When Push Comes to Shove; Real Life on Dead Tour; The Journals of Hollie A. Rose
Prologue:
Nothing else shaking so you might just as well
In the Land of the Grateful Dead, 1988 was a golden summer for us pot smoking, LSD swinging Tourheads. The cosmos was putting all its dancing skeletons in a row like there’d recently been some sort of harmonic convergence or something. The scene was robust and lush. The band was delivering stellar shows. Everything was vibrating at high frequencies. Everything was possibility and magic. Something was really happening here. Something was really coming together and it glowed in comparison to the American landscape that was not orbiting around the Dead.
Like a wave we were growing, gaining mass and velocity in a cosmic, spiritual, way that lent gravity and importance to the lighthearted everyday fun. We were particles in the universe being drawn together to create a new star. We became a spinning, shining sun, created as if an entire solar system needed our light.
I’d been a touring Deadhead since 1983 (reaching my 100th show milestone in July 1988), but I always went home to Connecticut between tours. I’d only been committed to a full-time life on Dead Tour since January 1988. I was seeing new vistas at every turn, and sharing it all with people I loved ferociously. I was now living in a dream land where synchronicity was commonplace, where magic really worked, and where everyday life was vibrant and colorful. My travels afforded me the opportunity to meet locals around the country and it pleases me now to consider how family came to me from those fields of locals. Like hand plucking a bouquet of the most beautiful flowers. How they too were being swept along by this irresistible tie-dyed tide.
I had found my people. Not just Deadheads, but Tourheads. Those of us who, in 1988, let our entire lives revolve around little but the Dead and each other.
Tourheads were a rare breed. We shunned the 9 to 5 conventions of the normal world. Tour was our job, and if you lived on tour, you sold something; tie-dyed clothing, imported textiles, beadwork, stickers, cassette tape covers, food, ice-cold beers, kind buds, mushrooms, LSD, something. You had to sell something. It takes money to follow minstrels around, and while it might seem that life on Dead Tour was all fun and games, quite the opposite is true.
It was hard out there. Such a life demanded stamina, and it was not for the faint of heart. A highly developed sense of adventure was key. Flexibility in the face of circumstances was required. It took a particular sort to thrive on Dead Tour; one part spiritual mystic trickster, one part intrepid seeker, and one part entrepreneur.
To sum it up, you had to be fearless to live out there.
LSD and the psychedelic experience prepared us well for the enormous, scary, and spectacular world we traveled. It honed the skills needed to navigate the chaos of existence and the vagaries of life on the road. Psychedelics however, are double-edged and not unlike staring wide-eyed at a train wreck and therein seeing the complexity, and the beauty, of the entire universe.
Grab it where you find it. That was how we lived.
The transcendent live performances of the Grateful Dead (upwards of 70 nights a year!) fueled our hearts and our souls. We guided ourselves, and each other, with the wisdom of the music, which echoed with folklore, mythology, and otherworldly knowing. In the music, we found encouragement, invitations, admonitions, and warnings. Signposts illuminating the dangers flashed like white-hot neon between the notes, but the music never blinked when things got bad. It never shied away from truth and heartbreak when such was served up. Great good things often happened, but they were not assured. The Grateful Dead never promised us anything.
No. Wait. That’s not true.
They promised us it would get weird as we rambled on in our mobile community of thousands. And they weren’t kidding.
Yes. I said thousands. That’s not an exaggeration. We Tourheads were a transient city so large it was impossible to know everyone intimately, or even to know everyone’s names, but we recognized the faces and the energies that were Us. We knew who we were, and we knew, when we looked at each other, that we had shared fates, shared futures. And we knew too, why, and how, each of us had gotten here.
Most of us didn’t particularly plan to go on tour full time. It just sort of happened. An irresistible gravitational pull had a hold on us, and we didn’t apply rhyme or reason. The siren song of adventure, and the grand quest for awareness and knowledge, was calling us. We had a thirst for freedom and exploration. We yearned for new ways to exist. We were misfits, disillusioned and unfulfilled at home, where the world we’d been brought up to participate in held little appeal. Eight years of Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, and the so-called War on Drugs was a farce, and we knew it.
