Grateful Dead, and New Riders of the Purple Sage | Vintage concert poster — the cancelled show

Property of Strider Shurtliff

Grateful Dead, and New Riders of the Purple Sage 

Vintage concert poster, for a cancelled Seattle show, 1971

Printed poster (22 x 14.25"). Printed in red and blue on brown paper, with a large illustration of the Dead at head, “Grateful Dead” and “New Riders of the Purple Sage” in decorative type.

An attractive poster for a double bill on 5 May 1971, at the P.N.E. Coliseum in Seattle

The show was cancelled, making this scarce poster one of the only records of its event. On 28 April, the Dead had finished five consecutive nights at the Fillmore East, and would resume their tour on 28 May at Winterland. Dennis McNally notes that “the spring of 1971 would mostly be recalled as the sad period in which both of Weir’s parents died--within weeks of each other, and each on the other’s birthday. Weir would never be terribly adept at acknowledging his pain, and the symmetry of the two deaths moved them, in his mind, from the tragic into the protocosmic, but it was still a painful season” (McNally 395).

REFERENCE

McNally, Dennis. A Long Strange Trip. New York: Broadway Books, 2002