A Long Strange Trip (77 page)

What neither these four nor the band could do was cope with the ticketless, since checking for tickets of the people in cars entering parking lots only backed up traffic more. Late in June the Dead created gridlock in a good chunk of southern Wisconsin. Dylan had played the Alpine Valley facility on Saturday night, and the promoter was unable to clear the lots by Sunday. The Dead played Monday and Tuesday, with forty thousand inside and at least twenty thousand in the parking lots, which de facto extended for about five miles in each direction. There was no violence, just lots of trash smelling awful in the 105-degree heat. The summer passed with no great disasters, and while it was true that crowd control issues were primarily management’s problem, everyone in the band and crew felt a certain tension at the possibilities. As a Tacoma police sergeant said, “I wouldn’t say we’ve got a tolerance policy. We have just totally lost control. And don’t quote me saying, ‘It was a zoo out there.’ We’re doing just enough to maintain safety and propriety.”

The tour brought new songs, and they weren’t altogether warmly received. Weir’s new tune, “Victim or the Crime,” included lyrics by a friend, actor Gerrit Graham. If he and Barlow had not had a parting of the ways before this song, they certainly would after Barlow, upset by his desertion by Weir, went on the radio to urge Dead Heads to write Weir their objections to the song, so infuriating Bob that he put his fist through a nearby wall. The song was complicated, morally grim—the opening line is “Patience runs out on the junkie / the dark side hires another soul”— and hard to dance to. In Garcia’s opinion, “Well, it’s a hideous song. It’s very angular and unattractive sounding. It’s not an accessible song. It doesn’t make itself easy to like. It just doesn’t sound good, or rather, it sounds strange. And it
is
strange. It has strange steps in it, but that’s part of what makes it interesting to play.” Weir, of course, reveled in the opposition. By contrast, Garcia’s first new tune, “Foolish Heart,” had a snappy hook and was an obvious single. Barlow turned to working with Brent, and their “Blow Away” was a good, if typically tormented, discourse on the end of a romance. “Gentlemen, Start Your Engines” explored the state of mind in which a normal drinker slurs and calls it quits, but an alcoholic—both Brent and Barlow qualified—thinks, “Gentlemen . . .” It was performed a few times but never fully recorded.

The Dead’s single most important response to their hit was to do something they’d never done before—put their name behind a cause. They’d been happy to do endless benefits, happier still to fill the Rex moneypot, but that fall of 1988 they threw a concert to raise money for the preservation of earth’s rain forest. The last night of their nine-show Madison Square Garden run, the event required their personal involvement and commitment. “We don’t want to be the leaders,” said Garcia, “and we don’t want to serve unconscious fascism. Power is a scary thing . . . But this is, we feel, an issue strong enough and life-threatening enough that inside the world of human games, where people regularly torture each other and overthrow countries and there’s a lot of murder and hate, there’s the larger question of global survival. We want to see the world survive to play those games, even if they’re atrocious.” Before they were done, Garcia, Weir, and Hart would appear at the United Nations for a press conference, do every interview they possibly could, and even endure intra-recipient (there were four beneficiaries) bickering and jousting for status as they went along. After a long tour that had ended with the benefit concert, Garcia and Weir dutifully marched off to an after-show reception for the high-end donors and signed autograph after autograph, a harder thing for them to do than writing a check. The next year, they would even visit with politicians, as the three of them addressed the Human Rights Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives on saving the rain forest. When a congresswoman sniped that Dead Heads didn’t vote, Garcia replied, “It would be nice to think there was something to vote for, you know what I mean? I know this. I know that Dead Heads will chain themselves to a tree.”

Despite their success and good works, the Dead were in no danger of being seen as saints or prey to anything resembling conventional behavior. Dead Heads were thrilled to learn that, at the request of a dying young man, the band had played an electric version of “Ripple” for the first time in eighteen years at a show that fall. What they did not know was that the request had come to Weir, who then told Garcia, “I’ll bet you ten bucks you can’t remember the lyrics.” Garcia took and won the bet—and Weir still welshed on it. As part of the rain forest campaign, they had posed for Francesco Scavullo at
Harper’s Bazaar,
getting in return the free use of the picture after it was published. When that time came, even though it was a wonderful picture of all of them, Garcia had decided he was fat, and the picture was never used. The year ended with Dead Heads in an uproar over the use of “Eep Hour,” a piece of music from Garcia’s first solo album, on a television advertisement for Cher’s Uninhibited perfume. Drawing an often-overlooked distinction between his own and the Grateful Dead’s music, Garcia snorted, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. I can sell anything, even my ass, if I want.”

