Why Do Dome of These Fashion Photos Look Like They Got Hit With a Bus
From the March 1992 issue of Automobile and Commuter.
A palpable buzz of electricity was in the air of the pretty clapboard towns surrounding Richfield Coliseum due south of Cleveland, even though the excitement—a three-night stand up by those cosmic old fogeys, the Grateful Dead—was withal two days away.
The buzz began with the first wave of wiggy onetime Volkswagen Buses that began appearing on the suburban landscape. Presently the local folks could be seen leaning forward over the steering wheels of their cars, squinting out at all the strange messages decorating the Buses. Look at that bumper sticker, Glenda!
"We ALL Alive DOWNSTREAM."
"I NEED A MIRACLE."
"MEAT STINKS."
The "Deadheads" had arrived, the camp followers of the middle-aged rock group who will travel any distance to attend these mini-Woodstock gatherings of their musical tribe. They pulled their Buses and vans off road nigh decorated intersections and set up shop, hanging up tie-dyes—sheets, shirts, hippie-manner dresses, T-shirts, Grateful Dead posters and paraphernalia, rastafarian hair wraps—on clotheslines. Overnight, the landscape was transformed. It was as if a traveling Sixties roadshow of rootless hippies had come to boondocks.
One supposes the locals appreciated the atmosphere of festival. There was a lot of grinning and shaking of their heads in local coffeeshops, only it was all adept-natured. (In the Sixties, at that place would take been a local brick-throwing contingent, for those travelers brought with them strange ideas and mind-expanding chemicals.)
The night before the Cleveland concert, some Deadheads, suited up in their necktie-dyed finery and sporting serious big hair and T-shirts with letters like "Eat, Drink and See Jerry," appeared to drink beer and consume among the locals at the nearby Winking Lizard Tavern, one of those places that utilize clean-cut college kids who have the exuberant wait of having experienced farm work. You could feel the excitement; you could even aroma the perfume of patchouli in the barroom.
The bartender, a strapping college-age youth, was asked if he was going to the concert. He grinned widely. "I was thinking of going," he said, "but I'one thousand kind of agape information technology'd change my life." A waitress his age heard that and laughed somewhat uneasily. She understood what he meant; strange ideas still have their attraction, and there was always the possibility of moral revolt, the temptation to dump tired sometime values. Who among these Nineties kids had not heard stories of the wicked Sixties, the sexual revolution, the Historic period of Aquarius?
So while the bartender laughed it off, perchance he considered the vague possibility of existence overcome past a foreign emotion to driblet out, to buy a mussed-up VW Double-decker for $500, to toss in a mattress, a hot plate, and a portable refrigerator, and to head off later on the Grateful Dead. What a trip! Thousands of Deadheads practise just that, and they manage to make a living in the process.
VW Buses and other provocative forms of weird transport were everywhere: lined upward behind filling stations, parked in vacant lots and backside motels, and, nearly of all, jammed into a nearby state-park campground. Down in that park, the Age of Aquarius had returned.
The VW Bus has gone by many names—Microbus, Panel Van, Kombi, Coiffure Cab, Camper, Station Carriage, Vanagon—but it is the simplest van, the Double-decker, built between 1949 and '79, that has been the vehicle of choice for those who have turned their backs on convention, or those who have wished to make personal statements most their values via their mode of transport.
The VW Jitney, similar the Beetle, has been "a negative status symbol" for near of its 42 years—patently as a brick, simple every bit a lawnmower, deadening as glue, cheap to buy, cheap to run, and cheap to fix, it has hauled a lot of people (and surfboards) around in a style that disdains style. If you're a Deadhead, it's not just a vehicle—it's home.
Something on the order of six.7 meg VW Buses have been built since 1949. Oddly enough, the idea for this simple "hauler" was not hatched in VW's Wolfsburg establish in Federal republic of germany, just in the caput of an ambitious Dutchman named Ben Pon, who saw the potential of VW later on the war and was to become an early exporter of its products (he personally brought the first Protrude to America).
Pon thought VW needed to offer more than just the Beetle, and with a simple sketch in a spiral notebook that is at present a museum antiquity at Wolfsburg, he drew a rendering of what he had in heed.
Pon's idea and then captivated Heinz Nordhoff, the late head human being at VW, that to launch the Omnibus in 1950 he had to cut back on production of the Protrude at a time when Volkswagen could not go along up with orders for its cheap car. Information technology was called the "Type 2" (Type 1 being the Protrude). Nordhoff and Pon had guessed correctly—by the mid-fifties, VW had to build a establish in Hanover only to build the Blazon 2s. Eventually the homely hauler would exist sold in 140 countries.
