The Grateful Dead’s Bill Kreutzmann and Jerry Garcia’s on Ticket Scalping

Kreutzmann: I hate that scalping thing. It's one of my pet peeves. It's legal robbery. There should be a law against it. I'm not going to mention names, but the bigwigs in the business, the promoters—whatever you want to call them—one of them now owns a ticket company, and they were going to try to take a whole lot of tickets and scalp them, and we got them to stop that. It's asking our fans to pay too much money for something that really should almost be free. Garcia always said, “Music is so good for you, it should be free.” That's a famous Jerry quote. It's a sore subject with me. Our ticket prices are 80 bucks, and that seems like a fortune to me. I mean, in today's market, “Am I buying food for my family or gas? Am I taking my kids to school, or am I buying outrageously expensive tickets?” It doesn't make much sense to me.

Crawdaddy!: What did the band do to curb that?

Kreutzmann: They were going to scalp a very high number of tickets, and we cut it way, way down. The whole idea is that you're taking money from people that you shouldn't be taking money from. You want to give them something. It's simple. We got ’em to bring back a whole lot of the tickets. Way more than half. So we did a pretty good job with them.

Crawdaddy Magazine, May 22, 2009