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One result is that the fans, knowing nothing important to the contrary, can go on assuming that the Dead live in a warm, funky, '60s time warp that has not really changed since the days when they jammed at the Acid Test roisterings of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Playing in a rock band for 20 years is probably a good way of staying in a time warp, and if the legs go first, as with boxers and third basemen, you do not pick guitar with your toes. But the stranger truth is that the Dead Heads have a '60s warp of their own. While most of the band members are now well into their 40s, not many of the Dead Heads are as old as 35, and at least half are in their teens, far too young to remember much about the era of "tune in, turn on, drop out." Yet in their pot-fuzzed peacefulness and in their costumes--tie-dyed T shirts, headbands, out-at-the-knee jeans, granny dresses--they resemble a lost battalion of hippies.
Some of the Dead Heads in San Francisco had been to nearly all 60-odd of the shows in 1984, which meant that following the Dead around the country was what they had accomplished for the year. Such wandering is considered not goofing | off but commitment. There were yuppies, who had flown out from New York and paid their fares with plastic. But the stoniest of the pilgrims followed their quest in the elderly bread vans and decommissioned school buses painted with rust primer and furnished with curtains and the kind of mattresses that are chucked under lampposts at 3 a.m. On their windows were stickers showing skulls or tap-dancing skeletons, talismanic to the Dead.
Dead Heads earn gas money to rattle from concert to concert by selling each other T shirts, and this activity took place in a small park near the auditorium. No camping was allowed, but neither the Heads nor the local police considered all-night snoozing on the park's wooden benches to be camping. (Dead Heads, who are apolitical, do not seem to enrage police as hippies did.) By the time the midday sun had warmed the bones of the park-bench bivouackers, the park had become a street fair. T shirts were on sale, decorated with tie-dyed spiral nebulas, skulls and roses (another important symbol to the Dead, who have more symbols than the Elks or the Masons). So were incense, posters, illuminated sweatpants, fly whisks for easy tropical living and magic cookies. "How magic?" the vendor was asked. "Magic enough to get you very high," she said with an encouraging smile.
The pervasive fog of drugs is the dark side of the Dead Heads' exceptional amiability. There is no thuggery here, as there can be in other rock crowds, no feeling of physical menace. Dead Heads cherish stories of Dead niceness. Kathleen from New Hampshire says that last fall at Augusta, Me., she was stopped at the door when someone sold her a counterfeit Dead ticket. She was sitting outside the hall, crying, when a stranger came up and gave her a real ticket, and a rose. But drug burnout is a problem among these nice people. Keep your ears open just before a concert and you hear an LSD vendor saying, "Trips, trips," without moving his mouth. "Yeah," says Monica from Santa Monica, Calif., a pale 20-year-old who looks 14. "My girlfriend was using acid, and she couldn't stop dancing at the end of one concert. They had to bring her down with Valium." There was another girl who was biting people.