Hollie Rose ~ Deadhead ~ Diarist ~ Author
Just how much do you want to know?
This is the short version, CLICK HERE for the long version.
My name is Hollie Rose.
I saw my first Dead show 4-23-83 in New Haven. I stopped counting my shows when I hit #100 at The Greeks in 1988. I lived full time on Grateful Dead Tour in the late 80s and early 90s.
I am a compulsive Diarist. That means (to me) that I can’t seem to live my life without writing about it. In the tradition of writers like Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin and Henry Rollins, I write to myself about my thoughts, my surroundings and my understanding of the world. I didn’t plan to be this sort of writer. To keep a journal was not a decision I ever consciously made. I have been writing my life ever since I learned how to hold a pen. It’s who I am. It’s what I do.
I am also a self-taught Diary Scholar. I have been studying personal writing for decades. I’m continually fascinated that I am not the only one who writes like this!
I combined the Deadhead part of me with the Diary aficionado part of me and presented a paper at the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus in 2017 called Diaries and the Deadhead Experience. If you ever kept a diary or journal when you went to shows, I’d love to hear about it. I truly wish I could publish a book of Deadhead Diaries. Who knows – with enough interest I just might!
My first published book, When Push Comes to Shove; Real Life on Dead Tour, consists of my actual Dead Tour Journals. My obsession with the genre left no room for the writing of a traditional memoir. If I had written a traditional memoir, I would have written my friends and myself as far less flawed characters than we actually are. This way, it’s more real and raw.
The story takes place between 1988 ish and 1992 ish – Years that I consider to be musically spectacular, but also fraught with troubles, trials, and tribulations.
I’m very glad I wrote it all down.
I’ve always felt that our time with the boys constitutes an important part of Grateful Dead history, of hippie history, of LSD history. We were the logical continuation of the poetry set in motion by Owsley, the Pranksters, and the Grateful Dead themselves back in the 60s. Well… here we are, 20+ years later, doing our thing. Doing their thing…
Ken Kesey once said, “It’s the truth even if it never happened.”
I swear, lol, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.
This story is my truth. And it is the truth, even if it never happened.
THE LONG VERSION
Who am I?
Damn good question. Let’s see what I can figure out and share with you from the perspectives in the autumn of 2024…
I was born and bought in Boston. (That’s all true but it’s a story for a future book…)
I was brought up in Connecticut and could not wait to get away. It all seemed so tiny in Connecticut. (Connecticut, I might add, is where I am sitting as I write this.)
In High School I spent my time getting stoned and telling my teachers that they had no right to grade me on anything. I was a bit of a rebel. I was a heavy metal head who spent my weekends at backwoods keg parties listening to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and our local legendary band The Best of Shit, better known as BOS. We didn’t much listen to the Dead at all. We had one Hippie in our High School who would go to shows and bring back party favors.
Where I grew up, we all dreamed of “going to California.” I left, with friends, from keg parties a couple times, to hitch there, but generally, we usually turned around somewhere around NYC come morning.
My travel buddy and partner in crime, Corvette, appeared at our High School one spring day in 1982, when I was a Senior and she was a Junior. Her nickname came about before I’d even officially met her when one of my friends told me excitedly, “I got a date with the new chick – Corvette.” She and I were were besties instantly.
It must be said that when you spend too much High School time smoking pot and telling teachers to go to hell, it doesn’t lead so easily into the previous dreams a little girl harbored about going to college and then law school. Smoking pot and managing BOS sounded way more fun.
In the spring on 1983 I was crushing on that one hippie boy who’d been going to Dead shows for years. He told me I should meet him at the Show in New Haven. I’d have followed him anywhere, but I sure as hell wasn’t going alone.
I made my two best girlfriends come with me – Carrie and Corvette.
Hippie boy had tickets and he went to the show with his friends. We were to meet him there.
It was April 23, 1983.
Carrie, Corvette and I weren’t even off the highway when we were elbowing each other as we slowed for the off-ramp. “Oh My God! Look at the guys!!!!!!!!!” They all had gorgeous long hair and looked oh so fucking cool.
Tickets were not so easy to come by as we’d expected but we hung around anyway – what fun!
Suddenly, a door was open, and one of us said, “I think that’s inside.”
It was.
The band was playing Alabama Getaway – that’s where Corvette had come from!
The bus came by…..
The second show for all three of us was Saratoga Springs in June, 1983. We got a couple hotel rooms and went up with all our hometown friends.
While wandering the hotel hallways in the middle of the night, a door opened and a guy said, “Anybody got any sandwiches?”
Carrie said, “Nooo, but… aren’t you the bass player?”
We spent the entire rest of the night in Phil’s room talking about music and watching a space shuttle take off. When morning rolled around, we went down to the lobby for breakfast but ended up sitting on couches and talking another hour while Phil was gradually surrounded by fans.
Everyone knows that Saratoga 83 was an epic show…. Right?
I mean, I don’t need to say that, right?
By July, Carrie and I had moved to Long Beach California. We picked Long Beach because we had a friend in the Navy there. And hey – there’s a couple Dead shows in Ventura!
Long Beach didn’t last and by August we were in Berkeley, wandering Telegraph Ave. and People’s Park.
Frost Shows.
Park West in Utah.
