June 26--Once, I received a miracle.
Not in the religious sense (though it did instill some faith in mankind), and not quite in the financial sense (though it did spare me a lighter wallet), but rather, in the concertgoing sense. I drove to the Worcester Centrum (now the DCU Center) in Massachusetts with a friend to see Bruce Springsteen on opening night of his "Tunnel of Love" tour. This was a few years after the blockbuster "Born in the U.S.A." tour, so tickets were seemingly nonexistent. We didn't have any ourselves but decided to try our luck, to wander the periphery of the arena and see what scalpers were asking. It's what you did before Craigslist. We knew how useless our trip would probably be, and within minutes, our suspicions appeared to be correct: A scalper offered two tickets for $2,000 (that's 1988 dollars); another more saintly scalper wanted $750 for one. Just as we decided to call it a night, a man casually asked: "How many?" Two, I said guardedly, expecting to hear a Pentagon-like price.
He handed me two tickets and, though it was February, said, "Merry Christmas" and walked off.
We didn't ask questions.
We got in line, half-expecting to be arrested for passing what were probably fraudulent tickets. Instead, we sailed through the gate and found our seats (lower arena, near the back) and noticed that others around us were holding similarly confused smiles and kibitzing, assembling how they had gotten so lucky. Turns out that man, a representative from Springsteen's management, gave away rows of seats. And he did it at every Springsteen concert, to undermine the insanely inflated prices of predatory scalpers, as a show of decency.
He was the miracle man.
I like that story because it seems improbable; when I think back, even I wonder if that world existed.
And yet, a lot of Deadheads will be praying for a miracle this week, when the Grateful Dead perform three sold-out shows at Soldier Field, billed as the final concerts in the band's 50-year run. Indeed, Deadheads pioneered the concept of the concert miracle, the unlikely free ticket, gifted by a friend or a stranger, a left-field act of kindness to remind you that experiencing a live performance shouldn't just be about having enough cash. It can be about community, and generosity.
And though I have never been much of a fan of the Grateful Dead, I have always been a fan of Deadheads, and in particular of this anachronistically earnest code, which states that a concert ticket should not be just another opportunity to fleece your fellow man.
As Linda Engels, of Edgebrook, a veteran of some 100 Dead and Jerry Garcia shows, put it: "Basically, you do your best to get your friends into shows. Someone has kind eyes? You try to help them, too. And unless they are going through a personal crisis, the true Deadhead would never ask you more than face value for their ticket.
"That would be, you know, immoral."
But it's a free market, I said.
"And I get that," she said. "But it's not just a concert you're messing with. It's a culture."
That is a brave argument for 2015.
One that cuts philosophically deeper than the Dead and its erstwhile community. To paraphrase Engels: When selling a concert ticket, it is not morally OK to ask more than what you paid for that ticket. And it's not OK because, as the argument goes, art is for everyone, and if you believe that everyone deserves the same opportunity to enjoy the music that you enjoy, then you have a responsibility to promote community.
Is this a hippy-dippy argument? Yes. Is it realistic? No, and you will not get far with this line of reasoning -- why, after all, shouldn't you ask to be paid what something is worth? When I called Max Waisvisz, founder of Gold Coast Tickets, Chicago's largest local ticket broker, and wondered if it was morally or ethically wrong to charge more than face value for tickets, it took all of his strength not to laugh: "Look, this is a pure form of capitalism and everything now is a commodity."
Emma Leggat, the head of U.S. communications for leading ticket resale site StubHub, said that the company offers no moral judgments or guidelines for the prices that the ticket sellers on its website set. She said that possibly because ticket resale "was handled in the past in an unsavory way," people tended to draw distinctions between the legitimacy of reselling concert tickets and the reselling of, say, a house or car. "But millennials rarely make that same distinction between secondary and primary markets. And with a show like the Dead, they are just thrilled to have access at all."
In other words, the Deadhead argument for selling tickets at face value is now quaint, improbable nonsense. David Browne, a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone and author of the new Dead history "So Many Roads," said there's a point to be made that the Deadhead "code of civility" itself has been eroding since the band's late '80s popularity attracted a broad audience: "Then Jerry died in 1995 and having a community was hard."
But maybe this is also an argument worth having, the kind that questions conventional wisdom.
You might even say it's the best thing to come out of the Dead ticket fiasco this winter, that awkward mash of old school (mail order) and conventional (Ticketmaster) ticketing that resulted in a land rush for 150,000 seats -- and a lot of bad vibes.
Engels told me she and many of her fellow Chicago Deadheads went the mail-order route assuming they would get tickets; they always had that way before. Plane tickets were bought and vacation days planned, then no one landed a single ticket. They turned online briefly, but prices were "nuts," so they fell back on fellow Deadheads. Old bonds were cemented again and everyone found tickets.
At face value.
To hear her tell this is to hear an idealistic community grappling with a 21st-century gentrification of concertgoing. When they started attending concerts, selling tickets was called "scalping" and now it's called "resale." When they started attending, the assumption was everyone had an equal chance at getting a ticket; now they are competing with a $4.5 billion annual resale market that employs online bots to gobble up seats and resells them at a markup.
When they became Deadheads, ticket resale was illegal; now there's a good chance your state allows some form of legalized scalping. Even Jon Landau, Springsteen's longtime manager, told Rolling Stone last year that "A large part of the public has accepted (ticket resale)."
But because it's legal doesn't make it OK.
