Deadheads Young and Old Mourn an Icon

Gary Dubofsky was born the year the Grateful Dead started touring and was 16 before he heard Jerry Garcia and the band in person for the first time. That still left enough time for the landscape architect from suburban Chicago to attend 320 shows in 35 states and collect 2,800 show tapes.

Such was the dedication of the colorful Deadhead subculture--from all ages and social groups--that followed the band around the country, kept alive the peace and love spirit of the 1960s and turned Dead shows into happy and lucrative reunions.

“After a while,” said Dubofsky, 30, “it became more important to see the shows to see my friends versus the actual musical content. But the music was always there.”

The music came to an end Wednesday for Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist and central figure, and left the Deadheads going down the road feeling bad, to paraphrase one of the group’s songs.

“All I can say is that I drove to work and I was crying,” said Mark Parnell, 43, part-owner of The Black, a novelty and smoke shop in San Diego’s Ocean Beach. “He was one of the representatives of my generation. There are very few of them left.”

Old hippies and the children of old hippies, mainstream lawyers and stockbrokers stoking the fire of youth, high schoolers discovering the laid-back life for the first time and other true believers who somehow managed to keep paying $50 or more for a ticket kept the phenomenon of the Grateful Dead’s tours alive long after the band broke away from its roots in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

On Wednesday, friends and fans across the country paid tribute to Garcia. In Hampton, N.H., Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir dedicated an evening performance to his longtime friend and musical partner.

In Los Angeles, thousands of fans assembled through the day Wednesday at the merry-go-round in Griffith Park for a candlelight vigil.

By nightfall, hundreds more still wandered the park grounds, with motorists calling out to pedestrians in search of the elusive carousel.

By 9 p.m., with the vigil over, the fans still streamed into the park on foot--some driving Volkswagen buses, others playing bongo drums.

“It was cool,” said Matt Rhodes, 21. “Everyone kicked back. There were a lot of candles. And there was a microphone where people got up and told stories about past Dead concerts. Jerry would have been proud. I think we did him right.”

All day Wednesday, radio station KSCA-FM (101.9) played nothing but Grateful Dead music after confirming reports of Garcia’s death about 8:30 a.m. KCRW-FM (89.9) aired a tribute in the morning and planned another for Wednesday night, while KLOS-FM (95.5) played an hour of Grateful Dead music at noon.

“The response has been remarkable,” said KSCA general manager Bill Ward. “It’s much like when [John] Lennon was shot. The response now is so immediate.”

Music stores reported a run on Dead records, and Capt. Ed’s--a 28-year-old Van Nuys head shop--had sold out its large supply of Jerry Garcia memorabilia by noon.

On the fabled corner of Haight and Ashbury--where the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream store, like others across the country, carries a flavor named Cherry Garcia--teary-eyed fans placed flowers and lit candles. On the polo field in Golden Gate Park, thousands of swaying mourners--some wearing tie-dye, some in suits--gathered under sunny skies, and a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.” Another candlelight tribute was held there for Garcia on Wednesday night.

News of Garcia’s death shot through the intricate web of cyberspace, where the band has a high profile. So many Wall Street professionals called up the news on Bloomberg News Service terminals that the system froze briefly around noon. On the Prodigy on-line service and at The Well in Sausalito, the on-line home for many Deadheads, admiration and shock were evident.

“Thanks, man,” wrote one Well user. Another said that Dead shows were the happiest times of her life, happier than trips to Disneyland, “a place where people gathered with big smiles on their faces . . . happy down to their souls.”

Garcia and the Dead were a disheveled and unkempt bunch, wearing ragged jeans, headbands and beards. Still, by the time of his death, Garcia’s designs, seemingly the product of drug-induced flights of fancy, were featured on $23 silk ties. His sensibilities and drawings were featured in high-priced Jerry Garcia suites at the Hotel Triton in San Francisco and the Beverly Prescott Hotel in Beverly Hills.

For many, the itinerant fans who have been following the band from city to city were a cultural remnant of the 1960s, reeking of carefree sex and casual drug use. Those are the hard-core Deadheads, who continued to sell T-shirts, bootleg tapes of the shows, overpriced tofu burgers and more than a small amount of drugs to finance their obsession.

“Suddenly, when you were there, you didn’t feel like there was any war,” said Anny Maurer, a 27-year-old San Fernando Valley bartender who has seen the Dead 20 times since 1988. “There was no pestilence, no anger, no difference between human beings. We were all there for the same reason--to show how much love and joy we have inside our hearts.”

Now, they have lost their compass.

Dave Smith, 29, and Davina Gonzalez, 24, both of Huntington Park, followed the Dead around the West Coast this spring, traveling in a 32-foot motor home that Smith bought with settlement money from a motorcycle accident and selling tie-dyed T-shirts for spending cash.

On Wednesday morning, after hearing the news of Garcia’s death, they motored to the impromptu vigil in Griffith Park.

“This changes everything,” Smith said. “I don’t really know where to go. I don’t know what to do.”

In a letter posted on the Internet this summer and handed out at shows, the group said that “over the past 30 years we’ve come up with the fewest possible rules to make the difficult act of bringing tons of people together work well--and a few thousand so-called Deadheads ignore these simple rules and screw it up for you.”

But if the party that broke out at every show was beginning to lose its luster, a new type of community has been emerging of late in cyberspace: Computer-savvy fans kept up with band news and song lists via the Internet and on-line bulletin boards.

The attraction Deadheads developed for cyberspace stems from the frequency with which the group played on college campuses, said Dave Serrins, 24, publisher of Unbroken Chain, an Austin, Tex.-based magazine devoted to the Dead.

“At this point, what’s happened is that a lot of the Dead audience, the older people especially, are really well-educated,” he said. “Deadheads naturally like to communicate with each other, they like to trade tapes, do things peculiar to the Deadhead community. What better place than the Net?”

A posting on one of the popular Usenet news groups devoted to the Dead summed up the feelings of many.

“A very, very sad day for all of us,” it said. “I must say that I feel right now the same way I felt when my dad died. But I came into my office and saw my 6-month-old son waking up from his nap with a sleepy smile in his eyes and knew that I had to try to teach him some of the things that Jerry and the rest have tried to teach me over the years.”

Tom Norton, host of “The Music Never Stops,” the Grateful Dead show that has aired Friday evenings on Los Angeles radio station KPFK for the past nine years, compared the impact of Garcia and the group to a religion.

Norton predicted that Garcia’s death would serve to rededicate Deadheads everywhere to the cause.

“I think what you’re going to see is like a supernova, like a star exploding,” Norton said. “The community will just be that much stronger. The music will never stop.”

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers John M. Glionna, Jerry Crowe and David Wharton in Los Angeles and Times researchers Nona Yates in Los Angeles and Norma Kaufman in San Francisco.