Monday, Feb. 11, 1985

In California: the Dead Live On

By John Skow

An unbeliever claims that only 10,000 people in the entire world are followers--cultists, really--of the durable and idiosyncratic rock band called the Grateful Dead. What gives the band its undeserved appearance of popularity, he adds with exasperation, is that Dead Heads, as these fans call themselves in what should be apology but probably is boasting, are so zonked on Dead music that they all show up for every concert, no matter where on the planet it is played.

"I don't know," says J.R., 25, an engineering student from the University of Massachusetts. "I missed some concerts this year." He is standing in a very chilly line outside the Civic Center auditorium in San Francisco, where in something like five hours the Dead will go onstage. J.R. is making what sportswriters call a great second effort to get serious about college, he says, his first effort having been stopped for no gain by, in part, too many Dead shows. The reward he gave himself for industrious scholarship this semester was to hitchhike across the continent, with little cash and no tickets, to attend all three sold-out concerts in San Francisco. He has managed to score tickets somehow and now is a happy man.

It can be argued that there are at least 37,351 Dead Heads, because that many attended an outdoor concert at Saratoga, N.Y., last summer. But even 37,351 is a statistical flyspeck in the megahyped world of rock music. The fact is that in almost 20 years of playing, the Dead have never managed to record a song that sold enough copies to make it as a hit single. They have had fair success with albums, but their ecstatic, visionary offshoot of rock spins with improvisation, and the necessity to nail things down in a studio version tends to fossilize the band.

What the Dead have managed, however, are those 20 years of playing, with most of the same early-'60s rebels and LSD voyagers who started the group. The original keyboard and harmonica player, Ron McKernan, known as Pig Pen, died of hard living in the early '70s, and the present keyboardist, Brent Mydland, is the only relative newcomer. Otherwise the Dead are still Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman on drums, Phil Lesh on bass, Bobby Weir on rhythm guitar and, first among equals, Jerry Garcia on lead guitar.

One of the striking qualities of the Dead Heads' obsession with the band is that although it is highly personal--the fans think they can sense how Bobby and Jerry feel during any given song--it is remarkably unintrusive. The Dead Heads don't seem to know or care what bandsman is dating or divorcing whom.

One result is that the fans, knowing nothing important to the contrary, can go on assuming that the Dead live in a warm, funky, '60s time warp that has not really changed since the days when they jammed at the Acid Test roisterings of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Playing in a rock band for 20 years is probably a good way of staying in a time warp, and if the legs go first, as with boxers and third basemen, you do not pick guitar with your toes. But the stranger truth is that the Dead Heads have a '60s warp of their own. While most of the band members are now well into their 40s, not many of the Dead Heads are as old as 35, and at least half are in their teens, far too young to remember much about the era of "tune in, turn on, drop out." Yet in their pot-fuzzed peacefulness and in their costumes--tie-dyed T shirts, headbands, out-at-the-knee jeans, granny dresses--they resemble a lost battalion of hippies.

Some of the Dead Heads in San Francisco had been to nearly all 60-odd of the shows in 1984, which meant that following the Dead around the country was what they had accomplished for the year. Such wandering is considered not goofing | off but commitment. There were yuppies, who had flown out from New York and paid their fares with plastic. But the stoniest of the pilgrims followed their quest in the elderly bread vans and decommissioned school buses painted with rust primer and furnished with curtains and the kind of mattresses that are chucked under lampposts at 3 a.m. On their windows were stickers showing skulls or tap-dancing skeletons, talismanic to the Dead.

Dead Heads earn gas money to rattle from concert to concert by selling each other T shirts, and this activity took place in a small park near the auditorium. No camping was allowed, but neither the Heads nor the local police considered all-night snoozing on the park's wooden benches to be camping. (Dead Heads, who are apolitical, do not seem to enrage police as hippies did.) By the time the midday sun had warmed the bones of the park-bench bivouackers, the park had become a street fair. T shirts were on sale, decorated with tie-dyed spiral nebulas, skulls and roses (another important symbol to the Dead, who have more symbols than the Elks or the Masons). So were incense, posters, illuminated sweatpants, fly whisks for easy tropical living and magic cookies. "How magic?" the vendor was asked. "Magic enough to get you very high," she said with an encouraging smile.

The pervasive fog of drugs is the dark side of the Dead Heads' exceptional amiability. There is no thuggery here, as there can be in other rock crowds, no feeling of physical menace. Dead Heads cherish stories of Dead niceness. Kathleen from New Hampshire says that last fall at Augusta, Me., she was stopped at the door when someone sold her a counterfeit Dead ticket. She was sitting outside the hall, crying, when a stranger came up and gave her a real ticket, and a rose. But drug burnout is a problem among these nice people. Keep your ears open just before a concert and you hear an LSD vendor saying, "Trips, trips," without moving his mouth. "Yeah," says Monica from Santa Monica, Calif., a pale 20-year-old who looks 14. "My girlfriend was using acid, and she couldn't stop dancing at the end of one concert. They had to bring her down with Valium." There was another girl who was biting people.

Later, think about that later. For now, the doors opened, the kids who were first in line sprinted across the auditorium floor, which was empty of seats, like a high school gym rigged up for a dance, and staked out standing room in front of the stage. Five hours to go. Promoter Bill Graham got a volleyball * game started. In the balcony the tapers set up their equipment (the Dead, unlike other rock groups, permit amateurs to record their shows, with the understanding that tapes may be traded but not sold). People sucked at funny cigarettes and listened with cheerful toleration to the opening acts.

The Dead came on at 10:15, after half an hour of anticipatory hooting from the Dead Heads. As always, stage center was covered by two Oriental rugs, strewn with roses thrown by the crowd. Weir and Bass Player Lesh stood to the left, Garcia and Keyboardist Mydland to the right, the two drummers and a percussion rig vast enough to drive a spaceship elevated to the rear. Lights swirled, and the bandsmen swung into the saddle and began their long ride.

For four hours they played clear, strong rock, veering now and then toward folk, and once, surprisingly, toward the kind of electronic music that bright young conservatory professors are putting together with computers and tapes. To an outsider it was fine and enjoyable; to the Dead Heads it was a rare peak of brilliance. Most of the audience knew that the wife and baby of Veteran Roadie Steve Parish had been killed two days before in an auto accident, and they assumed that the performance was a special effort, a memorial. But the Dead are always private; no announcement was made. At 2:15 a.m., Garcia sang the last song, an elegiac Bob Dylan tune that ends with the words, "It's all over now, Baby Blue." An 18-year-old girl who had been in the first row told her father that "he looked straight at me, and he was crying." So were you, Honey, thinks the father, looking at her blotched, beautiful face; so am I.