The rather touristic account of my first, and alas only West Coast GD experience later acquired additional context. Dylan biographer Howard Soundes claims that shortly after this bizarre guest spot, Dylan actually asked to join the Dead!  Seems Phil vetoed the move,  for which all concerned should surely be grateful... On a sadder note, Brent's appearance boded ill for the future.  Justin Kreutzmann videoed the show,  though it seems an unlikely contender for a View from the Vault...

Snow, unbelievably, greets my arrival in LA, but by Friday the Forum squats Close-Encounters-like in its huge lot beneath a blue and sunlit sky. The band only played here once before- June 77 - and this time they're working to be welcomed back a little sooner. A second set of Kaiser shows planned for March has already been cancelled following local complaints, so now as we go in we get the official flier warning us to behave. "Leave the urban jungles the way the Sierra Club suggests we leave the wilderness: leave only your footprints."

San Rafael had air couriered our tickets, and -  joy! - we have general admission for two of the three nights. We have time to marvel at some of the vehicles corralled into the vendors' section of the lot: an old school bus that's been to never-ever-land and back with a huge mediaeval oak door on the driver's side, and another with a VW microbus grafted on top to create a hump-backed double decker. Then in, past the dealers of doses and seekers of miracles,  though the real miracle may be that tickets are still being  advertised for Friday and Sunday, and those with fingers raised here are looking for a freebie.

We stake our space thirty feet or so from the stage and as Feel Like A Stranger emerges from the din, find it hard to believe in the laid-back West Coast audience of myth. Bobby, resplendent in black silk shirt and ponytail, is already improvising:  you know it's going to get stranger... stranger and stranger and stranger and stranger. How right he is.  Garcia is grinning right from the start of Franklin's, never more than when his misses his vocal cue on the second verse and the crowd roars. He makes up for it though. "Aaah want you to roll away the dew."

Worries about early-in-the-year stiffness seem unfounded. I'm relieved, since this is my friend DeLyn's first ever show...  Phil's not going to let me down, really walking on Walking Blues, fingers busy up and down the headless bass. Then Garcia's newly deep voice reinvents To Lay Me Down,  blues inflections replacing former fragility, a mature and impressive version. The Forum cheers the Coliseum line in Masterpiece, then it's time for Brent's superlative keyboard break in Friend of the Devil, just as my tape runs out. No-one here gives credence to rumours he's going to leave, though he does look rather thinfaced and worried compared with the cheerful trio in front of me, now closing the set with a powerful if geometrical Let It Grow.

In the break I have time to appreciate how they've tried to humanise the big arena.  A skull and roses disc hovers high above the stage, and 12 multiple strands of balloons radiate from the central scoreboard, imparting a New Years feel. Over the three nights, the crowd seem a varied bunch, many with the look of hardcore heads, but even down here at the front, lots more who seem to have slipped into a tie-dye after work. I spot a few shirts with the Lakers logo - LA's basketball team, whose home this is - and I recall Bill Walton's reception in Worcester 85.  But no more 85 references tonight, since the vibes, organisation and (Richmond excepted) music are all better  this time round. It's certainly still an all-American trip, and historical memory goes back further than DeadBase. Someone hears my accent and yells out "Hey! Redcoat!"

Stage setup is pretty standard. Bob fiddles frequently with his MIDI box of tricks, while Phil stands next to a Heath-Robinsonish wooden cabinet about six feet high, with two rotating cylindrical sections someone says are cooling fans for a custom monitor [actually part of Brent's Hammond setup]. Equipment down here on the floor is pretty sophisticated too: I've handed out lists to the Nakamichi crowd in the tapers' section but the bloke behind me has a tiny stainless steel Nagra reel-to-reel he bought, he tells me, at the bargain price of $4000.

Set 2 starts with lots of onstage discussion. Bill and Mickey play tug-o-war with a set of sticks. Bob leaves for a while and we get our first Brent song, Just A Little Light, a low key opener possibly relocated at the last minute from pre-drums. Then everyone lines up for Truckin'. Earlier this trip we've been to Magic Mountain,  a hard-ride amusement park to the North, with the world's second-largest rollercoaster -- well, this is the aural equivalent, as Garcia spirals up to the precipice and and Brent slams the organ chords as the lights change. Crazy Fingers is slow and raucous, Kreutzmann is on the attack fromt he first note of Playin' in the Band. Phil returning to his old bass for Space, a great Wheel,  Wharf Rat with a frantic, antsy solo from Jerry , a fast and furious Sugar Magnolia.  Jerry and Bob reach the very last instrumental phrase of the Baby Blue coda and pause, looking at each other. One more time to complete the melody?  But they've left it so long they just leave it hanging. Nothing so final. So much more to come!

Saturday we're seated high up at the side, angled so the stacks obscure Garcia and the drummers and, as Mississippi gives way to Minglewood,  the sound is a murky monophonic mess. I give up taping.  Given that the Dead play these venues all the time, couldn't they sort out the sound problems at the sides?  Bob misses the chance to go down to Inglewood, but this turns into a very full and interesting show, with two new Garcia songs - Built to Last and Standing on the Moon, the latter with a line about "crimson white and indigo." And two Brent songs, You Can Run But You Can't Hide, and I Will Take You Home, the latter's tinkly musicbox accompaniment and unashamed sentiment going down a treat. There's a Big River in effective isolation, Brent honkytonking away; and some nice minor-key variations in Bird Song before the usual power-chord ending to the jam (and the set).

