Garcia said “We were great for seconds on end.” I was lucky to see Jerry play for about 1,000,000 seconds exactly. Thanks for your 1,000,000 views here . Dave Davis wrote this blog for 500 posts and 5 years from 2015 to 2019. Contact me at twitter @gratefulseconds

Thursday, December 5, 2019

The Summer Solstice Pay-Per-View Experiment, Shoreline, June 21, 1989


In 2015, the Fare Thee Well shows generated the highest level of music PPV sales to date with 400,000 folks ordering at thousands of dollars a piece, well it seemed like that 

But back in the older days in 1989, I thought maybe they get 50,000 or less. And I used to guess in the papers in my first job after grad school. (see below)

The Dead show did "well" which means it did about 125,000 to 150,000 orders at $20 or more than $2.5 million (maybe the dead got half of half, maybe, or a mid-six figure number, which wasn't worth the hassle when they were making crazy bank in Summer 1989 averaging a million a night in ticket sales revenue)
(the Stones got about 200,000 later in 1989, see below)

Never miss a Sunday show, they say, and especially when Sunday (ie show 3 of 3) is a Wednesday, you can Hideaway in your own living room and crank it up and watch it.  Your modern folks might do this every week (like did you see Terrapin in the encore last night), but 30 years ago in 1989 this was brand new stuff.
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As you can see it's a pretty cool show, and the Big Man joined the band.  Luckily we can still watch this thanks to the stylings of our hero Voodoonola.  I especially like all the crowd footage at the start. Enjoy











See before I analyzed the Dead, I used to talk about this stuff






































2 comments:

Anonymous said...

6/21/89 was a Wednesday night, not Sunday.

My So Called Blog said...

That ad was pretty funny. Bobby Weir - what a natural actor!