Picture this... After you've had your hand stamped, you walk into a room that looks like a ten car garage. There's a stage comprised of 36" high risers that are 18 feet in front of you. There's one mirrored wall with a bar in front of it. There's carpeting on the floor. And that's it! That's the entire contents of the Grate Room.
A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to visit Terrapin Crossroads twice in five days. Phil Lesh's new food and music venue on a small inlet in San Rafael is fresh and alive. I've now been there several more times and see that the place is attracting a group of regulars. Bob Weir casually sat on the stage and tuned his guitar and played around tweaking his foot pedals. The small crowd just stood and watched him, like it was any regular guitar player and this was any regular place. When he walked off stage to get ready for the show, the crowd applauded.
Have you ever seen the Grateful Dead play in a large living room? This is sort of what it's like. I had been to Terrapin Crossroads before so I knew the size of the venue. My friend, Caren, a newbie, asked, "this is it, they're going to play right there, right in front of us?"
Needless to say, it's quite something to see a band that often plays in hockey arenas or in festival venues play in a small night club. There's, of course, the BIG sound and the musician-icons who are usually so far away and so high up on a stage surrounded by so much stuff, security, gear, friends, fans, just right there a few feet in front of you doing that thing you love for them to do, that they love doing. It's a wild combination of good fortune that somehow gets a ticket in my hand and a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge to this little haven of a music Mecca tucked away in a row of car dealerships in Marin.