“Busted, down on Bourbon Street”: How the Grateful Dead fought the law in song
It’s January 31st, 1970. The Grateful Dead have just rocked The Warehouse in New Orleans. Fleetwood Mac opened for them, what a night. But things are about to turn upside down… especially their hotel room.
The story you’re about to read is seldom heard of these days, but maybe it’s one we need to hear more often? If the incident of January 1970 led directly to one of the most iconic songs of the era, maybe we need this to happen again. After all, people love to say that rock music is dying… how about we revive it? Before we get to the song in question, let’s take ourselves back to 1970.
Grateful Dead rocked up to New Orleans on the Thursday before the gig. As they flew into the airport, they were expecting no more than just another stop on the tour. I doubt they were expecting a completely eventless trip; they are the Grateful Dead after all, but they wouldn’t have guessed what was waiting for them.
That Thursday afternoon in glorious New Orleans, the Dead’s guitarist Jerry Garcia was having an innocent stroll around the hotel. A detective approached him: “Are you with The Flock? (another band on the bill at The Warehouse)”, his reply was simple enough: ‘Nah I’m fucking Jerry Garcia and I’m with Grateful Dead’. Now they may not have been his exact words, but he is f-ing Jerry Garcia, and the detective should’ve known. The cop then looked him up and down and told Garcia, “Look, you better be clean, because you’re going to be busted.”
On another day, in another city, Garcia may have heard this and laughed it off. The cops are messing with the hippies, and it is just another day at the office. But this time it felt different. Just a few weeks earlier, the Dead’s friends, Jefferson Airplane, had been raided in the exact same hotel following their performance. Something was going to happen.
Grateful Dead did their gig at The Warehouse and returned to their hotel at 3am. To the surprise of very few, their rooms have been raided, and the narcs were just sat there… waiting for their prey. 19 people, including bandmates and crew, were arrested. Lenny Hart, the band’s manager, spoke to Rolling Stone shortly after the arrest. He raised the suspicion that the drugs were planted. A vast collection of narcotics was ‘found’, including marijuana, LSD, barbiturates and amphetamines. At the time in Louisiana, possession would get you five to 15 years behind bars. This was serious.
After paying the $37,500 bail, Hart told Rolling Stone: “It was very peculiar, and it seems like they set them up. Nothing was found on any of the people except stuff they had prescriptions for. Everything they claim to have found was in the room.” Whether Hart and the band’s claims were true is pretty unimportant now. Over 50 years on, Grateful Dead are remembered as one of the most iconic bands of all time, this incident is merely just a blot in a timeless career. But as said earlier, it did lead to one of their greatest songs…
The very same year as the arrest, the Dead released ‘Truckin’. Reminiscing on their five-year journey so far, Garcia and co. exclaimed, “What a long, strange trip it’s been”. The band’s bassist, Phil Lesh, put it better than I possibly could, “We took our experiences on the road and made it poetry.” I’ll leave you with these lyrics, you can make your own mind up on what incident they are referring to: “Busted, down on Bourbon Street / Set up, like a bowling pin / Knocked down, it gets to wearing thin/ They just won’t let you be”.
