7/13/2013 Saturday in the Arava Last night, I posted that I had the pleasure of reliving some memories of the Grateful Dead with Daniel, our Lotan Rabbi, who I discovered, to my delight, was also a fan of the Dead. My “friends”, Karen and Dvora, I discovered today, are also Dead fans. So for all the Dead fans that are curious as to how I got to sit on the stage with them during one of their concerts, here is the story but before I forget I am inserting some hyperlinks you can use to access their music. Sometime in the early 70s I had an office in a high rise office building in downtown Detroit . Two floors up was the best rock and roll station in Detroit, WABX. The station manager was Steve Dahl, who later became infamous as the Chicago DJ who told people to bring records to a ball game and bombard the field and thousands did completely disrupting the game. WABX was “putting on” the Dead in concert at a relatively small venue. This was before they were huge. I knew who they were because I had read “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolfe some years earlier but I didn’t know their music. Several hours before the concert was scheduled Steve called me and announced an emergency. The equipment manager, “Ramrod”, who was essential to the setting up of the equipment was being held by the Detroit police in the main police station. He had been carrying into the concert hall some illicit smoking material and was arrested . Steve asked me to try to get him released so that he could return to the hall to setup the equipment. I was thrilled to be asked to help as Ramrod was in the Tom Wolfe book and Ramrod knew Neal Cassady, who was also in the book and Neal Cassady was a friend of Jack Kerouac, who wrote “On the Road”, a book that had a significant impact on my life. So I ran down to the First Precinct and argued with the detective in charge of the case that Ramrod was just the equipment manager and how would he know what the musicians were bringing into the hall? I begged, cajoled, begged some more, raised the spectre of thousands of rioting ticket holders and how would Detroit look then and finally the police agreed to release him. I submitted a bill for $500.00 to WABX and went home. [I think my friends Dvora and Karen attended this concert]. A few months later, a big box arrived at my office and it contained every Dead album they had produced up to that point and some of the albums had tee shirts which, if I had not worn and instead had kept in mint condition, today would be worth lots of money. For those of you in the know, one of the shirts was the ice cream cone to the forehead shirt. I listened to the music and instantly became a “Deadhead”. Up till then, like so many others that had never heard them, I simply had judged them by their name which to me connoted the image of a heavy metal scrunge band but boy was I wrong! The following year they returned to Detroit for another concert. My partner Allan and I were asked if we would like to come, with dates, to the concert and that a “backstage pass” would be given to us so we could meet and eat with the band. We of course accepted and when they came to Detroit, we had the pleasure of meeting Sam Cutler, who I think was their road manager on that trip. He told me that my $500 fee to get Ramrod out of jail the previous year was very reasonable and in Chicago they had to pay a lawyer $5000 for a similar service a few weeks before the incident in Detroit. [an example of why my partner Allan and I never got rich] Now at a Dead concert there is no backstage. There is no backdrop. The speakers are set up and the band stands and plays so backstage meant on the stage and I sat immediately to the left of the bassist Phil Lesh and Allan sat right next to Jerry Garcia. To the front of us, 10 feet away, were thousands of screaming fans standing and swaying and dancing like the “ Deadheads” they were. Other people from the book by Tom Wolfe like “Mountain Girl” and “Owsley” were also backstage. Owsley handled the lights and walked around during the warm ups squirting something into the bands’ drinks and Mountain Girl walked back and forth helping Garcia get ready to play. And Neal Cassady was there. Being in the same room with Neal Cassaday was about as close to Jack Kerouac as I would ever get. I consider this to be the highlight of my legal and music “career”. As a friend of Steve Dahl and attorney for other WABX employees I sat in the front row at many concerts: the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, and countless other big time groups but nothing ever compared to this night with the Grateful dead. Laila Tov
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 17:01:17 +0000