My First Trip To California with The Dead/1986 (Part 2)

As I wrote in Part 1 of this story in my last blog entry, my friend Ron Bronson and I were driving from Minneapolis to Oakland to see the Grateful Dead at the H.J.K. Convention Center on 12/30 and 12/31/86.  We brought my friend Sean Morrison with but had dropped him off in Albuquerque, NM on the way there and would pick him up in Lovington, NM on the way back.  After 63 hours on the road we finally made it to the Kaiser at around 9 pm on December 28^th.  The Dead were playing that night but we only had tickets for the 30^th and 31^st.  We parked on the street next to a park which was across the street from the Convention Center.  We excitedly jumped out of the car and headed into the park where hundreds of Deadheads were milling around, drinking, smoking, dancing, and selling their wares. 

At a Dead parking lot scene you can buy pretty much anything you want from tee-shirts, jewelry, art and pipes to drugs, beer and food.  Speaking of food, we were starving.  For the last two days all we had eaten were Sean’s mom’s Christmas cookies and gas station food.  I gave Ron $20 out of the $120 I had left and put him in charge of getting us some food and a couple of beers while I went across the street to the Kaiser to see if we could possibly get in…maybe for free like we had for Huey Lewis an hour earlier.  I discovered there was no way of sneaking into the concert, but there may have been speakers set up outside because you could hear the music pretty well and there were a lot of people dancing around.

 

I went back to the car to meet Ron, but when I got there expecting a veggie burrito and a beer I instead found Ron carefully picking at a small, round, dark-greenish plant.  He looked up, and with a huge smile he triumphantly produced a tin foil wrapper with five more of the wet greenish-brown things.  “Peyote buttons!” he said excitedly.  What the hell?  Ron had used the entire $20 to buy half a dozen peyote buttons…a golf ball sized psychoactive cactus that contains mescaline and can produce trippy acid-like effects.  Who needs food when you can just trip?  Ron handed me one and said we should eat three of them each.  I declined, telling him I was tired from the long drive up the coast that day and did not want to trip.  Ron ate one button and then we went back over to the Kaiser and danced outside until the show was over.  We hung out in the park for a bit and then went to our car to sleep for the night with me in the front seat and Ron in the back.

 

The next morning, December 29^th, we woke up to a beautiful sunny day and decided to head over to San Francisco.  They Dead were playing 4 shows this run on the 27^th, 28^th, 30^th & 31^st so we had a day off from the Dead.  We found a Chinese restaurant just down the block that sold egg rolls for 50 cents, so after scarfing down a couple of egg rolls each we drove over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.  We went to the Haight-Ashbury district and took pictures of the signpost at the famous intersection as well as the Grateful Dead’s old house at 710 Ashbury Street.  Ron got a picture of me doing a headstand on the porch steps.  We checked out all the cool shops and the hippies and then climbed up the hill at Buena Vista Park and hung out for a bit taking in the sights.  It was nice and peaceful and felt good to just relax and chill up there.  Then we walked over to Golden Gate Park and hung out for a couple of hours.  For some reason we climbed up onto the roof of a building and we could see seals inside.  Strange.

 

Then we found our car and headed to the Golden Gate Bridge.  Instead of going over the bridge we pulled off onto a side street under the bridge near the water.  The bridge towered above us.  Ron pulled out a joint and although I rarely smoked pot anymore, I decided how could I not…I was in San Francisco with tickets to see two Dead shows!  We finished the joint and then Ron brought out the tinfoil he had purchased the night before.  He opened it up and the five remaining peyote buttons were now a giant pile of greenish-brown goo.  He reasoned that we had better hurry up and eat them before they got any grosser.  I could not argue with that logic so we hunkered down in my car for a meal.  Ron solemnly explained to me that the guy who sold them to him told him that you cannot just eat the whole button…you have to carefully pick out the white hairs in the middle because they are poisonous and you will die if you eat them.  Um, okay.  So after spending about a half hour carefully picking thru the wet gloppy mess we decided that we had removed every last dastardly hair.  Isn’t half the fun of doing drugs the preparation of doing the drugs?  Then we set about eating what was left.  They were wet, mushy and very gritty…just horrible, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

 

It was now mid-afternoon on a Monday…normal people were getting off of work and rush hour was just starting.  Dammit, with my low tolerance that joint had gotten right on top of me and the peyote was starting to kick in.  Coming from the flat Midwest I was completely dumfounded and amazed that people actually drove cars on these crazy-steep streets.  Ron had a map so he directed me towards the top of Lombard Street, wanting to go down the famous curvy street.  To get there though we had to climb up, up, up in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic in my stick-shift Toyota Celica and I was starting to freak out.  This was absolutely insane I thought.  We were on a 45 degree angle going up with cars right behind me.  It was impossibly steep and I was certain the car was going to tip backwards and roll end over end back down the street, or at the very least I was going to roll back and hit the guy behind me. 

I was having a hard time discerning what was real and what were the peyote effects.  We would move 5 feet, stop, and I would have to put on the emergency brake to keep from rolling backwards because my legs were shaking so badly…all part of the freak-out process.  Then the car ahead of me would move a few feet so I would have to mash down on the brakes as hard as I could, take off the emergency brake and then floor the gas while my shaky leg slowly let off the clutch.  The car would lurch up a few feet and die while the cars behind me honked.  I could not do this, but I was not going to let Ron do it.  While I was sweating and hallucinating and freaking out behind the wheel Ron was next to me laughing his ass off telling me to turn right, left, right, left.  The map was upside down and he was clearly incapable of navigating much less driving.

 

After what seemed like many tense hours we were suddenly at the top of Lombard and heading down…holy sh*t…this cannot be real…this has to be the peyote talking.  How do people live like this I wondered?  I was really starting to lose it so at the bottom of Lombard I grabbed the map, shook it violently in front of Ron’s face and yelled at him to get me the hell out of this goddamn city!  Ron suddenly stopped laughing and told me he knew of some friends in a rock band that lived about an hour or two north of Oakland.  We eventually made it back over the Bay Bridge to the Oakland side and headed north on the freeway. 

It was dark now and I did not care where we were going.  I was just so happy and relieved to be out of the city and those crazy streets and on a wide open 5-lane freeway.  We drove for a couple hours and then Ron admitted he had no idea of the address or phone number of these friends of his.  I was fine with that because I was still pretty loopy from the peyote and not feeling very sociable.  So we turned around and drove the two hours back to the Kaiser.  We found a parking spot on the same street next to the park and went to sleep, happy that we were going to live another day.

 

Waking up on the morning of December 30^th we decided to take inventory of what we had in our possession.  We had a pile of dirty clothes, the concert tickets, the cassettes, my camera, some cookies and about $90.  Figuring gas was about a buck a gallon and my car got 30 miles to the gallon, we had enough gas money to get us 2,700 miles.  After carefully studying the map we figured from Oakland, CA to Lovington, NM and then back up to Minneapolis was about 2,650 miles.  That was way too close.  Plus that left no money for food and we were down to our last ten Christmas cookies.  What were we going to do for money?!  I told Ron I was going to walk around and think and I would bring back some egg rolls.

 

When I got back an hour later I could see Ron standing by my car shouting something.  What was he yelling?  When I got closer I could see that he was standing behind a folding card table shouting:  “Tee shirts, cookies, cassettes for sale!”  What the hell?!  I ran up to him and he was maniacal.  He quickly explained that he had found the table in a ditch and was trying to get us some money.  He was frantically trying to sell everything in my car.  “We need money!” he shouted at me.  He had also found a pen and paper and had everything marked…cookies for 25 cents, cassettes for a dollar and shirts for $5.  I grabbed my shirts off the table and threw them in the car.  When I went back for my cassettes he had grabbed my shirts from the car and put them back on the table.  We went around in circles like this for a bit, the whole time him yelling at the top of his lungs at the people walking by until finally I grabbed the front of his shirt with two hands and started shaking him.  “Ron!  Stop it!  Quit selling my sh*t!”  “But we need money!” he blurted in rebuttal as he tried to grab the cassettes out of my hand.  He was losing it so I slapped him across the face and suddenly he stopped…he was calm…everything was going to be okay.