“Just say no.”
“This is your brain on drugs… Any questions?”
Yeah, we had questions.
We wondered if we could have our eggs scrambled, please.
We wondered what society was so afraid of.
Mainstream America in the mid and late 80s was a world we simply couldn’t relate to. A vast emptiness of spiritual meaning (in everything from consumerism to music) weighed against a surge of energy in and around the Dead, the antithesis of spiritual emptiness. The scales tipped, and the need to be there, and to be a part of it, was obvious for some of us. We didn’t want to miss out on our chance to scream a resounding “YES!” to the universe.
In 1988, no other option held the least viability as a life choice.
“Great North Special, were you on board?
You can’t find a ride like that no more
The night the chariot swung down low
Ninety-nine children had a chance to go
One long party from front to end
Tune to the whistle going round the bend
No great hurry, what do you say?
Might as well travel the elegant way.”
And here’s me, floating on this current, happily part of this growing wave. I loved the camaraderie and the “living large” aspect of it all, the audaciousness especially so. It suited me. Until I found my people, I’d been awash in pointlessness. And here, while it may have seemed I was forgoing purpose in favor of fun, and meaning in favor of the moment, what I was really doing was discovering purpose and meaning in being part of something so joyful and heart-filling, in singing the songs of the universe and dancing for the oneness of souls.
Ahhh the dancing.
We rocked the universe when we danced our tribal celebrations. Shakin’ our bones was an affirmation that we were alive! And everything that was good and awful was ours. We danced for the glory and the tragedy that was our human lot (though we never actually said that). It was the place where we shook off all the negative vibes and became one with the elemental core of life energy. The self fell away, the challenges and trials, gone… leaving only bodies, music, and the shape of space between us. We danced a dance of spirit and flesh, of connection and community. Our community. Your community. The human community. We danced like it was our job.
Spending my young life with the Dead was the best decision I ever made. I learned what it meant to be a part of something, for there is a unique and special cohesion to any group that experiences life collectively. Ordinary society simply does not allow for the kind of closeness and intimacy with large groups of people that we Tourheads were able to share. The way we lived more closely resembled ancient tribal societies than it did modern-day America. We not only saw shows together and danced together, we ate together, slept together, dreamed together, traveled together, and we spent our time together between shows.
Most of that time, we talked; uncountable hours of conversation, solidifying bonds that would never be broken. We talked of our philosophies, our interpretations of the riffs we’d heard Jerry play that night, or last week. We’d tell each other what happened yesterday, last tour, when we were 12, the crazy thing so-and-so did. We’d recount the adventures and bravery of our people; how this person or that one got away, or who made a good move in our game. We’d talk about the recent art in the lot, while we listened to tapes of previous shows – we had 23 years worth of previous shows to choose from. Or we’d watch bad TV and discuss each other’s love affairs, the larger societal issues we saw as we traveled, and our ability to preserve this great land. We’d talk about the size of our most recent fatty, tell of our exploits when we visited our hometowns, and share innumerable aspirations and plans with each other. Sharing our stories, growing the myths of our people, we forged ourselves into a tribe.
It was so natural and right. And it felt exalted to me. Both then and now. As if this whole coming together was set in motion long before I noticed and embraced it.
Because of course, we’d been here all along. All of us and each of us in our separate trajectories along this same path. But now, in that halcyon summer of 1988, we were one unit, one point of light. Large gatherings sprung up wherever we were, evidence of our coming together into what we called family; an infamous Lobster Bake on the coast of Maine on the 4th of July; a huge party at the cabins by the Eel River; and a positively epic party on a Northern California ranch in early August. As a family, we were coalescing. We were coming into our own and it was important. We didn’t talk about it much. We just sorta nodded at each other sometimes, because we knew.
This mattered.
But none of us really know what we’re up against.
We were all so earnest, and most of us, so young. We believed we were safe because we had good intentions, and because we thought it was our responsibility to spread the love and the light. We thought it was our duty to open minds to the myriad possibilities of this thing called life.
