| Title: | Take my advice, you'd be better off DEAD |
| Notice: | It's just a Box of Rain |
| Moderator: | RDVAX::LEVY ::DEBESS |
| Created: | Wed Jan 02 1991 |
| Last Modified: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 580 |
| Total number of notes: | 60238 |
Mods, move this if inappropriate..I have no permission to post these
articles...
This article appeared recently in the Washington Post:
WP 07/30 The UnGrateful Deadheads; My Long,
Strange Trip ...
The UnGrateful Deadheads; My Long, Strange Trip
Through a Tie-Dyed Hell
By Carolyn Ruff
She jumped from a window of a seedy motel on Market
Street in San
Francisco. From a room full of Deadheads she
considered to be her
family, she climbed out onto the ledge and then took
one more step
forward. No one made any attempt to stop her. I was
on the street
below and to this day remain thankful Iwas looking the
other way. I
don't even remember her name anymore. I suspect few
remember her at
all.
We met at a Grateful Dead show in North Carolina. It
was the end of
the Dead's fall tour in 1989, I had just completed my
first full tour
and she had finished what would be her last. She was
a bright,
beautiful runaway from a loveless home in Pittsburgh.
Like many of the
hundreds on the tour, she was attracted to the scene
around the
Grateful Dead as much as the band itself. In the
Deadheads, she
thought she saw family.
When we saw each other again a few months later in
Miami, I was shocked
by her mental deterioration. She rambled gravely
about how her closest
friends had stolen her clothes and her money. She
shamefully recounted
having sex with men in exchange for food and drugs.
She had lice in
her hair. She was hungry, lonely, miserable. Another
Deadhead
suggested that she medicate with acid to cleanse the
dark thoughts from
her head, and then swim in the ocean to rinse theblack
film on her
soul. This home remedy failed and a young life was
lost within months
of our meeting.
That incident occurred five years ago, but recent
headlines surrounding
the Grateful Dead have taken me back to that time and
to my own days on
tour. As the itinerant band celebrates an astonishing
30 years on
tour, it has been dogged by misfortune -- lightning
struck fans earlier
this summer at RFK Stadium in Washington, several
dozen people were
arrested outside a Dead concert in Albany and for the
first time in
three decades, a scheduled concert was canceled in
Indiana for fear of
crowd violence. None of this can be directly
attributed to the band
itself, but the incidents are nonetheless beginning to
expose a darker,
more malevolent side of the Grateful Dead milieu.
Contrary to the
image laid out by the Deadheads themselves, life on
tour these days is
far from peace, love and smiles. Capitalism, greed
and betrayal would
be more apt descriptions.
Today's Deadheads wear the tie-dyed costumes of a past
generation but
aren't propelled by the same sense of moral rebellion.
If bygone
Deadheads were protesting war and social strife,
today's seem only to
be dissenters from real-world monotony.
Unfortunately, like many of my
generation's discontents, they are cynical, savvy and
unhappy with
their lives.
In my seven years as a devoted Deadhead -- including
two spent touring
the country -- I came to take for granted that people
would steal from
a friend's backpack and rationalize their actions. I
saw friends sleep
with other friends' partners. I saw young women
sexually assaulted
after being unwittingly dosed with acid. I saw
someone give a friend's
dog acid just to watch it lose its mind. I saw people
stranded in a
strange city because their friends were impatient to
hit the road. I
saw people trash their friends' motel rooms, knowing
that they would
not be held responsible for the damage.
With no legal system within the Deadhead culture,
these injustices go
unchallenged. Thankfully, violent acts of retribution
have been few,
but who knows if it will someday come to that? The
common reaction
when this sort of incident occurs is to get a bit
meaner, shrewder and
make a plan to do it back to someone else.
Eventually, I came to
dislike the music of the Dead because of the
association I made between
the band and its followers.
