A very cool van. Photographs by Sophie Haigney. We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads. The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE. Being on the lot is basically just about wandering around and looking at stuff, so that’s what we did. One of my friends wanted to get a new Online Ceramics Dead T-shirt; another one wanted to buy a tiny ceramic mushroom to hold during the concert. My brother and I weaved in and out of some stalls, looking at shirts and stickers that said things like “Not like other girls” and “5-8-1977 was an inside job.” “There was this apple last night that I was eating and I couldn’t stop […]
Click here to view original page at The Final Dead Shows: Part Two
© 2023, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.