‘Deadheads’ Still Follow Music, Magic

As the six graying rock ‘n’ rollers of the Grateful Dead, some with middle-age paunches, played on, the multitudes--42,000--swayed, twirled, shook, passed pipes and hooted as loud as they could.

Sarah, wearing a sweaty tie-dyed T-shirt, stopped dancing long enough to catch her breath.

“It’s more than a group, it’s like a way of life,” she said. Sarah, 18, attended her first Grateful Dead show with her parents when she was 5 and dreams of someday taking in a concert with her own child--a third-generation Deadhead.

Anaheim Show Set

Welcome to the Grateful Dead show, which plays in Anaheim this weekend. It is a church of the offbeat, an ongoing acid test, a counterculture bazaar, a spacey, smoky, amorphous and continuously growing cult born of the ‘60s, psychedelics and Haight-Ashbury.

Its parishioners vary widely, from doctors and lawyers, to back-to-the-land types and nomadic bus drivers with long hair, beards, beads and rainbow-colored T-shirts. The Deadheads press on in pursuit of the band’s unique form of improvisational, raucous, meandering music. The high priest is the music; the guiding tenet: Question authority, but to a heavy back beat.

A Grateful Dead concert is preceded by an entourage of Deadheads who follow the band from stop to stop in a sort of traveling counterculture village. They arrive in the poor man’s Winnebagos--old buses, rusting pick-up trucks, ramshackle vans. The band insists that towns staging the shows set aside campgrounds for the throngs.

They may be derided as throwbacks to the ‘60s by those who don’t, as Deadheads say, “get it.” But for those who are a part of it, a Dead show is a “safe place in a very dangerous world, a happy place in an unhappy world,” said David Gans, 33, of Oakland. “The Grateful Dead is my parish.”

Gans, turning an obsession into a livelihood, wrote a book about the Dead, is host for the weekly Deadhead Hour, which airs on FM stations in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and with Deadhead friend Mary Eisenhart organized a modem-linked computer data base for Deadheads, run out of Sausalito.

He’s not the only obsessed apostle. Deadheads have compiled lists of every song played in more than two decades of Dead concerts, in the order the tunes were played. Since the band lets fans record its shows, there may be tapes of every song the band has ever played in public.

“When the archeologists come, they will know about the Grateful Dead,” said Eisenhart, editor of the Oakland-based Bam magazine.

Commercial Success

Based in Marin County, the band has long been noted for playing outside the recording industry mainstream, shunning studios and record deals in favor of concert tours, performed for an extended family of a few hundred thousand fans. But now, 22 years after it was formed, the band is having commercial success like never before.

Its single, “Touch of Grey,” broke in at No. 77 on Billboard Magazine’s Top 100, the first time the band has had a hit designed for the Top 40. The new album, “In the Dark,” the band’s first studio-produced effort in seven years, is No. 26 on Hits magazine Top 50.

There are videos, a planned movie, the July cover of Rolling Stone. The band is completing a six-stop tour with Bob Dylan that will have attracted 300,000 fans and grossed up to $6 million. The final concert is in Anaheim Stadium on Sunday. Lest anyone think that Dylan was the only draw, 54,000 fans showed up in June for three Dead-only shows in Ventura.

They come not just for the music, but for the show, and everyone there is part of it. Bill Graham, who has promoted perhaps 1,000 Dead shows dating back to the days when the band was called the Warlocks, said the scene amounts to an “attempt at another way of looking at life.”

“People leave their labors, their toils, their jobs. They come into space where there are no tight pants, or revolving drums, no strobes, no theatrics. It may not change the world, but it’s a wonderful thing to share,” he said.

Serious Brand of Fun

Whether they view it all as a church, a family or a small town, Deadheads adhere because of a “need to feel they are a part of something,” said John Barlow, a Wyoming cattle rancher and one of the band’s two main lyricists. “It’s also about serious fun. Deadheads are serious about their fun.”

Loyalists include a deputy press secretary to Sen. Paul Simon, an Illinois Democrat who is running for president; basketball star Bill Walton; San Francisco obstetrician Robert Liner, who has played the Dead’s song, “Franklin Towers” to help Deadheads through labor, and a fellow who calls himself Wizzard, 20. Wizzard sat shirtless in the Eugene parking lot campground, string beads, and when asked where he’s from, replied, “I’m from Earth, man, where are you from?”

“You lose yourself in dance and feel renewed,” said Century City lawyer Marc Sherman, 29, who has pinned a Dead poster to his office wall near his USC diploma. “You come back after a show with the belief that whatever else is going on, you can go forward because there has been such an inflow of energy.”

