TOUR

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The posts that follow are the recanting of my experience with following the Grateful Dead, and the Rainbow Family gatherings I attended when I was in my early twenties. They are long posts. As I write this, it is still largely unwritten, but I think there is enough for right now. There will be more to come. Feel free to comment or ask questions or make fun of me, but at some point, i will be reorganizing the posts to maintain the story as a continuous stream of posts.

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Sometime in early summer, 1991, Shelby suggested that we go on tour following the Grateful Dead. We were at Marsh Creek State Park pool at the time, and at first, I didn’t think she was serious. The matter, however, did not drop. Plans were laid, extra jobs worked, money saved. Gina bought a blue 1972 VW microbus with the money she saved. I made a bench/cupboard to fit along the wall opposite the sliding door. Someone made yellow curtains, and we installed curtain rods to hang them from. Stylin’.

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My Mom was worried for me, and my Dad was upset. There was a whole scene at my house as my dad ( who was there to pick up my younger brother Todd for a visit) tried to talk me out of it at the last minute. At the end, he accepted that we would all be fine, and there was much rejoicing. We had been to multiple shows in summers past, and knew what we were in for. Heather and Jeremiah had some friends from California coming along, and Gina, Shelby, Terry, and I went in the VW. Heather and Jeremiah would follow in the lil’ blue Chevette, and Tony and Rachel in Tony’s beige Toyota pick up truck with cap.

I didn’t know Tony or Rachel at all, as they had only gotten into town a few days before we left to go to the first show. They were real life hippies. So was Jeremiah, for that matter. Heather was about the hippiest of the rest of us. Middle class white kids. Tony, Rachel, and Jeremiah had “different” upbringings, and their mannerisms were noticeably different. Jeremiah had lived on various communes, Tony had grown up on the beach in Ca, and Rachel was only 15 and pregnant. Noticeably pregnant.

We decided on sleeping arrangements in the bus, divided up storage space, and filled the cupboard with rice and beans. Then Gina bought the Trunk. Aquamarine with brass corners, cheap masonite trunk. Why a trunk? Because her clothes had to be neat and unwrinkled. As we left to travel the country for an undefined period of time. She was an Ironing nut. Naturally, the only place the trunk would fit was on the floor, right where you open the sliding door to get in and out. So, for the next few months we would step over the trunk. Fine. Gina got her way most of the time. I was pretty oblivious to this for some reason, but it made Shelby see red, and as I would find out, she could only stand so much of that kind of thing.

Shelby and I bought new backpacks from I.Goldberg, and a nice new 4 man tent for the two of us. We had a propane stove, pots and pans, can openers, Frisbees, hackey-sacks, cards, beads in beadboxes, some leather, some crystals, and all kinds of shit in that bus.

The best part about the bus was that it was manual transmission, and Gina could barely drive it. She had to look the part, though, so whenever we were arriving to a destination, or departing, she insisted on driving. And almost every time, there were long awkward periods when Gina would wrestle with the shifter, buck and stall the van, curse, and eventually gain control of the beast. She held up traffic in Pittsburgh on an off ramp though 3 or 4 cycles of the green light. Shelby had to physically remove her from the drivers seat and get the van going. Gina pouted for a while. She was cute. Most of the time she was fun to be around, and very sweet, but certain things had to be just so

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the day before we departed:

JIM TERRY GINA SHELBY

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We left in late afternoon on day in early September headed for Richfield, OH. I don’t think I got in to the concert that day. Some one did, though because I can remember waiting outside while the concert was happening and playing hackeysack under the lights. At one point, Jeremiah ( who was extremely recognizable even in silhouette because of his Muppet like dread locks) came wandering over looking lost and afraid. He had taken too much acid, and was seeing dinosaurs. Unreal.

On to New York. MSG. We got there the morning of the first of nine shows, found a parking spot under a bridge, and set out to find tickets. It was cold and windy for early September. We hung out in Greenwich Village for a while; I watched a guy hurdling multiple trash cans on his roller blades. In a drug store, a lady spit on another customer who attempted to butt in line. “I’m on line here!”

Show time approached, and we had just one ticket. If you’ve ever been to a Grateful Dead concert, you may have noticed people holding their finger up in the air yelling “I need a Miracle!”. This means “ I want you to give me your extra ticket for free”. It is seen to be a considerable karma rich investment of good will to participate in this practice and “miracling” some random Dead Head can do wonders for your sense of self esteem. We were planning to be there for all nine shows, so we weren’t panicking about getting in that first night. Nonetheless, we all managed to get free tickets from the crowd coming in that had extras. “miracles” The show was just ok. I didn’t like the venue very much. So we decided that the city was not for us, and since we had all seen them, we would drive up to Woodstock and camp instead of staying and trying to get into the other 8 shows.

