“This Darkness Got To Give”
7/5/95
This Darkness Got To Give
Dear Dead Heads:
This is the way it looks to us from the stage:
Your justly-renowned tolerance and compassion have set you up to be used. At Deer Creek, we watched many of you cheer on and help a thousand fools kick down the fence and break into the show. We can’t play music and watch plywood flying around endangering people. The security and police whom those people endangered represent us, work for us — think of them as us. You can’t expect mellow security if you’re throwing things at them. The saboteurs who did this can only do it if all Dead Heads allow them to. Your reputation is at stake.
Don’t you get it?
Over the past thirty years we’ve come up with the fewest possible rules to make the difficult act of bringing tons of people together work well — and a few thousand so-called Dead Heads ignore those simple rules and screw it up for you, us and everybody. We’ve never before had to cancel a show because of you. Think about it.
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. Secondly, don’t vend. Vending attracts people without tickets. Many of the people without tickets have no responsibility or obligation to our scene. They don’t give a shit. They act like idiots. They think it’s just a party to get as trahed as possible at. We’re all supposed to be about higher consciousness, not drunken stupidity.
It’s up to you as Dead Heads to educate these people, and to pressure them into acting like Dead Heads instead of maniacs. They can only get away with this crap if you let them. The old slogan is true: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
Want to end the touring life of the Grateful Dead? Allow bottle-throwing gate crashers to keep on thinking they’re cool anarchists instead of the creeps they are.
Want to continue it? Listen to the rules, and pressure others to do so. A few more scenes like Sunday night, and we’ll quite simply be unable to play. The spirit of the Grateful Dead is at stake, and we’ll do what we have to do to protect it. And when you hear somebody say “Fuck you, we’ll do what we want,” remember something.
That applies to us, too.
Phil, Jerry, Bobby, Mickey, Billy and Vince
This letter was distributed to Dead Heads starting July 5, 1995.
The Grateful Dead had begun their May-July campaign with stops in Las Vegas, Seattle, Portland, Shoreline, Vermont, Giants Stadium, Knickerbocker Arena, RFK Stadium, Auburn Hills, and Three Rivers Stadium.
And then, on July 2, they played Deer Creek Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana, gate-crashers knocked down a fence during the first set, causing real chaos and the cancellation of the second night at Deer Creek. On top of all that, there had been a death threat called in before the show, putting everyone on pins and needles. Read about it here in this excerpt from So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead by David Browne.
The band prepared this flyer to hand out at Riverport Amphitheatre in Missouri for the shows on July 5 & 6 and the two Soldier Field shows July 8 & 9.
And the band had six shows scheduled for Boston Garden, six for Madison Square Garden, and three for The Spectrum in Philadelphia.
The flyer was the focus of the editorial on the front page of The Grateful Dead Almanac, Volume 2, No. 3, subtitled Summer’s Endless Bounty Issue 1995. It arrive in late July. No one could have imagined, at that point, that we had in fact seen the very last performance by the Grateful Dead, in Chicago, although Garcia opined in May (part of the excerpt from So Many Roads), that “I won’t see the end of the year.”
He was sadly prescient, passing away August 9, 1995. “That’s it for The Other One.”
Check out the comments from fans who were at the show, fans who crashed and regretted it, fans who crashed and are still proud of it, and fans in the lot who didn’t crash in this Archive.org file.