 

I handed him an egg roll and told him I had a plan.  I had been watching the acid dealers in the park and they were selling sheets of acid for $50.  That’s 100 hits, or 50 cents each.  If we turned around and sold individual hits for $2 apiece we would quadruple our money…we could turn that $50 into $200!  So as evening approached we went into the park looking for some acid.  Before long I saw a guy walking around quietly and carefully saying:  “Acid...I got sheets…$50.”  Sweet.  I pretended to know what I was doing by asking him what kind, how strong it was and how long before it kicks in.  He told me it was strong white blotter and he would hang out with me until it kicked in.  Well that seemed like an ironclad foolproof way of knowing it was real.  The whole time he was talking to me though a distressed hippie was standing behind him shaking his head at me and mouthing the words:  “No, no, no!”  Whatever…he probably just wanted in on my guy’s action…that wasn’t cool.  So I handed my guy $50 and he produced a square piece of paper with 10 rows of indents across and down.  Upon first glance it looked real…sort of.  The hippie sadly shook his head and walked away.  I ripped off one little square each for me and Ron.  We excitedly turned to each other seeing dollar signs in our future as we placed the paper on our tongues.

 

We decided that we would wait till the acid kicked in, then we would know it was real and we could start walking around selling as many hits as possible before the concert started.  I turned to ask our new friend a question, but he was gone.  Huh.  He must have had to take off.  No matter…the acid had to be real…nobody would just walk around selling fake acid.  Knowing we had money coming our way we splurged and bought a couple beers and talked happily about the concert starting in an hour.  It was finally here…this was what the journey was all about…road-tripping across the continent to see the Grateful Dead in sunny California!  We finished our beers and I asked Ron if he felt anything yet.  “I think so” he said.  “You?”  “Yep…it’s definitely kicking in.” I said as I stared at my hand and waved it around to see if I could see any trails yet.  Not yet…but I think it was starting.  15 minutes later and we still weren’t taking off…it had to be soon.  We decided to go into the show...we would sell the hits after the show.

 

While walking to the concert we ran across a girl looking for tickets.  We knew we had money coming in so we weren’t interested in selling ours, but for the heck of it I asked how much she was willing to pay.  “I’ll give you $75 for the pair!” she replied.  Wow…we had only paid $17.50 each for our tickets, so that would be more than double our money!  I looked at Ron…we stared at each other for a few seconds and then I shook my head no.  That was a LOT of money, but we came here for these two concerts.  We have to go in.  So in we went and found a kickass spot on the side balcony to the right of the stage.  The Neville Brothers were opening and they were awesome but we were getting excited for the Dead! 

After awhile though we realized we were not tripping.  Did we just happen to get a part of the sheet that was accidentally not dipped in the acid?  We were grasping at straws, not willing to believe that we had just handed a guy $50 for a 4”x4” piece of worthless paper.  I pulled the paper out and ripped off two more squares and we ate that.  Looking carefully now at the paper, it was starting to look more and more like some random piece of thick white paper that the guy had made little perforation marks on with a paper clip or a knife point.  We got screwed…totally f*cking screwed and we were down to about $35.  How were we going to get home?

 

It was a great show and we had a great time dancing to the Dead…my highlight was the awesome ‘Estimated Prophet’ into ‘Eyes Of the World’ (“California!  I’ll be knocking on the golden door!”).  Our money problem weighed heavily on us though and was in the back of our minds the whole time.  Should we still try and sell the acid in individual hits?  It seemed like a dirty thing to do, but we had gotten screwed over and we needed the money.  We decided we could not sell it there in the park though…after three days these people had become our family and we could not screw them over.  We decided we would head back over to the Haight-Ashbury district the next day and screw those people over.  We did not feel good about it, but we decided we had no choice.

 

The next day was the 31st.  After eating our daily ration of two eggrolls each we drove back over the bridge to the Haight.  Armed with our worthless little piece of paper we tried to figure out how to do this.  As we had seen done in the park, we stood in one spot waiting for ‘cool’ people to walk by…hippies, freaks, long-hairs…anybody that looked as if they might like acid.  Then we would mutter “Acid…need any acid?”  After a couple of failed attempts where people just smiled and kept walking or gave us dirty looks or ignored us completely, something ominous was coming our way.  It was about 6’ 6” tall with a black tee-shirt, black fingerless gloves, black jeans, black boots and a full black leather coat that went down to the ground.  He had long black hair on the right half of his head, and the left side was shaved smooth allowing everyone to see the large black raven he had tattooed onto his skull and face.  He skin was white as chalk but he had black eye makeup, black lipstick and black fingernails.  “Just ignore him!” Ron pleaded, but I was desperate and we needed to make some money.

 

“Hey man, do you need any acid?” I said, my voice quaking.  Raven stopped, looked down at me and sneered.  He regarded us like two sniveling bugs who had actually dared to talk to him.  I think he respected that.  He stared into my eyes for awhile and I felt like he was trying to read my mind.  I was scared shitless.  I was thinking about how to abort this doomed mission when he said that he would love some acid, but that if it was not real he was going to break all four of our legs.  He said we had to hang out with him until it kicked in.  “Oh my god, we will not have to worry about our money problems anymore because Raven is going to kill us.” I thought to myself.  He pulled two dollars out of a wallet that was on the end of a long chain and I pulled out the little piece of paper.  I ripped off a small piece and handed it to him.  He stared at the pathetic little scrap and said:  “This isn’t real…is it.”

 

“No no, it’s real!” I protested.  “Here…you take the acid and keep your money, and if you like it, then you pay us.”  I reasoned that if we didn’t take his money, maybe he wouldn’t kill us.  There was no way I was going to hang out with Mr. Creepy for the next hour though just waiting for the inevitable beating.  Ron and I were small, wiry dudes while Raven was huge with massive heavy boots…he would never be able to catch us.  We were following Raven down some street to god-knows-where.  When we got to the corner I motioned to Ron and we both took off running as fast as we could.  “Get back here you little f*cks!” shouted Raven, but we just kept running for about 10 blocks.  When we dared to stop and look back there was no sign of him.  Now we just had to loop around and get back to our car without him seeing us.  We walked back up onto the hill at Buena Vista Park and hid there for about an hour while keeping a careful lookout.  No sign of Raven, so we walked back down, took some side streets to our car and took off for our ‘home’ in Oakland.  Just as poor.

 

We parked on our familiar block by the park completely dejected and feeling hopeless.  Real home seemed like a million miles away.  Then I remembered seeing a commercial where you could get money wired to you magically over the phone lines.  Western Union I think they called it.  Should I call my mom and see if she would do that?  I did not want to and I did not tell Ron my idea, but I kept that vaguely possible option in my back pocket.  I tried to make light of the situation by taking out the piece of paper, ripping it in half and shoving it into my mouth.  “Look!  Ron!  I just took 50 hits of acid!”  We both laughed and walked across the street to the park to hang out.  We only had about $30 left, but at least it was New Years Eve and we were seeing the Grateful Dead. 