We found a really nice little campground with a lake and showers, and restrooms. We camped for 4 days during which, Terry sang compulsively. He sung poorly but enthusiastically. He also had a penchant for hollering out of car windows at strangers. You learn about people when you live in a microbus with them. Woodstock was a tourist trap.

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Every shop front window in Woodstock has tie-dye clothing and stickers in them, but when you go inside, they are all selling New York designer clothing. The shop keeper did not seem surprised to see a couple hippies wander in, look around, and walk out shaking their heads. We met a few interesting people almost immediately. Apparently there are a number of leftover hippies that have gravitated to the area, and stayed. We met a freaked out old black hippie named Lincoln, who introduced us to a house full of freaks just off of the main strip. There was a 40-ish yr old fat guy wearing a wifebeater t-shirt that would sing “MY God’s better than YOUR god!” repeatedly at intervals during our visit. There was a girl, who’s name escapes me, that had jet black hair in some bizarre fashion that I also disremember, as I was too focused on the many hoop earrings that adorned the various parts of her face. Three or four in her lips, a couple in her eyebrows, nose, obviously, ears, etc…. I think she said she had 29 in her face. This was 1991, remember. First time I’d seen something like that outside of National Geographic. She wore a Lilac dress with big black combat boots. It was an unreal and dreamlike afternoon. The house had that strange filtered lighting of late afternoon, when the sun comes in at an angle that lights up all of the dust in the air, and it seems to sparkle. It is an image that has stayed with me here twelve years later. The week we stayed in that campground was thoroughly enjoyable, and we had a good time gathering firewood, washing our pots, making tea, and playing hackey sack. I think we all dosed one night , and walked down to the lake and got all freaked out, but memories of times when I was tripping are elusive. Time passed quickly, and soon the Boston dates approached.

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We had van trouble on the way, and Gina’s dad knew a mechanic in a town on the north side of bean town. So we went to see him, and he was able to help out with I don’t remember what kind of repair. We spent a night in the van out in front of the garage. It was cold. Before the show, we stopped at a local grocery store, and loaded up on bagels, cream cheese, veggies, and plastic baggies. We made bagel sandwiches with cream cheese, apples red onion, and whatever else looked good. It cost us about $25 for the supplies to make 48 sandwiches, and we sold most of them for $2 a piece. Sometimes we gave them away, and we ate a little bit of the profits, too, but it generally paid for parking and gas to the next destination, with enough left to reload for the next show.

Bitchin Veggie Bagels. I wrote that on the front of the cardboard flat I sold them out of, and the name caught on. I had repeat customers. “ Hey, there’s the Bitchin Veggie Bagel Guy!” We hung out on the sidewalks out in front of the Boston Gardens. There was an over pass that had parking under it, and there were rows and rows of tailgaters, vendors, and locals partying. A festival. The main strip where the big vendors set up their camps was always called “Shakedown Street” You could see yards of tie die clothes, Guatemalan clothes, crystals, beads, drums, various kinds of food like Falafel, and soy bean burgers, and all manner of hippie regalia. I preferred to walk around with my little box. We stayed around Boston for five nights and I didn’t even get in once. Whatever. That wasn’t the whole point. It would have been nice, but we had a good time just hanging about. One of the show dates was on a weekend night, and at one point the cops rode their motorcycles up the sidewalks to clear them off. Someone got slammed into a plate glass window and cracked it. The cops were being unnecessarily physical, and they came very close to running over people with that stunt. As soon as they left, the sidewalks filled right back up anyway. Stupid bastards.

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At night, we had to leave the underpass parking spot, so we decided to park and sleep in a nearby subway station parking lot one night. It was raining it’s ass off, so we draped a tarp over the raised hatch doors of the van and Tony’s pick up truck. There were some friends from home along for the weekend shows, and all eight of us in the two vehicles. One of our friends from home, Dan, who was Gina’s on again off again boyfriend, had come up and met us after he went to the show. Heather had scored a nugget of Kindbud from a head named Darcy, and we were smoking it in Dan’s ceramic dry bong. I had not had any pot for a couple of weeks due to budgetary constraints, and the first hit I took almost made my lungs collapse. I was in the back of the van and, as I said it was raining really hard. Out the window of the van, I see two police cars coming down the street toward the lot we’re in. One of them turns in to the first entrance, and the second loops around to the opposite side. Uh oh. I reacted. I jumped out of the van (visualizing the scene from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and hoping the rain would obscure the cloud of pot smoke that must have come out with me) and trotted over to the cop’s car with a big smile and a friendly look.
“Hi! Is it alright if we park here overnight?” I said
The cop looked me over ( I was dressed like a circus performer, I’m sure) chuckled, and said, “ I don’t have any problem with it, but your on the transit Cop’s turf, and it’s their call. We were called about the odor of marijuana emanating from the area. You know anything about that?”
“Well, yeah, there was a white Subaru parked right over there when we got here a few minutes ago, and it was smellin’ pretty skunky” I said.
The cop didn’t want to get out of his car, I could tell. “ How was the show?” he asked.
“Oh, we didn’t get in. Our tickets are for tomorrow night, but we had hoped to get in tonight too.”
The cop mumbled something in his CB and the other car started to roll away. “Ok, you kids be careful, and have fun tomorrow”