Nineteen eighty-nine kicked off in February at the Kaiser Center in Oakland. The band had been busy in the off time, and the new songs were worthy. Garcia and Hunter had produced “Standing on the Moon,” a marvelous image of looking down on earth’s strife—“I hear the cries of children / And the other songs of war.” “We Can Run” was a righteous if bald environmental proclamation by Mydland and Barlow, and it found a suitable niche when the Audubon Society made it the sound track to a series of natural images as part of a public service announcement. And Weir brought out his last song with Barlow, “Picasso Moon,” a more musically angular take on the “Hell in a Bucket” subject matter of loose women, replete with a peculiar (and unpopular) chorus: “Bigger than a drive-in movie, oooo-eeee.” The last new song, Mydland-Barlow’s “Just a Little Light,” was yet another complaint about women, although beautifully done.

Then they went on the road and the troubles began. Before the band had even left San Francisco, neighborhood pressure around Kaiser had forced the cancellation of three gigs scheduled for March. The tour began in the South, and at first things went well. Every day, Brent would come to the venue early to work with Bralove on the music-box sounds for his lullaby, “I Will Take You Home.” But the tour had one stop scheduled in the Northeast, in Pittsburgh, and despite repeated warnings to the facility, the police were caught unawares. Thousands without tickets flocked in, and some tried to gate-crash the many glass doors. After the usual scrum, which included twenty-three arrests, eighteen for public intoxication and five for drugs, the evening was over. But TV had caught the melee, and the film ran everywhere. The cameras also caught a cop punching a Dead Head whose arms were restrained by two other cops. The officer was arrested, although the charges were later dropped. The local newspapers defended the Dead and criticized the police and Mayor Sophie Masloff, but the image of a violent audience was established. By now, the simple presence of the Dead in town was a major story, and as such, they made a convenient political football. In Irvine, California, that spring, a candidate for reelection to the local city council, Cameron Cosgrove, described the scene outside the show as a “potential riot.” Though both police and press dismissed him, and he failed to be reelected, his phrase circulated widely.

The early summer began with another special effort by the band to support a benefit, this time a major Bay Area fund-raiser for AIDS research. Before leaving on the summer tour, they experimented with a pay-per-view concert from Shoreline Amphitheater, a new facility in Mountain View, only a mile or two from their Palo Alto origins, hoping that it might do well enough to make it possible to cut back on touring. It didn’t do that well, but viewers were rewarded with an opening in which Weir, frustrated with his amp, hauled off and gave it a healthy kick.

The greatest change wrought by playing stadiums was in the realm of Candace Brightman, who had to make them work visually. Until late in the 1980s, the lights had been minimal and her budgets small, but now she began to push the envelope. Garcia once remarked of her proposed budget in a band meeting, “Give it to her. God knows why they [the Dead Heads] keep coming to see us. Maybe it’s her lights.” He paid attention to her work. Once in the middle of a discussion with Candace, Garcia whipped out paper and pen and sketched her light setup in an effort to understand what she was saying. She was intrigued to notice that the sketch was from her and the audience’s perspective, not his own, and was an extremely well rendered drawing. “My feeling,” she said, “was that it was the band we wanted to see . . . one of the things I like to do is turn off all the lights at a high point in the music, which is really idiotic, but I still approve of it—you only want to hear the music, and in the darkness your sight doesn’t get in the way of your listening . . . In general, don’t make a statement; let the band carry the show.” Under her supervision, a Polish artist named Jan Sawka made the band’s first elaborate stage set, a journey from sunrise to sunset with the following moon.

