So Many Roads (55 page)

Assuming their positions on stage at the Civic Arena on the second night, April 3, the Dead were a study in subtle contrasts, grown men who revealed the different ways they were handling middle age. Wearing a sweater, Lesh looked like a nicely coiffed college professor. Weir was in stylish gray slacks, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail. As always, Garcia was sporting a black T-shirt, of which he had a closet full, and his white hair was swept up over his forehead and cascaded down to his shoulders. Even though he was parked in front of his synthesizer and B3 organ, Mydland remained the most animated member of the band. At times he seemed to be heaving himself onto the keyboard with a desperate, almost manic energy, as if an electric-shock switch had been inserted under his piano bench.

The Dead rarely if ever rehearsed before packing their suitcases for the road, and some of the early shows on this spring 1989 tour reflected
that; the band sounded tentative or just average. Yet at some point along the way the beast awakened and began to roar, and Pittsburgh was one of those moments. Garcia was now standing next to Mydland (he and Lesh had switched places onstage), and the two alternated expressive solos on “Blow Away,” one of the new Barlow-Mydland collaborations. Mydland sparkled on a keyboard solo on “Greatest Story Ever Told,” the galloping Weir-Hunter song from
Ace
, and his harmonies continued to boost warhorses like “Uncle John's Band,” which ended with a dramatic, chord-crashing crescendo before leading into the Drums and Space segments. “We were real tight,” Weir opined to
Rolling Stone
in 2013. “We could hear and feel each other thinking, and we could intuit each other's moves readily. And at the same time, our vocal blend was at its peak. Jerry and Brent and I, we all individually reached new plateaus as singers. And when we were all singing together it was pretty strong. We packed a punch. For me that was our best era, the late eighties. There was a lot of electricity going on onstage besides the stuff that was plugged in.”

Garcia's voice continued to show the strains of his debilitating lifestyle of the previous decade; on “Crazy Fingers,” he sounded creaky. Flashes of his old strength came and went, and his guitar solos retained the quality of stones skipping over the water. The previous fall the Dead had broken out a new song, a loping Hunter-Garcia collaboration called “Built to Last” about healing, hope, and reconciliation that brought out the best in the band's casually bubbly Kreutzmann and Hart rhythms and Garcia's still-sweet delivery, and the song became a high point of the second night at the Civic Arena. Inside the arena Deadheads reveled in it all, roaring when Garcia stepped to the mic for “Bertha,” his first solo vocal of the night, or when the spotlight hit Lesh for one of his rare turns as lead singer, this time on a cover of Dylan's “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.”

Yet outside the arena was another, far less blissful story. By the time the Dead kicked into their first song of the night, another part of the
touring routine was in effect: the hundreds upon hundreds, sometimes thousands, of fans who'd come without tickets and opted to hang out and party in the parking lot. Depending who was asked, the number without tickets for the second night in Pittsburgh swelled to anywhere between three and ten thousand, all circling an arena that held sixteen thousand. Hearing the music emanating from inside, those who already had tickets began swarming in to the few glass doors that were open (or were cracked open by fans inside, which happened sometimes).

The police on duty panicked because there weren't enough of them to adequately corral the fans. With memories of the tragedy at the Who's 1979 concert at Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium in mind—eleven fans died of asphyxiation when the crowd rushed in—the cops called for backup, and in roared the traffic police on their motorcycles. The result was a perfect horrible storm. A small number of people, stoned or drunk and unfamiliar with the unwritten rules of a Dead show, began throwing bottles, and a handful of police decided enough was enough. One cop, later claiming a fan grabbed his arm too tightly and refused to let go, punched that fan in the face as he was being led to a police van, all of it captured on video by a local TV news crew. Other cops on duty kicked a fan in the head (allegedly for having pissed on a police motorcycle); another fan had his head slammed against a van. In the end twenty-two others were arrested on charges of drinking and drugging, and even a local TV reporter was briefly detained.

