It was my first Dead and Company concert. It seemed to begin on the Number 7 Flushing bound train with thousands of Deadheads. I might have been the youngest person on that IRT car by forty years. At Willets Point in Queens, a rainbow mob flooded out of the subway like a school of tie-dyed sardines. Some looked like they could have just hopped off the Volkswagen bus from Woodstock; weed and chakra bowls in hand, they wore their flower crowns, long hair and ungroomed white beards with pride. Indeed, the 1960s counterculture survives and thrives on The Dead & Company Tour. This time, the Summer of Love receives a 21st century twist–the Beats and the hippies unite with tattooed, pink-haired millennials and graying middle aged Americans for one thing and one thing only: to groove to their favorite band.
Fieldston history and English teacher Bob Montera has been to around 250 Grateful Dead concerts over a fifty year span. “A Dead show begins when the tickets are announced, when you call your friends and the Deadhead parents of your students, when you get your tickets,” he describes. “It’s the weeks of talking about the show, finding out about their other shows, watching the postings on line, [and] making lists in your mind of what you think you will hear. It’s the journey to the hall or stadium.”
The first concert Bob went to with his daughter, Rose, was at Citi Field in 2015, the year Rose became a Deadhead and graduated from Fieldston. On this tour, however, they saw The Dead at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts on September 2nd. “Rosie helps me to see it all in its wonder and charm.” And that includes parking lot life.
Rosie told him she “wanted to see he wanted to see ‘the shakedown.’”
“The what?”
“The shakedown.”
“Like Shakedown Street? The Parking Lot?”
“Dad oh Dad.”
What used to be “the parking lot” or a “tailgate party” has become Shakedown Street.
The Citi Field parking lot is like a flea market on acid, or in the words of Bob Montera, a “transitory travelling village, almost like a medieval fair.”
Sophia Gutierrez (V), also attending a Dead show for the first time, sets the scene from the August 20 concert at Citifield: “Anything you could possibly want and need was available inside the trunks of colorful and charmingly decrepit VW vans and school buses parked in the legendary lot across from Citi Field–chakra balancings, homemade kombucha, every tye-dye combination imaginable, classic American barbeque style fare, an assortment of expertly crafted drug paraphernalia and all of the best dead songs blasting from speakers–which served as fuel for the anticipation of everyone to enter the stadium and get lost in one of those groovy 15 minute jams.” “There was even a tent set up by Fieldston students,” she observed.
There are bizarre happenings. “Rose was transfixed by a fellow standing but nodding out with a finger pointing to the heavens.”
‘What’s that?’
‘He needs a miracle….a free ticket….you will see them everywhere. And they usually get in.”
Thousands of people and dogs flock through an array of multicolored tents selling everything imaginable. Most vendors sell band merchandise–t-shirts, posters, tapestries and drug paraphernalia–bearing signature Grateful Dead art. The crowd wears their bears, lightning skulls, skeletons and roses like uniforms. If not Grateful Dead art, vendors sell other band art or cannabis leaf designs. Montera recounts how he “once sold ‘imported California dyes’ for a friend—-Makes me laugh to this day.”
Food vendors sell craft beers and cuisine from all over the world. A woman weaves her way through the crowd openly advertising her homemade edibles. Other lone dealers sell joints and mushroom brownies. All around, people are inhaling nitrous oxide from balloons and every few seconds, a pop pierces through the crowd.
Everyone at Shakedown Street seems to be friends. Whereas other tailgates may feel territorial, with different friend groups huddled around their respective vehicles and tents, there is a strong sense of community at this concert. Peace and love are in the air. Old friends run into each other and relive concerts from the past and strangers discuss their predictions for the setlist. It’s like “a village square, a ‘Fieldston quad’ where you link up with old friends.” “But remember,” Montera adds, “It’s only a prelude, a small set piece in something larger. It’s an appetizer. The music is the meal.”
“A Dead show is a generous and kind place, energizing and calming in equal parts. It always takes you by surprise and you find yourself lighter at the end of it. You learn to give more away in life and you give it away more freely.”
Bob signed off his account with a lyric from Truckin’: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
The Grateful Dead, for so many people, is a way of life–a distinct subculture frozen in time, and yet oddly alive and doing well with a new generation of jam band fans. At these concerts, modern conventions of fashion, behavior and music fade away into a slow, colorful jam.
