[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 126 (Tuesday, August 1, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H8139-H8141]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1745
DEADHEADS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Metcalf). Under a previous order of the
House, the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Duncan] is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, as some people here know, I spent 7\1/2\
years as a criminal court judge in Tennessee trying felony criminal
cases, the burglaries, the rapes, the armed robberies, the murder
cases, the drug cases, the most serious cases. As everyone can imagine,
I saw many very sad things during those years. However, one of the
saddest cases involved what was then, and may still be, the biggest
drug case every to hit the city of Knoxville.
Four young people brought 72,000 hits of LSD from California and were
arrested in a raid at the Hilton Hotel. One of the four was a very
beautiful young woman, just 1 month past her 18th birthday. She
testified that she started with marijuana in the 7th grade, and because
she handled that with no problem, she went on to cocaine in the 9th
grade and heroin in the 10th grade. She then left home and started
following a band called the Grateful Dead. She became part of a
subculture called the Deadheads.
They used her for a couple of years or so until she ran out of money
in California and started living on the beach and having to beg for
money and beg for food.
Then she got involved in selling drugs. She came to Knoxville, got
caught and had to spend 12 years of a nonprobatable sentence in the
Tennessee Penitentiary for Women.
After she was arrested, she found out she was pregnant, and she had
twins which were delivered while she was incarcerated and had to be
turned over to the State of Connecticut where she was originally from.
I became horrified from what I heard from those young people about
how their lives were ruined when they became attracted to this band,
the Grateful Dead, and became part of this horrible subculture called
the Deadheads. So you can imagine how interested I was when I picked up
Sunday's Washington Post and read on the front page of the Outlook
section of a column, an article, a lengthy article entitled
``UnGrateful Deadheads, My Long, Strange Trip Through a Tie-Dyed
Hell,'' by Carolyn Ruff.
I wanted to read just a portion of this article because there may be
some people here tonight or some parents who are listening whose young
people are attracted to things like this. I do this sort of as
hopefully a warning for these young people to get some help. Carolyn
Ruff wrote this:
She jumped from a window of a seedy motel on Market Street
in San Francisco. From a room full of Deadheads she
considered to be her family, she climbed out onto the ledge
and then took one more step forward. No one made any attempt
to stop her. I was on the street below and to this day remain
thankful I was looking the other way. I don't even remember
her name anymore. I suspect few remember her at all.
We met at a Grateful Dead show in North Carolina. It was
the end of the Dead's fall tour of 1989, I had just completed
my first full tour and she had finished what would be her
last. She was a bright, beautiful runaway from a loveless
home in Pittsburgh. Like many of the hundreds on the tour,
she was attracted to the scene around the Grateful Dead as
much as the band itself. In the Deadheads, she thought she
saw family.
When we saw each other again a few months later in Miami, I
was shocked by her mental deterioration. She rambled gravely
about how her closest friends had stolen her clothes and her
money. She shamefully recounted having sex with men in
exchange for food and drugs. She had lice in her hair. She
was hungry, lonely, miserable. Another Deadhead suggested
that she medicate with acid to cleanse the dark thoughts from
her head, and then swim in the ocean to rinse the black film
on her soul. This home remedy failed and a young life was
lost within months of our meeting.
I continue to read from this column from the Washington Post, as
Carolyn Ruff put it this past Sunday:
Contrary to the image laid out by the Deadheads themselves,
life on tour these
[[Page H8140]]
days is far from peace, love and smiles. Capitalism, greed and betrayal
would be more apt descriptions.
In my seven years as a devoted Deadhead including two spent
touring the country, I came to take for granted that people
would steal from a friend's backpack and rationalize their
actions. I saw friends sleep with other friends' partners. I
saw young women sexually assaulted after being unwittingly
dosed with acid. I saw someone give a friend's dog acid just
to watch it lose it mind. I saw people stranded in a strange
city because their friends were impatient to hit the road. I
saw people trash their friends motel rooms, knowing that they
would not be held responsible for the damage.
With no legal system within the Deadhead culture, these
injustices go unchallenged.
I do not have time, tonight, Mr. Speaker, to read this entire
article. But I do commend the Washington Post for writing this and
Carolyn Ruff for bringing this horrible subculture of the Deadheads to
the attention of so many people.
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article to which I
referred.
[From the Washington Post, July 30, 1995]
The Ungrateful Deadheads
my long, strange trip through a tie-dyed hell
(By Carolyn Ruff)
She jumped from a window of a seedy motel on market Street
in San Francisco. From a room full of Deadheads she
considered to be her family, she climbed out onto the ledge
and then took one more step forward. No one made any attempt
to stop her. I was on the street below and to this day remain
thankful I was looking the other way. I don't even remember
her name anymore. I suspect few remember her at all.
