From an FB account called Aces Back To Back:
During the late 1980s, the Deadhead scene outside arenas began to implode. The traveling caravan, nicknamed “Shakedown Street” or “Dead Mall,” gathered in parking lots and followed the band from show to show.
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The move to stadium shows invited a swarm of vendors to “Freak Lot” with no connection to the music or the scene’s values.
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The interlopers brought a fast-food, fast-buck mentality to everything from the production of burritos and tie-dyed shirts to the selling of drugs.
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Marijuana, LSD and psilocybin mushrooms had long been discreetly available in the lot; now, pharmaceuticals, opiates, sheets of acid, pounds of marijuana and mushrooms, and balloons filled with nitrous oxide were being hawked, as were counterfeit tickets.
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Unwittingly, the Dead contributed to the problem by persuading stadiums and arenas to agree to overnight parking, an idea the band saw as a “thank you” to their loyal fans but one that turned out to be an open invitation to the slick outsiders to poison the lot scene.
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The most-glaring example of the fallout was the post-show mountains of trash. Scattered everywhere were discarded tents and other camping gear; thousands of crushed beer cans and broken bottles; still-smoldering barbecue grills; smashed styrofoam coolers, and millions of burst balloons, leaving arena parking lots looking as if an apocalyptic event had just taken place.
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Nearby parks and private facilities were also being trampled.
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These new “vendors” were out strictly to make easy money and had no interest in maintaining the environment or adhering to Deadhead ethics. The new comers only attended shows if they could sell their wares inside. This often left as many people outside as inside.
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“Too many people are showing up at our concerts,” stated Weir in response to criticism from the press. “That leaves a lot of people outside who can’t get in. And that’s a perfect breeding ground for trouble.”
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Most distressing was the conspicuous calling card being left behind by the new drug-dealing cartels: a spike in drug-related crime and incidents inside and outside arenas and a surge in drug-related arrests and problems in the cities where they Dead had just played that often lasted for weeks and months.
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The media were quick to expose the trend and to detail the issues on a city-by-city and concert-by-concert basis.
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“We come to town and there’s LSD choking the schools for the next three months,” says Weir. “I can understand how people get upset.”
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The calling card was one local, county and state police — operating on shoe-string budgets amid the Reaganomic years — were all too happy to answer and then pass along to the DEA.
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Drug-dealing Deadheads, as well as their johnny-come-lately counterparts, were defenseless against the shrewd DEA narcs that infiltrated the arena parking lots.
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As one undercover agent crowed, “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
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Given the harsh penalties cast in stone by the mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines written into law by the Reagan Supreme Court, Deadheads arrested in parking lots for selling the wrong quantity of pot or LSD were no longer looking at probation, a few weeks of house arrest, or community service as punishment. Now they were facing lengthy jail sentences and hard prison time with little to no chance of parole.
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“There’s this popular myth that we’re about drugs,” answered Weir in an angry rebuke to the negative publicity. “We’re not. We’re about music.”
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“There is a wild element in the crowd now which has no ties to what we [are] and the steady organic growth of the band and the way we do things and have traditionally interacted with our audience,” Robert Hunter observed in 1987.
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“They’re unmannerly, the way they crash the gates and make a general mess of things. Places are being closed to us right and left. We can’t go back to Hartford. Berkeley would like to get us out of town entirely. We don’t dare play Red Rocks again.
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“So, what we’ve been doing is broadcasting the gigs wherever possible, asking people that don’t have tickets to listen to it on the radio. Until we can somehow educate the crowd to not trash our environment, we sit around and talk about this - ‘What message can we put out ?’ Time will have to answer that.”
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The Dead first addressed the issue of fan behavior in 1984, when the band had to restrict audio taping to a section behind the soundboard called the “Tapers’ Section” and explicitly forbid videotaping. Soon enough, far more serious problems needed to be tackled.
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Gate-crashing incidents at shows in Hampton and Irvine during the spring of 1986 prompted a letter from Hunter that warned, “The Grateful Dead could be a very popular band that cannot find a place to play.”