It’s 1988 after all, and we consider ourselves to be direct descendants of the original Acid Tests. We are the inevitable destination of all the cross-country journeys taken by our ancestors when the Interstate Highway System was new. We are the next generation of the consciousness-raising hippie movement of the late 1960s. We are the culmination of all the cool subcultures that came before us, embodying the legacies of Kerouac, Cassidy, and Ken Kesey and his Prankster bunch, honoring their stories with our daily existence. In homage to them all, everything in our world is decadent and over the top. We are enlightened and aware rule-bending rebels who dare to take risks. We are wild children who use outrageousness as an avenue for enjoyment. We live where laughter, hilarity, and mayhem abound. We are free and we are love. And we are unafraid.
And.
We are breaking the law with our habits and beliefs. This kind of life comes with no guarantees. There were traps, pitfalls, and slippery slopes to navigate. But most times, laws be damned, we felt invincible.
It’s true that we saw what we did as constructive – giving people the choice to disrupt their own consensus reality and find their own new ways to live – but we’re still in America, and we’re still on the non-subsidized side of America’s War on Drugs.
No sooner had all this family energy come together, than it was already falling apart. I know that 1988 wasn’t wonderful for everyone. Like every cresting wave there is a part of the whole that is already washing back in turbulence. There are personal and legal dramas playing out in 1988 for people I love, that I won’t learn about for decades.
In other cases, I was aware of the difficulties some of my friends faced.
In my journals I refer a time or two to Irvine. (I wasn’t there, I’d gone to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest instead.) The happenings at the Irvine Dead Shows in the late spring of 1988 had been a total shitshow. Not the shows actually, but the events that transpired for our family at a particular hotel on the morning after the shows. It wasn’t a well-planned and executed raid, so much as the cops seemed to blunder upon an over-large contingent of people with money, enjoying the fruits of their labors. Lots of my new family were busted, and the sense of the safety of our insular lives showed some cracks. They were small cracks though, and for a while, we were able to go on about our business and not pay those cracks any mind.
Another thing I’ll learn decades later is that the ups and downs we experienced on tour pretty closely mirrored the journey of the Grateful Dead themselves. It’s the crow’s story (same as it ever was) and we can’t escape the story, or pay the teller off in gold to change the way the story goes, any more than the boys can.
In the band’s world, things were cresting and turbulating as well. The hit status of Touch of Grey in 1987 was cause for media attention, notoriety, and an upsurge in the numbers of Tourheads and Tourists alike. A mere matter of overpopulation was taking its toll. Touch of Grey had put us all on the radar and the undertow was roiling for the Grateful Dead themselves too, as evidenced by the flyer they distributed in June 1988 with the heading, “When life looks like easy street there is danger at your door.” In it, they insinuated that their problems of late were caused by us Deadheads; that the influx of new fans was our responsibility, not theirs.
They weren’t right – that it was our responsibility, or our fault, but they had their own shit going on. It’s understandable that theirs views on it all got a little clouded. Everyone wanted someone to blame.
We Tourheads shrugged it off, but we warriors in the War on Drugs have a lot to learn in the coming years. We’re going to have to learn that freedom comes with a price. We’re going to have to define and redefine what it means to be family. We’re going to have to decide what matters most and what matters best.
But hey, we excelled at living in the moment. And this was our moment. So let’s not worry about all that other shit.
This is life on Dead Tour.
I’ve heard it said that nothing lasts. I suppose it’s true, but if you had told that to 24-year-old me, I would have been as inclined to listen, and take heed, as the 8-year-old when told that summer isn’t endless.
Were we like lemmings running towards our demise? Like moths before a flame? We didn’t think so. Magic was everywhere and our love for each other was enormous. And shouldn’t that be enough?
We’d found it after all!
We had created our utopia!
Nothing would ever get in the way of that.
Until it did.
You’ve just read the opening to the book –
When Push Comes to Shove; Real Life on Dead Tour; The Journals of Hollie A. Rose
I hope you enjoyed it.
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Thanks!