We met at a Grateful Dead show in North Carolina. It was
the end of the Dead's fall tour in 1989. I had just completed
my first full tour and she had finished what would be her
last. She was a bright, beautiful runaway from a loveless
home in Pittsburgh. Like many of the hundreds on the tour,
she was attracted to the scene around the Grateful Dead as
much as the band itself. In the Deadheads, she thought she
saw family.
When we saw each other again a few months later in Miami, I
was shocked by her mental deterioration. She rambled gravely
about how her closest friends had stolen her clothes and her
money. She shamefully recounted having sex with men in
exchange for food and drugs. She had lice in her hair. She
was hungry, lonely, miserable. Another Deadhead suggested
that she medicate with acid to cleanse the dark thoughts from
her head, and then swim in the ocean to rinse the black film
on her soul. This home remedy failed and a young life was
lost within months of our meeting.
That indecent occurred five years ago, but recent headlines
surrounding the Grateful Dead have taken me back to that time
and to my own days on tour. As the itinerant band celebrates
an astonishing 30 years on tour, it has been dogged by
misfortune--lightning struck fans earlier this summer at RFK
Stadium in Washington, several dozen people were arrested
outside a Dead concert in Albany and for the first time in
three decades, a scheduled concert was canceled in Indiana
for fear of crowd violence. None of this can be directly
attributed to the band itself, but the incidents are
nonetheless beginning to expose a darker, more malevolent
side of the Grateful Dead milieu. Contrary to the image laid
out by the Deadheads themselves, life on tour these days is
far from peace, love and smiles. Capitalism, greed and
betrayal would be more apt descriptions.
Today's Deadheads wear the tie-dyed costumes of a past
generation but aren't propelled by the same sense of moral
rebellion. If bygone Deadheads were protesting war and social
strife, today's seem only to be dissenters from real-world
monotony. Unfortunately, like many of my generation's
discontents, they are cynical, savy and unhappy with their
lives.
In my seven years as a devoted Deadhead--including two
spent touring the country--I came to take for granted that
people would steal from a friend's backpack and rationalize
their actions. I saw friends sleep with other friends'
partners. I saw young women sexually assaulted after being
unwittingly dosed with acid. I saw someone give a friend's
dog acid just to watch it lose its mind. I saw people
stranded in a strange city because their friends were
impatient to hit the road. I saw people trash their friends'
motel rooms, knowing that they would not be held responsible
for the damage.
With no legal system within the Deadhead culture, these
injustices go unchallenged. Thankfully, violent acts of
retribution have been few, but who knows if it will someday
come to that? The common reaction when this sort of incident
occurs is to get a bit meaner, shrewder and make a plan to do
it back to someone else. Eventually. I came to dislike the
music of the Dead because of the association I made between
the band and its followers.
It would be unfair to imply that all of those on tour
engage in such loathsome behavior. There are many who revel
in the shows and demonstrate respect not just for their
fellow Tourheads but for the cities they visit. Their sole
desire is to immerse themselves in the music and peacefully
co-exist with others who feel the same. But the dominant
culture is not so sanguine.
In an attempt to escape the society they so disdain, the
Deadheads have created a world underpinned by the same
materialism and greed. Whether it be overpricing their wares
or selling crack and ecstasy, the looming specter of
capitalism rules supreme, and it is every bit as ruthless as
that of the American mainstream.
Newcomers naive enough to think otherwise quickly have
their misconceptions dispelled. I met quite a few 14- and 15-
year-old kids who came to tour without a penny and thought
they could turn to other Deadheads for support. Somehow, they
thought money didn't hold the same relevance that it does
elsewhere. But unless you're a Trustfund Deadhead, sustained
by the family fortune, everyone needs a scheme. Selling
veggie sandwiches is one option, as is hawking jewelry or
clothing. To make these business go, some Deadheads trek to
Central America between tours to buy the Guatemalan jewelry
and garb so
popular among Dead followers. Others make their own products
to sell. And with a steady flow of suburban kids who have
the cash to spend on a $5 tofu burger and a $20 T-shirt,
these entrepreneurs have an ideal location at Dead shows.
But these business ventures take a level of initiative and
planning beyond what most Tourheads are willing to expend.
More typically, people make just enough money to cover food,
lodging, their concert ticket and enough gas to get to the
next city. If you are not good at selling or at least
scamming, you will not make it on tour. Many Deadheads, while
professing distrust and disdain for the government, make it
by accepting food stamps and other public hand-outs. A walk
down the streets of Berkeley or San Francisco, a popular hub
of between-tour activity, is evidence enough that many
Tourheads are also adept at panhandling, although this is not
a profitable choice for survival.
The drug trade is also an easy and rather lucrative route
to sustenance. With perseverance, one can usually find
suppliers of acid, mushrooms or ecstasy to resell, and the
rising popularity of crack and heroin on tour is opening up
new markets. There is the nuisance of undercover agents from
the Drug Enforcement Administration, to say nothing of fellow
Deadhead narcs, but this can add an element of excitement to
a new career--which for today's Deadheads is a tonic in
itself.
