The Grateful Dead's first "Fare Thee Well" concert went over with rave reviews and ended on the perfect note, with a vivid rainbow appearing over Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, CA. What was an ideal situation seemed just a little too ideal for some Deadheads and conspiracy theorists, who suggested that the high price of tickets for the concert series was partially used for outlandish specials effects...such as a rainbow machine.
Of course, it didn't help that legitimate media entities were reporting that very fact. Billboard's review of the first show included testimony from an unnamed "insider," who claimed that the band had spent $50,000 on the technology necessary to create an artificial rainbow. Billboard later removed the passage, perhaps realizing that this was ridiculous, but it was too late: Thousands of fans already believed that the Dead were spending loads on weather-altering / light-bending device.
One fan managed to figure out the Twitter identity of the band's lighting director, and posed the question of how they managed to pull it off. Paul Hoffman, the director in question, responded that the techs had set up 600 varilites (small spotlights that can rotate around an axis as well as up-and-down) on a building two miles away from the stadium. He quickly clarified that he was kidding, and that the rainbow was real.
Or at least that's what he wants us to think.
This isn't the best music conspiracy theory we've heard today, but it could be worse. All we can say is, when your concert starts to incorporate elements from the introduction to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, you're probably doing something right. We'll see what the band has in store for the Chicago shows next weekend. A Jerry Garcia hologram is our first guess.
