Fare thee well: One last Saturday night with the Grateful Dead

HANDOUT/REUTERS Trey Anastasio, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir on stage at Soldier Field.

“They hardly ever talked to the audience, but we would all feel part of what’s going on”, she said. Listen, it’s driven by the ringmaster in the middle, which is the band.

JEFFREY BROWN: Music promoter Peter Shapiro put the event together. You will see lots of spectacle.

Not all artists get to have such a proper sendoff.

There’s just no other scene. I knew other guys with 200 or 300 shows. The global network of tapers who’d trade, never sell, recordings by mail, Wired would also argue, laid the foundation for open online file trading.

JEFFREY BROWN: You think so?

“Nobody thought it was real because it was so flawless”, Shapiro told CNN.

Mark Pinkus is the president of Rhino Entertainment and its official General Manager of Grateful Dead Properties.

The legendary band have teamed up with Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio for the gigs, replacing frontman Jerry Garcia.

“After the best shows I would go out and have the most outrageous time”, Kreutzmann said. And then about… If you were around for the late 80’s/early 90’s then you saw the boys play this Willie Dixon number, traditionally performed in the style of Chicago Blues. The band has one more show Sunday of what they say will be their last show ever as the Grateful Dead. In many ways, the assembled masses knew they were witnessing a little slice of American history, for the Grateful Dead are surely the most iconic and long-lived of American rock bands. I always liked how apolitical the band was, at least in public. It wasn’t just a band.

CONTRERAS: Rhino enlisted David Lemieux, the band’s long-time archivist, to curate a series of releases for fans who want to hear from every tape in the vault.

So what is it about The Grateful Dead that seems to attract more Republicans than Democrats to their concerts? On their final night – which I viewed via stream on YouTube – they chose for a motif a suitably eccentric album, 1977’s “Terrepin Station”.

Known for their poetic lyrics and constant improvisation which can turn a three-minute song into an 18-minute experiment, the Grateful Dead emerged from the San Francisco Bay area to become one of the longest lasting and most influential bands of the era. They were an Internet band without the existence of the Internet. Each show had a seat-of-the-pants quality that meant things could go wrong, but also that great heights could be reached.

MAN: I have gone to 98.