by David Browne
In 1986 the Dead was in need of a new business manager because their finances, especially after Garcia’s coma and their canceled shows, were in shambles; they were also behind on their tax returns. The band approached Nancy Mallonee, a CPA with experience in the music business. During her job interview at a band meeting Garcia chuckled and said to her, “I don’t know why anybody would want to do this job, but if you want it, it’s yours.” Mallonee saw for herself the way their finances turned around the following year. “Things changed dramatically after In the Dark was released,” says Mallonee. “The business took off after that. It was surprising how much things changed from 1986 to 1987. Huge. They made a lot of money off In the Dark.”
Record sales were merely one indication that the Dead’s business was erupting around them in the wake of “Touch of Grey.” By now touring income amounted to 80 to 90 percent of the Dead’s gross income; the Dead grossed $26.8 million in 1987 alone. In 1987 mail-order ticket sales hit 450,000, more than ten times from a few years before. Enough requests had come in for their 1987 New Year’s Eve show at Oakland Coliseum to fill that venue six times over. Some promoters didn’t even bother advertising for shows; because the fans knew ahead of time, it was just wasted money.
Sensing they had the upper negotiating hand for the first time in their careers, the Dead barreled into the renewal of their contract with Arista with a rare sense of boldness and self-assurance. With their savvy, poker-champ lawyer Hal Kant leading the way, they demanded and received a higher royalty rate, about $3.50 per CD. They floated the idea of releasing a series of live albums from their vault on their own label, to be curated by in-house archivist Dick Latvala. Arista wasn’t initially taken with the idea—they feared it would compete with live albums the label was planning to release—but the company agreed, as long as the band limited the pressings. “I said, ‘You can’t sell more than twenty-five thousand units,’” Arista vice president and general manager Lott recalls. “‘If you have live recordings and want to sell twenty-five thousand to the hardcore, go ahead.’” (That series became One from the Vault, launched in 1991 after soundman Dan Healy convinced the band to dig into the archives and release the famed Great American Music Hall gig in 1975. That release was followed in 1993 by the launch of the two-track recording series Dick’s Picks, helmed by Latvala, Candelario, and John Cutler.) Busting Arista’s chops a bit more, Kant insisted the contract be as boiled down as possible and limited to only five pages at most, about ten times shorter than the usual music business paperwork. To squeeze in all the details and numbers, Arista lawyers had to extend the page margins and make the point size as small as they could and still have it be readable. But for the Dead post–“Touch of Grey,” it would be done.
Playing by the industry’s rules had never been the band’s forte, as was immediately evident during their five-night run at the Garden starting September 15, 1987. To the puzzlement of Clive Davis and his troops, they only played “Touch of Grey” two of those five evenings. One top executive was also baffled when Garcia would start a solo but stay put where he was rather than walk to the front and engage in some watch-me-play showboating—standard rock procedure for nearly every other arena band in the world. Garcia would have none of it.
McNally received a lesson in industry politics himself when Garcia, Weir, Mydland, and Scher dropped by New York’s iconic rock station, WNEW-FM, to hang out and chat with Scott Muni, the gravel-voiced DJ legend. As Scher watched, surprised but helpless to stop them, the band and Muni began playing cards on the air. “I was jumping out of my skin,” Scher recalls. “Every time Scott took a break, which was not very often, a lot of advertisers got screwed. I remember saying, ‘Hey guys, we’re on the radio—it’s not television! Nobody can see what you’re doing!’” Unfortunately no one in the Dead organization told anyone at the label that the Dead were dropping by the station for some lackadaisical promotion, and back at his hotel room McNally received a furious call from an Arista executive who hadn’t been informed of the Dead’s plans until he’d turned on his radio. McNally had to apologize for the oversight. “It wasn’t intentional,” he says. “It just didn’t occur to me to coordinate with the record company. I hadn’t even talked to the company until those meetings in the spring of 1987.”
