Further Festival, The Other Ones, Thomas & Mack Center, Las Vegas, NV 7/21/1998

One thing you have to understand is that I was a poor kid who had never traveled anywhere, but desperately wanted to. Now I was traveling across the country seeing Bob Weir & Phil Lesh everynight, and it was all too much fun. After the Denver show, I fell asleep as we drove through the mountains, and as was the custom in those days, we slept overnight at either a rest area or a country road pull off. 

Waking up in the morning to the American west, a very real high plains desert, was absolutely stunning. We drove I-70 west through Utah, cut through the corner of Arizona, and onward through the hot roads to Vegas. We had no air conditioning, there were about 6 of us in the car, all crammed in. Smells and Bells, indeed. 

I remember vividly driving for what seemed like forever in the nothingness of the southwest desert when suddenly a city appeared out of knowhere. Quite an amazing scene in July 1998. All of us were pretty low on funds: the durable goods we were selling on lot were facing steep competition as supply was much higher than demand could keep up with it, causing prices to plummet. The driver who I hired back in Ohio, still with us, decided to try spanging in Vegas. Turns out, folks in Vegas were not a giving crowd, at least not outside the casinos, lol. 

We spent the night at the Tropicana hotel (free bottle of wine), and the night before show pranced around town. We didn't really have money, but we had fun.

The show at Thomas & Mack was fun. We all went our separate ways, working the lots. I met some future friends here: Stephen Jenkins (from Iowa, living in Madison, WI) was selling stickers with a big smile at every show. He introduced me to some guys on DeadnetCentral (where I was posting those days), one of which passed on a few years later from mesothelioma. The bitter feud between the tour kids who worked on the lot and the tour kids who listened to rap and mooched grew more heated, no doubt due in part to the financial strain of the western part of tour. 

The show itself was great-The first set Dark Star and then the West LA were total worlds apart, but I loved both, and the Lost Sailor>Saint>Corrina>Drums>The Way it Is was fantastic, and that Sugar Mag had the whole place dancing. 

We drove all the way to Los Angeles after the show, pulling into a seven eleven and parking in the back by a dumpster where a few of us just got out of car and threw down our sleeping bags and slept until a couple of hours later around dawn an Indian man who owned the place came out screaming at us to leave, which was pretty fun if you look at it a certain way.

Further Festival, The Other Ones, Thomas & Mack Center, Las Vegas, NV 7/21/1998

Shakedown Street, Ramble On Rose, Dark Star, West L.A. Fadeaway, Hound Dog, Baba Jingo, Friend of the Devil, Lost Sailor > Saint of Circumstance > Corrina > Drumz > The Way It Is, Uncle John's Band > Sugar Magnolia

(Most Recent "Hound Dog")