Police Say Grateful Dead Crowd Never Out of Control : Officials Differ With Councilman on Concert Events

Irvine city officials distanced themselves Tuesday from comments made by City Councilman Cameron Cosgrove, who characterized events at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre last weekend during three Grateful Dead concerts as a “near riot.”

Cosgrove, who had asked to accompany police to the amphitheater Saturday night, had raised the possibility that the situation could have escalated into a situation similar to that which claimed 94 lives at a British soccer stadium.

But Assistant City Manager Paul Brady Jr. and Lt. Mike White of the Irvine Police Department denied Tuesday that riotous or near-riotous conditions existed at any time during the weekend and said that the situation was never out of control of authorities.

“I want to make it clear,” said Brady, who attended the Friday and Sunday night concerts, “ the Irvine Meadows ownership did everything they said they were going to do ahead of time. I give them a lot of credit for that.”

“I’m not budging my position one bit,” Cosgrove said. “I’m not changing my mind. . . . I never said it was out of control. I said it could have gotten out of control.”

Cosgrove said that his initial comments regarding a crowd of 500 people, tossing bottles and setting fires, were based on “what I was told” by police and not on what he saw.

If police are now revising their account, he said, “I want to find out why they’re changing their story.”

A total of 79 arrests were made at the concerts, police said, most on narcotics charges. Eleven of those arrested were juveniles. Several of the arrests took place when a crowd of about 300 people without tickets tried to force their way into the amphitheater Saturday night and were moved off the grounds by private security guards.

Of that group, about 100 sat down on Irvine Center Drive, some refusing orders from police to leave. Cory Meredith of Staffpro Security of Los Alamitos, which handled the concerts, called the incident “an isolated hippie sit-down that was blown out of proportion.”

Sunday, some city officials said they would urge the amphitheater management to ban the Grateful Dead from appearances there. Yesterday, though, Irvine Mayor Larry Agran said such reports were “a total misrepresentation.” In any case, no formal efforts by the city to ban the group are planned, Brady said.

“That’s not the role of the council,” Cosgrove agreed. Rather, he said, the council’s responsibility is to ascertain exactly what happened and why, and then “put that information before the owners of the amphitheater and ask how they are going to address the community’s concerns.”

Tuesday morning, two Irvine Meadows partners met briefly with Assistant City Manager Brady to discuss the weekend’s events. All three agreed to gather additional information about the concerts and to meet again within the next week.

Special precautions were taken to increase the number of tickets available for area Dead fans over the weekend.

The band has its own hot-line network for distributing tickets to dyed-in-the-wool fans. Usually, said Bob Barsotti of Bill Graham Presents, one of the concert’s promoters, 60% of the tickets to a given Dead show will be sold through the local promoter and 40% will be sold through the Dead’s network.

But for the Irvine Meadows shows, 80% of the tickets were allocated to be sold through local channels in Southern California, while only 20% (including all the orchestra seats) were distributed through the Dead’s network. (Barsotti noted that some of those network tickets would have been bought by local fans, so more than 80% of the ticket buyers came from Southern California).

Barsotti said the promoters figured that taking extra steps to satisfy local demand would minimize the number of potential gate-crashers. “A kid who lives 5 miles away is more likely to come over to the show without a ticket, taking a chance, than a kid in San Francisco,” he said.

Brady added that traffic problems in the area could not be blamed solely on concert-goers.

“A major part of the traffic obviously (was) due to the air show” at El Toro, he said. The air show attracted an estimated 300,000 people to the area over the weekend, as opposed to the 45,000 Grateful Dead fans.

Staff writer Mike Boehm contributed to this story.