Santa Fe native and an avid music fan, Rick Salazar was accustomed to hearing a variety of sounds and seeing a lot of zany characters in the City Different in the early 1980s. But two music events in 1982 and 1983 made him feel like a stranger in his own town. “I remember walking through a parking lot full of VW buses, beat-up trucks and seeing people selling tie-dyed shirts and bootleg tapes,” Salazar recalled. “It was almost like a gypsy village. It was fun!” Then there was the band he went to see. “They were just a bunch of guys having fun,” said Salazar. “You could tell they were playing what they felt like and they had no set list.” That’s how the Grateful Dead operated on stage for 30 years: Without a net, a phrase aptly used in the title of one of their live albums. The iconic grandfathers of psychedelic rock were part of a group of lucky survivors from the legendary 1960’s San Francisco sound.
For 30 years, the Dead — Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart and other, revolving casts of characters — did everything by the seat of their pants, and their obsessive legions of followers loved them for it.
Salazar had never seen anything like the Dead or the circus-like atmosphere that came with their first visit in 1982. The Dead played three shows at The Downs: one for their Santa Fe debut on Oct. 17, 1982, and back-to-back shows on Sept. 10-11 in 1983.
Sadly for concert-goers like Salazar, 1983 was the last year the band played in New Mexico — 25 years ago this month.
“It was one of the wildest experiences of my life,” Salazar said. “The way the crowd got into the music and the band and seeing all of these people from around the country come to Santa Fe. I’m glad I got to experience them.”
‘Wide appeal’
Beginning in the late 1960s, John Morris had helped produce several Grateful Dead shows around the world — including their 1972 European tour — before bringing the band to Santa Fe.
A production coordinator for 1969’s Woodstock Festival, where the Dead played an unremarkable set that was plagued by technical difficulties, Morris felt Santa Fe was a natural fit for the band and the counterculture it represented.
“This was Santa Fe,” said Morris, a longtime Santa Fe resident, in a recent interview. “The area was the home of the communes, the hippies. A lot of people moved out here and lived in the mountains when they got burnt out (in places like the San Francisco Bay area) ...
“I knew we’d get every hippie within 500 miles,” he said. “But we also got bank owners and politicians. The band had wide appeal.”
Salazar was admittedly not a Deadhead when the Santa Fe shows were announced, but he knew it was something worth checking out. “For young people, it was like, ‘Wow, the Dead are going to be here,’” recalled Salazar, who said that picking up hitch-hiking hippies on the way to the Downs was an added novelty of the concerts.
But Salazar said other folks especially those who were older, were not as thrilled as he was that the Dead were coming to town. “There were a lot of people scared of these Deadheads invading Santa Fe,” said Salazar with a laugh. “This was before tourism was big and a lot of conservative types were concerned about drugs.”
Of course drugs were part of the Grateful Dead culture, but locals said it did nothing to darken the jovial atmosphere. “They were all probably loaded on grass,” said longtime Santa Fe resident Lisa Law, who photographed the band’s three shows. “May be a little acid, too. But it was wholesome fun.”
Law said her vehicle broke down on the way into Santa Fe for the shows, but she managed to make it to both years’ concerts with her children. “They loved it,” she said. “They became Deadheads because of those shows in Santa Fe.”
Deadhead artist
Dennis Larkins is a creator of several of the Dead’s most familiar and eye-catching concert artwork pieces — including the Dead’s legendary 1980 run at New York’s Radio City Music Hall and the album cover for the live album, “Dead Set.”
Larkins most recently designed artwork for a series of Phil Lesh and Friends concerts in San Francisco and also shows some of his more off-the-wall artwork at Santa Fe’s Pop Gallery on Water Street.