Before long we saw a dude selling his New Years Eve ticket to somebody.  Suddenly another dude ran up breathlessly and asked if had another one to sell?  Nope.  The guy looked sad so I walked up to him.  He asked me if I had a ticket to sell.  “I’ll give you $200, cash, right here, right now.” he said hopefully.  Holy f*cking sh*t.  $200?!  Face value was only $25.  With $200 we would have MORE than enough gas money to get home.  We could even buy some real food…get a good meal and some beer!  Could I really drive over 5,000 miles to see the Dead on New Years and then sell the ticket though?  We were desperate, and we had already seen them last night I rationalized.

 

With a heavy heart I said:  “Okay.”  He happily handed my $200 while I placed the ticket in his eager hands.  I looked at Ron sadly and he shrugged and said he would do the same thing.  I told him not to bother…we had plenty of money.  We bought a couple beers and walked around for a bit when suddenly I heard a guy asking if anybody needed a ticket.  “How much?” I asked.  “$100.” He said.  “I’ll take it!” I shouted.  We would still have enough money to get home, and I would get to go to the concert!  Just then Ron was about 20 feet away talking to a guy.  What was he doing?  He walked back over with a smile and showed me a wad of cash.  He had just sold his ticket for $140.  “Dude, you didn’t have to do that…I have $100 and a ticket now!”  A few minutes later though Ron found another guy selling an extra ticket for $100 so Ron bought that.  Suddenly we had $140 more than we had an hour ago!  We were saved!

 

We went into the show as happy as could be, excited for the countdown and the concert.  We found almost the same spot up in the balcony just to the right side of the stage and had a blast.  David Crosby opened first, and then the Neville Brothers.  Close to midnight Bill Graham appeared at the back of the auditorium dressed as an eagle.  He flew over the crowd tossing down roses, and then descended to the stage during the countdown.  Millions of balloons dropped as the Dead started the second set with ‘Touch Of Grey’.  The Nevilles sat in with the Dead for a few songs.  After the last notes of ‘Brokedown Palace’ drifted away to end the third set we blissfully filed out of the Kaiser.  We had a couple of beers in the park and then went to bed happy.  Now for the journey home.

 

The next day on January 1^st, we woke up excited for the road trip and happy to be getting the hell out of Oakland.  It was a new day, a new year, and who knows what 1987 held for us.  We jumped on Highway 5 and zipped down to Bakersfield by mid-afternoon.  Taking turns driving we crossed Arizona and got to Albuquerque in the middle of the night.  We stopped at a rest area and slept until morning before heading down to Lovington, NM to grab Sean and head back north to home.  We got to Reinhart’s place around noon on January 2^nd and it was weird and a little bit disconcerting walking around in the wide open desert after hanging out in a crowded hectic city for the last few days.

 

Reinhart was renting a little pink house (think ‘Pink Houses’ by John Mellencamp) for $75/month that was in the middle of effing nowhere.  I think he thought we were going to stay awhile, but after driving an additional 4 ½ hours south out of our way from Albuquerque to get Sean we just wanted to get back on the road to home.  Plus, sorry Reiny, Lovington just looks so desolate and boring.  It’s always nice hanging out with Reinhart for a bit and catching up, but we only stayed for a few hours.  We went to an old Pony Express station not far from his house and took turns shooting his new .357 Magnum at bottles and cans.  That was and is the only time in my life I have ever shot a handgun…not a fan.  We also went over to his friend Mike’s house for a couple beers and to smoke some weed.  As any normal New Mexican would, Mike thought Ron was gay because of his short spikey blond hair, his long trench coat, and his short black boots with heels that zipped up the side.  Ron was not gay but he fancied himself a quirky rock star because he was the drummer in a band called Three-Car Garage.  Mike’s weed turned out to be strangely dark green and no good.  We left after a bit to go back to Reinhart’s place.

 

Despite Reinhart’s protests to stay longer we pulled out of Lovington late that afternoon on January 2^nd and were finally heading home.  Within minutes we were in Texas and not long after that I got pulled over for speeding through some tiny town.  I think I was going 30 in a 25.  The town sheriff took a long, slow suspicious look at the three of us but without too much hassle let us go with a $50 speeding ticket.  I never paid that sucker and may still be a wanted man in Texas for all I know. 

Eventually we got to Kansas City on the morning of January 3^rd and instead of continuing on with the final 6 hours home, Sean took the off-ramp into the city.  He informed us that we needed to stop and collect on a guy that he used to be in a band with.  The band had been touring out in California and the gigs dried up so Sean quit, but the band stole Sean’s guitar and all his equipment.  Sean wanted to find this drummer and either get a guitar from him or some money or he was going to beat the guy up.  Really?  I just wanted to go home but Sean did not give us an option.  We drove around all day making phone calls and trying to track this guy down.  I was getting pissed at the huge delay when we were so close to home but Sean was determined and finally got an address on the guy.

 

It was afternoon and light was fading.  Sean had a grim look on his face as we pulled into the guy’s neighborhood and parked a few houses down the street.  He told us this shouldn’t be a big deal, but then explained that if the guy got uppity or had friends with him he might need some back up.  Some muscle.  Me and Ron muscle?  I was a peace-loving hippie and Ron weighed about 100 pounds, but okay…we were Sean’s muscle.  Sean knew the guy would not answer the door if he knocked, so he wanted me to knock on the door while him and Ron waited in the bushes.  Then when the guy came to the door Sean would appear.  After a minute the guy came to the door wondering who the heck I was.  Sean slowly merged out of the bushes and you should have seen the look on the guy’s face.  He was almost crying as he immediately started apologizing and blubbering to Sean that he did not have any money or his guitar and that the band had ripped him off too.

 

So after talking to him for awhile Sean let him off the hook (it’s hard to beat up a whimpering grown man I guess) and we got back on the road to Minneapolis.  We got in late that night on January 3^rd.  I was exhausted and completely broke but so happy to be home after 9 full days on the road.  Lona was glad to see me but she was a little pissed off as she had been expecting and waiting for me all day.  I explained about the delay in Kansas City and then curled up in our bed…an actual bed instead of the front bucket seat of a Celica.  We had a fantastic trip to California, but it was just the first of many…

 

My First Trip To California with The Dead/1986 (Part 1)

It was December of 1986.  I was 20 years old, in my 3^rd year of college at the University of Minnesota and really starting to get into the Grateful Dead.  I had only seen them 5 times prior to this but they were quickly becoming a way of life.  One day I got a call from a buddy of mine who had seen a couple of Dead shows at Alpine Valley the previous summer and had got all caught up in the frenzy.  He had bought a VW bus, plastered it with Dead stickers and suddenly he was a Deadhead.  He even went so far as to mail-order for New Years Eve tickets to see the Dead in Oakland before he realized he was not that into it and did not want to “drive all the way to California in the middle of winter to see a couple of freakin’ concerts.”  He had scored a pair of tickets for the 12/30 & 12/31/86 Dead shows at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, so he called me up and asked if I wanted them.  I hung up and called my buddy Ron ‘The Snake’ Bronson and he immediately said yes, he’s in.  We’ll take ‘em!  We decided the two of us would drive out there right after Christmas in my yellow ’78 Toyota Celica.

 

I had been visiting my parents for Christmas at their house in Waukesha near Milwaukee.  With deep and valid concern in my mother’s eyes as I pulled out of the driveway, I headed up to Minneapolis early on December 26^th to get Ron.  I got there around 11 am and our friend Sean Morrison was at Ron’s house.  Sean had nothing to do and thought it would be fun to visit our friend Reinhart Simpson who lived in Lovington, New Mexico.  He asked if we would drop him off in Albuquerque on the way to Oakland and pick him up in Lovington on the way back.  Sure!  The more the merrier!  Wait…I asked him if New Mexico was on the way to Oakland.  “Practically”, he said.  He noted that it was a littttle bit farther south than one would normally be going from Minneapolis to Oakland but that it was almost as fast if not faster because one would avoid the worst of the Rocky Mountains in the winter.  Fine, no problem, let’s do it.

