Alpine Valley Music Theatre

Gospel one season, a long look back the next.

this town handed jerry a trophy for musician of the year while he was hardly ever off stage for a while the shabby palace on market street was simply where the serious music in this city got made it did not last after one benefit the band was plainly too large for the room and in the years that followed they drifted to bigger halls across the bridge because the warfield by then was not really theirs to book any more and here is the part the people who were there still cannot settle a band this big did not need this room they could have taken something larger cleaner safer in a better part of any city in the country instead they picked a seedy old theatre with two-in-the-morning streets and a nervous walk to the car and they sat down and played it acoustic some of them will tell you it was a decision a deliberate shrinking an artist peeling the wall of sound back to wood and gut-string just to hear the songs breathe again others will tell you it was nothing so noble it was the room that happened to be free close to home the gig a tired guitar-player could walk to so which was it did the dead come down to the war-field to make a point about sighs and silence or did a homesick man simply want a stage he could reach on foot the ones who filled those gold seats were the ones who were actually there they still do not agree everyone warns you about the traffic first you hear about it before you ever hear about the band a two-lane road into dairy country ten thousand cars nosing toward a ski resort that has no snow in july everyone stopped everyone patient everyone already a little gone the trick the veterans tell you is not to fight it the trick is to just camp arrive pull off set up and tell yourself you do not need to leave for two nights some of the sweetest memories anyone keeps of this place are of the parking lot not the show because the show is up a hill this is a ski slope in the flat middle of wisconsin an amphitheater carved into the side of it so the lawn is an actual mountain and the crowd sits looking down a long grassy incline at a stage far below the pavilion catches the people who paid for a roof everyone else takes the hill which in the mid-west is the whole point they call it the week-end in the valley and in this part of dead land it is awaited with something close to religious fervor a pilgrimage with a lawn and a cooler the band came out here the first summer almost as a lark and then never really stopped every warm season for years the caravan formed up again plans made over margaritas the whole trip aimed to swing through chicago on the way home there was nothing like alpine valley on a warm summer evening The air smelled like cut grass and campfire and spilled beer.

The stage lights came up against a black wall of trees.

The band would open with something easy, an Alabama getaway rolling into promised land, and the whole hill would rise to its feet at once, 10,000 people standing on a mountainside in the dark.

The pavilion people drove home that night.

The lawn people mostly did not, because the lawn people had already decided not to leave.

and here is the thing the tape cannot settle for you ask any one who made the trip what alpine valley was and watch how few of them start with the band they start with the drive the camp the margaritas the walk up the hill in the last of the light the coolers the faces the music when they finally get to it tends to come in somewhere around fourth so you have to wonder what the magic actually was was it the band on that distant stage small as a coin from the top of the hill or was it everything that happened on the way to seeing them from way up on the grass honestly could you even hear it that well and if the answer is not really did that ever once matter to a single person on that hill the people who spent those weekends in the valley will swear it was the best the band ever sounded they will also cheerfully admit they were a very long way from the stage both of those are true and nobody has ever quite managed to hold them apart off the lake the wind comes over the top of the stadium and does not stop it is summer in chicago the last summer though nobody standing on the field is thinking in those terms They are thinking about the weather and the beer line and whether the band is going to be good tonight.

Soldier Field is a big stone bowl with old colonnades along its flanks, built for football and speeches, and tonight it holds a crowd that has traveled a long way for a concert and carries, most of them, a small private worry they are trying not to name.

I would just, I would kind of, uh, end up seeing any time they were in Milwaukee, Chicago, um, quad cities, St. Louis.

I would, I would drive to those shows, um, Alpine Valley, which is up in Wisconsin as well.

Um, And if they did three shows at Poplar Creek in Chicago, I went to all three shows.

I just had to, uh, I, it just was honestly, they, they, took over my life, for lack of a better, like, I just loved them.

What's the problem? Whatever the internal dynamics are, something shifts in 2002.

August 3rd and 4th, Alpine Valley Music Theater in East Troy, Wisconsin.

Grateful Dead Family Reunion.

It's marketed as a festival, a gathering, multiple bands camping the whole scene.

They navigated the tension between Bob Weir's vision and Phil Lesch's vision without Jerry Garcia there to mediate.

And the music? Listen to the tapes.

The Alpine Valley Terrapin Station from August 2002 has a precision and intentionality that comes from years of not playing together.

They're not taking it for granted anymore.

It was co-directed by his daughter Rashida Jones, and it offered a deep look into his decades of cultural influence, and I have seen it, and it is a great documentary.

In 2019, Farm Aid 32 took place at the Alpine Valley Music Theater in East Troy, Wisconsin.

The usual suspects were there, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and of course it helped to raise money for the farmers.

And in 2021, legendary filmmaker, actor, and composer Melvin Van Peebles passed away in Manhattan at the age of 89.

And they're like, well, he died right down the street from where you grew up.

So I grew up next to Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisconsin, where Stevie played his last show and his helicopter crashed.

I had no idea who he was.

And then a friend of mine had Stevie Ray Vaughan live at the El Macombo on tape.

just wait for it this is so ropey i'm blue and green got a big red beak i have strong legs i can walk all week but only little wings so i cannot fly and then they thought we went extinct And that's about the time they rediscovered me.

Alpine Valley living wild and free.

We're still in danger from some best species.

Dear, we're eating all our food.

I got home, processed all the film, sent it all out to magazines, everybody started using it, And I called Bruce's publicist and said, listen, I got really great stuff, but I want to get more.

And he's coming to Alpine Valley next week.

This is like now the beginning of July.

He's doing two shows at Alpine Valley.

I want to shoot those too.

And she said, well, why not? No problem.