My initiation to the Grateful Dead came in 1986 and
coincided with the band's resurgence back then. I was in
college and had been more interested in the Clash and Flipper
than wearing bells on my shoes and tie-dyeing every white
shirt I owned. But after going to a few shows I grew
enchanted, with the band and with the hordes of colorfully
attired people who seemed like happy children at recess. I
worked every conceivable retail job to finance my indulgence,
choosing positions where there was little commitment. With
the money I had saved and the cushion of a few credit cards,
I was able to traverse the country with relative financial
security. It also helped that I had family that, though
preferring I settle down and get a job, made clear that I
could rely on them if things got desperate.
It might have been different had I joined the tour earlier.
One retired Tourhead who requests anonymity for fear of
losing a respectable job says the late 1980s ushered in a
more amoral environment. ``The demise of the Dead scene began
in 1987 when going to shows became like going to some sort of
pop scene,'' says this ex-Deadhead who himself was eventually
scared away by the violence. He blames alcohol abuse for what
he sees as an increased incidence of fighting, show-crashing
and other disruptive behavior.
Today's version of tour is a mockery of what the original
Dead followers created. There is an attempt to form family
units, but too often they aren't bound together by loyalty
and trust. The members travel together, bunk together and,
theoretically, provide the love and support that one might
bestow on a relative. And, to a degree, there is a sense of
sharing: In spurts of generosity, one person or a few will
support the others by buying the gas or paying for the motel
room. But typically this generosity is born of necessity--
everybody else is broke.
Rarely do the relationships that develop transcend each
person's own selfishness. Usually, the break occurs over
money--someone feels they've been cut out of a drug deal, or
grows tired of supporting a parasitic family member.
To survive on tour, it helps to have emotions encased in
steel. Courtesy is not mandatory and verbal assaults, rude
comments and sexist remarks are common in the course of a
motel room conversation. People refer to each other freely as
``sister'' or ``brother'' but there was rarely the
accompanying intimacy. Practically everyone goes by a
nickname--Woodstock, Scooter, Zeus, Rainbow, Jinx. Often, I
never knew people's real first names, and rarely did I know
their last. There was a degree of secrecy which supposedly
stemmed from a paranoia of the law, but sometimes I wondered
whether going by a fake name among friends was just a way of
preventing anyone from getting too close.
So what's the beauty of it all? The question for many on
tour is probably: What's the alternative?
``There is this core group of Tourheads who have dropped
out of society and their only alternative is to follow the
Dead,'' says Jill, another former Deadhead. These people live
[[Page H8141]]
for tour to resume each season, but quickly grow disgusted. They boast
of making enough money from the present tour to buy that land
in Oregon and settle down. But more typically their money is
blown on lavish hotel rooms, expensive meals, beer and drugs.
Strung out and broke, they're left scrambling for someone to
support them until tour begins again.
And so a cycle evolves: Many may want to try a new life but
have become ensnared in the tour culture. Financially, they
know no other way to make money other than selling wares on
tour. Socially, whether they truly like them or not, the
people on tour are the only friends they have. Alienated and
fearful of what the real world is about, they settle into
what they know best: The Dead.
Every time there is a scare that the Dead may stop touring,
I find myself worrying about the lost souls who know nothing
else but the parallel world of the Grateful Dead. Many are
talented and have skills adaptable to the mainstream. It's
those who use the Dead simply as an escape who will have
difficulty adjusting to life without tour. Sadly, I cannot
picture their future.
They will surely endure the loss of the Dead's live
performances, but can they handle the end of tour? That
possibility seems ever more zeal with the current malaise
surrounding the band. As the amount of violence and police
confrontation has grown, so have concerns about how to
curtail it. A group calling itself Save Our Scene has formed
in an attempt to quash disruptive behavior. And through
newsletters and the Internet, band members have practically
begged their fans to clean up their act. If they don't, the
Dead will stop touring' or so they threaten.
In an open letter passed out to Deadheads at a recent St.
Louis show and later posted on the Internet, the Dead told
fans that ``over the past 30 years we've come up with the
fewest possible rules to make the difficult act of bringing
tons of people together work well--and a few thousand so-
called Dead Heads ignore these simple rules and screw it up
for you, us and everybody.''
Arguably, it is not the Tourheads who are responsible for
the bad behavior, but local kids who view the parking lot at
a Dead show as an invitation to party with complete abandon.
Tourheads can blame the less devoted concert-goers, but it is
these ``outsiders'' who buy the goods that sustain the
Tourheads lifestyle. And it is the Tourheads who have created
the atmosphere that is so appealing to revelers in the first
place.
The Dead went on to say, ``If you don't have a ticket,
don't come. This is real. This is a music concert, not a
free-for-all party.''
To me, the issue of blame isn't really relevant. The real
question is: How long did anyone think the party could last?
____________________