It would be unfair to imply that all of those on tour
engage in such
loathsome behavior. There are many who revel in the
shows and
demonstrate respect not just for their fellow
Tourheads but for the
cities they visit. Their sole desire is to immerse
themselves in the
music and peacefully co-exist with others who feel the
same. But the
dominant culture is not so sanguine.
In an attempt to escape the society they so disdain,
the Deadheads have
created a world underpinned by the same materialism
and greed. Whether
it be overpricing their wares or selling crack and
ecstasy, the looming
specter of capitalism rules supreme, and it is every
bit as ruthless as
that of the American mainstream.
Newcomers naive enough to think otherwise quickly have
their
misconceptions dispelled. I met quite a few 14- and
15-year-old kids
who came to tour without a penny and thought they
could turn to other
Deadheads for support. Somehow, they thought money
didn't hold the
same relevance that it does elsewhere. But unless
you're a Trust fund
Deadhead, sustained by the family fortune, everyone
needs a scheme.
Selling veggie sandwiches is one option, as is hawking
jewelry or
clothing. To make these businesses go, some Deadheads
trek to Central
America between tours to buy the Guatemalan jewelry
and garb so popular
among Dead followers. Others make their own products
to sell. And
with a steady flow of suburban kids who have the cash
to spend on a $5
tofu burger and a $20 T- shirt, these entrepreneurs
have an ideal
location at Dead shows.
But these business ventures take a level of initiative
and planning
beyond what most Tourheads are willing to expend.
More typically,
people make just enough money to cover food, lodging,
their concert
ticket and enough gas to get to the next city. If you
are not good at
selling or at least scamming, you will not make it on
tour. Many
Deadheads, while professing distrust and disdain for
the government,
make it by accepting food stamps and other public
hand-outs. A walk
down the streets of Berkeley or San Francisco, a
popular hub of
between-tour activity, is evidence enough that many
Tourheads are also
adept at panhandling, although this is not a
profitable choice for
survival.
The drug trade is also an easy and rather lucrative
route to
sustenance. With perseverance, one can usually find
suppliers of acid,
mushrooms or ecstasy to resell, and the rising
popularity of crack and
heroin on tour is opening up new markets. There is
the nuisance of
undercover agents from the Drug Enforcement
Administration, to say
nothing of fellow Deadhead narcs, but this can add an
element of
excitement to a new career -- which for today's
Deadheads is a tonic in
itself.
My initiation to the Grateful Dead came in 1986 and
coincided with the
band's resurgence back then. I was in college and had
been more
interested in the Clash and Flipper than wearing bells
on my shoes and
tie-dyeing every white shirt I owned. But after going
to a few shows I
grew enchanted, with the band and with the hordes of
colorfully attired
people who seemed like happy children at recess. I
worked every
conceivable retail job to finance my indulgence,
choosing positions
where there was little commitment. With the money I
had saved and the
cushion of a few credit cards, I was able to traverse
the country with
relative financial security. It also helped that I
had family that,
though preferring I settle down and get a job, made
clear that I could
rely on them if things got desperate.
It might have been different had I joined the tour
earlier. One
retired Tourhead who requests anonymity for fear of
losing a
respectable job says the late 1980s ushered in a more
amoral
environment. "The demise of the Dead scene began in
1987 when going to
shows became like going to some sort of pop scene,"
says this
ex-Deadhead who himself was eventually scared away by
the violence. He
blames alcohol abuse for what he sees as an increased
incidence of
fighting, show-crashing and other disruptive behavior.
Today's version of tour is a mockery of what the
original Dead
followers created. There is an attempt to form family
units, but too
often they aren't bound together by loyalty and trust.
The members
travel together, bunk together and, theoretically,
provide the love and
support that one might bestow on a relative. And, to
a degree, there
is a sense of sharing: In spurts of generosity, one
person or a few
will support the others by buying the gas or paying
for the motel
room. But typically this generosity is born of
necessity -- everybody
else is broke.