Backstage at the Garden the time had come to honor the Dead’s promise to pose for photos with the higher-ups at Arista while holding sales awards for In the Dark. McNally began hitting one dressing room after another. But schmoozing with record industry people—those who Garcia would regularly refer to in a David Letterman–esque way as “weasels”—still wasn’t especially appealing. When McNally began making the rounds, the responses were, to say the least, mixed. Weir, agreeable as ever and also the most cognizant of the value of face time with label folks, emerged readily. But with the rest McNally found himself begging and cajoling the Dead, sometimes on his knees, to leave their rooms and shake a few hands: “We promised!” McNally implored. Finally Garcia begrudgingly agreed, and he, Hart, and Weir trudged into the Arista-filled room, where they gathered with Davis and his troops, smiled, stood still for a few photos, and then almost immediately left. McNally would later describe the experience as “brutal,” leaving him frazzled and exhausted after what he called one of his worst days on the job.
The first night at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, Sunday, April 2, had gone reasonably well. The set included a slew of the band’s usual grab-bag of covers, from blues (“Little Red Rooster”) and New Orleans romps (“Iko Iko”) to covers of what were now being called classic-rock songs (Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately,” Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy”). There were few surprises, which sometimes rankled Garcia. “There’s a certain amount of laziness,” Garcia would tell Rolling Stone later that year about the band’s repertoire during this time. But the ebullience that infused the 1987 and 1988 shows largely continued into the new year, and in Pittsburgh the crowd did hear a few new songs that had yet to appear on an album: Mydland and Barlow’s “We Can Run” and a relatively new Hunter-Garcia song, “Foolish Heart.”
By now a new generation of devoted Deadheads had begun following them gig to gig, town to town, and Dan Ross, who had a ticket for both Pittsburgh shows, embodied that new breed. Born the year the Skull and Roses (Grateful Dead) album was released, Ross was raised in the Detroit suburbs. In the early eighties a friend had given him an unwanted copy of Dead Set, and even though Ross was more inclined toward punk bands like the Dead Kennedys and the Misfits, he was captivated by the Dead; because his father had served in Vietnam, both the culture and counterculture of the sixties resonated with the eighteen-year-old. And because the Dead were far from in vogue when he first discovered them, his classmates shunned Ross in some quarters, but his fascination with the band didn’t dim.
In April 1988 Ross finally made it to his first Dead show, at the Joe Louis Arena in St. Louis. He’d been to other concerts before, including one by Kiss, but his St. Louis experience was like none other. The crowd of strangers was uncommonly welcoming—to the point of dosing him—and he noticed how the crowd would erupt at even the tiniest of Garcia’s gestures. The interaction between band and fans was like nothing he’d seen. Arriving home, he was so stoked that he woke up his parents at two in the morning to tell them about it; they seemed happy, if sleepy.
Like many before—and many to come—Ross was immediately hooked on the band’s music, culture, and mythos. Deciding he had to attend every Dead show on their summer and fall tour that year, Ross, who was still in high school, made an unusual deal with his parents: if he maintained an honor-roll average for the remainder of the academic year, his mother would give the school her approval for him to miss certain days in the spring. His parents would also put aside $60 a week, which he’d receive if he maintained that average. (He eventually used that money to support himself as he followed the Dead around for every tour from then on.) Ross graduated on time but couldn’t attend the ceremony; the Dead were playing that night in Fo
xboro, Massachusetts. When he stopped by his school later on to pick up his diploma, a teacher asked where he’d been. “Dead show,” he said. “Yeah,” the teacher shrugged, knowingly.
Ross wasn’t a “Touchhead”—a derogatory term old-timers used for those fans who’d never heard of the Dead until their radio-welcomed hit—nor was he a grizzled veteran. To demonstrate he wasn’t a newbie, he quickly adapted to the unwritten rules of how to behave at Dead shows: no gate crashing, no scalping, no dosing without the consent of the person about to get dosed, and no sneaking ahead in line for shows at the same venue the following nights. “It was basically the same behavior you would expect or condone in any other community,” he recalls. “Be a good neighbor.”
