Why didn’t the Grateful Dead ever play in Australia?
For a band who lived and breathed live touring, it seems remarkable that the Grateful Dead only ever performed in 12 countries throughout their 30-year career. All but 64 of their more than 2,300 shows took place in the United States and Canada, although they did manage multiple tours of Europe and even performed gigs in Egypt and Jamaica.
Their European tour in 1972 was a career highlight for the band, with the final show in London bringing Jerry Garcia to tears. The band’s persistence in continuing to tour even after Garcia’s diabetic coma in 1986 even inspired Paul McCartney to head back out on the road.
It seems strange, then, that the Dead never made it as far as the land of Oz, the southern hemisphere country with one of the largest psych rock followings in the world during the late 1960s. Judging by the thousands of members populating social media groups like Australian Deadheads and Deadheads Down Under, as well as the pioneers of neo-psychedelia like Tame Impala and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, who’ve clearly been influenced by the Dead on some level, they must have had some kind of following in Australia.
Jefferson Starship, the successor of the Dead’s fellow Frisco Bay freakout rockers Jefferson Airplane, managed to make it down under. So why didn’t the Dead get together a touring party for the south side of their psychedelic fanbase?
Bang for the buck?
According to legendary Aussie music promoter Michael Chugg, the man who brought the Police and the Cure to his country, it was just too much of a gamble for anyone in the Australian entertainment business to take a punt on the Grateful Dead. Chugg told the Sydney Morning Herald there was no compelling evidence of a constituency of Australian Deadheads large enough to make costly flights from the US and extensive staging across various cities around Australia worthwhile.
It’s a shame that the Dead’s fanbase Down Under has likely grown considerably since the untimely death of Garcia put an end to their 30-year run as a live band. If the legendary group were able to perform in Sydney or Melbourne today, they might have sold out an arena. Perhaps not in the manner of their US stadium tours, where crowds could reach as many as 70,000 people. But more than enough to justify bringing untold joy to thousands of Aussie Deadheads.
Even with reunions and new iterations of groups featuring original members of the Dead, ever since the passing of Garcia, it’s been clear that the Dead themselves are gone. But part of the band’s mystique for tens of thousands of Deadheads around the world is listening to and watching (often fan-made) recordings of their gigs, reading about what it was like to be there, and imagining the real magic of participating in a Dead live show. That’s as true for young Americans as it is for older generations of Deadheads abroad.
