The Dead’s Parking Lot Was Their Best Invention [And Worst]
The Grateful Dead built their parking lot on the fewest possible rules. By 1995 organized crews were hauling nitrous tanks into it, and nobody in the community had the power to stop them.
It started as one guy with a backpack. Blair Jackson bought his first Dead T-shirt outside Manhattan Center in 1971, handmade, pulled out of somebody’s bag. By the Oakland Auditorium New Year’s runs of 1979 and 1980 that had grown into what Cameron Sears, who ran the Grateful Dead’s touring operation, called “a sort of self-policing community — take care of your neighbor, look out for one another.” No cops enforcing it. No promoter organizing it. It worked because everyone in the lot had come up through the same culture, and the band’s stated philosophy was to run their world on “the fewest possible rules.”
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