- Name is a lie.
- The town is an American one.
- Has been since 1776.
- I mean, the town was only incorporated in 1888, but the parcel of land has been under control of American authorities since 1776.
- Some rich drunkards wrote it down on fancy paper–All this shit is ours now, King George, you little bitch–and that was that.
- And the name is a lie in a second way: the Dead’s Englishtown show did not take place in Englishtown.
- Technically, Raceway Park is in Old Bridge.
- AHHHH-hahahaha HA! Raaaaaaceway PARK!
- That was the sped-up and demonic voice on the radio advertisements, and it was a piece of life’s soundtrack in New Jersey as Watch the tram car, pleeeeeease or Double-yoo-SEE-bee-ESS…ehhf emm
- They mostly had drag racing, which is the most gentile way to spend time or money, and so Young TotD has never been to the site.
- (Brother on the Dead has been to a monster truck rally. It was right after Prince died, and so the producers played Purple Rain while one of the trucks spun around the course doing what BotD described as “interpretational dance with really big tires.” That’s about the entirety of the family’s involvement with novelty motorsport.)
- This is down in Monmouth, which is South Jersey.
- You may in your travels come upon a quick-tongued stranger who pours honey in your ear about a mythical land called “Central Jersey.”
- HE IS A ROGUE!
- Do not trust that stranger, for “Central Jersey” is as real as Yoknapatawpha or Middlemarch or Little Aleppo.
- There’s North Jersey.
- And there’s South Jersey.
- That’s it.
- The dividing line is the queue for Fat Sandwiches at the Rutgers New Brunswick campus.
- And Monmouth County is South Jersey; this means the shore (which inhabitants of lesser states might know as “the beach”), horse girls, cursed swamps, overwhelming greenery, and a couple cities where you die if you get lost.
- TotD grew up in the other Jersey.
- Remember the intro to The Sopranos?
- There.
- I grew up in the intro to The Sopranos.
- That’s North Jersey.
- Anyway, Raceway Park is in South Jersey and the concert promoter who owned South Jersey was named John Scher, whose voice is second only to Bill Graham on the “recognizable announcer” list.
- Both voices are deeply Jewish.
- If John Scher wasn’t a Jew, his voice would be racist.
- And now you’re hearing him in your head, aren’t you?
- Mizzus Donna Jean Got-Chow!
- The rock and roll promoter business was just like the wrestling racket: you had a bunch of territories and each one had a king. (They were always men.)
- Bill Graham controlled San Francisco, and Barry Fey owned Colorado, and Harvey “Mr. Fun” Weinstein ran Buffalo for a while.
- They had control of the venues, pull with the unions, and–most importantly–the power to fuck you bloody if you encroached on their turf.
- A manager booked a band for someone else in my city?
- No one that motherfucker is associated with plays for me ever again.
- And John Scher had Jersey.
- He opened the Capitol Theatre in Passaic in ’71 and started making friends in the music business, chief among them the Dead and Bruce Springsteen.
- Who are wonderful friends to have if you are in the music business in New Jersey.
- John presented the Dead at Roosevelt Stadium a bunch of time and y’know what?
- Corry over at the indispensable Lost Live Dead tells the whole story better than I do, and his version is With Research.
- So, John Scher calls up Garcia and goes,
- “Jerry, bubbeleh, let’s do the show in a field and a million, billion kids will come.”
- And Garcia is like,
- “Yeah, all right, man.”
- It happened just like that.
- It was a thousand degrees and the Dead hadn’t played in almost three months because Tweedle-Drum drove his Porsche off a cliff.
- This is what it looked like:
- See the perimeter?
- Those are empty railroad cars in an unbroken circle that measured a certain amount of miles.
- Anytime you had one of these mondo-sized shows, gate-crashers would show up and bust through the fence; this was fine for Woodstock, but it was 1977 and that hippie shit didn’t play in Jersey: John Scher was getting your twelve dollars.
- Fences don’t work, even if you top ’em with barbed wire and that is not a good look for a rock show, anyway.
- What you need to do is–God forgive me–build a wall.
- You may make your own joke about who will pay for it.
- The cars worked, too: they’re too sheer and vertical to climb, plus semi-employed drunks and disgraced cops were atop them waiting to fuck some teenagers up.
- (And do you know what it took for a cop to become disgraced in 19-fucking–77? In New Jersey? I can’t even think of anything. Maybe forcing the governor to blow you at gunpoint. And you’d have to do it in public.)
- So no one snuck in.
- The New Riders, whom no one cared about by 1977, and the Marshall Tucker Band, whom no one cared about ever, opened.
- And then the Dead killed it for the whole damned show.
- Put soup on your nuts.
- That’s not the phrase.
- Excuse me?
- “From soup to nuts” is what you were going for. If something maintains consistency throughout the entirety of its existence, it does so “from soup to nuts.” I have no ifea what the fuck you’re talking about.
- PUT SOUP ON YOUR NUTS.
- I’m just gonna let you continue.
- There is no film or videotape of the show, which seems ludicrous given that John Scher recorded nearly every act that played for him, but the whole of the footage is some boring “setting-up” bullshit and a few soundless minutes of the performance.
- Which is a shame, because Englishtown was the debut of Fat Phil, who was several months into the Heineken Years.
- The show was also the near-debut of this nightmare:
- Oh, Bobby, what is you doing?
- The Grateful Dead is not a double-neck guitar band, Bobby.
- You are gonna play slide on both of those necks, aren’t you?
- Put the stunt guitar away, young man.
- The Boys were going to play the At A Siding section of Terrapin.
- Or maybe it’s called Alhambra.
- Terrapin Flyer?
- I have no idea what it’s called: the weird part of Terrapin that’s on the record but they don’t play live.
- Tragically, but predictably, the band voted “Let’s not try so hard” and stuck to the arrangement they knew.
- They ended up not needing the cherry on top; the show is on everyone’s Best EVAR short-list.
- I could review it, but fuck that noise.
- Go listen to it; you own it; hell, you might have been there.
- But keep in mind this: there is no “Central Jersey.”
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When I was but Lil JES, my pops was the head of the Marine Corps unit at Naval Ammunition Depot Earle in Monmouth. My memories of Monmouth are all woods and bikes and chasing the DDT Truck, frolicking in its fulsome vapors, and creeks with freakin’ massive skunk cabbages and ferns that could tie up and eat a kid back in the trees behind the bunkers where they kept the nuclear weapons. It was bucolic redneck living with a post-apocalyptic twist. But my sister had the misfortune of being born there, and to this day, the rest of us native Southern folk in the family look down our noses at her and smirk at the misfortune of her roots there . . .
My first show! I grew up nearby, in the heart of Central Jersey. And btw, people did sneak in. And if one of the Hell’s Angel’s standing on top of those trailers caught you, God help you.
Not much to say on the subject of Englishtown (like the 1/2 Step, but think the show is generally overrated . . . gulp).
But ,clicked over to the Lost Live Dead story which went deep on the history of rock in New Jersey. Thought I’d pass along, for those that might be into this sort of thing, that the Jesse Jarnow (friend of TOTD) book about Yo La Tengo (Big Day Coming), which is similarly doctoral level work on Garden State rock, was really great. I particularly like that the book had a listening list included among the reference material at the back.
Lost Live Dead made multiple references to Central Jersey
While the proprietor of that site, the estimable Corry, is respected and trusted by all right-thinking men and women, he is from California and not to be seen as the final arbiter on New Jersey quarrels.
I think the guitar belonged to a guy from Marshall Tucker Band, who opened? Though that may be wrong.
Also: notice that the gentleman dresses to the left and also to the right.