How Bill Graham Created A Movement

Shakedown Street wasn’t conjured out of thin air by hippies. In January 1978, a Bill Graham logistics man saw the same fifty faces at every show — and one porta-potty order accidentally built a subculture.

That man was Peter Barsotti, working the winter run through Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, and Stockton for Bill Graham Presents. The first fifty people in every line weren’t similar people — they were the SAME people, following the Grateful Dead as a way of life. Barsotti told his boss, and Bill Graham — the toughest promoter in rock — gave a purely logistical order: open the lot the night before, put out some porta-potties, make sure there’s water. Not a drum circle. Not a gathering of the tribes. Crowd control.

Out of that decision grew everything. Time and space in an open parking lot turned into grilled cheese, bootleg tapes, and handmade jewelry — then a six-day tent city at the 1979 Oakland Auditorium run, where Graham started hiring the campers to work his own food operation. Dennis McNally and Blair Jackson documented how the busiest strip took the name of the Garcia–Hunter song, and how the whole thing held together on scale: a few hundred travelers who policed themselves.

Then “Touch of Grey” hit in 1987, the lots filled with credit-card booths and people who couldn’t name five Dead songs, and by 1989 — gridlock in Wisconsin, a letter from Giants Stadium, police who’d “totally lost control” — the Grateful Dead had to write an open letter begging their own fans to give up camping and vending, or lose the tour entirely. Jerry Garcia never wanted to be the mayor of a traveling city. This is how a porta-potty order made him one.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Same Fifty Faces in Every Line
• 1:15 Bill Graham’s Porta-Potty Order
• 2:10 The Watkins Glen Playbook
• 3:00 What an Open Parking Lot Created
• 4:00 The 1979 Oakland Tent City
• 4:50 How “Shakedown Street” Got Its Name
• 5:40 Small Enough to Police Itself
• 6:10 “Touch of Grey” Breaks the Scene
• 7:35 The Letter from Giants Stadium
• 8:30 The Dead Ban Camping and Vending
• 9:20 Begging the Deadheads to Stop

Sources

• Dennis McNally, “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead”
• Blair Jackson & David Gans, “This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead”
• Grateful Dead Archive, UC Santa Cruz — https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/gratefuldead
• Grateful Dead Live Music Archive — https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead
• Grateful Dead official — https://www.dead.net
• The Shakedown Archives tells the rise-and-fall stories of the bands and artists that defined an era — the music history nobody filed away.
• The music history nobody filed away.
• #GratefulDead #ShakedownStreet #Deadheads