 

I had a small pack with some underpants, some tee-shirts, the concert tickets, a briefcase full of cassettes, a camera and about $200.  Gas was still just under $1/gallon so I figured $200 would be plenty to get us there and back, and any leftover money would be for food.  Sean had a small pack, and Ron just brought a case of beer.  We had everything we needed.  The three of us set out from Minneapolis around noon heading south on I-35 with me behind the wheel, Sean riding shotgun and Ron in the back.

 

By the time we had gotten half-way through Iowa Ron had plowed through half the case of beer and was puking and obnoxious.  By the time we go to Missouri he had passed out but wet his pants and he was really starting to stink up my car.  I begged Sean to let me pull over at a rest stop and leave him there.  I rationalized that Ron could hitchhike back to Minneapolis and Sean could take Ron’s place.  The voice of reason, Sean said no but that we could stop in Kansas City where his mom lived and get Ron cleaned up.  She was a very sweet, understanding lady who had seen a lot in her days of raising Sean and his brother.  She washed Ron’s pants, gave us a large plate of Christmas cookies and sent us on our away.

 

It was about 9 pm and a blinding ice storm had moved into the area.  Sean was driving now as we continued south towards Wichita and then Oklahoma City.  After an hour we had finally gotten clear of the Kansas City metro area and into the open plains, but the ice storm was making the going very slow as Sean slid around on the highway trying to avoid the ditches on either side.  I was up front holding on for dear life while Ron snored away in the back seat.  It was getting late and Sean reasoned that with all the beers he had drunk there was no way he was going to make it through the night without some extra help so he produced a baggie full of mushrooms.  He held the bag up and with a nod motioned me to dig in, but I declined citing the need for sleep.  He placed the bag on his lap and started munching away while driving.  I fell asleep but at some point during the night was awakened by a large “THUMP”!  We were still moving, but Sean sadly told me that he had hit a large white dog running across the freeway.  In his hallucinogenic state I could not be sure if that was true or not, but we had definitely hit something.

 

I woke up the next morning and looked out at bright sunny Texas.  No more snow and ice!  Sean was still driving and grinning and said that other than a few fishtail episodes on the ice, the hassle of avoiding all the cars that were off the side of the road and the one huge dog he had hit, everything was groovy.  We pulled over in the desert, got out and climbed around.  I marveled at all the cactus and tumbleweeds and lizards and stuff I had never seen before.  At a lonely gas station in the middle of nowhere there was a large cowboy about 20 feet tall pointing a pistol, so I had Sean pull over and take a picture of me getting shot.

 

Ron and I eventually realized that Albuquerque was nowhere near San Francisco, but the three of us finally got to Albuquerque on the evening of the 27^th.  We met up with our college buddy Reinhart at a bar, had a few beers and talked about old times.  Then Ron and I continued on into the night heading for California with Ron driving while I slept.  I woke up briefly as we approached Winslow, AZ and I made Ron pull over and take a picture of me next to the sign so I could say that I was “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona”.  It was, in fact, not such a fine sight to see and not one single girl in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at me.

 

I woke up early the next morning at the California border with Ron stopped at a checkpoint.  Huh?  They wanted to know if we had any fruit.  Hell no I thought, but I hope they don’t search us and find Ron’s weed.  Nope…we continued on and got to Los Angeles around 9 am on the morning of December 28^th.  We decided not to stop in L.A., but just head straight up to the Bay Area.  We could have taken the faster way on Hwy 5 which is only about 6 hours, but we had heard how beautiful Hwy 1 is along the coast.  So with me behind the wheel we took the 9 hour way up the scenic winding coastal highway.  It was absolutely breathtakingly beautiful for a couple of Minnesotans who had never seen the Pacific Ocean before, but after a few hours it got tiresome…left, right, left, right, constantly turning the whole way along this never-ending winding road.

 

Late in the afternoon we made it to Big Sur near Monterey.  We sneaked past the checkpoint and went into the Big Sur State Park looking for a free shower.  We hiked around for a bit, showered, and I called my girlfriend Lona to let her know that I had made it to California and everything was groovy.  There was a lot of noise in the background and it sounded like she was having a party.  She did not seem interested in hearing about what a great time I was having so I made it a quick call and hung up.  Feeling refreshed we got back onto Hwy 1 and headed for Oakland.  We did not have tickets for the Dead’s show that night or any extra money to spare, but I started thinking that maybe when we got to the H.J.K Convention Center we could somehow score some free or cheap tickets for that night’s show.  Four out of my five previous experiences with the Grateful Dead had been at Alpine Valley, so I just assumed there would be a nice friendly camping area and plenty of extra tickets.

 

We finally got to the Bay Area and were heading northing on Hwy 880 around 8 pm on the night of the 28^th.  Suddenly I saw a large arena off to the right packed with cars in the lot and I assumed it was where the Dead were playing.  What luck!  We had no idea where the Kaiser was, and we just happened to stumble across it!  We joyously pulled into the parking lot and slowly drove through the rows of cars looking for a spot.  But wait…this was weird.  The lot was packed with cars but no people.  Where were all the Deadheads?  The VW buses?  The hippies milling around selling tie-dyes and beers and bracelets?  The loud Dead music with a different bootlegged concert blaring out of every other car?  I realized the show had already started but the lot was like a ghost town.  Maybe they do things differently in California?  Maybe once the show starts everyone with a ticket goes in and everyone else leaves.

 

So we parked our car and headed towards the arena.  We could hear the music playing and we were getting more and more excited as we got up to the gate.  Then…we just walked right in!  Nobody asked us for a ticket!  Holy crap, we had just gotten into our first California Dead show for free!  We stood in a stairwell near the stage to check it out and look for open seats, but something was not right.  Was that even the Dead?  I did not recognize the song at all.  I did not have my glasses on, but it sure did not look or sound like them.  Ron had never seen the Dead and he had no idea what was going on, so pointing to the stage I asked a guy if that was the Grateful Dead.  He just stared at me, then slowly shook his head and said:  “No…that’s Huey Lewis and the News.”  Dammit!  We were not at the H.J.K. Convention Center…we were at the Oakland Coliseum.

 

(Weird side-note:  I am typing this here at work on my lunch break.  Just a second ago at the exact moment that I was on Google getting the correct spelling of ‘Huey Lewis’, the girl in the next cubicle took her headphones off and I could hear the familiar sounds of the popular 80’s song ‘The Heart Of Rock And Roll’ playing.  Am I mistaken or is that a Huey Lewis song?  Yep…I just Googled the song and yes it is Huey Lewis.)

 

Anyways, we sheepishly backtracked out of the Oakland Coliseum, jumped in the car and headed further north looking for the Kaiser.  After driving around for a bit we eventually found it right smack in the middle of Oakland.  After 63 hours on the road I had finally made it from Waukesha, WI to Oakland, CA.  We found a parking spot on the road across the street from the park which was across the street from the Kaiser.  For the next four nights this block on this street would be our home.  I will close the story here for now, as the entire story is going to be very long.  This first part is the intro…getting to Oakland.  Part 2 will be all the stuff that happened in the Bay Area, as well as getting home.

