I’ll go ahead and apologize for the quick review of this show but I’ve seen them once before and honestly I write on here for myself and no one else…
A little backstory….2 years ago I went to sooo many shows. I’d say it was somewhere around the 100 show range. Looking back at it I was bummed because I didn’t have a “history” of all the shows I’d seen. I mean off hand I can think of Primus, Dawes, Journey, Tom Petty, Dave Matthews..but thats just the beginning of the iceberg.
I decided I needed to fork over some money to start up a website to where I could treat it like a journal and keep track of shows, songs I like, and heck I might even start writing about tv shows I like. It’s just hard to remember stuff anymore and its nice to be able to look back and be like “oh yea I love that!”
Anyways back to the show at hand, this was my first time heading up to the gorge the same day as the show. Let me just say, I’m never doing that again. Traffic was horrendous, and the line at the gorge was godawful. I seriously don’t know how they could screw up so bad but hey, I’m not surprised. Best part though was my buddy Jake was in town from Indiana and we were gonna have a good time. It was me, Jake, Jake, and Alyssa. We ended up meeting with Allen and his daughter Aleina.
Right when we arrived we only had half an hour to “chill” before we needed to walk to the show to catch the beginning. I think we kind of took our time and chugged some beers and ended up leaving a little late. Sure enough we missed the beginning unfortunately. I’m telling you, never show up the day of the show!
Anyways, as was the case back in 2016, the vibes were great and everyone was in a great mood. John Mayer was sporting his new “90’s” look on stage wearing what looked to me to be a pink jacket. All the players were spread out on stage nicely and Bob Weir had a nice spot up front looking OLD. He’s still a shredder of course.
The setting at the gorge is unbelievable and I was overcome with a sense of peace. I had a great time drinking some beers and catching up with Jake to the sweet sounds of John Mayer just shredding the crap out of the guitar.
One downside of this concert compared to the last one was I did not know hardly any of the songs. I think I only knew one, “Playing in the Band”. That was kind of a bummer…granted you can’t go wrong with the Dead…but still I would have liked to have known more of the material.
Regardless the musicianship was out of this world and it was just great being around friends in that setting. We ended up leaving a little early and headed back to the campsite. I was pretty toasty and after a short amount of time I was passed out in the tent.
Next day we had a nice trip home and got some food in Ellensburg. Kind of the usual for a gorge trip! Anyways you can see the “official” link below for a real live video from the show! Enjoy.