From: [erickson m k] at [aol.com] (EricksonMK) Date: 7 Jul 1995 10:37:13 -0400 Subject: Article in today's Washington Post (long) I know I have waaay too much time on my hands, but what the hell, I'm leaving my job in three weeks and moving to Maine. So here goes: >From the Washington Post, 7/7/95 Headline: Pandora's Box of Rain Sub-headline: Cosmic Disturbances Plague Grateful Dead By Megan Garvey, Washington Post Staff Writer Riots, stonings, bolts of lightning, people being crushed, tear gas, dogs, cancellations, broken bottles, overcrowding, overdoses. There's some bad stuff going around. Among the people living their lives following the Grateful Dead--selling tie-dyed shirts to earn their keep, riding on that last edge of love, peace and understanding that's now three decades old--this summer has been a bummer. On the Internet, where hard-core Deadheads have been gathering for 10 years, the question was: If this is the voice of God, what on Earth is She trying to say? It has already been a long year for the intrepid touring band, a mainstay of American music since the '60s. Early this year, twice as many people as expected showed up at a Vermont airfield. Because of the crowd's size, officials stopped taking tickets and opened the gates to everyone. On June 21, police in Albany, NY arrested more than 50 people outside a Grateful Dead concert after a confrontation with vendors. Then a little more than a week ago at Washington's RFK Stadium, lightning struck three fans, one of whom remains in critical condition. The list goes on. Sunday night in Noblesville, Ind., thousands of ticketless fans threw rocks and bottles and climbed the fences in an effort to break into the concert. Several dozen people were arrested, four police officers were injured, and tear gas was used to disperse the melee. For the first time in the history of the Grateful Dead--and just two weeks after their 30th anniversary on tour--the concert scheduled for Monday night was canceled because officials feared more crowd violence. If your head isn't spinning already from the steady pounding of disaster--wait. Just about midnight on Wednesday a porch collapsed at a campsite near St. Louis, where about 4,000 Grateful Dead fans were making their temporary home. The collapse injured more than 100 fans, some of them seriously. What had become a tangled mess of misfortune was now an unmistakable pattern. The media vultures, including the three major TV networks, are now circling the strange but beloved American tradition. What is with the Grateful Dead? Are they cursed? Has the karma of aging bodies and livers poisoned the once exceptionally mellow tie-dyed fandom? Have Deadheads become, pardon the reference, a lightning rod for apocalyptic happenings? Even the Grateful Dead's publicist, Dennis McNally, admits that things have gotten strange in the past few weeks. "It's been raining a little bit hard lately," he said in an opaque fashion. "Things on the ground have gotten a bit thick." To be fair, the Grateful Dead can hardly be held responsible for calling lightning down from the sky. That certainly falls under "acts of God" on the grand list of bad trips. And McNally points out that the campsite where the fans were injured was more than 10 miles from the concert. The concert itself, he said, couldn't have gone more smoothly "if the Osmond Brothers had been playing." Still, committed fans of the Dead are seeing the accumulation of disasters as beyond eerie and approaching frightening These are people who write down all the songs played at Dead concerts and note each change as though the course of the future was contained in a song list. These are people who think what shirt Jerry Garcia is wearing has significance. How can they miss the Old Testament gloom and doom that have accompanied this summer's tour? "it used to be the Grateful Dead was about peace and love and bringing that 1960s mentality into the '70s and '80s," said Ken Crockett, 29, a fan of more than a decade who has been to more than 100 shows. "Looks like it hasn't made it into the '90s." There are really two issues going on in Grateful Dead Land. One is the cosmic meaning of disaster--the idea that karma moves with the crowd and the events of the past week are more than unfortunate coincidence. "Were I their spiritual adviser, I would be waving my arms and sending them home until further notice," wrote Michelle Waughtel on the Bay Area-based WELL, site of the oldest Grateful Dead conference in cyberspace. Come on, say the Grateful Dead, let's not overreact. "I don't regard this as a test of karma," said McNally. "Look, the Grateful Dead provide the music soundtrack for people's lives. A lot of beautiful things happen, and tragic things happen too." The more serious issue for those interested in taking the pulse of an aging phenomenon is the way the fans have changed. "In the last several years the scene has become a destination of its own," explains David Gans, who hosts a syndicated radio show on the Dead and has written two books on the group and its followers. This summer, say people who have attended concerts, the demand for free tickets has been greater than ever. In the long- standing tradition of the Dead, fans hold a finger in the air indicating that they don't have a ticket for the concert, calling out simply, "I need a miracle." But even the band has grown tired of freeloaders. In a letter sent to fans over the Internet that carried the group's ubiquitous skeleton logo, the Dead put it on the line. "If you don't have a ticket, don't come," it said, warning later: "Want to end the touring life of the Grateful Dead? Allow bottle-throwing gate crashers to keep on thinking they are cool anarchists instead of the creeps they are." Dedicated fans concur. "It's become 'Give me something for nothing,'" said Peter Orlov, 26, who works for a music database in New York City and has followed the band for 11 years, attending 12 concerts this summer alone. "This summer I saw a guy who instead of asking for a miracle basically was saying to people, 'Who wants to sit on his [butt] out in the parking lot while I see a show?'" What does it all mean? Are the Grateful Dead a way of life or just a band that keeps on trucking, or is it somewhere in between? Can a band with a jazz soul and a rock-and-roll lifestyle have cosmic meaning? "The Grateful Dead are in the inspiration business," said Gary Lambert on the WELL. "...But at least as often, probably more often, we have seen audience members with painfully constricted cultural horizons who think that following the Grateful Dead is, in and of itself, a valid social statement or contribution to society." So the hangers-on, the uninformed and uninspired rub elbows with the pure at heart. Sometimes things go wrong--lately more than ever before. "In a relationship that you maybe should have left a while ago you start to attract bad luck," said Steve Silberman, 37, author of a dictionary of Deadhead terms and a follower of the band for more than 20 years. He wants to make one thing clear, though: He's not for a second saying that the group is washed up or is cursed. But he does admit, "It's definitely eerie." Mike Kaplan "Sometimes we live no particular way but our own"