Those rules were still in effect and honored, but a new, less informed swarm was beginning to descend upon Dead shows. MTV initiated the rush with its “Day of the Dead” broadcast in the summer of 1987 as part of the promotional push for In the Dark. With its footage of partying, tie-dyed fans in parking lots (and the implied message of vast quantities of drugs in the vicinity), the show sent out an intractable message: Come here and party, even if you don’t know much about this band or its history. As Steve Marcus of the Dead’s ticket office says, “It was the beginning of the end.”
Initially the influx of new followers didn’t faze the band, who rarely if ever ventured out into the crowd once they were ensconced in the belly of the arena beast. “We became immensely popular, and from what I could see, our popularity jumped by 20 percent,” Weir has said. “We were already taking venue security into account before In the Dark. People were crashing fences and stuff. People were getting hurt. We had to be very careful the way we plotted our moves to avoid trouble. And when we had a hit record suddenly with In the Dark it had the potential to take us into a fairly troublesome space. But we were already so well versed at handling crowd situations that it wasn’t much of a blow.”
During this initial wave of mainstream popularity comical sights abounded: the lawyer in the three-piece suit who zipped into the parking lot at RFK stadium in his BMW, all the while screaming at his female companion about the judge who’d kept him in court too long and made him late for the show. Jumping out of the car, he yanked off his vest and jacket, revealing a tie-dyed T-shirt underneath; popping open his trunk, he pulled out shorts and flip-flops. Instantly he became a Deadhead, making Don Henley’s lyric from several years earlier—“I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac”—come to life. Meanwhile Candelario would hear from Deadheads who’d begun monitoring his every move on stage as he and the crew set up, which he found odd and unnerving.
As amusing as such moments were to those who worked with the Dead, they also portended an invasion for which no one was fully prepared. In 1988 the Dead played three shows in Hartford, but the people who camped out at Bushnell Park left it a paper-clogged mess. Although plastic bags had been distributed to help clean up the trash, few were used. The next day Jim Koplik, the local promoter, received a call from the Hartford city council, which banned the Dead from the city. (Memories of a 1975 riot at a Dead show there, where five thousand fans tried to barrel into a show that wasn’t even sold out, were still dogging them.) The city publicly ordered the Dead to pay for cleanup. The Dead refused, but privately the band forked over $2,500 in the form of a donation to Bushnell Park, thereby putting a good face on an ugly situation. The Dead would eventually play Hartford again, but not until several years of income had been lost at one of their most profitable venues.
By the time the Dead were preparing to go onstage the first night in Pittsburgh, Deadheads had already been camping out near the Civic Arena. Police reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette began hearing about cops growing increasingly anxious and infuriated by fans who’d begun setting up tents in vacant lots in the adjacent Hill District, a poor and drug-addled area to begin with. Tensions were gradually escalating, and the traffic cops patrolling the Deadheads were a special, aggressive breed at the time, down to their black leather jackets and boots—“fucking storm troopers, and they dressed like them,” recalls one Post-Gazette reporter. The situation hardly seemed rosy, but then the Civic Arena had hosted hundreds of rock shows before this, including the Dead’s, with few incidents.
The guest lists at Dead shows reflected their newfound roles as mainstream outlaws. Walter Cronkite, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, various members of the Saturday Night Live cast—the range of guests revealed their growing range of followers. After John Kennedy Jr. worked as a ranch-hand at Barlow’s Bar Cross ranch in Wyoming, he and his sister, Caroline, attended at least one Dead show (the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1978), and John took a seat next to Weir at one band after-show dinner. Jill Larson, one of the stars of the soap opera All My Children, was invited to sit onstage after one of the Dead and his wife took a tour of the set of the show. (Before she had a chance to compliment Garcia on Cherry Garcia, the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor, one of the crew warned Larson not to mention it—something about it was still a sore point.) At a later ’90s show, Bralove looked over and saw, next to him, Tipper Gore (then wife of Vice President Al) and a retinue of Secret Service agents; Al himself was on the other side of the stage. The Dead’s long, strange trip was only becoming stranger.