The immediate aftermath of the chaos ranged from ridiculous to infuriating. Sophie Masloff, Pittsburgh's seventy-one-year-old mayor, was well known (and sometimes beloved) for her malapropisms; Bruce Springsteen was, in her words, “Bruce Bedsprings.” When she weighed in on the Civic Arena mess she referred to the band as the “Dreadful Dead” and added, of their loyal fans, “I don't want those Deadenders ever back again.” According to local reporters, Pittsburgh bike cops at the time had a history of aggressive behavior, but they accused the city of not preparing enough for the fans. Deadheads insisted fans hadn't
attacked police, whereas others pointed to newbies who shouldn't have acted out or been there in the first place.

On the basis of videotape of one cop slugging that one fan as well as other clips of the chaos of that night, three officers were brought up on disciplinary action. The judging panel consisted of fellow officers, as per procedure, and their defense lawyer argued that the issue was “whether the force used was necessary under the circumstances. That tape was not, in and of itself, enough to show that.” Under the circumstances it was hardly a shock when the charges were dismissed. Mayor Masloff said she disagreed with the verdict—but added that she wouldn't pursue another hearing because “another trial board would have had the same results.”

In terms of the Dead's relationship with Pittsburgh, the repercussions of the fuzzy events of that night would be relatively minor. The Dead would continue to play there, albeit at Three Rivers Stadium, which held many more people. (Even though they tried to avoid uncontrollable outdoor stadium shows, they always wound up being pulled back into them.) The incident itself was seen within the organization as a fluke based on unfortunate planning. The show was the Dead's only date in the Northeast until the summer, and given the enormous number of Deadheads who still lived in the New York–Washington corridor, it was inevitable that many would converge on Pittsburgh to catch the band's only local performance of the season. With a guileless smile Weir told MTV, “If it gets really bad, then we'll go to Europe or Asia or something and play over there, wait for things to cool down.”

But they couldn't talk away the growing perception that Dead shows were a problem, even when they weren't. Managers of the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, where the Dead were scheduled to play five nights after Pittsburgh, immediately beefed up security. During a later
Philadelphia Spectrum show Scher spied cops with billy clubs; when he ran up to them and started screaming for them to put them away, he was picked up and heaved out the back door. A little over three weeks after Pittsburgh ninety-one people were arrested at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater, charged with drugs, “alleged assaults,” and other instances. (Deadheads countered by saying that drunken yuppies were to blame.) By comparison, earlier incidents—like the Houston teenager busted for LSD at a show in 1984 whose probation mandated that he couldn't attend any Dead concerts for five years—seemed frivolous.

At a June 1988 band meeting in San Rafael the Dead grappled with the influx of new fans—and what they were leaving in their own wakes. The goal was to craft a carefully worded statement warning ticket holders to tidy up and not flaunt anything even vaguely illegal in the vicinity of the show. But the band had to be careful: How to get the message across without patronizing their fan base? Now the time had come to get serious. Before the Dead's shows at Giants Stadium in July 1989, management at the venue informed the band they couldn't accommodate overnight parking (a euphemism for “camping out in the lot,” as most Deadheads knew). That practice meant the venue would have to provide local city services—medical tents, portable toilets, medical supplies—for a miniature city of the ten thousand that everyone predicted would take over the lot.

Faced with the potential of losing out on yet another profitable venue, the band decided they had to tamp down on camping and reluctantly agreed to break the news themselves to the fans. When the Dead office sent out tickets for a later show, they attached a letter, written by McNally and signed by the band: “We're going ahead with camping and vending this summer full of doubts as to whether we can continue them,” it began, adding, “we're running out of places to play. . . . Camping and vending have turned it into a largely social scene that is potentially a real and ominous threat to the future live performance of
the music itself.” The letter then announced “a limited amount of onsite camping available at each gig.” Vending booths would be limited to an area the size of a blanket.