Imagine a 2300-pound van that promised to behave equally many as nine people only was propelled—hardly the right word—past a 25-horsepower engine! Past 1962, when the one-millionth "Bully" (named for its bulldog, workhorse stance) came off the line, its output had been increased to 34 hp and it finally got a synchronized manual.
VW offered its Jitney in countless configurations, with varying interior heights and bed plans and door arrangements. American buyers, who had to get upwards to speed on freeways, soon got a model with a ane.5-liter, 42-horsepower engine. (Still it was an adventure to be striking by a gust of wind in a VW Bus while crossing the Aureate Gate Bridge.) The first major facelift came in 1967; the two-piece windshield was replaced by a unmarried pane, its nose was flattened, and the doors, which had opened like those on a barn, were now sliding. The VW Bus craze in this country reached its peak in 1969, with a record 65,069 sold that year. More minor facelifts continued, and in 1972, a Charabanc arrived with a Porsche 914 engine. The post-obit year, an automated transmission was offered. In 1974, the Hanover plant was able to build an astounding 1200 Buses in a single day, and sales went over the four-million mark.
The mod-day Bus, the Vanagon, appeared in 1979. It now had an all-bicycle-drive model and a squared-off, all-concern front. It was the best Omnibus ever made, but it had lost its goofy charm. Sales that had begun to slide in the seventies slipped even further in the eighties (5147 in 1989). The heyday of the VW Bus was over.
John Hollander, who goes past the name Emmett and is just 23, had parked his '77 VW Motorcoach behind a truck stop among a crazy quilt of Deadhead vehicles, including a couple of converted yellowish school buses reminiscent of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters' autobus of Sixties psychedelic fame ("Positive Vibrations," it appear). Kids roamed through the area, girls in muslin tie-dyes, and Jerry Garcia'southward phonation boomed forth from the open doors of cars. Hollander had driven all the way from Seattle, and he was digging around inside looking for something; the within of his Jitney looked like a twister had visited information technology recently. His hair was wild in rastafarian fashion, and he was slight of build, looking equally if he hadn't spent much time eating.
The Bus was painted a apartment white, equally if he'd done it with a paintbrush. The unabridged Bus was covered with paw prints in various bright colors.
Emmett is a budding entrepreneur learning the tie-dye ropes. It has non been all gravy. At a Denver concert of the Expressionless, ''the cops busted me for vending without a license. They took twenty shirts off me. I went home with $4." It'due south not like shooting fish in a barrel being a Deadhead, although Emmett did non desire to be described equally i.
"What's the deal with the manus prints?" he was asked.
''Well, I had a stencil of a hand, so... " He thinks for a moment. What was his purpose? " ...so, I figured I'd put a black hand on ane side, and, well, information technology just went from at that place."
Like a lot of the independent thinking Deadheads, he gave me an answer that had the band of Zen when I ask what information technology is he likes about his Motorbus, which has a rebuilt engine and cost him $2000.
"Uh, I kind of liked the idea of an air-cooled engine, y'all know?"
We wished him luck, and headed off for the park campground. A long gravel road led finally to a gated checkpoint, where we paid a $10 fee to become in. "Are there any Deadheads down there?" we asked a young woman wearing a khaki uniform and a Smokey the Bear lid. She rolled her eyes around in her head, similar it was a question not worth answering.
Coming downward the hill'south incline to a meadow where the tribe of Deadheads all of a sudden came into view, where Grateful Dead music filled the air, I was somehow reminded of Custer, and how he must take felt so momentarily strange coming upon the sight of an entire nation of Sioux camped at the Little Large Horn. It is reflexive upon seeing a sight like this to utter Christ'southward first name, though not in vain. "Jesus."
The starting time VW Autobus that caught my eye belonged to Anthony Vanderford of Casper, Wyoming. Vanderford, who was twenty, had been following the Dead since high-school graduation two and a half years ago. He had prepare up a table with all sorts of things for sale, and tie-dyed sheets were pinned to trees forming a canopy higher up his Bus.
The cheerful Vanderford invited me to look inside the Bus. Poking out from nether a pile of bedding and habiliment was a sleeping woman's caput. There was a sink and a stove and a fridge and running water, and a series of bunk beds.
"It's a lilliputian home. It's got everything you need," he said proudly. Meanwhile, some potential customers poked over his appurtenances. Simply these were Deadhead army camp followers like himself, and I wondered out loud if it was possible to sell stuff to other Deadheads, who were in the same business.
He gave me a cosmic smiling, like the whole thing was a mystery to him, too. "I know what you're saying, but I've only been hither a couple of hours and I've already fabricated two hundred dollars!"
