The summer of 2015 was a culminating moment in Bill Walton’s life. He’d been seeing the Grateful Dead , in all its iterations, for 48 years by that point. He’d been to hundreds upon hundreds of shows, but like so many Deadheads, the series of 50th anniversary shows in Northern California and Chicago (billed as Fare Thee Well) were going to be monumental: The first time most of the group’s surviving members would play together in years, and the last time it would happen.
Walton, who by then was already known as one of the world’s most famous — and, with his six-foot-eleven stature, recognizable — Dead fans on the planet, spent the summer serving as an unofficial liaison for the group: giving interviews about the reunion and writing an afterword to a coffee table commemorating the shows. Walton, who suffered from chronic pain ever since he began suffering injuries as a teenager, was ready for the grueling run of marathon shows. His spine felt good, he had a new knee, he was ready.
Walton stood amidst the massive crowd for the shows, which he described, in earnest hyperbole, as the “nine days that changed the world.” “Everybody was so happy and there was just the tears of joy and pride and gratitude,” Walton later told Relix of the experience of seeing the shows up close. “I got to be in the pit, 12 people deep, right in front of Bruce Hornsby.
I was there , and I will never forget, and I feel terribly sorry for the person behind me.” Bill Walton, who d.