Winterland Ballroom
Music venue in San Francisco, CaliforniaWikipedia
30
MENTIONS
16
EPISODES
8
PODCASTS
Search complete. 30 mentions across 16 episodes found for "Winterland Ballroom".
Oct 30, 2026
Mitch MelnickHOST
Final pair of tickets to give away to the Million Dollar Bash.
Mitch MelnickHOST
A very strong Montreal salute to the music of Bob Dylan and the band from 1966 where it all wrapped up at Winterland in San Francisco 50 years ago next month on American Thanksgiving with The Last Waltz.
Mitch MelnickHOST
Stay with us.
speaker_9PANELIST
Question of the day.
speaker_13SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
final concert by the band.
Mitch MelnickHOST
at Winterland in San Francisco on American Thanksgiving.
Mitch MelnickHOST
They played three classics on Saturday Night Live.
Mitch MelnickHOST
Stay tuned for an opportunity to win tickets to a salute to the 50th anniversary of The Last Waltz, the 60th anniversary of the first ever electric tour with Dylan and the band, and a whole lot in between, some of their major moments from the 70s as well.
Mitch MelnickHOST
Final pair of tickets to give away to the Million Dollar Bash.
Mitch MelnickHOST
A very strong Montreal salute to the music of Bob Dylan and the band from 1966 where it all wrapped up at Winterland in San Francisco 50 years ago next month on American Thanksgiving with The Last Waltz.
Mitch MelnickHOST
Stay with us.
John StillHOST
Question of the day.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Two hours, three hours, sometimes more.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The Marathon Dead show, the thing that defined them for the next 30 years, crystallized at the Fillmore and Winterland under Graham's watch.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Those 1967-68 shows where they'd stretch Viola Lee Blues to 15-20 minutes, where Alligator would go for half an hour, where Caution, Do Not Stop on the Tracks, became this 40-minute improvised journey.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
That was Graham creating the space for them to discover what they actually were.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
When cops showed up at the Fillmore looking to bust people for drugs, Graham physically blocked them and called lawyers.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
When city officials tried to shut down shows over noise complaints or crowd control, he fought them in public hearings, gathered citizen petitions, hired legal teams.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The Fillmore and Winterland weren't just music venues.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
They were fortresses where the counterculture could exist without getting immediately crushed by the establishment.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Two weeks later, on the last of the three nights at the Great Pyramid in Egypt, they played it again, on the night of the eclipse.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Then it went quiet for a while, through the rest of September, until the band came home to San Francisco in October for a run at Winterland.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
And here's the odd thing about that night.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
At Winterland, on the 20th of October, the band played their whole show, two full sets, and came back for the encore, and played Johnny B. Goode, the old Chuck Berry rocker they so often closed with.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
And then instead of saying good night, they stayed.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
They played a second encore, and it was the brand new song.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
But here's your tape oddity for tonight.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
In the winter of the Wall of Sound year, the dead closed a three-night stand at Winterland, in San Francisco, and for the encore, out of nowhere, Garcia sang Baby Blue.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The historian Corey Arnold did the arithmetic.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Thirteen days earlier, Garcia had seen Bob Dylan play.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Later a small horn section was laid over it.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
In the spring it was played live for the first time, at Winterland in San Francisco, second in the first set, right after Bertha, and then, quietly, it went away.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The band stopped playing it when they came off the road in the middle of the 70s, and it stayed gone for about 15 years.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Weir told Blair Jackson, near the end of that long absence, that the man in the song was not somebody he could get behind.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
March 18, 1977.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Winterland Arena in San Francisco.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
For the first time, the Grateful Dead segued from Scarlet Begonia's directly into fire on the mountain.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
It happened organically.
BrentGUEST
It's been a while since I've watched it, but
AndyHOST
yeah, I mean – Yeah, the one that always stands out to me is that black and white one, like Winterland from, like, 74 or 75.
AndyHOST
Yeah, the very early ones.
AndyHOST
But, yeah, like, if I pop it in, that's usually what I watch.
BrentGUEST
I didn't think so either.
BrentGUEST
I thought somebody had said they thought they did, but then I looked and I couldn't find a Blu-ray or anything.
AndyHOST
The Winterland from Hotter Than Hell Tour.
AndyHOST
There's a Midnight Special from 1975.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The dead had built something specific in specific rooms.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Winterland, the Fillmore West, the smaller halls where the relationship between the stage and the floor felt like something other than a stadium transaction.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The Cow Palace held 14,000.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The press hadn't given deadheads a way to understand that the wall existed precisely to preserve intimacy at that scale.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The dead's monthly overhead while running it was by Wasserman's own reporting something like $100,000.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The economics were unsurvivable.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
The Winterland run in mid-October was the last of it, and then came the hiatus, and then the wall was retired.
Rich BonnifaceNARRATOR
Seven months wasn't long enough.
6 more episodes mention Winterland Ballroom.
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