Whew. What an adrenaline rush that was. From that point forward, during this tour, I was encumbered with the title of “PR Man” and the responsibilities that came with it. I learned to be the one to approach authority and seek approval for something that it was within that particular authority figure’s power to grant, and guide the conversation away from whatever I was trying to slip by them. I felt like if we were upfront and nice, and polite, the Cop was more at ease and less suspicious. There were several close calls like that narrowly averted search of our vehicle, and subsequent arrest on drug charges. Man, when I think about how close we came how many times, I can’t believe it.

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After the shows had finished in Boston, we stopped in to visit our friend Dan’s relatives who lived nearby in Connecticut. We all showered, and slept fully stretched out for the first time in too long. In a house. Strange how good a thick carpeted floor feels to sleep on after sleeping bent up in a van for a few weeks. We had a REAL breakfast, and then we headed for Woodstock again. The Dead’s next show wasn’t until the end of October, and as it was September 27th, we had some time to kill. So, we headed back to camp in that campground. We spent another week camping there, but it started raining and didn’t stop. By the third day, we decided to take up an offer of hospitality that someone had garnered and connected with a couple that lived in Kingston, which was only about a half hour south of Woodstock. I don’t remember the people’s names whose house we stayed in that night, but I do remember that they had a pit bull. A nice one named Delilah. Very affectionate, but very strong. The next morning, in talking to our hosts, we found out that it was really, really easy to get food stamps in this town. I was resistant to the idea, having been raised to earn my own, but Heather, Jeremiah, and Rachel had all done it before, and it was a great way to get some food in your belly. So I went along with them. We wore dirty clothes, and I’m sure we stunk to high Heaven. There were a couple of brief interviews, and within about an hour and a half, we walked out of that office with something like $300 in food stamps, with more available if we were still in New York in two weeks. To the Grocery store!! I felt very guilty when I was paying for that food with food stamps that I didn’t deserve. But I was hungry. Time to begin the second phase of our trip.

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Enter Rainbow Family. The Rainbow Family is like a roving commune. Rainbow people go from gathering to gathering for most of the warm months of the year. A gathering is like a mass campout. There are often many smaller gatherings happening simultaneously throughout the Summer in different parts of the country, and there are “National Gatherings” which are more planned and advertised and draw as many as 10,000 people. The layout of the gathering depends largely on the location. There are typically several “Kitchens” that are maintained by volunteers throughout the gathering. They are large central campfires set up for cooking, and sitting around socializing. Some with ovens for baking, some with huge stew pots, some with a nice grill. The evening meal is eaten in a huge “circle” in the main gathering area (usually a field) and people stand up and talk to the gathering about whatever is on their mind. Oft times, there are prayers made to the earth and sun led by what we came to recognize as “Super Hippies”. These were the self appointed and very impressive people that spent the bulk of their time at the gathering organizing and leading, and being very important. They had been in Rainbow Family for a long time, some even being born into it (Rainbow Family has roots in colonial American time) . They were, in fact, very important participants at these gatherings, as hippies tend to need direction in order to accomplish things like gathering firewood, supplying the group with potable water, digging shitters, etc. There were several other types of people at these gatherings which I unconsciously categorized in my mind as one type of hippie or another. There were the Bums, who were real life bums that had caught wind of the Rainbow Family, and realized that they would be fed and usually transported if they could make friends and help out a bit with chores. “Happy” was the first of those we met. Then there were the “Wing Nuts”. They were crazy. Really. And they all seemed attracted to me for some reason. They’d be magnetized to wherever I was and invariably begin to tell me some of the most bizarre and disturbing things I had heard at that stage in my life. And there were “tweakers” that had an agenda to promote. They’d preach to you or the group you were with if you walked too close to them. There were also a lot of really, really cool people that made the gathering a life changing event. The first gathering we attended was in Shawnee Forest, in Shawnee, Illinois.