I came upon Conrad and Dan Neil, brothers from Manitoba, Canada. Conrad was selling exotic posters for $10 each. This was Dan'southward third concert, just his brother has traveled to 30 of them.
Asked what it is about the Dead's music that he plant so alluring, Conrad had to recall a moment. Finally he said, "The feel, human being. It talks to you. It's a natural high, and everybody's calm. I like the calmness of it."
An upholsterer past trade, Conrad had a fine '78 Bus loaded with civilities. He summed upward his affection for it: "It can sleep 6 and it's great on gas. What else tin can I say? The guy I bought it from wanted $5000, but I got it for $3600. You can't beat that."
But in fact Jeff Johns of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, who was parked 50 feet away, beat that. His '73 Autobus cost him $475 just five months before. Okay, it wasn't as squeamish as Conrad's. Johns, 20, a wheel mechanic "on and off," said be bought the Motorcoach from a Czech who "buys them, fixes them upwards and sells them." The Czech, it turned out, wasn't setting any entrepreneurial records. "He bought this van for $400, and he was request $550 for it. We told him our situation, which basically was nosotros don't take whatsoever money. And then he sold information technology to us for $475."
Intrigued by an old '72 Bus with a humorous protective vinyl bra strapped over its nose, I came around the back and ran into Angie Padgett, who would be, hands down, The Prettiest Freckled Girl in the World were there such a competition. She was posing for a picture when her boyfriend, Steve Yatson, showed upwardly. They are both in their early twenties, and he'd given up the yuppie lifestyle to follow the Dead for awhile, learning tie-dying.
"I went from a Porsche 944 to this," he said laughing, amused by his own change of lifestyle. "I paid $400 for this Bus, but I did tons of work on it."
Angie said, "At some places, if you've got problems with your Motorcoach, there are mechanics around who will piece of work for beer."
Yatson said, "fifty used to sell structure materials, and did very well. Just you tin can make money here, too." Pointing to a necktiedyed sail he'd made that was draped over his van, he said, "That sheet toll almost $two to make, and we sell it for $35." It was clear that for Angie and Steve, this was a temporary distraction. "I'1000 going to have to do the real-life thing again pretty soon." Sometime soon he will be headed for college in San Jose, California.
Nosotros wandered around, and I was reminded of a conversation I had with Blair Jackson, a Dead historian from Berkeley, California, who puts out a periodical of Grateful Expressionless lore called The Golden Road. "The Volkswagen Bus is the cheap warhorse vehicle of the Seventies.
"There'southward a whole iconography of the Expressionless and the VW." I had to expect that upwards. It means the images and pictures that get the symbols that describe a civilisation.
"The Dead has a tradition of taking traditional items from the civilisation and then twisting them—in a friendly fashion. Like [a depiction of] Calvin and Hobbes, just they're smoking a bong or doing nitrous oxide. " Just and then I saw a Charlie Dark-brown T-shirt, with Charlie's head ballooned to watermelon size, making him "Cosmic Charlie." Some other shirt declared, "Bo Knows Jerry." A Disney-like theme park reads, "Deadheadland."
No one, including the Grateful Dead, at present in their 26th yr, can quite explain their popularity. Says leader Jerry Garcia: "Here we are, we're getting into our fifties, and where are these people who keep coming to our shows coming from? What practice they find fascinating about these middle-aged bastards playing basically the same thing we've ever played? I hateful, what do 17-year-olds observe fascinating about this? ...So what is it about the 1990s in America? There must be a dearth of fun out there in America. Or take a chance. Peradventure that's it: possibly we're just 1 of the last adventures in America. I don't know."
Blair Jackson says there'due south a "sense of gamble" to it. "It'south stone 'n' scroll with a bit of country-western. And blues. Really, it'south like a jazz ring—they never play the aforementioned set twice. They have such a large body of music—probably 110 to 120 songs at whatsoever given fourth dimension. They played vi shows in the Bay Area, and during all that, they repeated just ane song—'Promised Land.'"
Any the case, in the first one-half of 1991, Dead concerts grossed $20 meg. Their average take per show, according to Pollstar, a firm that reports on the music manufacture, was more than than $i.ane million, or nearly twice that of the summer'southward second biggest touring act, Guns n' Roses. The Dead played 9 nights in New York'due south Madison Square Garden, 3 in Cleveland, and half dozen at Boston Garden—and all of them were sold-out performances.
"Nosotros didn't invent the Grateful Expressionless," says Garcia. "The crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were simply in line to encounter what was going to happen."
Similar the popularity of the VW Bus, it defies caption.
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