A Good Year In Music (2015)

(Rolling Stones during ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ @ TCF Stadium 6/3/15)

Well 2015 is winding down, New Years Eve is fast approaching, and I have been thinking about all of the cool concerts I was fortunate enough to see this year.  Some bands I have seen a million times, some bands I have never seen and some are bucket-list guys.  There was one stand-out fantastic show and one stand-out crappy show…but mostly a year filled with awesome music.  I have ramped up my live concerts in the last couple of years mainly due to age concerns…my age and the advancing ages of all my musical heroes.  I always regretted skipping AC/DC the last time they came around (twice) during the ‘Black Ice’ tour in 2008 and 2009.  It has now been almost 15 years since the last time I saw them in 2001, and until they announced they will be here next February I was starting to wonder if I would ever see them again.  And I made that mistake with Ray Manzarek as well…I skipped his last show here in Minnesota few years ago and then he died.  After I let those shows go by unattended I started thinking about age.  And time…it is relentless.  It is moving faster and faster the older we get and all my favorite bands are retiring or dying.  Ten years from now I may have nothing to see.

 

So I decided that I had to try and see every single band or artist that I like when they came to town in case it is the last time.  That’s the thing about ‘the last time’.  You never know when the last time is until it’s over with.  Was the summer Rolling Stones concert the last time I will ever see the world’s greatest rock and roll band?  Or what about Motley Crue?  Three times now I have gone to see their ‘last show ever in Minnesota’, but the bastards keep coming back and I have to keep going.  Or the freaking Who…I paid out big bucks ($17) when I was in high school to see their ‘final tour’ in 1982, and yet I have tickets to see them coming up next May.  Or the Rush concert last spring…they kind of hinted that was their last tour.  You just never know.

 

Looking at the list below, here are some of observations:  I would have to say my favorite show of the year was the Rolling Stones and my worst show was Gordon Lightfoot (as detailed in my 7/30/15 blog-post ‘The Good, the Bad and the Awesome’).  My favorite venue for quality of shows, sound, staff, the bar, and convenience (it’s just down the road from my house) is the Medina Ballroom.  My worst venue is the Dakota.  I suppose seeing a mellow performer like Jorma Kaukonen is okay in that small, intimate, upscale expensive environment, but seeing a rocking band like the Subdudes and having to sit down instead of dancing is counter-productive and annoying.  The Medina can have that problem too, but usually for the hard rock bands they remove the tables and make the whole place General Admission.

 

I have to give special mention to two other concerts.  First of all, the Dead & Company show.  I do not know why some people are so insanely opposed to this.  Jerry can’t be in the band, he’s dead.  Does that mean everyone else in the band should refrain from making anymore music?  I pay money to see good music, and this was good music.  I do not know anything about John Mayer, but he is an awesome guitarist and I would definitely go again.  I liked this Dead even better than last summer’s Chicago version.  I am not a fan of Trey’s (or Phil’s) voice, so this new version was the best post-Jerry show I have seen.  I scored a pit ticket for the Dead by calling AXS instead of toiling with their website and it worked great!  I got right in and scored a coveted General Admission pit ticket.  The front third of the floor was GA, the back two-thirds assigned seats.  Doors at 7 pm and music at 8 pm, and they said people with GA could start lining up as early as 5pm.  I figured the hell with that…it was freezing out and I did not need to be up front. 

 

So I got there at 7:15 pm but there was still a massive line as the doors had not been opened yet.  I was not going to wait in that line so I walked up to the front to ask one of the guards when they were opening up.  She said “Right now” and grabbed me and I was the first one in the building!  So I ran downstairs and holy sh*t the floor was empty…I walked right up and got front row center on the rail!  I could not believe it.  Then two nice girls got next to me and I told them that for all 100 of my Dead concerts I had been front row only once…in Louisville.  They asked when that was and I told them spring tour ’89.  They both laughed and said that was the year they were both born.  It was a pretty good mixed crowd between young and old, with all the young ones having been introduced to the Dead through their parents.  It was a pleasant crowd and I had no problem leaving to go get a drink or pee and getting back to my front/center spot.  One of the girls went into a seizure-like thing though during ‘Space’ with her head bouncing off the railing as she collapsed, so me and the other girl had to help her to the back.  Other than that it was a great night, fantastic show.

 

The other honorable mention goes to Alice Cooper/Motley Crue’s final ass-kicking show here in Minnesota last week.  I did not care that this was the third final show in Minnesota that I had seen on this tour and I did not care that the setlist was the same as last August.  I just love seeing these two bands in concert.  Alice Cooper was his usual great self playing all his hits while being electrocuted and stabbed and beheaded, and Motley Crue was just as loud and brash as ever with a monster set full of explosions and flames and great tunes.  It also helped that I went in solo on an $18 ticket and managed to walk right up to a 5^th row aisle seat right on the side of the stage.  I could feel the heat and the concussions from all of the explosions, and I had Nikki Sixx in my face all night.  He even threw me a guitar pick.  Great concert, great night, and I will miss seeing those guys live.

 

Another thing I noticed on the list is that all but one of the concerts was in Minnesota.  The only out-of-state show was in Chicago.  That is a far cry from my earlier days when every other month I was traveling with Mitch or Ted or Freak or B-Dog or Arnie or Brad or Penny or Dirty Dan to San Francisco or New York or New Orleans or someplace to see the Radiators.  Or going to see major music festivals like Jazz Fest in New Orleans or the Austin City Limits Festival in Texas or Summerfest in Milwaukee.  Or before that touring with the Grateful Dead all over the country.  Now that I have a couple of small kids my traveling days have come to almost a complete halt.  I miss those adventures, but I would not trade what I have now for anything.

 

I also noticed that a good majority of the bigger shows I went to solo.  I am totally cool with that.  A younger me would have never dreamed of going to a concert by myself…uh, loser.  But now I almost prefer it.  I go to a concert to see music, not to talk.  Also, when I am solo at a large venue like an arena or stadium I have the option of buying a cheap ticket and then sneaking my way down to the front and finding an open expensive seat.  That works just about every time when I am solo, but is much harder with a friend.  Don’t get me wrong I like going to concerts with friends, but I have no problem going solo if nobody else wants to go.

 

The best show that I did not see last year was the Foo Fighters on January 10^th at the LA. Forum.  On January 7^th, the night before heading to Los Angeles from Jan 8-11^th for a funeral, I decided for the heck of it to go to ticketmaster.com and see what music was playing for the 3 nights I was going to be there.  I happened to login at exactly 9:00 pm and suddenly a Foo Fighters concert popped up on the screen.  Huh.  I was ignorant and had never seen them before but I know they are huge so I decided to try for one ticket.  Huh again…12^th row in the lower level on the front-side of the stage.  Perfect.  Wait, only $50?  Oh, it was a benefit show and all tickets were $50.  I did not know much about the Foo, but I thought tickets were hard to get for their show.  This was easy.  I had 8 minutes to complete the purchase.  I called my brother in Los Angeles to see if the family was doing anything that night…if not, I could go.  He did not answer.  I called my mom in Portland…I got her voicemail too.  Hmm.  It was a great ticket but I did not want to be stuck with the ticket if I couldn’t go.  Nobody called me back, time expired and the ticket was gone.  I immediately started to feel pangs of regret.  I tried again right away to get another ticket just to make sure they were still available in case my brother or mom called back.  The wait-time for tickets was now 45 minutes!  It was 9:10 pm.  They must have went on sale at 9 pm and they were now basically sold out!  Weird, I thought. 