Rarely do the relationships that develop transcend
each person's own
selfishness. Usually, the break occurs over money --
someone feels
they've been cut out of a drug deal, or grows tired of
supporting a
parasitic family member.
To survive on tour, it helps to have emotions encased
in steel.
Courtesy is not mandatory and verbal assaults, rude
comments and sexist
remarks are common in the course of a motel room
conversation. People
refer to each other freely as "sister" or "brother"
but there was
rarely the accompanying intimacy. Practically
everyone goes by a
nickname -- Woodstock, Scooter, Zeus, Rainbow, Jinx.
Often, I never
knew people's real first names, and rarely did I know
their last.
There was a degree of secrecy which supposedly stemmed
from a paranoia
of the law, but sometimes I wondered whether going by
a fake name among
friends was just a way of preventing anyone from
getting too close.
So what's the beauty of it all? The question for many
on tour is
probably: What's the alternative?
"There is this core group of Tourheads who have
dropped out of society
and their only alternative is to follow the Dead,"
says Jill, another
former Deadhead. These people live for tour to resume
each season, but
quickly grow disgusted. They boast of making enough
money from the
present tour to buy that land in Oregon and settle
down. But more
typically their money is blown on lavish hotel rooms,
expensive meals,
beer and drugs. Strung out and broke, they're left
scrambling for
someone to support them until tour begins again.
And so a cycle evolves: Many may want to try a new
life but have become
ensnared in the tour culture. Financially, they know
no other way to
make money other than selling wares on tour.
Socially, whether they
truly like them or not,the people on tour are the only
friends they
have. Alienated and fearful of whatthe real world is
about, they
settle into what they know best: The Dead. Every time
there is a scare
that the Dead may stop touring, I find myself worrying
about the lost
souls who know nothing else but the parallel world of
the Grateful
Dead. Many are talented and have skills adaptable to
the mainstream.
It's those who use the Dead simply as an escape who
will have
difficulty adjusting to life without tour. Sadly, I
cannot picture
their future. They will surely endure the loss of the
Dead's live
performances, but can they handle the end of tour?
That possibility
seems ever more real with the current malaise
surrounding the band. As
the amount of violence and police confrontation has
grown, so have
concerns about how to curtail it. A group calling
itself Save Our
Scene has formed in an attempt to quash disruptive
behavior. And
through newsletters and the Internet, band members
have practically
begged their fans to clean up their act. If they
don't, the Dead will
stop touring, or so they threaten.
In an open letter passed out to Deadheads at a recent
St. Louis show
and later posted on the Internet, the Dead told fans
that "over the
past 30 years we've come up with the fewest possible
rules to make the
difficult act of bringing tons of people together work
well -- and a
few thousand so-called Dead Heads ignore these simple
rules and screw
it up for you, us and everybody."
Arguably, it is not the Tourheads who are responsible
for the bad
behavior, but local kids who view the parking lot at a
Dead show as an
invitation to party with complete abandon. Tourheads
can blame the
less devoted concert-goers, but it is these
"outsiders" who buy the
goods that sustain the Tourheads lifestyle. And it is
the Tourheads
who have created the atmosphere that is so appealing
to revelers in the
first place. The Dead went on to say, "If you don't
have a ticket,
don't come. This is real. This is a music concert,
not a free-for-all
party."
To me, the issue of blame isn't really relevant. The
real question
is: How long did anyone think the party could last?
--
Carolyn Ruff, a Washington Post news aide, attended
close to 100
concerts in her seven years following the Grateful
Dead.
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 470.1 | positive article | CXDOCS::BARNES | Fri Aug 04 1995 12:43 | 395 | |
from Steve Silberman:
The following contains my reply to the Washington Post.
It is a reworked version of the essay that went out on
AlterNet last week.
Many of the grafs are familiar, but some are new and
specifically
responding to Carolyn Ruff's piece.
I hope they find room for it. Enjoy!