Having moved back to Santa Fe from the San Francisco Bay in 1981, Larkins was a natural fit to peg for artwork of the Dead’s New Mexico shows. In 1982, he combined the lightning bolt from the iconic “Steal Your Face” skull logo with the New Mexico Zia symbol for an attractive and understated poster that included his own special style of lettering on the artwork. “I called it Adobe Deco lettering,” Larkins said.
As October 1982 approached, Santa Fe became familiar with Larkins’ artwork. “The town had them up all over the place,” he said of the posters, which were plastered on telephone poles and business walls around Santa Fe. “But most got trashed or stolen.”
But for the ’83 concerts, Larkins wanted to do something more memorable and even more affiliated with New Mexican culture. For this, he used the image of a Hopi Indian clown, the Koshari, for the artwork and “deadized” it. The striking image that resulted was of a dancing skeleton dressed in Koshari garb, with the words, “Grateful Dead, Santa Fe, 1983,” surrounding the artwork.
“I always thought of (Koshari clowns) as the pranksters, which reminded me of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters that followed the Dead around years back,” he said. “(The Koshari clowns) were sort of the jesters, but also had a dark side to them. It was a really strong graphic.”
The image never made it onto a poster, which was intended to be given away to fans leaving the shows. Larkins had “worked two all-nighters” to get the image done in time to submit to a local printing shop. But when he got to the store, the owner wanted twice the amount of money than had been agreed to for the job. The posters were never distributed.
But Larkins’ image did make it onto T-shirts, which several concert-goers could be seen wearing in Law’s pho tos. Grateful Dead Merchandising would bring back the T-shirts for mass production in the late 1990s, but stopped selling the shirts after the Hopis asked the band not to distribute them any longer.
“I never thought of the (Koshari clowns) as a spiritual figure,” he said. “I didn’t think of it as being off-limits.
“Of course, I didn’t talk to anyone about whether they were offended because it was such a strong image and a local image.”
Last time
As best as circulated bootleg recordings of the Santa Fe shows can detail, The Dead played well during the ’82 and ’83 concerts. Rain poured down on the Sept. 10, 1983, concert, which featured a shorter two-set show that night.
Staples from the band’s vast repertoire played on Sept. 10 included everything from the hypnotic “Playing in the Band” to the foot-tappin’, bluegrass-inspired “Cumberland Blues.”
Anthems like “Truckin’” and “U.S. Blues” were played during the Sept. 11 show, which also included the cowboy tune, “Me and My Uncle” — concert-goers on bootleg tapes could be heard cheering with delight during this song when Bob Weir belted out the lyric, “We stopped over in Santa Fe. That being the point, just about halfway ...”
That wasn’t the only time during the three Santa Fe shows the band paid homage to the home crowd: Chile ristras dangled over the stage while the band played its 1982 concert.
The Dead never returned to Santa Fe or any other New Mexico town after those shows.
“Nobody had done a concert that big (at Santa Fe Downs) before,” Morris said. “Santa Fe is at best a tertiary market. There’s no venue that could have best-served the Dead.
“We didn’t make a bunch of money. The Downs is a great venue, but the market just wasn’t there. The people who were Deadheads were really excited. Advance ticket sales were very good, but day-ofshow sales were not.”
But what the most dedicated Deadheads who listen to recordings hold on to is how energetic and youthful the band was at that time. This was before keyboardist Brent Mydland died of a drug overdose in July 1990, which led the band’s energy level and charisma to plummet for much of the early 1990s.
Then, on Aug. 9, 1995, the Earth stood still for Deadheads as the jolly fat man himself, Jerry Garcia — who battled a 20-year heroin addiction — died of a heart attack the same night he checked into a California drug rehab clinic.
But fans like those who attended the Santa Fe shows got to see three shows at a vital and remarkable time in the band’s historic 30-year run.
“There were the young kids who came in and had never seen a concert and had a great time,” said Morris. “There were the older Deadheads who loved the band and everyone was together and had a great time.
“They were Grateful Dead concerts. The Dead wanted to come to Santa Fe and it fit.”
