Grateful Dead

Listened to KFOG replay and the mix had Trey so out front I couldn't hear the rest of the band. Could just be the radio replay, but I wanna hear Phil, Bobby and the rest of the band. Can't wait to see it at the movie theater on Friday (and maybe Saturday and Sunday)

Thanks for my morning eye-opener!!

Watch 'em knock 'em dead in Chicago. I must've gone to at least 100 shows. The first one was in 1966 in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, or the Furthur Fesival at San Francisco State College, whichever was first. I actually felt like Phil was addressing me personally when he made his speech at the end and thanked everyone for coming out, because I tried to get tickets to as many Phil Lesh and Friends at Terrapin Crossroads shows as I could. He came up to me there and let me say, "Hi," which rock stars don't have to do. However I couldn't afford to follow Bobby around like I used to, and he always lets me know, which is flattering that he invited me. He sang a song about losing money, which is true. He sang some other songs which might have been directed at me, and I instinctively responded by singing along. Then, at the beginning of the last song, "Fare Thee Well, My Honey", "Brokedown Palace", I thought he was like, he wanted me to sing along, so I did, and then he ended it abruptly, got in line with their arms on their shoulders, did their bow, and it was over, but I'm planning to see the live stream of all 3 Chicago shows at Terrapin Crossroads. When I went to UCI in 1987, my dad gave me $100,000/year, an apartment in grad student housing, a car, and a bunch of credit cards on his account. They tracked me into the Information and Computer Science major. Then he came down and took some of the credit cards back, and my sister took all 6 of my Irvine Meadows Grateful Dead tickets. Like William Burroughs wrote, "When did they ever give anything that they didn't take back if they could, and they always could!" and he went to Harvard. I went out and bought 6 more, at the inflated price of $50, for $300, and canceled the aftershow party at my apartmnent I'd posted on the Well. Because of losing the credit cards, I got a bad grade and had to go to CSUB. Laurie Senit moved in, and life was pretty good. We lived across from the campus in an apartment complex with 4 swimming pools and 4 jacuzzis, the 2nd best in town. My parents bought me a brand-new Toyota Tercel. Then my mom said, "We're going to send the two of you to Hawaii. Pick out a hotel from this brochure." I picked the Big Island because I'd been to Maui, and the Kona Hilton because the Dead liked Hiltons. In nearby Paradise Cove the scuba boat captain claimed he was on a first-name basis with Jerry. When Jerry died the Rolling Stone article said his house was in Kona, which I didn't know, and gave the name of his dive shop. I called information and the dive shop, they said it was across the street from the Kona Hilton, and Jerry probably did used to go scuba diving at Paradise Cove. They were showing videos of him scuba diving tonight. That's why I wanted to do it, but I had to do it straight, not being a rock star. I proposed to Laurie on the beach in Kona. We stopped at my parents' house in San Francisco on our way home. My dad, James Abrahamson, had 3 restaurants, Pam Pam East on Geary and Taylor, Rosebud's English Pub next door, and Biff's Coffee Shop on 28th and Broadway in Oakland, and he sold institutional furniture, commission contract sales, for Thonet and American Chair Co., and later Serta Mattress, in the Merchandise Mart on 10th and Market. My mother, Lucille Abrahamson, was elected to the San Francisco School Board twice, two years as President, worked in Mayor Dianne Feinstein's Office of Childcare, and was appointed S.F. Human Rights Commissioner by Mayor Frank Jordan, the former Police Chief. I told them we were engaged and my Dad said, "Don't marry her, I can't afford it. We sold the restaurants to Mama's, they went bankrupt, didn't pay, we went to court, the judge fined me $160,000, and they wanted me to declare bankruptcy." My little brother said later it was his half-partner, Bill Munro, the manager's fault. He abused the help, especially the head cook, who really ran the place, the union went on strike, won so many benefits they had to go out of business and sell it. Munro had cooked the books, the judge saw it, and hence the fine. My dad said it was because I had spent too much money on Grateful Dead concerts, but I don't think that was correct, although I may have spent too much money. They wanted me to go to this psychiatrist in Bakersfield, Dr. Perelli-Minetti, who was a nice man. He said the Grateful Dead was OK. He was always telling me expensive restaurants to which to take Laurie, like where he took his wife, and encouraged me to spend lots of money on her, buy expensive dresses, jewelry, etc, so I thought it was OK. He gave me Risperdal when it first came out, in 1994. We didn't really go to that many Grateful Dead concerts. My dad didn't like the Grateful Dead and Bill Graham for other reasons. When I first got back from the New Mexico Hog Farm after Woodstock, I tried to turn him on, he thought about it for a minute and decided no, he was afraid to get busted, he was too square to get on the bus. Later he