The Dead: 30 Years on the Road
by Steve Silberman
The Grateful Dead are on the road for their 30th
year, but that
isn't news. It's no glitzy, grab-the-bucks, "hell
freezes over" reunion
tour enshrined with a battery of MTV and VH-1
appearances, a
quick turn on Letterman, and the cover of _Interview_.
It's a couple
of dozen cities and 70 shows or so, load in, make the
people happy,
and load out: business as usual.
When the Dead have made headlines this summer,
it's the
tragic lightning-strikes and gate-crashing fans,
nitrous-oxide
purveyors and parking-lot predators which have been cast
in the
starring roles, rather than the music. The fact that
the Dead have
kept up a fertile conversation in song for three decades
- in their
quintessentially American synthesis of jazz
improvisation, folk
balladry, avant-garde soundscapes, transcultural
rhythmatism, and
good ol' time rock-and-roll redemption - takes the back
seat to the
collapsing balconies, the overdoses and
seemingly-damning acts of
God.
Though the only accomplishment of comparable
longevity in
exploratory American musicmaking is, say, the Duke
Ellington
Orchestra - which suffered more changes of principal
players than
the Dead have - that's barely acknowledged, even by the
Dead themselves.
It's just Jerry Garcia up there under the lights again,
spinning out
another solo that lands nowhere you expect it to,
singing in his
broken angel's voice about trains, card games, and
careless love.
Garcia once quipped that the Dead, like old
whores and
architecture, simply stuck around long enough to become
respectable. They did more than that. They managed to
become
the most financially successful touring rock and roll
band in history
without caving into industry homogenization or
type-casting as a
"'60s band," and without distilling the dissonant and
unpredictable
edge out of their music. Though the band's repertoire
has become more predictable with the years, at nearly
every show there's still one moment of pure discovery, a
jam that
goes somewhere it's never been before (and never will be
again), an
emotional peak which seems to boil up out of some
primordial
storehouse.
I've been going to Dead shows, off and on, for
all of my adult
life. Going to see "the Boys" (as Deadheads
affectionately refer to
the bandmembers) in 1995 for me is like going back to
the family house,
though families don't live in houses for that long
anymore. I look around
me in the big halls, and glimpse faces I grew up with,
kids when I was a
kid who now bring their own sons and daughters to shows,
to dance
with them. I also see the Deadheads who are young now,
who must
feel like they're hitching a ride on the caboose of a
great American
locomotive that's been steaming down the silver track
forever, since
long before they were born. For them, the Dead must
seem part of
the natural world, like El Capitan or the Grand Canyon,
inevitable
and immortal.
The Dead, however, and the extended family of
Deadheads,
are more like a fantastically intricate snowflake which
has been
sufficiently tenacious enough to drift over a glowing
radiator for
three decades without melting.
At least part of the heat now being brought to
bear on the
Deadhead community is emanating from within, from the
behavior
of certain groups of people who go to shows. I won't
say "fans,"
because someone who trashes a room at the Motel 6,
bulldozes an
arena fence, and spends the duration of the concert in
the parking lot
hawking beer or nitrous is not there to enjoy the music,
and
obviously doesn't care if the Dead and Deadheads will be
welcomed
back to the venue the following summer.
I'm no stranger to the sleazy entrepreneurs and
patchouli-
doused petty larcenists who have attached themselves
like
suckerfish to the Deadhead touring community, vividly
portrayed in
Carolyn Ruff's article in last Sunday's _Post_, "The
UnGrateful
Deadheads: My Long, Strange Trip Through a Tie-Dyed
Hell." On
the other hand, Ruff's story does not tell the whole
story, or even a
large part of it. A longtime fan I know read Ruff's
piece and
objected, "It's like a microscopic picture of a tumor,
not a portrait of
the whole patient." I agreed, but pointed out that such
a cross-
section might be useful in a diagnosis. Even die-hard
Deadheads
have been forced by the first-ever cancellation, due to
fan misbehavior,
of one of the Dead's shows in June, to wonder if some
cancer
hasn't taken hold in this collective body which has been
home to so many for so long.
