Cooooool story! Thanks for sharing.

Awesome story man what luck!

taking this energy with me to all 4 NY dead & co dates, happy halloween everyone

Love to hear stories like this 👍🏻

December '82 or '83 one of my sister's HS friends stayed @ my home to taste test CA. That year's New Years run was his Holy Grail & w/ youth's torrid ambition he let us know he aimed to spend the night at the stage, a venture requiring more endurance than comfort, so we bid him fare well & we'll see ya behind the sound board after the show. After the show we're all gathered & hyped & ready to go except for our young east coast house guest who, as expected, none of us have seen all show. About the time we're starting to wonder here he comes w/ a standard post-show ear-to-ear grin. Being alone at the stage at the start of the show & too shy+high to join the conversations of the friend groups around him he naturally had nothing to do but inspect the local landscape, @which noticed he could see UNDER the stage to light at the far end of that very wide tunnel, a light in which occasional feet+calves could be seen moving freely. Ambition is as ambition does so being short+thin+alone he crawled under, chose a right moment to emerge unseen, & spent the show wandering as inconspicuously as he could. Based on other tales from folk I met over the years; the band+family seemed to relish providing this special treat to various seekers during the '70s & early '80s.

and wasn't that followed by a rather outstanding warf rat?

My recall is they announced before the show that the Fire Marshal had threatened to revoke BGP's permit to play Berkeley Community Theater because BGP had been allowing folk to dance in the aisles. There was extra security to keep folk at their seats, or the seats anyway. There was also a very numerous+attentive police presence outside the theater, which is (or at least was) a Berkeley H.S. facility, before + especially after the show. Plus some very speedy blotter being sold on Berkeley streets at the time. My college roommate met us at this show, ate some of that blotter, got too high to talk + very claustrophobic, had a nonverbal conversation (I didn't witness it, but it was 2hours after the show before he could say anything except a whispered "2 white paper", so its a safe surmise) with event staff working the door at the break that convinced himself he could step outside for some fresh air & open space during the set break, & then found to his extreme dismay that there had been some misunderstanding during this nonverbal conversation & he couldn't get back into the show for the 2nd set, which he spent in the park outside the venue, w/ far too many police cars for company. When we found him outside after the show, too high to talk & no way to tell what he could make out of what we said, somebody went for their car but he was too claustrophobic to get into it & I was the only person there that he recognized & so he got halfway in & then backed out of the carful of strangers (to him) 6 or 8 times, which began to feel dangerously conspicuous w/ all the police cars buzzing around like flies on a carcass, so that I finally got directions to the house we'd be staying at & managed to get him to follow me there becuz I was his only familiar face. I remember having to run becuz when I was walking+talking he kept hesitating as if he had other ideas or wanted to judge the plan or something but when I ran he panicked about being left alone & ran after me. We ran the whole mile or so to the house & then he stood in a corner of the kitchen watching us while we all talked simultaneously for the next 2or3 hours until suddenly all at once a big dramatic "Whoooooooshshshshsh" came out of him as he fell to his knees alongside the table & at about 100 words/minute this whole story came pouring out of him in one long flood that silenced the rest of us for as long as the flood lasted. The band played great but definitely too much weird heat vibe going on that night. Do NOT eat the speed laced doses. Nor the good stuff given the ambient vibe these days. It's psychedelic enough just watching the walls surrounding reality shrink w/o any excess biochemistry at all.

Very well stated! I have on my channel about 23 personally recorded Dark Stars. I am still producing them in 2020. Cheers from NY......

Always searching my friend

Last time I was on this page there was somebody's 4hour quilt stitching Dark Stars together in series lurking in the sidelines list. Bring your parachute, and perhaps a sober, deaf friend who can pull the plug to pull you out if you start to rerun the reruns ad infinitum. If no friend is devoted or deaf enough to supply the service; perhaps a loud, old-fashioned dinner bell will do.

aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!! good call. I was at this show; & never even heard of the Veneta show until a few years later; tho' now having seen the movie several times it's the one show I missed that I most wish I'd been at. We were too high to judge how good the band was this night by any objective standard; except that this Dark Star was special.

The disco balls and the really fine 4-way truly made it seem like a ufo ride through a multitude of galaxies, all of which were at least as fantastic as those we currently are blessed with by the incredible James Webb Space Telescope camera shots.

@@bscinor amen re: new frontiers in astronomic photography + disco balls

And nobody for the past year until now... It's okay, don't need validation from big numbers to know when something is great.

Good question. Why do vids get so many views but no responses is beyond me.

I don't understand the "thumbs down" people. I'll forgive half of them that in a very stoned moment they hit the wrong vote.

I think some are due for sound upgrades. 1980 birdsong on "all the years" video has so much better sound you can hear Jerry's voice loud too, as an example.

so few saw it that night Berkeley Community Theater was a fairly small venue I'd seen Jimi there in '70, one of the shows they made the movie from, & what seemed like the whole crowd left their seats to dance in the aisles & open area between seats & stage about the 3rd or 4th song. I don't remember returning to seats, but memory vacated @ same time. At this show Berkeley Fire Marshal had been hassling BGP over letting people dance in the aisles so BGP had extra security on to keep us all in our seats, an innovation we were not happy about. I'd seen Carlos there earlier that summer (or spring?), & he'd asked the crowd for a minute of silence for our dead & dying brothers(+ others) in Nam w/o much success from the high partying loud crowd. But at this very high show, during this Dark Star the Dead at one point got gradually quieter+quieter which led crowd to get quieter + quieter to hear where this especially beautiful Dark Star was going until the whole place got so quiet that somebody, maybe to demonstrate just how remarkably quiet it had become, offered up a one-word stage whisper from somewhere in back we could hear plain as day up front. I'm betting everybody in the place could hear it; it was that quiet. I'm guessing few folk here will need the one word spelled out, but if you need a hint it has 4 letters & was not onomatopoeiac

Pics???