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Heather, Shelby and Gina had been to a Rainbow gathering the previous year in Sept Isles, Quebec (and one shortly following that in Woodstock, NY.). It was a National Gathering and there were thousands of people there. Shawnee was to be a smaller gathering. By the time it was in stride, there were only 100-150 people at this one. Imagine a field party without the kegs and the band. For two weeks. We arrived after dark, and there was a very confusing scene as other people were also arriving and spilling out of their cars and milling about. Selecting a campsite was quite interesting. Somehow, though we managed to set up in an ideal spot that was private, and yet just a short walk from where the main kitchen ended up being. The first thing I remember about the next morning was people’s voices through the trees calling, “Welcome Home!” to each other. And when we all got our selves together, and made our way to the kitchen, we got the same greeting. Introductions all around, “Would you like some tea?” We had breakfast with them, and then got busy stocking our camp with dead timber for our own campfire. These two weeks stand out in my memory.

I think it was the first day we got there that we met Marco. Marco was a cross between a bum and a tweaker. He was naked when we met him. Completely naked. Striding about the rocks like he was in his bathroom. He was from the Bronx, and had the accent to boot. He’d been in jail, and found rainbow shortly after his release and had latched on to it, and followed it wherever it took him. Ok. A nudist. I think he had a girlfriend that was also naked most of the time.

The campsite was in the woods on the edge of a big flat field where we would gather. Behind the tents and campsites, there were great slabs of stone forming a ridge about 20 feet tall that ran laterally for miles in the woods. Above these shelves were more shelves of stone that led to the top of the hill and ran along in both directions out of sight. There was a path along the top of the highest ridge, and sparse trees grew along the edges of it making it into a corridor of filtered sunlight by day, and a ribbon of shimmering moonlight on the stone path by night.

We spent entire days on those rocks crafting this and that. In that time, I learned how to Peyote stitch and made various casings for some of the crystals I had brought with me. We had also brought a bit of deerskin suede that we made pouches and medicine bags out of. It was our intent to sell this stuff at the Oakland shows at the end of October. I also began working on a belt, as I was losing weight rapidly. When we left, I was 225 lbs, and by the time we returned home in late November, I was around 170. Food, water, and wood were ever present priorities in our daily life.

Most days, we began by gathering firewood and water to last us the day. We took turns driving into Shawnee to fill several 5 gallon jugs with water at a gas station to bring back to camp, since there was no potable supply on hand. It was around this time that we met Troll. Troll was a Dead Head and had come to this gathering alone. Well, he had recently acquired a golden Labrador puppy named Daisy. He drove a yellow Gremlin wagon with wood paneling. He was one of those guys that you like right away, and he fit in with our group immediately. We invited him to camp with us, and he did. Troll went with us when it was our turn to go get water for the kitchen, and while we were at it, he and Daisy managed to “Spange” $30 in a half hour in the neighboring McD’s parking lot. “Spange” is a contraction for Spare Change. He used the “I need to buy some puppy chow” line very effectively. I remember being somewhat aghast at this, as I’d never known anyone that begged before. I was also impressed that he’d made $60/hour doing it. I had quit a job that paid me $8.50 and hour to go on tour. This was also my first exposure to WalMart. I was perplexed by the existence of this monolithic store in the midst of this highly rural area. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the town apart from the gas station and fast food restaurants. Seemed like a great store to me at the time.

We would bring the big jugs back to the main Kitchen, and drop our own smaller jugs off at our campsite, and then try to help with making dinner. Usually some type of bean chili over rice, with a salad or potatoes if they were available. One day I woke up feeling a cold coming on. My throat was aggravated by the Bugler tobacco we had been smoking because it’s much cheaper to roll your own smokes. I was urged by Heather to eat an entire raw clove of garlic. I tried it. It was awful. That night in the kitchen, I witnessed two separate cooks give the rice and beans “en extra healthy dose” of cayenne pepper. By the time the second one heard me shouting at him, it was too late. That was some bumpin’ food. Never did get that cold, though.

