Logic

Me too. One thing that would be a big help is.....oh, never mind.

Thanks for the post. The things that stick out to me: - Blame injuries or QBs or coaching or whatever, but after some early All-World play, OBJ has actually had a pretty unremarkable career. - Mike Evans is a beast. - Jarvis Landry is vastly underrated. - John Brown has had just as good a career in terms of production as the guy we traded up for, Sammy Watkins. - The 1996 WR class is still the best of all time, in my opinion. No one can ever convince me that Eric Moulds wasn’t a HOF level talent whose career was wasted by mostly bad QB play and mostly bad offenses.

A story in pictures:

Great selections you've already made. I'd like to add a few of my favorites. Eddie Vedder, Richie Havens, Grateful Dead (who could fill an entire album with Dylan covers), and Wilco w/ Fleet Foxes The Eddie Vedder cover of Masters of War, in particular, gives me chills.

70,000 Bridge-and-tunnel chuds will once again be allowed to pack into one place, either pretending they're a jet airplane in the stands or drunkenly demanding that women take their tops off in the concourse. A great day for humanity.

I haven’t heard of any paper tickets for this Dead tour, other than those which come with the VIP packages. All mobile tickets. That said, I have learned that if you go to the box office the day of the show and tell them you like to have a physical ticket stub, they’ll usually turn your virtual ticket into a paper ticket for you. At least I’ve had luck doing that several times at past shows.

Yeah. I got lawn seats for the San Diego show very easily. Face value, same cost as the Tampa show. There are STILL a bunch of available. In fact, generally speaking, almost every show on this tour seems to be pretty easy to get a lawn seat for at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately for me, the only difficult to obtain tickets on the whole tour happen to be for a series of shows I was planning to attend (LA). Ah well, such is life. If it's meant to be, I'll find some affordable tickets. If it's not, I won't.

I disagree. Beane is a pretty straight shooter. Case in point: He talked leading up the draft about needing to "affect the opposing quarterback" more effectively, and then they drafted two edge rushers in the first two rounds. How do you explain that? All we know from watching that video is that they tried to trade up and the cost being asked of them was too high. Without knowing what that cost was -- and a bunch of other variables -- there's a limited amount that can be inferred. They very well could have been willing to give up, say, their second round pick to move up, but the team on the other line was asking for next year's first. It doesn't mean they weren't highly interested in whatever player they were pursuing.

Personally, I believe that the "Bills want to trade up for ETN" smoke was real. I believe they tried. I believe ETN was the player they were targeting. Beane literally said that if a running back added something to the room that they didn't already have, they'd absolutely take him. He want on just a few sentences later to admit that something they lack in the room is "a home run hitter". He also explained that guys like CMC and Kamara are worth first round picks because they improve both the run and pass game. Now we hear that ETN is cross-training as a WR in Jacksonville. We'll never know for sure how serious the Bills' interest in ETN was, but it is my personal opinion that they were very interested.

I don't want to derail this thread, but there are tons of resources available that can answer your questions.

Oh stop. You would.

Welp... Was into the ticket-buying screen ONE MINUTE after ticket sales opened up for the Hollywood Bowl shows. All that was available was "verified re-sale" and "platinum" tickets for hundreds of dollars over face value. I know it's not a new revelation that Ticketmaster is a heinous, disgusting organization, but what I want to know is...how do they get away with it year after year? It's just amazing that there hasn't been any intervention to stop this obvious monopoly and their obviously unfair business practices. Sorry. Done venting. Happy for anyone that got tickets. Seems like many/most east coast shows were no problem at all. Just so frustrated that there often is no chance in hell of actual humans beating out re-sale robots and acquiring face value concert tickets. It gets so damned old.

Yes. Last March, when I was furloughed at work, I started doing daily walks around the neighborhood. Somewhere between 20 and 45 minutes. I found that I liked it quite a bit, and well...furlough stretched on and on. Here we are, 14 months later, and rarely does a day go by that doesn't see me taking some kind of walk. I do NOT, however, enjoy running. Have given it a legitimate, sustained try several times. It's not for me. I've got an exercise bike in the living room instead that I can point at the TV and ride for 40 minutes or so while watching old football highlights or something.

Uh-oh. First Charles Grodin, now Rennie Stennett. Rule of Threes. Who will be next? Somebody go lock Betty White inside her house.

I guess the Bills are considering running an all-returner offensive package. It could certainly rival the excitement caused by the vaunted Joe Webb Package.

