“This was normally the place that was always safe and you felt the love from the audience. He’d performed the task dozens if not hundreds of times before, but never before had he felt as if a bull’s eye was plastered on his chest. At one point in the show a piece of electronics gear began misbehaving, and keyboard technician Bob Bralove, who usually stood behind the keyboards or drum riser, was forced to walk to the front of the stage to fix it. Ironically, the show opened with “Here Comes Sunshine,” the twinkling kaleidoscope of a song that was dropped from the repertoire after 1974 but had returned starting in 1992. But they weren’t about to take any chances. No one knew what the supposed shooter looked or dressed like, and no one even knew for sure whether the threat was real. We were worried, of course, but we didn’t want some lunatic to shut us down.” Indiana state police made their way into the crowd and the stage pit there they were joined by other Dead employees, including publicist Dennis McNally and Steve Marcus of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, all nervously glancing around for. The decision was made and everyone came around. But I remember joking, ‘Jerry, could you move over six inches onstage? At least I’ll make it!’ We were screaming laughing.
“All those things run around in your brain. “Would you sacrifice yourself for the music?” Mickey Hart recalls of that night.
But Garcia brushed it off, saying he’d dealt with crazies before and wouldn’t let this one stop him. “I was not going to stand up there and be a target,” he recalls. Verifying the threat was difficult, but Phil Lesh, the most immediately concerned because his family was there, made the case for canceling the show and heading out. Huddling backstage with the head of security, the band grappled with what to do. The information was unclear, but the implication was that the girl couldn’t be found and had run off on the road with them, and that the father was planning to attend the show and shoot Garcia. An anonymous person had called local police claiming to have overheard the distraught father of a young female Deadhead. Similar calls and warnings had arrived before, but this one felt creepier. On their way from their hotel (north of Indianapolis) to the venue word filtered down to band and its management: a death threat had been called in to Deer Creek. Although the Dead had played Deer Creek six times before without major incident, tonight began on a sour note. Out there the straight world never felt so distant. Springing up amid cornfields and cow pastures a half-hour north of Indianapolis, the amphitheater was, like the band, an enclave unto itself. “Please, don’t murder me,” Jerry Garcia sang again, now in a voice weathered by age and abuse, as cops pivoted their heads, hoping to catch sight of the man who’d vowed to kill Garcia before the night was over.Īlong with the likes of Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin, the Deer Creek Music Center had become a destination spot, a revered haven, for the Dead and their fans alike. But tonight, in the middle of Indiana, they again injected it with the crisp, merry gait of the recorded version, and even the song’s refrain harked back to its original impending-death inspiration. They’d played it innumerable times since, occasionally slowing it down a half step. Twenty-five years had passed since the Dead had recorded that song at Pacific High studio.
Three songs into the show, the house lights still on, the time had come for “Dire Wolf,” but with a perverse twist no one had anticipated. Excerpted from "So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead"
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