The "Deadlot" was the parking lot at
Grateful Dead concerts. For people who lived
on the road touring with the band, it served as a
meeting point. For locals of the towns where the band was playing, it was a place to experience a unique
subculture, buy
drugs, or find recruits for their
religion of choice.
The Deadlot had an
organic quality to it, specific locales would appear naturally - most notably, "
Shakedown Street", which was named after one of the band's songs. Here is where the open
market would naturally form full of people selling their wares, ranging from
clothes to food (vegetarian:
burritos, stir-fry, etc.) to, of course
drugs, most openly
LSD,
Mushrooms, and
Marijuana, although
heroin and
works could be easily obtained if one knew where to look.
The various
cliques of
Deadheads were easily observed in the lot, as were many painted schoolbuses (including
Elsewhere, Alluvus, and others, a
reference to
Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters' Furthur bus) and
communal drum circles.
Over time, more and more
undercover cops/
DEA would be on the lot trying to bust the
LSD rings that passed through town leaving
tripping schoolkids in their wake. Towards the end of the
Grateful Dead phenomena,
beatings and arrests were not uncommon. A number of people on the lot were runaways,
fugitves and
bail jumpers, so rumors of
bounty hunters on the lot would sometimes surface. The rise of
heroin corresponded with more problems, including panhandling, arrests, rip-offs, and the occasional
overdose. As the Dead became more popular (mostly in the wake of the single Touch of Grey) more violent fans emerged from college
frat houses and introduced problems like gate crashing,
fights, and
riots.
While it lasted, the Deadlot represented a meeting ground of many interesting slices of American
subculture and themes, including the "
free love" optimism left over from the
sixties, the
beat's yearning for life "
on the road", the destruction of drug
addiction, the
outlaw life, and, of course, the curious onlooker.