 

Turns out it was a surprise unannounced concert for Dave Grohl’s 46^th birthday party, complete with special guests Paul Stanley, Jack Black, Slash, Alice Cooper, Zakk Wylde, Perry Farrell, Trombone Shorty, David Lee Roth and Lemmy Kilmister.  Tons of my musical heroes doing all my favorite songs.  And as it turns out I could have went.  By that third night in town all the family activities were done, so the night of the Foo concert I was sitting on a bed in a hotel room just down the street from the Forum with my Uncle Jim swilling a bottle of scotch watching Sports Center.  It is now and will remain one of my life’s all-time biggest musical regrets.  After telling my friend Penny McCartney about what I had done she was shocked at my stupidity for not buying the $50 ticket.  “You realize of course that people will pay $1,000 for a ticket to see these surprise Foo concerts.  It would have been the concert of a lifetime.”  I think she was genuinely mad at me, and for good reason.  Ughhh.  Here is what I missed:

http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/foo-fighters/2015/the-forum-inglewood-ca-5bcab724.html

Anyways, here is what I DID manage to see last year:

 

1/16/15 – Fleetwood Mac @ Xcel Center – St. Paul, MN

1/17/15 – Sesame Street Live @ State Theatre – Minneapolis, MN
2/6 & 2/7/15 – New Orleans Suspects @ Bunkers – Minneapolis, MN
2/26/15 – Gov’t Mule @ State Theatre
3/13/15 – Robby Krieger @ Medina Ballroom – Medina, MN
3/29/15 – Stevie Wonder @ Target Center – Minneapolis, MN
4/11/15 – Jorma Kaukonen @ The Dakota – Minneapolis, MN
4/12/15 – Disney’s Frozen On Ice @ Target Center
4/19/15 – Sixx A.M. @ Mill City Nights – Minneapolis, MN
5/12/15 – Rush @ Xcel Center
5/16/15 – Billy Joel @ Target Center
6/3/15 – Rolling Stones @ TCF Stadium – Minneapolis, MN
6/20/15 – Gordon Lightfoot @ State Theatre
6/27/15 – Dr. John @ CHS Field – St. Paul, MN
7/3/15 – Grateful Dead @ Soldier Field – Chicago, IL
7/10 & 7/11/15 – Raw Oyster Cult @ Bunkers
8/5/15 – Motley Crue @ Xcel Center
8/21/15 – Mofro/Big Head Todd @ Hilde Performance Center – Plymouth, MN
8/22/15 – Foo Fighters @ Xcel Center
8/27/15 – Def Leppard/Styx/Tesla @ State Fair – St. Paul, MN
9/18 & 9/19/15 – Honey Island Swamp Band @ Whiskey Junction – Minneapolis, MN
9/20/15 – Uncle Acid @ Mill City Nights
9/29/15 – Mark Knopfler @ Orpheum Theatre – Minneapolis, MN
10/9/15 – Leon Russell @ Medina Ballroom
10/16/15 – Ringo Starr @ State Theatre
10/25/15 – Arlo Guthrie @ O’Shaughnessy Auditorium – St. Paul, MN
10/29, 10/30 & 10/31/15 – Raw Oyster Cult @ Bunkers
11/10/15 – The Subdudes @ The Dakota
11/14/15 – Eric Burdon @ Medina Ballroom
11/21/15 – Dead & Company @ Target Center
12/8/15 – Motley Crue @ Target Center
12/31/15 – Hairball @ Medina Ballroom

 

Looking ahead to 2016, I have tickets lined up for the following…I can’t wait!

 

1/15 & 1/16/16 – The Radiators @ Tipitinas – New Orleans, LA

1/25/16 – Black Sabbath @ Target Center
1/29/16 – Blue Oyster Cult/Jefferson Starship @ Medina Ballroom
2/14/16 -- AC/DC @ Xcel Center
2/23/16 – Warren Haynes Band @ Fitzgerald Theatre – St. Paul, MN
2/28/16 – Disney On Ice @ Target Center
2/29/16 – Bruce Springsteen @ Xcel Center
4/9/16 – Marvel Universe Live @ Target Center
5/1/16 – The Who @ Target Center

Getting Busted In The Dorms (The Aftermath)

In the last blog entry I told you about my dorm room getting raided on May 30^th, 1986.  How my roommate Mark and I got busted for growing 18 pot plants, as well as for theft due to the cops finding our ‘Stolen Goods Report’ carefully detailing all of the stuff we had shoplifted over the school year.  After being on the lam for about a week, Mark’s girlfriend Mindy made an arrangement with the cops for us to turn ourselves in on the condition that we would not be immediately jailed.  After meeting with the friendly female detective in charge of our case, our next step was to go to court.

 

I got charged with possession of marijuana which was a misdemeanor, and theft of goods totaling less than $400 which was also a misdemeanor.  Mark was actually facing much more trouble than me, because he had been ‘winning’ the stealing competition.  The wheelchair he had stolen was worth close to $400, and with the addition of the dozens of other littler items he had stolen his total was well over the $400 felony threshold.  He would have been facing felony theft charges except for the incredible coolness of our understanding detective.  Recognizing that we were a couple of idiot college students with a future if we stayed out of trouble, not a pair of lifelong master criminals, she charged Mark with something like 25 counts of misdemeanor theft.  Instead of totaling all of the goods and charging him with a felony, she broke it down to a misdemeanor theft charge for each individual item.  Apparently a ton of misdemeanors is better than even just one felony.

 

In addition to that bit of kindness, the detective made recommendations to the court that we do no jail time, that we complete a large number of community service hours, and that after our probationary period our records would be wiped clean.  No adult criminal record.  Holy crap.  Would it fly?  The judge sat up in his bench for about 10 minutes reading over our case.  I anxiously watched his face.  Sometimes he furrowed his brow in disgust, sometimes it wrinkled with laughter, and then his brow raised in surprise.  Really?  The cops were recommending community service and then a clean record?  He conferred with our public defender and with the prosecutor for a bit and then he finally brought forth his judgment.  We pleaded guilty to all of our misdemeanors, and in turn he sentenced me to 150 hours of community service for my 2 charges, and Mark to 200 hours of community service for his pile of charges.  We would be on probation for 1 year, and then if we remained out of trouble during that time the charges would be wiped from our records.  The University of Minnesota had also put us on probation, so we were currently on probation from the State of Minnesota, the U of M, and the State of Wisconsin (see the ‘Busted In Trempealeau, Parts I-IV’ blog posts dated 9/9/11-9/16/11).

 

So no jail time, but now we had to deal with what seemed like a million hours of working for free.  They let us both leave to go to our parents’ homes in Waukesha, WI for the summer, but in the fall when we returned to college we would have to start knocking off our community service hours.  So that September we went back to the cop shop and were shown a list of places that we could work at.  We told them where we lived and our school schedules and what days and times were best for us, and they picked the places for us to work.  Mark ended up being assigned to the police station doing filing work, while I got sentenced to a crazy holy place.  I cannot remember the name of it, but it was in a street-level office building on E. Hennepin Avenue near the St. Anthony Main area.  The location was great because it was only a few blocks from my apartment off 4^th street, and it was right across the street from my favorite place in the whole world, Surdyk’s Liquor.

 

The first time I went in to start working my hours, I stopped by Surdyk’s beforehand to pick up some wine for later that night.  They were simply appalled and many eyebrows were raised when I walked in carrying a bag full of the devil’s elixir.  The place was a fundamental super-religious sect that took the bible extremely seriously.  Their world had no room or tolerance for booze and they made sure I was aware of that with a lecture on the evils of alcohol.  I promised to never drink again and then my training commenced.  Mostly I would just be stuffing envelopes with fliers to send to their members to raise money.  They also made money by selling cassette tapes of their teachings.  They had a huge old cassette duplicator thing that was as a big as a stacked washer/dryer and sometimes they would let me make tapes.  That was fun because I was way into making Grateful Dead tapes at the time.  I thought about bringing some in so I could mass produce like 20 copies of a show at a time, but I was pretty sure they would frown upon anything related to the Grateful Dead.