The letter made the rounds and made a degree of impact. “They were coming without a ticket,” says Hart. “There would be more people outside than inside. And we said, ‘You're going to kill the thing you love the most—you're going to put us out of business. We can't go out there and fight cops and gate-crashers.' So we made a real appeal to them, and they responded. They actually calmed down.” But not all of them knew there was a problem. At Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, one of the Dead's cherished regular venues, over 40,000 fans showed up nightly for their July 17–19, 1989, residency. Afterward the Dead were banned for the foreseeable future.

Scher says he didn't freak out when he heard about the venues that no longer wanted them: “There were always other places to play,” he says. Still, the message had to be stronger. When the next batch of mail-order tickets went out, for fall shows in New Jersey, Miami, Charlotte, and Philadelphia, a sterner letter was stuffed inside those envelopes: “We've all seen how the camping and vending have attracted people there for a party, not for the music—if the outside scene interferes with the music inside, it's gotta go.” Then in capital letters no one could miss on the page, the anvil came down: “AND IT'S GONE; THERE WILL BE NO VENDING AND NO CAMPING ON THE TOUR.” The letter (written, again, by McNally but credited to the band) ended with: “If you're a Dead Head and believe in us and this scene, you will understand what the priorities are. Thanks for understanding.” Kidd Candelario was now charged with enforcing rules against bootleg merchandise outside the venues, and he would get injunctions to go after anyone doing so. “A lot of people were doing simple stuff from show to show, and that was okay,” he says, “but there were Jamaican gangs and fucking criminals who were bootlegging.” Ironically, with the help of the law, Candelario would have the illicit, unauthorized goods impounded.

In general, though, the band was befuddled and unsure what to do, and overcrowding became more of a discussion at their board meetings. “We're getting that same rap from nearly everywhere now,” Garcia told
Relix
's Steve Peters that fall. “There's very few places that welcome the way the shows, the way the audience and so forth, has defined itself previously.” Eliminating the problem without offending Deadheads was becoming trickier than anyone thought. During a radio interview to talk about the edict, McNally, in his role as band spokesman, received a taste of what the band was facing in laying down any sort of law. On the air he made the band's case: Deadheads weren't living in a bubble, there were consequences for their actions, and the “Shakedown Street” area was subject to the law of the land just as much as anyplace else in the country. As fond as he was of Deadheads, McNally was still stunned that they could walk around outside the venues yelling “Doses! Doses!” and not expect any repercussions. During the interview McNally finally blurted out he thought the fans were “just plain dumb” (or words to that effect) to ignore that reality.

When the interview ended, McNally didn't think much more about it. After being in the job five years and having attended Dead shows even before he worked for the band, he thought he could gauge the temperature of the crowd. But this time he was wrong. In the growing world of online chat rooms, McNally was excoriated by Deadheads, who compared him to a spokesman for a malevolent cigarette company. McNally was completely taken aback by their vitriol; like the crowds at the shows, it was another new aspect to the scene that few had witnessed before. (In fairness, the rules were new to fans, too.)

By year's end other problems would plague them. In October the body of nineteen-year-old Adam Katz was found near an overpass outside the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey after a Dead show. During an investigation it was determined that Katz was killed by a “blunt instrument,” but little else was clear: two medical examiners' reports had conflicting information about the drugs in his system (one
said he had them, another didn't), and allegations that overzealous security had played a role in the death were never proven despite a statement by a sixteen-year-old who said one of the guards told him security had smashed Katz's head against a van and “just dropped him off someplace.” At the Inglewood Forum in California in December Patrick Shanahan, a nineteen-year-old business major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, walked outside to go to a medical tent; he'd taken some LSD and wasn't feeling well. Police said Shanahan was being difficult—“yelling and rolling around,” in their words—and had to be restrained by eight cops, but in the van on the way to the police station Shanahan stopped breathing. Later it was determined he'd died of “compression of the neck during restraint,” strongly implying homicide. No criminal charges were brought against the police, but the Inglewood City council settled a lawsuit by Shanahan's family and paid them $750,000. Although the city denied any wrongdoing, some saw the money as an admission of guilt.