Today in 1975, a famous concert by the Grateful Dead at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall.
And if you look closely at the credits in the liner notes, you’ll see a peculiar listing that reads “Mickey Hart – percussion and crickets.”
There’s a whole story behind that, and it does involve actual crickets, not Buddy Holly’s backing band.
This concert came at an unusual point in the history of the band.
The Dead were known for their live shows; they toured constantly.
But in the mid 70s, they took a break and only played a handful of shows.
One of them was essentially a record release party for their upcoming album, Blues For Allah.
The band was eager to show off the new songs, and especially excited to show that during their long break from the stage, they could still put on a great show.
They had the concert professionally recorded so it could be broadcast on the radio a few weeks later; it was released in 1991 as the album One From The Vault.
The recorded version of the song “Blues For Allah” had cricket sounds, recorded by drummer Mickey Hart.
For this preview concert, they wanted the cricket sounds again.
So Hart bought a box of crickets from a pet store, as one does, and the sound team set up a microphone in the basement for the crickets to chirp.
Some accounts say the crickets weren’t chirping loud enough so someone had to shout out to the engineers to boost the cricket mic on the soundboard.
Others say the crickets weren’t chirping in time with the music, so they made the room warmer to get the insects back in rhythm.
Most accounts say that when the show was over, the band took their equipment but left the crickets behind, and the people at the venue complained that crickets were everywhere backstage.
Maybe they just wanted to keep jamming.
This week in Maine, it’s the Machias Wild Blueberry Festival.
Appropriately there will be pie eating contests, lots of desserts on hand, a five mile blueberry run and a Blueberry Musical Review!
Of course, with blueberries, you can always take your pick of the activities.
So many roads : the life and times of the Grateful Dead by David Browne (via Google Books)
Machias Wild Blueberry Festival
Keep this long, strange trip of a show going as a backer on Patreon
Photo by Chris Stone/Gratefulphoto.com, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikicommons
