Forbes Focuses on Grateful Dead and Their $20 Million

Rock ‘n’ roll may never die, but it sure isn’t what it used to be. Most of its old anti-Establishmentarian edge has long disappeared. Still, it’s a shock to see a photo of the Grateful Dead in Forbes, where the former countercultural outlaws are praised for their business acumen.

The Grateful Dead’s financial success story is attached to Forbes’ report on how compact discs have injected the otherwise flat record industry with higher profits (record companies clear almost $4 on each $13 CD, which costs about $3 to make; 53 million were sold in 1986).

The Dead look like the aging hippies they are, and critics generally have written them off as dinosaurs. They haven’t released a record in seven years, but the band--22 years and 1,600 concerts after its birth--grossed more than $20 million in concert revenues in the last two years, due to hard work, rabidly loyal fans and modern business methods.

They’ve got a “Dead hot line” that handles as many as 6,000 calls per day. They employ a staff of 35, have a computerized mailing list of 150,000 fans and a line of merchandising that includes a $20 golf shirt. They’ve even had to call in the FBI to investigate the mass counterfeiting of its concert tickets.

By the way, an early photo of the Dead and quotes from guitarist Bob Weir about the dawn of the mid-’60s San Francisco rock scene appear in Rolling Stone’s great spread on the Top 20 live concerts that changed rock ‘n’ roll. The special issue begins with Cream’s final fling at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1968, ends with Prince’s steamy ‘82-’83 tour and includes Elton John’s historic and wild opening-night show at the Troubadour in 1970.

The Fighting Critics

Balding Gene Siskel and bulging Roger Ebert may seem like they really dislike everything about each other. But in her amusing twin profiling of the pioneering TV movie critics in Chicago magazine, Toni Schlesinger suspects that behind their carefully concocted squabbling media image there “could be more love than hate.”

As part of her effort to prove that their public “ferociousness may now be a finely tuned act,” she cleverly sprung a surprise quiz on the rich and famous and powerful duo. Ostensibly, she was testing their motor skills, drawing ability and general knowledge. Actually, she was hoping to observe how they behaved toward each other when their guards were down.

At one point, both were asked to recite their top 10 movies of all time as fast as they could into a tape recorder. Siskel ended up on his knees screaming, “ ‘City Lights,’ ‘Notorious’ . . ,” but Ebert did it faster merely by moving his lips, and, Schlesinger says, “Siskel hated him again.”

The two equally “driven, controlling, critical child prodigies who have to be the smartest and the best” both scored pretty miserably. But, just as Schlesinger had presumed, “the quiz brought the fighting whiz kids together.” They eventually put aside their intense competition and ganged up on Schlesinger, trying to discredit the test and intimidate her. “If they were ever separated,” she deduces from this and other evidence of their genuine concern for each other, “how terrible it would be. They might become despondent and forlorn. Life might lose its meaning.”

Hart-Broken Coverage

Gary Hart’s swift fall landed him on the covers of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, in whose inside pages he found little sympathy. It also put Donna Rice’s figure on display in assorted swimwear and lingerie in Time, Newsweek and People, but not U.S. News.

The score card: Newsweek, 11 flashy pages plus Meg Greenfield’s firm back-page piece that said the issue was not Hart’s judgment but his personal values; Time, 10 pages plus Lance Morrow’s back-page essay that mulled the question of Hart’s seeming self-destructiveness; U.S. News, 8 pages, including Michael Kramer’s proffering of a political epitaph for the former front-runner who “wasn’t a victim of character assassination but of political suicide”: “Gary Hart--Fool.”

Hugh Sidey of Time took a historical tack, filling a whole sidebar with examples of sexual fooling around by in-office presidents F.D.R., J.F.K. and L.B.J. Suzannah Lessard in Newsweek insisted that the real issue is “the question of womanizing.” The strong reaction to Hart’s activities, she says, shows that a “feminist sensibility has seeped into the public consciousness sufficiently to make philandering appear to be at best unattractive, maybe unacceptable and possibly alarming when the candidate’s emotions and psychology are concerned.” Presidential philandering has a new meaning it didn’t have before, she says, and part of the reason for it is that there is a greater “awareness of the dignity and equality of women.”

Bits and Pieces

In the American Spectator, L.A. conservative columnist/author Ben Stein briefly recounts how he came to supply ABC with the concept for what eventually became “Amerika,” the controversial miniseries about a Soviet takeover of the U.S.A. Stein’s original treatment is reprinted, and its grim vision of a Soviet-run America in 2002 makes the U.S. depicted in ABC’s telecast seem like Disneyland: 12 million U.S. citizens disappeared in mass graves, 20 million in an American gulag, New York City nuked to rubble and the staffs of the New Yorker and CBS News executed to show that the Soviets “intended a true decapitation of the former society.” Stein admits he’s not proud of the bargain he struck with ABC that gave him money but no screen credit. When he’s up to it, he promises further details about “the people who hurt me and my treatment so badly.” . . .

The American Society of Magazine Editors’ 1987 National Magazine Awards for General Excellence went to New England Monthly (under 100,000 circulation), Common Cause (100,000 to 400,000), Elle (400,000 to 1 million) and People (1-million-plus). Other winners and their categories: Consumer Reports (personal service); Sports Afield (special interest); Life (reporting); Money (public interest); Elle (design); National Geographic (photography); Esquire (fiction), Outside (essays & criticism) and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (single topic issue). Money won for its March, 1986, investigative article that, as its citation reads, documented “the failure of the blood industry, including the American Red Cross, to heed evidence that AIDS can be transmitted by transfusions” and how this failure “unnecessarily delayed the implementation of procedures to screen out contaminated blood.” . . .

Speaking of AIDS, Newsweek’s On Campus, which is distributed at 170 universities, reports in “Risky Business” that its correspondents have detected no decline in casual sex among college kids despite warnings about AIDS’ spread to heterosexuals. Nationally, there are about 75 reported cases of AIDS among college students, many of whom, On Campus says, still don’t understand AIDS and how it is transmitted. . . . And California UFO, the “international forum for extraterrestrial theories and phenomena,” is now available nationally. Its cover story on dolphin research includes a roundup of theories linking cetaceans with “off-planet intelligences.” There’s also a first-person report by a psychic/teacher who says he communicated telepathically with a UFO he met while driving on the Santa Ana Freeway. One ad offers practical help on how “You can transmute the toxins and poisons in your food and water with cosmic rays.” Another, with a Hollywood mailing address, is for an interplanetary mission of love and light that “specializes in Star Soul Attunements for Star People who need to contact their home planets.”