"Life on tour these days is far from peace, love
and smiles,"
Ruff declares. "Capitalism, greed and betrayal would be
more apt
descriptions," she continues, citing the scams which
give a small
subgroup of tour-followers the means to stay on the
road: rip-offs,
double-crosses, injustices with no recourse in a
community
which prides itself on living outside certain laws.
Part of the appeal of the Dead scene for kids
who came of age
up in "Just Say No" America is that Deadheads say yes to
many
things damned by the status quo. In the '80s, when
youth culture
traded its gadfly outsiderhood for the MTV quick-cut
hard sell of
brand-name looks, haircuts, and attitudes, Deadhead
society prized
that which was handcrafted and individually expressive.
Mass-
market ersatz tie-dyes were eschewed for hand-dipped
one-of-a-
kinds. Trademarked icons - like the distinctive
skull-and-roses
image that San Francisco poster artists Kelley and Mouse
adapted
from a 19th century illustration for _The Rubaiyat of
Omar
Khayyam_ - became elements in an original folk-art
vocabulary,
hand-stitched into dresses and denim jackets and
silkscreened on t-
shirts, to be sold at prices well below those at the
local
mall. In the parking lots outside of shows, impassioned
circles of
drummers locking into their own deep groove attracted
more
dancers than tapes of the band.
"To live outside the law," cautioned Bob Dylan,
"you must be
honest." Heads put a premium on that kind of salty
honesty that
leaves no room for pretense, or for the self-serving
duplicity which
metastasized throughout the American body politic in the
very
decades that Dead crowds swelled from an intimate fan
base to a
stadium-filling phenomenon, attracting notice from the
likes of
_Fortune_ magazine.
This find-your-own-way attitude carried into
areas of
personal conduct. For thousands of years, people have
used
psychedelics like peyote and psilocybin mushrooms,
usually in the
context of music and rituals passed down by tribal
elders, to attain
sacred states, and gain essential insights into the
meaning of being
human. It is in this traditional spirit that many
Deadheads use
these outlawed substances - so that some Heads refuse to
call them
drugs, preferring, in the manner of the Native American
Church, to
call them sacraments.
The incidents cited by Ruff, of Heads being
"dosed" against
their will by fellow Heads or similarly abused, are not
only contrary
to the law of the land, they transgress Deadhead
extended-family
values. In a culture which values the sanctity of one's
own mind
above obeying local drug laws, committing someone to a
psychedelic
experience against their will is obviously a violation
of the Deadhead
prime directive. The people who Ruff cites as exemplary
"Tourheads" - raping, feeding drugs to animals,
abandoning their
touring partners - would very quickly find themselves
outcasts from
Deadhead society, which survives, and protects its own,
by
maintaining an intimate word-of-mouth network,that now
extends
into cyberspace.
The phrase "misfit power" is heard often around
the Dead
scene, a tribute to the fact that the Dead have kept
their collective
gaze set firmly on what was essential for their own
growth as
musicians - maintaining the acuity of listening,
remaining open to
the next whim of the Muse,and technically proficient
enough to do
Her justice - without regard to industry fashion.
Additionally, since
"Deadhead" is an honorific title one bestows on oneself,
the Dead
scene is singularly inclusive. In researching our book
on Deadhead
culture, my co-author and I interviewed Republican
Deadheads, tie-
dyed lesbian Deadheads, sober "Wharf Rats," lawyers who
sport J.Garcia ties in the dock, Deadheads of color,
"trustafarian"
Heads on the family dole, Deadhead sociologists,
Deadheads-for-
Jesus, surgeons who unwind after an operation by
spinning tapes,
orthodox Jewish Deadheads - and the aides to one
Deadhead who
happens to be married to the Vice President of the
United States.