At a show at the Forum in Los Angeles early in 1989 a familiar face, partly covered by a hoodie, was wandering in the back of the hall—Bob Dylan. When Dylan had toured with the band about two years earlier the results had a certain oil-and-water quality (although the Dead’s own sets were largely stellar), and the live album that came from it, Dylan and the Dead, was so anticlimactic (especially compared to the looser rehearsal tapes of the Dead and Dylan at Front Street) that Arista didn’t fight when Dylan’s label, Columbia, wanted it. “Columbia insisted that the album be on Columbia, and I remember not being disappointed,” says Lott. “We could have gotten into it—‘You can’t have the Dead’—but I didn’t think much of the album, and we were coming off a high with ‘Touch of Grey.’” In the crowd at the Forum Dylan spotted Debbie Gold, the friend of the Dead who’d also worked for him and was wading through the crowd. “Take me to Jerry!” he said. As she led him up to the stage, Dylan enthused, “I get to play ‘Dire Wolf!’” He wound up sitting in with them for more than one song, playing guitar alongside them but never singing. Even knowing Dylan, the Dead were baffled; during the intermission one of them wondered what the hell was happening. According to Dead legend, Dylan called the Fifth and Lincoln office the Monday after the show and asked whether he could join the band, but at least one member of the Dead nixed the idea—assuming it was even a serious one to begin with on Dylan’s part.
By now the backstage area was also filled with a few new family members. In his limo one day in the middle of 1987 Garcia broke some news to driver Leon Day. “He said, ‘I guess I’m fathering a child,’” Day recalls. “I said, ‘You guess you are? You don’t know? What are you doing about it?’ He said, ‘Well, it would be nice to know the kid’s okay.’”
That night Day met the mother, Manasha Matheson, a Deadhead who, by coincidence, had grown up in Englishtown, New Jersey, the site of the Dead’s mammoth 1977 show. As a child Matheson had played in the same field where the show was held and even attended the concert herself as a teenager. (Even before the Raceway Park show her first Dead experience was at the 1973 Watkins Glen extravaganza, where she says she was struck by the “sound and clarity” of Garcia’s guitar.) Matheson had met Garcia in a roundabout way. While she was studying abroad at Oxford, by way of her own Chicago school, Shimer College, a friend attended a Dead show in Illinois in 1977 and brought Garcia a pumpkin with a playful note inside that read, “Manasha says hi.”
The following year Matheson was back in the States at Shimer and preparing to see the Dead at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago. Before the show she’d been listening to Terrapin Station while working on figure-drawing sketches when a friend visited, holding a topographic map of Illinois. “I noticed an area ca
lled Terrapin Ridge,” she says. “As serendipity would have it, Jerry’s voice came through the stereo speaker at that moment singing, ‘The compass always points to Terrapin.’” Matheson tucked the map and some red roses into a carved-out pumpkin she’d bought from a farmer, took it to the Uptown, and, walking up to the stage just as the show was beginning, presented it to Garcia. “It made him smile,” she says. “He thanked me and gently put the pumpkin on his amp.” By way of a pal of Hart’s, she and a friend met Garcia the next day at his hotel. After talking about Catholicism, among other topics, Matheson said to him, “I think you are a saint.” Garcia chuckled and replied, “How are you defining ‘saint’?” Despite their nearly twenty-year age differences, the two had certain things in common: Matheson’s father was a clarinetist, like Garcia’s dad, and thanks to her parents, Matheson was interested in visual arts in much the way Garcia was.
By the mid-eighties Matheson was living in California and working at a health food store in Fairfax in Marin County. When she heard about Garcia’s coma, she hitchhiked to the hospital; there she met Hunter, who, she says, told her Garcia was “drifting in and out” and that she shouldn’t see him in that condition. When Garcia woke up from his coma she heard he’d evoked her name. During his recovery Garcia called her at her parents’ house in New Jersey and asked her to come back to California, sending her a plane ticket so she could visit him in Los Angeles (where he was working on the So Far long-form video). Although he and Mountain Girl were living together at his apartment on Hepburn Heights in San Rafael, Matheson and Garcia went to the Dead’s Easter weekend shows in Irvine before returning to Marin. By the Dead’s summer tour the two were a couple.