Video reinforcement directed by Len Dell’Amico accompanied each stadium show, and the tour marched down the East Coast like the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla, from Boston to Buffalo to Philadelphia, where they closed the rotting old JFK Stadium, and then Giants Stadium in New Jersey. There was, briefly, trouble in Washington, where another local politician, Nadine Winter, decided to use the Dead in her feud with the mayor, Marion Barry. When the Dead’s management and the local promoter were done with their political ploys, she was buying tie-dye T-shirts in the parking lot for a photo op on the day of the show. The gorilla kept stomping, but it was starting to run out of places to stomp. One of the band’s favorite venues was Berkeley’s Greek Theater, and that summer would mark the Dead’s final series there. The environment—the town, the campus—simply couldn’t absorb the numbers of ticketless Dead Heads the shows attracted. The last show at the Greek was a Rex benefit, with recipients including Earth First, the Environmental Defense Fund, Heart of America Bone Marrow Donor Registry, New Alchemy Institute, the Oceanic Society, St. Anthony’s Dining Room, the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

The rest of the summer and early fall were spent working on the new album,
Built to Last.
Garcia and Cutler produced again, but that was the only resemblance to the methods that had produced
In the Dark.
Instead, in good Dead fashion, they went to the extreme alternative. The songwriters—Garcia, Weir, and Mydland—would each lay down basic tracks, and then the other musicians would work separately on their own parts, using what are called slave reels. It was true that, with Garcia producing, Mickey Hart recorded three hundred sound effects, including the sound of a crushed lightbulb and that of a vacuum cleaner, at his home, “Studio X,” of which Garcia would use two notes in the final mix. The musicians almost never spent any time in the studio together, and the songs, in general, had little opportunity to grow onstage. Once again, they had accepted a deadline. They were doing their best to meet Arista’s schedule, which had settled on a Halloween release. As Weir put it, “We create a deadline somewhere in the impossible, hazy future but it’s a real firm deadline. And then we just ignore it.” He laughed. “When the real world’s gonna-end deadline comes, we keep ignoring it until panic sufficiently motivates us to get to work. Then we make most of our records in about a month and a half. The last two weeks are particularly hellish.” The prevailing theory held that without a deadline, they’d never record anyway.

Fall 1989: Desperate to avoid being “cops,” the band found itself dragged into exercising authority anyway. “Overnight parking” (i.e., camping) and vending attracted the ticketless, who absorbed parking spaces and generally made concert logistics come unglued. Getting rid of camping was easy; security simply cleared the parking lots. Dealing with vending was not so easy. The band sent out a message, which read in part, “The music and the dance is important; being able to buy a T-shirt or camp out are not. If you’re a Dead Head and believe in us and this scene, you will understand what the priorities are.” Of course, Dead Heads are Americans, which means that they feel entitled to whatever it is they want. Many of the vendors dismissed the effort as a ploy for the band to sell more T-shirts. Me? I’m good vibes. The band doesn’t mean me! The band also tried another technique to cut down the scene outside, selling tickets to two shows in Hampton, Virginia, under the name “Formerly the Warlocks,” and putting them on sale only a week before the concert dates. The plan was a success, and it took three days to sell out. This meant the tickets went to local people, which cut down on travelers. Then the band sabotaged itself perfectly, playing a brilliant set that included such old treasures as “Dark Star,” “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” and “Attics of My Life,” thus ensuring that no Dead Head would ever miss a “Warlocks” show again.

Hampton was not their only superior performance that fall. Even so demanding a critic as the
New York Times
’s Jon Pareles applauded their work at the Meadowlands. “But what the concert lacked in psychedelic explorations, it made up for with focused, resonant performances of songs with the Dead’s own amalgam of tall-tale Americana, fatalism and benevolence. And while the Dead did not take many risks tonight, it made well-constructed songs ring with conviction.” The shows were remarkably good, considering that the Dead were sharing their hotel with the Rolling Stones, who were playing at Shea Stadium on their “Steel Wheels” tour, and Weir and Ron Wood enjoyed each other’s company.

The run of good vibes was not destined to last. Around 10 P.M. on October 14 at the Meadowlands, a ticketless Dead Head gave up trying to get into the show and went home. On his way to his car, he discovered the body of Adam Katz lying in the road. Adam’s death from trauma was destined to remain a troubling mystery. Many assumed that this slight, 115-pound boy was unintentionally killed by one of the arena security guards in a scuffle and then dropped in the road. It was certainly true that many of the guards were goons. But despite a considerable reward and severe police pressure, no guard—they worked in pairs—had any information. Katz’s parents later filed suit claiming a cover-up, but in truth, the local prosecutor saw much potential political gain from solving the case and acted accordingly, and neither he nor the police had any affection for the guards. There were no clear answers. Dead Heads rightly complained about the abusive attitudes of Meadowlands security, and many implicitly came to blame the band and its management for the death.