Tickets to the Grateful Dead’s farewell reunion weekend in Chicago went on sale this past weekend, and as expected, tickets went pretty fast. But the secondary ticket-selling market went completely batshit, with some tickets, originally priced in the $59.50 to $199.50 range, going for nearly $15,000.
The average re-seller price for Dead tickets to the three shows, July 3 to 5 at Solder Field in Chicago, are said to be in the $2,000 range. On StubHub, parking passes were going for nearly $200.
One Deadhead isn’t feeling it.
In a post to Craig’s List a few hours ago, this pissed off Deadhead warns scalpers that this mark-up shit is just unacceptable. Don’t bet against a fan base that knows how to sneak into shows, he or she writes, and more importantly, stop being dicks.
Late frontman Jerry Garcia must be shaking his damn head at all this.
Read the post below…
Hi there. So, you’re selling tickets you don’t have yet to a show you have no interest in. Well, let me tell you a little about us deadheads. First off, we’re crafty. We invented getting 10 people into a show with one ticket. We figured out how to live while following a band around the country. Most of us didn’t see this band once or twice, we’ve seen them 10, 20, 50, 100 and more times, and lots of us have NEVER been shut out of a show. Do you really think charging $2000-10000 (or more) for a ticket is going to work? It won’t. Those tickets will sit online until the day before the show when you realize that you’ll be lucky to get $20 over face value. Once they announce the inevitable web streams or pay per view, you’ll be totally out of luck. And if they simulcast in Grant Park or Northerly Island, then hundreds of thousands of heads will be able to bypass you completely. Game over.
With that in mind, I am going to flag every post from any person or broker attempting to sell Grateful Dead tickets for anything over face value. And to those of you that jumped on resale tickets for $600 and are now trying to make $2000 in them, don’t complain to me. The price in the ticket is that price for a reason and it’s not negotiable. I get charging a little over, but over $2K for a $70 ticket is ridiculous.
So instead of being a dick trying to make a quick buck, be a decent person and sell your tickets for a little over face to pay for your time and then leave us alone and go back to snatching up tickets to Nickelback concerts.
Thanks for reading.
Word.
By the way, Soldier Field is the site of the three-day Fare Thee Well weekend because the Bears stadium was the last place the Dead performed live with Garcia, who passed away a month after that show in 1995.