Grateful Dead Claim Conspiracy of A Thousand Fools

     Jack-booted cops on horseback have patrolled the Grateful
Dead concert scene for years; military style helicopters have
been a recent addition. After a miniscule tear-gas police riot
quieted the disruption of Grateful Dead concert on July 2 (police
eventually arrested thirty people in connection with the toppling
of a security fence), the band felt compelled to add lecture to
injury. It printed and distributed a note to its ordinarily
docile fans at it's next concert in St. Louis, July 5.  One
Deadhead called the note a "Police`R'Us" rap for asserting that
"The security and police whom those people endangered represent
us, work for us -- think of them as us." Do the Dead see a
conspiracy against this fusion of higher consciousness and
tighter security?
     "Your justly-renowned tolerance and compassion have set you
up to be used," claimed the note, entitled "This Darkness Got to
Give" by the band. It went on to characterize the trouble-makers
as "saboteurs," but described their agenda as a "free for all
party" and "drunken stupidity," which might be an apt description
of some of the more senseless conspiratorial activity of late.
The biggest culprits named in the note are the venders, who sell
unauthorized t-shirts and beer at the concerts. The note makes
the odd claim that "Vending attracts people without
tickets...that have no responsibility or obligation to our
scene." Do people without tickets really go to the concert site
to buy t-shirts and beer? Where do the Dead think these people
are really coming from?
     The conspiracy turned dangerous after the July 5 concert,
when a pavilion at a nearby Deadhead campground collapsed and
injured over 100 people.
     Meanwhile, the latest issue of New Dawn repeats a recent
charge made by an English anarchist paper that a 1968 FBI memo
stating that it hired the Dead to politicize the counterculture
with drugs. The anarcho-zine, Freedom, claims that the memo
emerged after a law suit, although the reason for the suit and
its participants are not reported in New Dawn. New Dawn is an
impressive conspiracy zine published in Australia. It does quote
a polemic by Freedom that "More progress would have been possible
had not a part of the rebel movement decided that an effective
method of personal rebellion was to go for hallucinogenic drugs
like LSD...The diversion of revolutionary energy into drugs was
clearly harmful to the revolutionary movement, but few seriously
suspected at the time that it was directed by the state."
     Perhaps, but it could be that the memo was a form of "snitch 
jacket" designed to make the Dead look bad. Similar rumors have long
circulated about Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, and other people
whose work can be connected to recreational drug use, most of
whom give the CIA great credit for inadvertently starting a
psychedelic revolution.

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