As to the first bolded: Yes. If you want to close your eyes and feel like you're actually at a prime era Grateful Dead show, DSO is the way to go. Even the crowd vibe and venues chosen often harken back to the 70s Dead. I'm convinced that DSO sometimes plays Dead shows better than the Dead played them. I know that's a controversial statement, but I hold to it. For one thing, DSO does not, as far as I'm aware, have all of the "extra stuff" to distract them: drug addictions, groupies, dealers, Hell's Angels, John Belushi doing eightballs in the dressing room, etc.. For another, they don't have much margin for error. Whereas the Dead got a pass from Deadheads to be "on" some nights and "off" for others, DSO doesn't get such a pass. If they kept playing stinkers, they wouldn't keep selling tickets or having the credibility they do. Certainly a good night of DSO is better than the last couple years of the Grateful Dead, which was sad due to Jerry's addiction and was often musically awful. As to the second bolded: So much yes. Oteil has a beautiful voice. He also has much more genuine soul than Mayer, in my opinion. The old quote about "the skill of a singer comes down not to how skillfull his voice his, but by how much he can convince you he is telling the truth" comes to mind. I BELIEVE Oteil when he sings. I don't know that I believe Mayer. For as skillful a musician as he may be, no part of me believes that he has the emotional depth to embody much of the Dead canon in the way that Jerry did. Oteil DOES seem to have that depth, AND he has a more harmonically pleasant voice. The only songs Mayer should sing, in my opinion, are the old Pigpen blues tunes like "Hurts Me Too" or "Next Time You See Me". He's a blues singer, so let him sing the blues. Leave everything else to the guys who mean it.

Mahomes Brady Rodgers Wilson Watson

Yeah. I was taken aback. This was supposed to have been the last opportunity to say something to the assembled Deadhead community (at least as the “core four” unit) that had been paying your bills and supporting your art for a half century......and “hopefully everyone can move on and do something better with their lives” was what he came up with? I love Phil, and I’m guessing he’s probably a great and generous person if you get to know him. But he has sure been painted as (and has come off as) quite the curmudgeon in recent years. And for what it’s worth, in terms of playing Dead music in an original, exciting way and at the proper tempos, I prefer DSO and probably even Joe Russo’s Almost Dead these days. Dead and Co shows are still church for me, though. Still the waning days of a one-of-a-kind and never to be duplicated gathering of the tribes. Still a chance to see three musicians who have meant so much to my life get up on stage and search for the muse.

Agreed. Based on interviews with other band members from that summer and from Joel Selvin's book "Fare Thee Well", It seems clear to me that just about everyone in the band wanted to do east coast shows except Phil Lesh. Frankly, it seemed like most of the guys wanted to do a full 50th anniversary TOUR. Phil was the exception, apparently. It was like pulling teeth to even get him to be willing to to the Soldier Field shows, and then again to get him to agree to the Santa Clara "warm up" shows. He also apparently was very difficult during rehearsals. It put Trey Anastasio and Bruce Hornsby in a weird spot, having to learn/rehearse a 100-song songbook but only getting to go through every song once. In general, there have been tensions and disagreements among the band -- primarily between Phil and the drummers, hence Dead and Co featuring everyone but Phil -- since Jerry passed. Sad, really. I went to the Fare Thee Well shows, and of all the post-Jerry iterations I've seen over the years (Ratdog, Phil and Friends, the Dead, Further, Dead and Co), they were my least favorite shows, musically speaking. The weekend was a great deal of fun and and a cool celebration, and I don't regret going. But the lack of rehearsal and the uneasy peace amongst the members was evident to me. Phil's stepping up to the mic on the last night and saying "now hopefully we can all move on and do something different with our lives" left a bad taste in my mouth. Not "Thank you", not "we love you", just "enough already. Let's all move on". I love Phil Lesh, but everything I've ever read on the subject suggests he's been a bit of a dictator since Jerry passed. I always think of Mickey Hart's comment on the subject: "When Phil received a liver transplant, he must have gotten the liver of a jerk".

Is that right? I guess I'm not surprised. The NYC area has been a Deadhead hotspot since at least 1970. Even though the Dead are a west coast band, they've always made most of their money and seem to have their most large and loyal legions of fans on the east coast. I'm gonna do my best to get tickets early, but I don't want to be roped in by the pumped up price hustle of the "verified fan pre-sale" if I can help it. I'm a bit scarred by the 2015 "Fare Thee Well" Soldier Field ticket buying experience, though, so my FOMO panic may get the better of me.