 

One time I went in there with a slight limp.  I cannot remember why, probably a sprained ankle playing soccer.  So one of the guys asked me what was wrong and I told them that my right leg is slightly longer than my left (which is true) so I limp sometimes.  Before I knew what was happening he had grabbed me and thrown me up on a table and told me to lie down.  Then he called everyone in the building over to the table and they started chanting and ‘laying hands’ on me.  What the f*ck?!  I was a little freaked out at first but I decided to go with it.  While about 5 or 6 of these people laid their hands on various parts of my body and chanted, the head weirdo started tugging on my left leg while beseeching the lord to:  “Make this boy’s leg grow in the name of Jesus!”  After three or four times yelling at Jesus he started to look worried and I felt bad, so I suddenly jerked my left leg forward just a little bit.  “Sweet precious lord it’s a miracle!!” they all shouted over and over again.  After yelling for awhile and some high fives around the table, they all dissipated back to whatever they were doing and left me alone to stuff envelopes.

 

They seemed like pretty happy people which I am all for, but I received a few lectures during my times there about the dark path I had chosen.  Whatever happened to separation of church and state?  I found it very hard to believe I was sentenced by the state to work for this wacked out church place.  I resented the lectures and having their views thrust on me, but mostly I just let it go and tried not to rock the boat because as it turned out they were also a very trusting people.  This worked to my advantage because they let me be in charge of my work log.  I would go in on say a Friday for the first time in two weeks, and log that I had been there that Monday and Wednesday, and 3 days the prior week as well.  I would go in for 2 hours and log about 20 hours.  Nobody seemed to catch on or care when I came or went, so out of the 150 hours of my sentence I probably put in about 20 or 25 at most.  Mark was jealous and a little bit pissed off because he certainly had to do his full 200 hours…he was not going to get away with fudging the numbers at the police station.

 

I finished my community service hours in a couple months, and after a year when the probation ended it was all over.  It was scary at times but I learned a few things.  I learned not to steal things.  I learned not to grow pot in dorm rooms.  I learned that Thomas Jefferson’s separation of church and state theory does not apply to stupid college sophomores.  And I learned that not all cops are created equal.  Some of them are people too and can be pretty cool.  Probably most of them, but I would not know because I try to avoid them.  I have not always succeed as you may have read in past entries, and maybe in some future ones as well.

 

Cops and Dorm Rooms Don't Mix (Story #2...Weed/Theft)

It was the spring of 1986.  I was a sophomore at the University of Minnesota and this was my second year of living on campus at the Pioneer Hall dormitory in Minneapolis.  I lived with my high school best friend Mark Smith.  Instead of sharing a normal single dorm room, we had a sweet suite, one of the few in the building.  We each had a small bedroom equipped with a bed, a dresser, a closet and a door leading to a good-sized living room area in the middle.  The living room had our desks, a fridge, the TV and a real couch perched on top of beer-case couch that we had made from the leftovers of our numerous beer parties.  It was a double-decker couch, much like the one Emmet had thought up in ‘The Lego Movie’.  There were no pets allowed in the dorm but we had a 5-foot Ball Python named Damian, a stray cat for part of the year, a dog for a little while, a hermit crab named Jzero, some chameleons that roamed free and a small garter snake named Floyd.  (Poor Floyd met an untimely demise one night when he escaped into the hallway where somebody accidentally stepped on him enough to injure him but not to kill him.  We never bothered locking our door so the person put Floyd back in his 5-gallon tank where he lived with Jzero.  When we got home we were saddened to discover that Jzero had eaten Floyd’s head clean off.)  Anyways, it was a great room but it was getting near the end of my second year there and we were thinking it might be time to move out and get actual big-boy apartments.

 

One day I got mysteriously called down to the dorm director’s office.  Uh oh…this cannot be good.  When I got there he looked sad, and not sure how to go about saying what he had to say.  He explained that it had been a tumultuous year for Mark and I with numerous warnings about parties and pot and noise and whatnot.  He then hesitantly went on to say that with the thin walls, people hear things…things that we do not want them to hear.  I mistakenly thought I was just getting a lecture about our loud parties bothering people.  He even went on to say that we should not be surprised if one day soon the cops showed up…and that we had better be extra super careful and clean up our act.  Fine, okay, fine…we will keep the noise down I thought to myself.  There was less than a month left in the school year, and then we would definitely be moving out for good I decided.

 

What I stupidly did not realize was that this kind man was trying to warn me that the cops were actually planning a full-blown raid on our dorm room and that we should empty it of any incriminating evidence.  Now that I think about, he all but told me exactly that, but I chose not get the message.  That past winter I had scored a grow-light from a friend named Humper who lived in a frat.  He owed me money and he gave me the light as payment instead.  So naturally we cleared all the stuff out of the closet in my bedroom and used it to grow pot.  We had 18 pot plants crammed in there which made it a bit difficult for me to sleep because we kept the bright light on 24 hours/day.  But it would be worth it as we thought of the sweet harvest we had envisioned for ourselves at the end of the school year.  In addition to the plants, Mark also had a sheet of paper acid (100 hits) that we would eat on the weekends or give to friends.

 

It was on Friday, May 30^th, 1986 when Mark and I jumped on a Greyhound for the 5-hour bus ride to our hometown of Waukesha, WI.  We left that Friday morning and planned on coming back Sunday night.  Mark had tickets for the Aerosmith concert at Alpine Valley that night, and I was looking forward to spending the weekend with my girlfriend Lona who was a senior at Waukesha North.  I was at Lona’s parents house Friday night when I got a frantic call from Mark’s girlfriend Mindy in Minneapolis…the cops had raided our place that day!  I was panicked…what the hell were we going to do?  I could not even tell Mark about it because he was at the concert.  This was way before cell phones or email so the sketchy reports I was getting from friends in Minneapolis were of little use.  All I could find out was that they cops were there the entire afternoon and had completely destroyed our place.

 

I started going over in my mind all the things that they would find.  The pot…the acid…and oh no, the ‘Stolen Goods Report’.  Oh god I hoped Mark had hidden that or took it with him.  Yes, this is embarrassing to admit, but like stupid sophomore college idiots we had gotten into shoplifting.  It was mostly little things like blank cassette tapes and record albums from the local record shop, but Mark also had swiped a wheel chair from the hospital a couple blocks away.  We had both gotten incredibly proficient at riding that thing all over the dorm on just the two back wheels and it was a lot of fun.  Eventually the shoplifting had become somewhat of a competition between Mark and I, so we decided to keep track in a journal of what we had each taken.  So in the ‘Stolen Goods Report’ we had carefully and painstakingly documented every single item we took, when, from where, and how much the item cost.  We had one column for Mark, and one for me.  The idea was to tally up at the end of the year to see who had gotten the most.  I got no sleep that Friday night and when I finally got a hold of Mark the next day he told me that he think he left the notebook in his room.  We were scared shitless, dreading whatever was waiting for us when we got back to Minneapolis.

 

As it turns out, the cops initially had only been there to bust us for the pot and the acid.  They drove a big police van onto the sidewalk and backed it right up to the front door of the lobby in the picture above.  Then they hauled out all 18 pot plants and loaded them onto the van.  From accounts of friends who were there, it was a very hot day and the overweight cops were sweating bullets climbing up and down the three flights of stairs lugging all of our stuff.  Then the tedious work began…looking for the acid which was by now only a half sheet, a piece of paper maybe 2” by 3”.  Between us Mark and I owned literally hundreds and hundreds of cassette tapes (mostly Grateful Dead concerts) and many more albums and books and stuff for them to look through.  While looking for the acid one of the cops happened to spot a notebook sitting on Mark’s desk with ‘STOLEN GOODS REPORT’ proudly written in large block letters on the cover.  Oh my god those cops must have gotten the biggest laugh when they opened that thing up and passed it around.  Yes, every single theft we had ever committed that year written down in great detail for them.  I have never stolen anything in my life since then.