We lurk in the centre of the walkway after the interval but just as the China-Rider transition takes off  we're ordered back to our seats. When I persist, I get mildly manhandled. "Next time you're out!"  The security guy is annoying, but put a tiedye on him and he wouldn't look that out of place in the audience, and anyway I suppose we really shouldn't be here. Back to watch the stacks. Airto, Flora and a third percussionist turn up during drums and a jaunty, brief Eyes leads us out. But the mood's gone for me and only Phil's impassioned Box of Rain encore briefly restores it. We both need a tape of this show to re-experience it, properly.

The Herald Examiner's review reports speculation that Dylan could appear to plug "Dylan and the Dead", released the previous week.  Maybe he's too embarrassed- it's a wretched piece of work, seemingly designed to trash for posterity a sometimes inspired meeting. But we've put those thoughts behind us by Sunday, as we make it to within 20 feet or so of the stage. We're there by 5, start time is 6. Meanwhile a mobile monster movie develops in the first row: a giant inflatable Gumby (from comics and Saturday morning TV) does battle with Godzilla, with the audience taking sides. Later, Relix tells me they  also terrorised Oakland. It's almost seven before a tight Cold Rain and Snow, everyone singing along, is followed by Hell in a Bucket, not one of my favourites but here done with some precision and a different, MIDI-inflected midsection jam. Bobby's silk shirt is at the laundry, replaced by a blue tee. Row Jimmy has a lovely, rippling break from Jerry. Long wait, much conferring, Bobby checks his watch. A 12-beat intro to Beat It On>Promised Land.

Another long wait while the crew bring on extra monitor and mike. I hold my breath, but it's an understated West LA, redeemed by eerie slide work from Bob. Then uproar as... Spencer Davis! emerges, and it's rock-and-roll time, starting with  a familiar sounding blues number, How Long Baby How Long. [aka How Long Blues, by Leroy Carr: I'm later reminded Dylan did it with Jack Elliot at the Other End in '75]. The tall, white-clad Davis stalks the stage like a madman, guitar in hand, jagged, linear riffs played off against Garcia's fluidity. Then it's Gimme Some Lovin', second time this weekend, but exposing the Dead's own version for the limp thing it often is: tonight it's an 8-minute epic, even faster, longer and ballsier than Davis's previous guest spot in Philly 87, and done 65-style: Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-HEY!! Everyone interacts like crazy, Bobby dropping to the floor and playing on one knee in a doomed attempt to outpose Davis. The jam quotes from the Beach Boys' Do It Again, and from Catch a Falling Star!

Dazed, we crash to the floor and stay there for another hour.  Microphone and monitor stay in place. The monster movie starts up again, but soon cries of Godzilla! mutate into cries of Dylan! and there is a Jokerman in the works after all. Strolling on with the rest of the band, leather-waistcoated and wry, that mock-resigned, contractually-obliged look familiar from the 87 tour poster. A brisk Iko Iko,  then things really get strange, with the first ever electric Monkey and the Engineer, or a few verses of it anyway. Alabama, with Garcia forgetting most of the words, and a good Dire Wolf. Throughout, Dylan plays rhythm but we can't really hear it, and he seems to be mouthing the choruses but we can't hear those either. In Cassidy he seems to be picking out a contribution to the jam, testing the edges of the gestalt - but we still can't hear it. Phil then tries to segue immediately into Mobile, but there's a break before it gets going, Weir doing all the singing and both he and Garcia throwing pointed looks at its uncommunicative author.

Weir takes us to the rain man verse -- then claps his hands to his head in the I've-forgotten-the-words gesture familiar to viewers of the 86 New Year video, only here he does it very pointedly and obviously, looking straight at  Dylan so that finally the Zim is forced to move nearer the mike and deliver his own lines in full voice! After that he stands there looking rather cross, occasionally "trading licks" with Jerry, who stares back at him as if waiting for another verse.

My 14th Dead show has just, my strange coincidence, segued into my 14th Dylan show and I'm delighted. But we've just been listening to what is basically a first set. Did Dylan turn up late, thinking that showtime was, as yesterday, 8 rather than 6? That would explain the hour's delay at the start, though not Spencer Davis. What were the first words Dylan actually sang out loud? "People just get uglier and I've got no sense of time!"

Both scheduling and performance have been typical Dylan now-you-see-me, now-you-don't behaviour. But the strangeness continues. No Brent, nor drummers, on stage for the start of The Other One, as Weir launches into the slow, echoey version of the first verse with just the guitarists on board. The lights pinpoint the keyboards - and an empty seat. Bill hurries in a split second before the chorus, Brent eventually following. Stella seems pointless here, the wrong mood for this intriguing but chaotic show, and Jerry visibly realises this, though it sounds ok on the tape.  Hurriedly he strums us into Foolish Heart, another first for me, and fun in that Touch/Bertha mode despite hasty delivery- another candidate for slowing down on the album.

Dylan's back for the NFA encore, now in a Wembley 84-style long black jacket. Finally he commits himself vocally as the weekend that began with Feel Like A Stranger comes to a close with

Mama wipe this blood outa my face
I can't see through it any more
Sometimes you feel so out of place
Feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door

He's done a similar reworking with Petty,  but it was never more appropriate than here. Yet in its expressiveness, planting one foot on the bus even while asserting distance.

Then - almost six hours after we came in - dispersal. I'm grateful for the last shambolic 100 minutes, but also for the weekend of musicianship that preceded it. And for the inflatable monsters, and the beachball knocking over Phil's mike stand, and the new songs -- maybe too sentimental for some, but drawing more and more listeners within this band's luminous embrace.  We both now wish we had a tour ahead of us!  But the next show is over a month away, on the other side of the continent, up from Atlanta through the Midwest.  So instead we head off to the real Sierras. Tape player whirring. Leaving only our footprints.

[bp] from Spiral Light 1989
photos bp

Eyes of the World