Red Rocks.
Before we had time to blink we were back in Connecticut and Fall Tour was on the horizon.
To San Francisco for New Years at the Civic Center!
Then it was Spring Tour again. And by the time we rolled around to New Haven 1984, I’d seen 23 shows.
I didn’t go “On Tour” full time until just after the New Years run celebrating 1987–1988.
Somehow I’d gotten it in my mind that that wasn’t something I could actually do. For more on that part of the story, see the book Dedication.
For three years, my time in Connecticut between shows was spent working anti-sabbatical jobs in factories (not much else to do as a young adult in the mid-80s in Connecticut if you didn’t go to college) and cultivating a Radio DJ career.
I started on WESU, the Wesleyan University Radio Station in Middletown. I had shows like Dead Aire, The Psychedelicatessen, and my overnight time slots that were called Spend the Night with Hollie.
I got a job at WCCC in Hartford and I was on my way to that sort of musical life when I eventually blew it all off and went on tour.
I supplemented my income (free college radio gigs and part time commercial radio gigs are a boon of concert tickets, but don’t pay the bills so well) with things my friends mailed to me from the Best Coast.
It’s funny, even now that I don’t put the real words in print so easily.
Let’s just say the USPS Overnight Express Eagle was my friend…
For the details of my Dead Tour years you’ll have to read the book.
The next bits may sound incongruous but this is the long version so stick with me…
My reading choices always mostly leaned towards actual published Diaries and Journals. Anne Frank is just a start. There are so very many published diaries and journals it’s honestly mind-boggling. Diaries are where I learned most of my history. From early Asian pillow-books written by Court ladies, to the journals of Che Guevara, from the meticulous logbooks of explorers of the new world back as far as the 15th and 16th centuries, to accounts of war experiences around the world; in the battles, and on the Homefront. There are journals of philosophers and scientists, country parsons and city gadabouts, of young girls in Brazilian diamond mining towns, a midwife in the 17th century in Maine, artists and writers (Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, Kurt Cobain, Audrey Lourde, David Wojnarowicz), aristocrats and slaves, President’s wives and shop girls. There are diaries of medical journeys and travel diaries galore. Travel journals are my favorite. I’ve been everywhere while reading travel journals! My absolute most favorite are the journals of overland travel to Oregon and California by wagon train in the mid-1800s.
They’re like the earliest American Road Trips.
Anyway, when I left Dead Tour I tried to find a college program where I could officially study this form of personal writing. It’s not like any other sort of writing. It’s raw and real, uncensored and surprising. There’s never any foreshadowing in a diary.
I never did find a college curriculum to suit my niche interests so I went back to Connecticut and opened a coffeehouse where we could serve quality consumables, treat people like the beautiful individuals that they are, and create community. Corvette came and joined me and we rocked Klekolo World Coffee in Middletown together for 18 years. At that point I wanted to move on so I sold Klekolo to Vette and she still owns and runs it to this day.
While I owned Klekolo I continued to read and study diaries and journals and fashioned myself into a bit of a diary scholar. I acquired the rights to a publication that came out for years in newspaper format but had gone defunct. It was called The Diarist’s Journal. With the graphic help of my dear friend Joan Fox, we put out four very high quality 80-page magazines.
That website is long gone but if you want to see more of what it was all about (ya know, in case you are as fanatical about diaries and journals as I am…) it can still be seen on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – and most of the links still seem to work.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050311210137/http://www.personalwriting.org/lettersto.html
Another thing about my history with Diaries and Journals – check this out –
I used to spend my time on Tour looking for people writing in notebooks.
Above is an image of the flyer I handed out on Tour
<SHRUG> That project didn’t ever really go anywhere.
Since Klekolo I’ve been a Personal Organizer and I have come around to specializing in Decluttering – I love to help people find themselves under the piles of things they have collected in life.
While living a life of that sort of work in Connecticut, I spent lots of time writing, and some time transcribing my old journals. My old Tour Journals to be precise.
At the prompting of a writer friend, I applied to present a paper at the Grateful Dead Scholar’s Caucus. I was invited to participate in the Southwest American Popular Culture Conference in Albuquerque in February 2017. I presented a paper called Diaries and the Deadhead Experience. That was when I fully came to understand that I am actually a Diary Scholar. I could talk about this stuff for weeks!
I had always assumed, when I was writing my journals, that I was taking notes for the book I would write someday. But in transcribing the notebooks, I came to see that what I had written was far more visceral and honest than any story I would craft about that time of my life if I were to write it now.
Also, my total dedication to the Journal/Diary genre would simply not allow me to put out my first book in any other way. It HAD to be my actual journal. Nothing else would suffice.
I was dissuaded on such an idea from, literally, EVERY direction. Friends and writer colleagues urged me not to go this route, saying how the industry does not support actual journals. Early readers told me I was missing an opportunity to craft a fabulous story “using the journals as source material.” Two early agents to whom I submitted, requested full manuscripts then told me the editing would be a nightmare for a book like this. A later full manuscript request, when I was searching for a professional editor, came back to me saying that I really had a chance here to stretch my writing muscles and write a “real” book.
I stuck to my guns and took a chance.
I hope you enjoy my journals…
I share them with you, with love…
What?!? You want more?