This Darkness Got to Give: The message Grateful Dead gave to fans after a concert riot
Concert riots are often tied to aggressive and angry styles of music, with punk, metal and rock and roll being the main offenders. However, live music riots are a lot more common than you might think. Over the years, everybody from Rage Against the Machine to Diana Ross have sparked crowd-based anarchy at their shows. In 1995, even the spaced-out, peace-loving hippies that populate the crowds of the Grateful Dead showed an appetite for destruction.
During a summer tour in 1995, The Grateful Dead were due to play multiple dates at the Deer Creek Music Center in Indiana. These shows were set to be among the greatest the Dead would play during the tour, with the open-air amphitheatre renowned as one of the greatest venues in the American Midwest. After the show, though, the band’s musical performance in Indiana took a backseat to the disturbances caused by the crowd of dedicated Deadheads.
Self-described fans of the band had torn down the perimeter fence of the Deer Creek venue, meaning that hundreds – even thousands – of fans without tickets could freely enter the show. Thus ensued violence between Deadheads, security teams and local authorities present at the concert.
Grateful Dead’s fanbase was usually renowned for their peace-loving nature and endless desire to open their third eye; the Dead were hardly a band you would expect to cause a riot. Admittedly, though, the band’s ties to LSD and drug use meant that their shows had been patrolled by authorities for decades – the band were even the subject of an FBI investigation – sooner or later, something had to give.
The violence at Deer Creek caused the Dead to cancel their second show at the venue. At the next stop on their tour, Riverport Amphitheater in Missouri, the group distributed a stern letter to their fanbase entitled ‘This Darkness Got to Give’. Within the bizarre letter, signed by the band, the Dead wrote, “The security and police whom those people endangered represent us, work for us – think of them as us.” This seemed a particularly strange sentiment from the band, given their countercultural roots and the harassment they had experienced at the hands of the police since their inception.
The Dead’s letter contained more indictments of the Indiana gatecrashers, writing, “If you don’t have a ticket, don’t come. This is real. This is first a music concert, not a free-for-all party”. Although these statements might go against the reputation of the band, you have to examine the context behind the letter. Not only had the band been forced to cancel their other show at Deer Creek, much to the disappointment of fans, but that same tour had already seen an overrun of fans in Vermont.
That show at Deer Creek had also been preceded by a death threat against Dead songwriter Jerry Garcia, so the band were clearly not in a harmonious state when it came to the relationship with their fanbase. Plus, these incidents had given the band a reputation for unrest and violence, leading to increased police presence at their shows, and just as it is difficult to enjoy a Grateful Dead show without psychedelics, it is difficult to have a good trip surrounded by flashing red lights and men carrying batons and guns.