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By the summer of 1987, things were completely out of control.
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“Vending and camping are killing the band,” declared Dennis McNally. “Over the last two years, the amount of energy that has been put into the out side scene was more financial than social or musical.”
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To drive home the point, the Dead outlawed the selling of merchandise in the parking lot that infringed on their copyrights. In announcing the move, their lawyer, Hal Kant, said,
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“What in previous years was a small cottage industry of dedicated fans raising small sums to stay ‘on the road’ and follow the band has been over whelmed by large, professionally-organized operators selling millions of dollars of infringing merchandise, frequently of low quality.”
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In a press release, the band added, “Wherever venues allow it, good people will still be allowed to make road money dealing artifacts. You keep what you make, or give us a cut if you deal our trademarks. All you’ve got to do is ask for permission, fair and simple.”
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The Dead began to send tour manager Cameron Sears — sometimes a year in advance — to cities where they are scheduled to perform to present a three-hour orientation to arena and municipal officials on what to expect and how to handle the various issues that will arise when the circus comes to town.
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The band asked that alcohol sales be banned or restricted during their shows and that any drug-related crisis be treated as a medical problem first and not a police problem first. Local radio stations were given pre-recorded messages from the Dead to play that asked fans without tickets to “please stay at home.”
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Two shows in Irvine on April17 and 18, 1987 result in the arrests of over 100 fans. An incredulous Irvine police sergeant is quoted in an AP wire story as saying, “All of the LSD and other drugs we confiscated was just incredible.”
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The scene continued to digress. At concerts in Monterey and Ventura in the spring of 1987, people used spray bottles to randomly dose unsuspecting fans, leading the band to distribute flyers warning of such danger.
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For the Dead / Dylan tour in the summer of 1987, another flyer listed twelve “Concert Information” rules and guidelines, but little changed in the lot scene. After 350 counterfeit tickets were confiscated at the door for the New Year’s Eve 1987 show, rock bottom hit.
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To make good with local municipalities, the Dead began to make donations through the Rex Foundation to civic organizations in the cities where they were scheduled to perform. They set up a “Grateful Dead Information Booth” inside arenas to get feedback from fans about the scene and the issues plaguing it.
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The band also threw its support behind the Cosmic Recyclers, donating garage bags to the grassroots organization of Deadheads dedicated to cleaning up both recyclable and disposable waste outside arenas.
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In 1988, another well-intending group of Deadheads — the Minglewood Town Council — created an online bulletin board on the WELL for then-computer savvy fans to exchange ideas and opinions about the state of the Deadhead scene. A flyer handed out at shows by the Minglewood folks announced, “Our collective goal is to reach Deadheads who do not respect the communities we invade.”
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The handout also advised fans to “be a part of the Good Karma Patrol and infect people with good ideas.”
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For the spring 1989 tour, in an attempt to alleviate the problems being caused by the lot scene, the band avoided regular tour stops like East Rutherford and Hampton and played in cities such as Greensboro, Louisville and Milwaukee.
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The problems just kept on coming.
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At the Greensboro show, rampant camping in prohibited areas and copious amounts of litter raised local ire, but that paled in comparison to what took place next in Pittsburgh. At shows on April 2 and 3, gatecrashing incidents both nights prompted skirmishes between police and fans that escalated to near-riots and resulted in 31 arrests. After footage of police brutalizing Deadheads was aired on local news stations, two Pittsburgh news papers ran editorials rallying around Deadheads and the band.
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Inevitably, as the issues piled up, the consequences began to reach far and wide. Venues that had long been second homes to the Grateful Dead started to ban them, including the Greek Theatre, the Merriweather Post Pavilion and Stanford University.
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Even after the Dead broke up, the blame for the gate-crashing phenomenon was still being laid squarely at the feet of Deadheads. A 1999 New York Times article about gate-crashing incidents by fans at shows by Phish and the Dave Matthews Band stated: “Those unable to miracle tickets today often mass for ugly gate crashes, a holdover from Grateful Dead concerts.”
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— Scott
October 22, 2025