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Daisy:

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Troll:

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One Saturday night, as we were all just falling asleep in our tents, we heard a car pull up and some (had to be) locals shouting and hollering. Then we heard gunshots. And then the locals sped off back down the gravel road. Everyone was OK. I guess the farm boys had heard we were in town and decided to give us a little scare. It worked. Another day, the Sheriff pulled down the road slowly looking closely at all of us as he drove by. I was away from our camp sight, but when I saw them slow down and stop near it, I hustled the girls down to meet them and prevent them from getting in to our gear. One officer had gotten out of the car and started walking toward our camp, and the car pulled forward to meet us. I arced off the path through the woods to intercept the cop that had headed for our camp. He was wandering around it looking into the tents, and peering around the woods. “Hey, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Runaway” he said. “ We are looking for a 15 year old girl who has run away. Her parents think she may have come out here.” Sounded like a lie to me. Just something in the way he said it. I think he was going to search our stuff, but when he saw me coming, he decided not to. Not that we had much other that a little paraphernalia to find, but I didn’t want the hassle. I stayed with that cop until he began walking back toward the car. When we got to the car, the girls had been talking to the cop in the car and were getting along nicely. The cops continued down the road to the main kitchen, where they told the same story, and heard the same “we haven’t heard anyone say they ran away, but there are probably a few 15 year old girls here, and who can tell if one is a runaway?” the cops didn’t bother searching very hard for her, which lent itself to my theory that they had just hoped to catch us at something untoward, or they just wanted to make their presence felt. We complained about the locals firing their guns , but they shrugged and said it could have been any one. Boys will be Boys.

The remainder of the time blurs for me except for two things. One night, one of the local residents came to visit. He was a hermit type and a little bit peculiar, but nice enough. I can’t remember his name or even what he looked like specifically. But, after hanging out with us playing guitar and singing one night, he invited us to his house the next. So, about 7 or 8 of us trekked along the top ridge of those rocks in the woods for about 2 miles until we came to a cozy little house that overlooked a long stretch of valley. We shared a joint with him as soon as we got there, and hung around his place as the evening faded to night. He made spaghetti for everyone, and I ate heaps of it. A general hungriness had settled over me since we’d been at the gathering, and this was a hot and delicious meal. I noticed that although the joint we smoked should have worn off by now, especially after filling up on spaghetti, I was feeling pretty high again. So I said so. Our host then informed us that he had put over a half ounce of pot leaves from his plants into the sauce while it cooked. Nice. That walk back to camp in the dark with no flashlights across the top of that huge rock shelf was intense. The moonlight was just enough to see by and I can remember looking up at some thin wispy and small clouds that were illuminated by the moon. Beautiful.

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The other thing I remember was less enjoyable. There was a dog there named Reilly. He stayed at the main kitchen. I don’t remember who’s dog he was, but they had tied him to a tree to keep him out of the food, and a copperhead had gotten tangled in his rope and bit him on the neck. Venomous snake, naturally. The people freaked out and rushed him to town, where they were lucky to find a veterinarian capable of helping the dog, and advising the owners on how to care for him. Reilly was a bit subdued for the rest of the gathering, but by the time we left, he was doing fine again.

On the day we left the gathering, saying our goodbyes and loading up the van, Gina shows up with these 3 girls in tow, and says she offered them a ride with us in the van. After we planned and plotted for months the previous summer about how we would do things, she just went and invited them without checking with any of us. It was her van. And Terry had wrangled a ride on a big school bus and was off on his very own adventure now. They promised that they would sleep outside at night and wouldn’t interfere with anything we did, and they would help with gas money, and food etc… At this point, we were one of the last cars there, and if we left them, these girls would be totally screwed. Apparently their ride had left them. So they loaded up into the van with us. The “leader” of these girls was named Carter, and I think the other two had made theirs up. Carter was a very pretty girl but the more we got to know her, the more obvious it became that she was totally nuts. She also had a disturbing infection on the skin surrounding her ear. We got rid of them as soon as we were able. I think in Oklahoma somewhere.

Our next stop was Prescott Arizona. Gina nearly killed us all 3 or 4 times on the ride along route 40 west. We all got so mad at one point that we forbade her from driving anymore. She protested, of course. It was her van, after all. But the deal had been that I would save cash, and she would buy the van. She also would get to keep the van when we went home. I had saved up $1200 and was treating it very communally. Gina, however, was becoming bossier by the minute, and kept falling back on the argument that it was her van, and her vote counted more than other votes. It was an uncomfortable ride to Prescott. We were going there to kill the last week before the Oakland shows on Halloween and to visit Gina’s more recent boyfriend, Paul, who attended a Flight School in Prescott. Paul was a cool guy. He looked a lot like Getty Lee from Rush, but shorter. He was very gracious about opening his apartment to all 8 of us, and we had a nice time there, apart from a few Heather and Shelby vs. Gina spats. The Chevette had a squealing belt, and while we were there we decided that it need an adjustment. So Jeremiah and I tightened the tension on the Alternator belt, and patted each other on the back for handling the problem so quickly and efficiently.