While Elvis’ fans still make pilgrimages to his shrines, no fan can outdo an inveterate Deadhead. Stories abound of “mixed marriages” that break up because one partner is a Deadhead and the other isn’t, or of people who move to San Francisco because the band plays in the Bay Area more often than anywhere.

At least one couple is planning its family around the band, putting off having a baby until after they follow the band on its planned tour of China next year. Another fellow gave up a $40,000-a-year Silicon Valley job, sold his house and supports himself by selling T-shirts outside Grateful Dead shows.

Followers Hawk Wares

Chris Doyen, 22, has not been back to his home in Maine since he went “on tour” by following the rock ‘n’ roll carnival six years ago.

When the Dead are on tour, Doyen and his 18-year-old wife survive by selling food to hungry Deadheads from the back of their Ford pickup in the parking lots and campgrounds near the concerts. When the band goes off the road, “we starve or go on welfare.”

Bernie Bildman, 42, pays the bills by being an oral surgeon in Birmingham, Ala. He plans his vacations around Dead shows. He has seen more than 100. Sometimes when he listens to the music, he gets “as close as I can remember getting to what religious people call rapture.

“When I get there, I feel the good that I think Jesus told us to feel. It touches the good in me, the thing in you that makes you want to do good.”

All this for a group of suburban kids who formed a jug band in Palo Alto 22 years ago, then became house band for author Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, whose adventures revolved around a Day-Glo bus and LSD and were made famous in Tom Wolfe’s 1969 book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

80 Concerts a Year

Long after other San Francisco 1960s counterculture bands broke up and the Haight-Ashbury district became another yuppie neighborhood, the Acid Tests go on in the form of 80 Grateful Dead concerts a year, probably more than any rock ‘n’ roll band ever. The band also may have grossed more on concerts than any rock band in history, although no one is quite sure.

“So much money passed through this scene that never even slowed down,” lyricist Barlow said.

“I’d say $50 to $60 million has passed through; $15 to $20 million may have tarried a while, a short while.

“I’m not quite sure why this (success) is startling. I could see why it should have happened for years now. Culturally, we’ve been going through a real desert. What’s going on out there in suburbia? People are making money. How far is it getting them?”

One reason for the new success may be the band members’ health. Today, for example, guitarist Jerry Garcia--an ice cream company named a flavor for him (called Cherry Garcia, and he’s suing them)--seems to be in better shape, after falling into a coma last year, preceded by an arrest on a heroin possession charge in Golden Gate Park.

Barlow said: “Garcia was just one who got the ink. But there was nothing unique about that. It was a trend. We all got about as self destructive as we could be, and now the trend is toward getting healthy.” There are even indications of increased attention to business. The band has passed on money it could make in licensing fees, instead letting Deadhead craftsmen create their own versions of Dead logos--roses, skeletons, lightning bolts--and print them on T-shirts, posters, stickers and other wares for sale.

Bootleggers Targeted

But while most vendors simply make enough money to get to the next show, there is growing concern that the band is a victim of organized pirating. The band has “begun a massive crackdown” on large-scale, organized bootleggers of T-shirts, said Hal Kant, an attorney for the band. And a lawsuit is being readied against one pirate of a Dead album.

If the utopian economy outside the show is invaded from time to time, the nirvana inside also may be threatened, or so some Deadheads fear. With the rush of popularity, “values that have taken so long to grow and solidify won’t be passed down,” longtime Deadhead Tom Stark said. There’s more litter at the concerts now. At a recent Dead show in Irvine a fence was trampled.

Last weekend in Eugene, a city of slightly more than 100,000, 42,000 people converged for the concert by Dylan and the Dead. Every hotel room was filled.

Groupies hawking everything from tie-dyed baby dresses to tofu sandwiches were conducting business in a farmer’s market of counterculture in the stadium parking lot.

“Drop acid, not bombs” said one poster for sale.

Eugene police arrested nine for small-scale drug sales, but Lt. Eric Mellgren said the force was not pressing it. Police were surprised by the prevalence of LSD, something rarely seen in Eugene. From what Mellgren saw, however, the “reputation has proven accurate, that Deadheads will engage in some drug use.”

Fans Know Limits

At the same time, the band’s medical staff reported more problems with heat exposure than with freakouts and overdoses. Several sources said drug problems are far less prevalent at Dead concerts than at other rock shows, perhaps because Dead fans are older and know their limits better.

Wizzard and his friend, Rassberry, 20, took time out from selling their wares to ponder what might happen when the band stops playing.

“The music is just the center of the energy, and when the band is gone there will just be a new channel,” Wizzard said. “When it happens, it will just happen and you’ll know and the right people will know. . . . Me personally, I’ll probably end up in Maui, a beach in Maui.”