dead sound like they might collapse next to him (though not in any kind of sync with one another). Also not really a keeper.

But then Garcia leads the band confidently into “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a song the Dead have played many times (86 through this show, according to JerryBase’s latest count). The Dead play it, basically, as if Dylan wasn’t there, and he joins with Garcia on the vocals when he remembers the words. It’s Dylan’s first time doing it in almost two years. Garcia’s singing is notably out of breath but fully present and lovely (if you think Garcia’s voice is lovely). How you feel about the thundering double-drums and synth might be another question. There are parts where Dylan lays out, maybe just hanging back listening to Garcia, and then blasting back in to almost comic impact (but also sometimes adding very sweetly and almost inaudibly, unless my headphones are deceiving me). One remarkable thing is Garcia’s utter unflappability, continuing to sing gently as Dylan barrels across the song. It’s not a keeper in the sense that I’d ever inflict it on non-Deadheads, nor even on a room of the most sympathetic Dead freaks. But it’s charming to hear it unfold, knowing that Garcia and Dylan would only grow closer in the next few years, and thinking of it as documenting an act of friendship, rather than a public performance in a stadium with a large audience.

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” [Grateful Dead with Bob Dylan, 7/2/86]

There’s about two minutes of video, too, shot from the side of the stage by, I believe, Justin Kreutzmann, son of Dead drummer Billy Kreutzmann—the very end of “Little Red Rooster,” and tiny bits of “Don’t Think Twice” and “Baby Blue.” And, frankly, I think it’s darling, and adds a tiny bit of visual context. Garcia’s beaming at full wattage throughout. There’s a bit during the “Don’t Think Twice” solo when Dylan watches him for a moment and then just grins big.

It’s a lot to read into a little, but a real moment in both Dylan and the Dead’s entwined timelines. The rest of the Dead show is once again decent for the era, highlighted for me by a punchy bass-forward “China Cat Sunflower”/“I Know You Rider,” recommended if you’re in the mood for some rainbow 6-string low-end by Phil Lesh. After “Playing in the Band,” Bob Weir starts up the Dead’s own version of “Desolation Row,” and Garcia bails from the stage. It’s less a comment on Weir than a sign of the bad things to come. According to Blair Jackson’s Garcia biography, the guitarist had an infected tooth, given emergency codeine by a local dentist. They play “Desolation Row” well enough without him. When the parking lot is clearing out, it finally rains.

“Desolation Row” [Grateful Dead, 7/2/86]

1986-07-02, Rubber Bowl, Akron, OH [Dylan set]

1986-07-02, Rubber Bowl, Akron, OH [Dead set partial soundboard, archive.org link]

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Jesse Jarnow co-hosts the official Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, and is the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Wasn’t That A Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle For the Soul of America, and Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. The Invisible Hit Parade: A Taper’s History of Music will be published next year. The Frow Show can be heard every Tuesday on WFMU (including Bobsday celebrations).