 

Luckily we were out of town when the raid went down which kept us out of jail.  But now what?  We got back Sunday night and stayed at Mindy’s house.  We waited until 2 am and then snuck back into the dorm and up to our 3^rd floor room to assess the damage.  It was horrific.  Every single cassette and album had been opened up a dumped out.  Our beds turned over, all of our dresser drawers taken out and dumped.  The dorm room fridge was open, tipped over on its side, and all the contents strewn about the floor.  Other than the Stolen Goods Report (which was not there so of course the cops had found it) the thing we had been most worried about was Mark’s acid.  Pot was one thing, but acid was a major felony.  As I surveyed the carnage, Mark ran over to the fridge, tipped it back upright and HOLY SH*T!  There was the acid!  Mark kept the paper acid in the fridge to keep it fresh.  The cops had emptied every single beer can, old piece of pizza, ketchup packet and whatever else was in there…they had completely emptied it clean except the acid.  Mark yelled to me and I came running over and I looked to where he was pointing.  There alone in the fridge proudly sat the little sheet of acid.  PHEWWW!  We grabbed the acid, some clean clothes, our schoolbooks and got the hell out of there.

 

With the acid problem off the table, now we just had to face the music of the pot plants and the stolen stuff.  We stayed at Mindy’s apartment for about a week trying to figure out what to do.  We had so many questions.  Were the cops looking for us?  Were they staking out the dorm or our classes or friends?  Who had turned us in?  Were we facing serious jail time?  We still had another week of school and finals to get through, but we did not go to the dorm for fear of being caught and we were equally nervous about going to our classes.  We were officially ‘on the lam’.  We could not afford a lawyer so we had Mindy make an anonymous call to the cops from a pay phone.  She told them that we were in town and we wanted to know what was next.  The head detective was a nice lady and said that a warrant had not been issued yet, but would be soon unless we came in to talk to her.  We had Mindy call her back with a time to meet and with the condition that we would not be tossed into jail.  She agreed.  We would be booked, but not jailed.

 

So we nervously went down to the cop-shop and were led to her office.  She was an incredibly nice lady who had done her homework on us.  We were both good students who were smart in school but f*cking dumbasses otherwise.  She showed us the evidence room where the 18 plants were slowly dying and she said she felt bad about that.  Then she laughingly pulled out the Stolen Good Report, plopped it on the table in front of us and shook her head at how easy we had made her job.  But then she grabbed Mark’s shirt with two hands, jokingly shook him around and said:  “Off the record…WHERE WAS THE ACID?!  I was there all day opening every single goddamn cassette tape looking for that sh*t!  Was it in the snake cage?  I opened the cover to the wooden box, took one look inside and slammed it shut.  You could have had a pound of heroin, I was not going in there.”  Now it was our turn to laugh.  Still grinning Mark explained to her that it was in the fridge…that it was the only thing left in there after they had emptied it.  “Dammit!!” she yelled.  But she got it over it.  They had plenty to bust us with.  Apparently the dorm RA had heard us talking about drugs in our room and that was enough for the cops to get a warrant and raid us.  If only I had heeded the dorm director’s ominous warning about the impending raid.

 

This has gotten long enough so I will save the rest.  I will explain in the next blog entry how our court dates went, our punishment, and how we got through all of that mess.  Until then remember, don’t do drugs and stay in school.

Cops and Dorm Rooms Don't Mix (Story #1...Blow)

I lived at the Pioneer Hall dormitory on campus at the University of Minnesota for my first two years of college, from September of 1984 through May of 1986.  While there I had a few run-ins with the cops.  One notable time was during my first year there.  Our dorm was attached by an underground tunnel to the dorm next door called Frontier Hall, and we shared a basement cafeteria with them.  One night I was in my friend Ron Bronson’s room in Frontier Hall with Ron, his roommate Paul, Rinehart Simpson who lived across the hall, and one or two other guys.  Paul was a rich kid from Colorado who had an expensive high school cocaine habit.  He had pretty much quit doing blow when he got to college, but occasionally he would still splurge and have some fun.  This was one of those nights.  While we were all sitting around smoking pot he suddenly pulled out a 12”x12” Van Halen carnival mirror and dumped a gram of coke on it.  Yay!  Coke is a pretty crappy drug for many reasons but it was fun every once in awhile, especially if you did not have to pay for it.

 

We had been having a heated discussion about the breakup of Pink Floyd and which one is ‘Pink’…Roger Waters or David Gilmour. I love Gilmour, but I have always been more in the Rogers Waters camp.  I was going to help prove my case by having the group listen to a kickass Roger Waters bootleg cassette I had of a recent concert at Madison Square Garden.  In the dorms we had been warned many times about smoking pot so we were very careful about SLT’ing (Shut/Lock/Towel the bottom of) the door whenever we smoked.  I removed the towel covering the bottom of Ron’s door and left to run over to my dorm room and get the Waters tape.  Ron’s room was the very last room at the end of a hallway, and on the third floor.  I walked the length of the hallway and turned left to get on the elevator to go down to the basement tunnel to my dorm.  As I turned the corner I literally ran smack into the dorm’s Resident Assistant (RA) and a cop!  After bouncing off his belly, the RA gave me a sad but stern look and wordlessly they made the turn heading for what I was sure was Ron’s room.  Despite our precautions, the RA must have smelled the pot and called the cops.

 

My first thought was huge relief that I was no longer in that room.  My second thought was “Oh sh*t, the coke!”  Pot was bad enough, but if my friends opened the door thinking it was just me coming back and they had the mirror sitting out it would be big trouble.  As soon as the cop/RA turned the corner I ran past the elevator to the adjacent stairwell and ran down the three flights of stairs as fast as I could.  When I got down to the lobby a few precious seconds later I grabbed one of the two lobby phones and called Ron’s room.  He picked up and said “Hi.” and in the background I could hear loud knocking on their door.  “Cops, ditch everything!  Cops ditch everything!!” I yelled.  Then in order to make my point and hopefully get him moving instantly, I slammed the receiver down loudly as I hung up.  I walked over to my dorm, drank a beer in my room and hoped for the best.

 

I waited about a half-hour and then called the room.  Ron answered, gave a weak laugh and said:  “God, thank you man, come over.”  When I got there the gang was hanging out talking about what happened, while Paul was sitting on the corner of his bed looking in the Van Halen mirror and making strange faces with his mouth.  Ron told me that the second I hung up he motioned for everyone to hide the drugs.  Somebody stashed the weed under a mattress while Paul grabbed the mirror.  He did not want to dump $100 worth of drugs on the floor, but he did not want to risk being caught with it either.  So he quickly huffed the entire pile of coke into his mouth!  Then he licked the mirror clean and slid it under a pile of junk.  When everything looked cool Ron answered the door and let the cop and the RA in.

 

Luckily they did not search the place, but they had smelled the weed and my friends got a written warning from the RA and a stern lecture from the cop about the evils of marijuana…how it is leading them down a dark path, that the next time they will bring a warrant and search the rooms and they will all end up in jail.  The cop questioned each guy in there if they were smoking pot and if there was any in the room.  Everyone denied it vehemently, but when they got to poor Paul he could barely talk.  Not only was he nervous and getting all jacked up from the instant ingestion of an entire gram of cocaine, but his mouth was completely insanely numb from it.  Imagine getting a dozen shots of Novocain in your upper/lower gums and your tongue.  He was all mush-mouthed and doing his best to keep from drooling while answering the cop’s questions.  “No thir…I havth nod been thmoking weed.”  The cop looked at him curiously and asked what was wrong with him, but Paul told him he had a really bad cold and the cop left him alone.

 

All’s well that ends well, but remember kids…don’t do drugs, and stay in school.