Why did the Grateful Dead keep getting shut down?
Throughout their first decade of existence, the Grateful Dead fought a seemingly never-ending battle against getting their shows shut down. As the most notorious band to emerge out of the 1960s American counterculture, the Dead brought a circus wherever they went. Although shows in their later years became notorious for large crowds and unruly behaviour, those performances rarely got shut down, even when Jerry Gracia received death threats.
In contrast, early Dead shows often got axed mid-song for a variety of reasons. Whether it was because promoters and venue employees wanted the band to stop, police were enforcing curfews, or just because the band’s drug-fueled reputation caused panic to spread, the Dead had a difficult time getting shows to start and stop at their own leisure.
“There was a while there when every tour, our second set – the last half of our show, somebody would fuckin’ turn off the power, would shut us down,” Garcia observed to band publicist and biographer Dennis McNally. “And we started to get pathological about it. It happened all the fuckin’ time. And we started to get crazy behind it. You have no idea what it’s like – building up, and all of a sudden, the power is gone… Someplace in Ohio or some dumbshit college somewhere, and it just makes you crazy. It just made us furious. I mean, goddamn.”
“It seemed like that never stopped happening for one year, maybe ’69 or ’70 or somewhere in there, right when college campuses were in their greatest upheaval,” Garcia added. “So everybody associated us, for some reason – I don’t know why, God knows we were never very political – but they associated us with danger. As soon as they started seeing people freak out, they thought, ‘OK, that’s it. We’re not going to let this go any further.’ Boom.”
As early as 1966, the Dead started to take their shows into extended sonic territories. The unpredictability of these concerts was shared by the audience and the band. The Dead never wrote down set lists, preferring to work off the top of their collective heads. This was obviously based on whatever precarious state of mind those heads were in at the time. This helped birth the band’s improvisational side, pushing concerts well beyond what anyone had done before.
The age of professional bands playing short, compact sets was still en vogue at the time. Festivals or professional rock venues were few and far between in 1966, with bands expected to play sets shorter than 45 minutes. As the Dead began to incorporate jams into their live sound, time limits and curfews became a serious issue.
In fact, the first-ever Grateful Dead tape features a shutdown. As the Dead were performing at the Fillmore Acid Test on January 8th, 1966, police raided the Fillmore Auditorium and instructed the participants to disperse. Unhappy with the turn of events, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh can be heard screeching ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ as Garcia attempts to interact with the officers. Merry Prankster Ken Babbs was recording the events for posterity, and the resulting tape became the first documented live performance of the Grateful Dead.
As the Dead continued to grow bigger and more experimental with space explorations like ‘Dark Star’ and funky rave-ups like ‘Turn on Your Love Light’, it wasn’t uncommon for shows to extend the three-hour mark as songs received righteous extended jams. The longest single-song jam that the Dead ever played was a ludicrous 46-minute version of ‘Playing in the Band’ from Seattle, Washington, on March 21st, 1974.
Even some of the band’s allies had no choice but to shut them down. Bill Graham, best known as the owner and proprietor of the Fillmore ballrooms, helped promote the Dead at nearly every one of their west coast shows. When the band played at the Expo ’67 festival in Montreal, the overexcited crowd caused police to descend on the audience. Desperate to avoid a scene, Graham pulled the plug on the Dead.
“I mean, everybody did it. Bill Graham even did it to us up in Montreal,” Garcia explained. “The audience started freaking out, and the cops started getting uncomfortable, and Bill Graham told us to stop playing so exciting. ‘Okay, Bill, okay, we’ll play some lame shit.’ You know what I mean? What kind of thing is that to say to us? I mean, that’s what we’re there for. That’s what the crowd is there for. That’s what everybody is there for, and we knew nobody was going to get hurt. They were all like girls and stuff like that. We knew nobody’s going to get fuckin’ hurt. It was, like, crazy, but it scared them. It used to be that anything that looked like it was out of control scared them, scared the cops.”
“I notice that the entire area is full of people – and more are jamming in… The cops appear and join arms to keep the surging people off the stage (which is at ground level),” Lesh observed about the Expo in his memoir, Searching for the Sound. “All the while, Bill Graham is standing behind the amps, screaming, ‘Don’t play so good!’ and ‘Calm it down!’ We play on, exhilarated by the knowledge that the music is literally pulling people in off the street but oblivious to the fact that those same people are slowly being squeezed into paste. Finally, Bill runs onto the stage between Pig and Jerry, waving his arms and screaming, ‘Stop! Stop playing!’ We grudgingly acquiesce… I look up and see…[a] line of blue-shirted police standing nose to nose with…the band, and behind them, the distended faces of the public crushed up against one another.”
A particularly thorough Deadhead under the username of ‘Light Into Ashes’ has compiled some of the best instances of the Dead getting shutdown over at the Deadessays blog. In a post titled ‘Cut Us Off Again!’, the author lists almost all of the known shutdowns that the band had to endure during their earliest days. You can even find shutdowns that appear on officially released recordings, bringing sudden ends to albums like Two From the Vault and Download Series Vol. 12.
As the band began to get bigger, road managers like Sam Cutler were able to put clauses in the band’s contracts that allowed them to play as long as they liked. As longer concerts became the norm toward the end of the 1960s, the Dead’s proclivity for long shows was becoming more accepted. However, they were still playing exceptionally longer than most acts. Another response to the shutdowns came in the form of the band and their sound team, Alembic, creating their own set of PA and instrument amplification to deter venues from having access to the equipment.
“Jesus Christ, I mean, that’s the evolution, really, of our whole sound system and our power things – with those big fuckin’ things that clamp onto the main trunk route – that stuff all evolved from that,” Garcia explained. “We want something that nobody can fucking turn off, ever. It was like they drove us to it, I must say. We were perfectly happy with our regular amplifiers, but they wouldn’t let us go on.”
Check out the Grateful Dead getting shut down during a passionate ‘Morning Dew’ from Two From the Vault, plus an abbreviated ‘Caution’ that is abandoned to prevent the group’s road manager from getting arrested that appears on Download Series Vol. 12, to get a sense of what the Dead had to fight against down below.