Before the paving of the information
superhighway, the Dead
community gave kids accustomed to suburban anomie a
place
where they could link up with something larger than
themselves: a
training ground in generosity for the offspring of the
Me Decade, a
road scholarship for learning to trust the instructive
flow in the
events of daily life. And now, nearly a hundred
thousand
"NetHeads" have translated the open-minded bonhomie and
care for
the commonwealth they were schooled in on Dead tour into
good
citizenship on the Internet; the kind of citizenship
which doesn't
require censorship to stand in for good sense and humane
concern.
For thirty years, the Dead scene has been a most
miraculous
beast: an anarchic society on wheels, an ongoing
experiment in
practicing "random kindness and senseless acts of
beauty," as one
bumpersticker says. Though tickets are harder to get,
the venues
are more cavernous, and the DEA has discovered that it's
easier to
slam Little Ivy sophomores bartering 'shrooms into the
state pen
than face down crack dealers, one thing that there has
never been a
shortage of on the Dead scene is joy.
As the world beyond the Tie-Dyed Barrier becomes
increasingly conservative and belligerent, however, Dead
tour more
and more resembles a life raft in choppy, shark-filled
seas. For a
group that defines itself as misfits and outsiders - yet
welcomes
anyone who clambers onboard - questions of
self-discipline and
guidance from within loom large. One casualty of the
mid-'80s
Deadhead growth-spurt was a natural enculturation
process, of
older Heads taking younger Heads under their wing, and
demonstrating by example what sorts of conduct have
helped keep
the community self-sustaining.
To address these issues, a group of concerned
Deadheads has
founded a task force called Save Our Scene, which will
work with
Heads, venue staffs, and the media to ensure that Dead
shows
continue to be a boon not only to Deadheads, but to the
local
communities along tour routes. More than "an attempt to
quash
disruptive behavior," as Ruff put it, SOS aims to
reassert the
primary values of the Dead community. As Deadheads are
allergic
to dogma, one of the first tasks SOS faces is to
formulate what
those values are, in the absence of any authority more
central than
the hearts and minds of those involved. The savvy of
professional
Deadheads who "got lives" beyond Dead tour years ago,
and have
learned how to be, as Walt Whitman put it, "both in and
out of the
game" of mainstream life, should prove of utmost
practical usefulness
to this noble effort.
I feel sad that the 30th year of the Dead's
creative vigor is
being celebrated with ominous news reports, but the Dead
have
always been committed enough to their own creative
vision not to
be distracted by excessive praise or blame. Jerry
Garcia never claimed
to be captain of anybody's trip but his own, for better
and worse.
At Dead concerts, during those breakthrough
moments in the
music when a vitality beyond words momentarily banishes
the woes
of the world, the teenage "newbies" and grizzled older
folks who
have been "on the bus" for light-years, turn to one
another in a
shared moment of recognition. And through it all, the
collective body
dances, poised on the brink of a mystery.
The headlines will fade away. The music,
transcendent
memories, and workable models of community developed
over
three decades will not, because they are woven in our
bones.
Happy Anniversary, Boys.
Steve Silberman is the co-author of _Skeleton Key: A
Dictionary
for Deadheads_ (Doubleday '94).
His email address is digaman@well.com.
(415) 681-3401
109 Alma Street
S.F., CA 94117
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| 470.2 | DELNI::DSMITH | We've got mountains to climb | Fri Aug 04 1995 14:11 | 12 | |
Sounds like the author of the first article was into the "scene" a
little too much. Perhaps she ought to consider a career path in
socialology instead of journalism.
She neglects to mention anything about those raging, stellar,
performances that leave you on your hands and knees. The kind that
when you exit the show it's hard to speak anything but "aahh duhhh".
The ones that entice you to be on tour and make it all worthit.
She needs a show! ;-)
I like the second clip much better.
| |||||
| 470.3 | get a clue | CSLALL::LEBLANC_C | In n' out of the Gaahden they go! | Fri Aug 04 1995 14:36 | 3 |
YEAH!
us undercover_DEA_narc_deadheads are a respectable bunch
:^)
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