Police Hope to Avoid Deadhead Scene in Irvine

Phish and its fans travel the land marked with a tie-dyed bull’s-eye inherited from the granddaddy of all hippie bands, the Grateful Dead.

Phish’s phenomenon is a replay of the hippie caravan that followed the Dead. Turning concert venues and surrounding areas into urban campgrounds and street bazaars, the Deadheads wore out their welcome in city after city in the late 1980s and early 1990s, making it difficult for the band to find places to play.

Irvine was one of them. For six consecutive years during the 1980s, the Dead was a staple of the Irvine Meadows concert season. But shows were marred by crowd spillover into surrounding neighborhoods, due partly to fans who would show up without tickets, hoping for a lucky break that would get them in, or just wanting to be part of the communal scene outside. After 1989, when police skirmished with fans near the Irvine Meadows entrance, city officials declared the Dead and its following no longer welcome. The band never played Orange County again.

Memories of those problems haven’t faded. Irvine Police Sgt. Craig Smith, who oversees preparations for Irvine Meadows concerts, said he’s received “maybe a dozen calls” from neighbors in Irvine, Lake Forest and Laguna Hills who are leery of a replay of the old Deadhead scene when Phish play Irvine Meadows on Sunday.

“Some people recognize the name [Phish] and say, “Oh boy, this could be a problem,” Smith said. “If some guy shows up [on their street] in a 1962 Bluebird school bus and starts living out of it, people are going to be concerned.”

Smith is impressed with the Phish organization’s willingness to lay out potential problems and recommend ways to prevent them. He recently met with a Phish advance team at Irvine Meadows.

“These guys were the most up-front [people],” he said. “I take what they tell me to heart. But in light of concerns in the community, I’m going to see for myself.”

Smith had planned to spend most of Thursday in the Bay Area town of Mountain View walking the Shoreline Amphitheater grounds before, during and after Phish’s evening show there, and consulting with local police. Today, he expects to finalize plans for how best to control a crowd that by all accounts is gentle but can overwhelm unprepared communities.

*

Phish Manager John Paluska said the band and its fans have learned from the Grateful Dead’s difficulties. “Our audience realizes that there need to be boundaries drawn, and they need to self-police if they want to keep the scene intact.”

Irvine probably won’t get the full brunt of the wave that has overwhelmed towns such as Morrison, Colo., which was inundated in 1996 with an overflow of Phish fans during a sold-out, four-night stand at Red Rocks Amphitheater. In Phish’s most publicized security woe, some fans became embroiled in bottle-throwing clashes with sheriff’s deputies in the small town about 20 minutes west of Denver.

Paluska said those troubles might have been avoided had local law enforcement officials not ignored a standard Phish security plan that numbers about 30 pages. Irvine poses far less of a problem, he said, partly because Southern California is not as strong a hotbed of Phish fanaticism as other regions so the show in Irvine is not a guaranteed sellout, and partly because the caravan that follows the band around from show to show dwindles after the school year begins.

He estimates less than 20% of the crowd will be nomads needing overnight accommodations; Phish tries to guide them to area campgrounds, via its Web site and leaflets distributed at earlier shows on the tour, hoping to prevent the kinds of problems that beset Irvine Meadows neighbors in the Deadhead days.

Cory Meredith, head of Staff Pro, a Los Alamitos concert security company that handles events at many Southland venues, including Irvine Meadows, said Phish poses “similar problems, but not of the magnitude of the Grateful Dead.”

Paul Wertheimer, a concert safety consultant from Chicago who tracks security problems, arrests, injuries and fatalities at rock shows around the world and collects them in a data base, said the only real threat Phish fans may pose is to themselves.

“I’ve been to Phish shows, and it’s the Grateful Dead [crowd] without the edge. These are mellow people, so easygoing. It is a drug-consuming audience, but it is not a volatile audience,” he said.

Still, bad things tend to happen to Phish fans in disproportionate numbers on their way to and from shows, Wertheimer said. He said his research shows that 10 Phish fans have died in nine vehicular accidents since 1995.

“It stands out in a stark manner,” he said. “I don’t know of any other tour with such a high level of traffic fatalities. Fans travel long distances to be at the shows, they try to beat the band to the next site, and they don’t get enough sleep. I don’t know if [Phish] can stop it, but they can address it.”

Phish’s manager didn’t know whether those death figures--which Wertheimer said are compiled from cross-checked news accounts and police reports--are accurate. But incidents such as the four traffic deaths of fans driving after a 1997 Phish festival in Maine have troubled the band, Paluska said.

“We say to people, ‘Make sure you’re well-rested; don’t push your limits. We do everything we can to encourage people to take good care and be prudent with these things. Our fans do a lot of long drives, taking unfamiliar roads--that’s just part of the lifestyle.”

The proper forum for such safety reminders is the band’s Web site and newsletter, Paluska said, rather than the announcements at shows that Wertheimer thinks would best alert fans to the apparent skein of traffic deaths.

“The band feels the performance is the performance, and they don’t want to parent the fans,” he said.