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The Oregon Ducks football team is flying high this season at 5–1, so it should be no surprise that the team is tapping into the deep connection shared by the University of Oregon and the venerable high flyers of the music world, the Grateful Dead.
The contest on Oct. 25 at Eugene’s Autzen Stadium is being dubbed a “tie-dye out,” the first in the history of American college or professional sports. Instead of the usual palette of green and yellow gear, Ducks fans are encouraged to let their freak flags fly and don their best tie-dyed apparel.
Planning for the tie-dye out has been in the works for over a year, according to Brooke Robinson, the Ducks’ assistant athletic director of marketing and fan experience. The Ducks opponent for the game, the University of Wisconsin Badgers, was carefully selected based in part on the many shows the Grateful Dead played on the Badgers’ Madison campus.
For stats-loving sports fans and Deadheads alike, here are a few numbers to ponder: The Grateful Dead played in Madison seven times, from a first show in March 1971 to the last in June 1983. The penultimate Madison Dead show, on Dec. 3, 1981, is rated as one of the top 30 Grateful Dead performances ever by Rolling Stone.
Just as the football matchups between Oregon and Wisconsin historically tilt in favor of the Ducks 4–3, with Oregon winning the last four in a row, the number of Dead shows on the Oregon campus exceeds those on their opponent’s grounds, 14–7. This includes 10 shows at Autzen Stadium between 1978 and 1994, and three more at the 1926-vintage former campus basketball venue McArthur Court. Oregon students from across the generations can ponder the very first University of Oregon Dead show on Jan. 30, 1968, at Erb Memorial Union, the student commons building better known as the EMU.
There were two other notable Eugene-area Dead shows that help explain the ties between the band and the school. These are the magical 1972 and 1982 outdoor shows near Veneta on the site of Oregon Country Fair, formerly the Oregon Renaissance Faire (not to be confused with the current iteration founded in 2016).
The 1972 show was intended to benefit the Springfield Creamery, which had been an Oregon Country Fair vendor for many years and was owned by members of the Kesey family. Its most famous member, the late Ken Kesey, was the author of lauded novels Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was closely affiliated with the Merry Pranksters, the pack of LSD-loving bohemians responsible for a series of music- and hallucinogen-focused happenings—or Acid Tests—for which the Grateful Dead served as the house band.
So, when the Creamery needed help, Kesey asked the Dead to play the 1972 Veneta benefit. Despite missteps and a day the mercury topped out at 104 degrees, the Dead delivered as planned on Aug. 27. Rolling Stone ranks it as No. 9 on its list of best-ever Dead show, remarking that “band and fans seemed to be flying on the same solar delirium. And as the sun finally began to set, the Dead topped everything else with the deepest, wildest, scariest ‘Dark Star’ they ever played.”
The 1982 Veneta “Second Decadenal Field Trip” may not have been as wild as the first, but it was still a hot and swirling, high summer good time. Having attended that show, I remember little of the Dead’s set list, but distinctly recall Peter Rowan of Old & In the Way, who was on the bill, yodeling into the warm, dusty twilight after the show had officially concluded.
Ken Kesey was just as strongly tied to UO as he was to the Grateful Dead, the Merry Pranksters and his family dairy. He graduated in 1957 after becoming a championship wrestler there, and the school holds an archival collection of his writing. He also briefly taught during UO’s 1988–89 academic year, overseeing a highly unconventional graduate-level course that culminated in the publication of the collaborative novel Caverns.
Further details of the Grateful Dead-influenced “tie-dye out” game (beyond the fans’ sartorial display) remain a tightly guarded secret. The Ducks’ staid athletic director, native West Virginian Rob Mullens, has never seen a Dead show and would only disclose that his outfit for the game would be a surprise. Head coach Dan Lanning, a 39-year-old former Missourian, seems both too young and too football- and family-focused to have ever bothered with the Dead. And the players, well, none of them was born before Jerry Garcia bid us all good night back in 1995.
So, we are left to ponder the weighty questions: Will the Ducks wear tie-dyed uniforms or accessories for the game? Will Oregon’s zany mascot, the Duck, pull a special stunt or two, like when he dressed up as a Labubu earlier this season? Will the standard Autzen Stadium playlist morph into something a bit spacier? And, perhaps most importantly to the fans who attend, will the favored Ducks beat the visiting Badgers? To paraphrase a Dead classic: Let there be football to fill the air.
SEE IT: Oregon Ducks vs. Wisconsin Badgers at Autzen Stadium, 2700 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., Eugene, 541-346-4461, goducks.com. Kickoff TBA Saturday, Oct. 25. $105–$1,000.
