I just don’t know what to make of this.
So, unless we have six beautifully-concocted fakes, it certainly seems the people had tickets for a Jerry Garcia show on this date at this location. The stubs are torn and so they appear to have been honored and used.
Here’s the kicker: there is simply no other evidence that this show happened on this date. It happened on December 9th. How do we know this?
First, there are multiple eyewitness accounts.
Second, there are ticket stubs:
Third, there is a delightful recording, which, after pitch-correcting, shows this to be a typically fun and hot late 1977 JGB east coast tour show.
Fourth, there is loads of evidence from the SUNY Stony Brook Statesman (happily, online!) that the show happened on 12/9, and none whatsoever that points to 11/28.
a) For ex ante evidence, there is a piece from 10/28 that describes a ticketing snafu, whereby Ticketron was able to sell tickets before the SUNY Student Box Office could (1). The article clearly states that the show is scheduled for December 9th.
b) For more ex ante evidence, ads published in the Statesman (I think … not sure why I didn’t note the publication info) that span the 11/28 and 12/9 dates show nothing happening on 11/28, and the Garcia show on 12/9:
c) For ex post evidence, there is a show review (2).
Fifth, if you look again at the scans of the 11/28/77 tickets, you’ll see the middle one on the left has handwritten “Dec. 9” under the date.
Sixth, I have now seen the gig contract, and there it is – 12/9.
So, what are we to make of the 11/28 ticket stubs?
H1: reschedule. Historically, the Jerry Site worked under the reasonable assumption that there was a reschedule.But there is simply no evidence for this. Given the coverage in the Statesman, this would have been all over the paper. Eyewitnesses also say it just wasn’t so. So I think we can reject this possibility.
H2: the “11/28” stubs are counterfeits. Pro: don’t these stubs look like GDP design? Should they look like that? Cons: The scans certainly have a lot of verisimilitude. Why would someone go through all the trouble of making such realistic fakes (of objects that just aren’t worth that much, anyway!), only to get the date wrong? I suppose it could give the sense of rarity or something, but this just doesn’t seem likely. Not impossible, just highly unlikely.
H3: the date mis-printed. Note that the ones that are correctly dated are Ticketron tickets, while the “11/28” ones have the different style. The Neilssen piece (1) indicates at least that there was separate ticketing from the campus and from Ticketron. Maybe the student activities group putting the show on put some stoner in charge of getting the tickets together, and he/she just goofed.
I don’t really know. I kind of lean to H3, but just can’t bring myself to think that such an error would have slipped through the cracks.We’d really need some folks who were there, preferably involved, to weigh in. So please send your Stony Brook alums here to clear up the mystery!
REFERENCES
(1) Tom Neilssen, “Ticketron Gets Garcia Tickets Before Campus,” Statesman (SUNY Stony Brook), October 28, 1977, p. 3.
(2) Mitchell Alkon, “Garcia Is Alive Without the Dead,” Statesman (SUNY Stony Brook), December 14, 1977, p.9
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