said that Bill Graham had applied to join their Jewish men's club, the Concordia-Argonaut, on Van Ness and Geary, and that he was going to vote against him. Not only was he a hippie, and made his money that way, but he was an orphan, an immigrant, and a Holocaust survivor. What it really was is that Graham was more successful than him in the role of Jewish businessman. My brother moved to Mill Valley, said he saw Graham's house and was impressed. Graham made more money than all of them, and he started as a hippie, and that filled squares like my dad with jealousy, anger, envy, and rage. My dad said, "I wish the Grateful Dead were dead," in his outrageous way. When Bill Graham's helicopter crashed on the way home from the Concord Pavilion and they had his funeral in my dad's temple, Temple Emanu-el, my dad said, "I hope it didn't hurt the helicopter!" He even hated them during the Haight-Ashbury and helped the City Fathers drive them out of town. My family was spending a lot of money at first, and I thought they were encouraging me to emulate them. When he first gave me the $100,000/year, the credit cards on his account, and sent me to UCI, my dad was acting like he could afford for me to buy anything I saw that I wanted. Then he told not to buy anything over $200, and I complied. They were all spending lots of money. He had 2 new BMW"s and a new Mercedes-Benz. He and my mom went on a temple tour of Eastern Europe and stayed in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, she said it was a five-star hotel. My sister went to Yale after me, in Art, then got a Masters in Art Education at Stanford, an Ed.D. at Harvard, a J.D. at Cal, got a job in the White House as Assistant Chief-of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Ronald Reagan White House and then Founding Chairman of the Barbara Bush Campaign For Family Literacy (me at UCI) in the President H.W. Bush White House. There's a photo of her and Vice-President H.W. Bush having an audience with Pope John Paul in Sweden, and she is shaking hands with the Pope. That dress must have cost something, not to mention the travel. In her closet I saw hundreds of French gowns, and more shoes than Imelda Marcos. She met this guy from the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., a USC Professor of International Relations, Jonathan Aronson. He went to Harvard and Stanford in Political Science, and his father was a rich St. Louis banker. They bought a mansion in Bel-Air near the Reagans', put in an Italian marble bathtub, baby grand piano, swimming pool, his self-portrait in the living room, pirates' table, Persian rug, and he drove a Jaguar S3. He said, "We're going to Paris for 2 weeks," "I'm going to Thailand to speak," and they had their son's Bar Mitzvah in Bali, so they didn't hold back on the spending. They took the whole family, including me, to the Club Med in Ixtapa, but they went bankrupt because I spent too much money on Grateful Dead concerts! My brother spent $2000 of my dad's money for a Rolex watch to keep up with the other Oshos and flew back and forth to India every few weeks for years. They flew me there, to Europe twice, and to Hawaii twice. I guess my dad was having problems, and he asked me to spend less money, but he didn't really communicate that I should spend less money because he was having financial problems. I was spending too much money on Laurie. So I ignored him. So he took away some credit cards, and I kept spending at the same level. I couldn't comprehend that commission contract sales is an up-and-down business. Then two new credit cards, each with a $5000 limit, came in the mail. I should have sent them back, but I couldn't resist the temptation. Soon I realized that I couldn't let my dad find out about them, because he would take them away, too. I set out to get revenge on him for taking away my credit cards by charging even *more* money. The first thing I did was take Laurie to the most expensive restaurant in Los Angeles, Spago's, $140 for salmon for two. Then the 2nd most expensive, Palms in West Hollywood. Then dresses, jewelry, and when we went to Hawaii we did the same thing with the recreation. Maybe *that's* what drove my dad into near-bankruptcy, not the Grateful Dead concerts. We really didn't go to that many. I just spent a lot of money on her. She just liked to go to movies, comedy clubs, country-western dance halls, miniature golf, roller skating, she was always thinking of something. They cut my allowance from $100,000/year to $40,000/year, my sister and brother-in-law, Joan and Jonathan, became "trustees of your trust fund", keep the Blue Cross PPO. They took away all 12 of my credit cards and defaulted on them, leaving me in debt to the credit card companies for $15,000, with bad credit to this day, since 1993. They raised it up to $60,000 and I moved to New Mexico, near the Castagnas who used to live at the Hog Farm. Alberto asked me to call my mother, father, sister, and brother-in-law and ask each of them for $10,000 for a liver transplant for his Hepatitis C because his job as Director of Taos County Ambulances, working his way up from paramedic and EMT, didn't have good insurance. They said no. Maybe that's what set 'em off. They asked me to go to a psychiatrist, who dismissed me. Then Laurie wanted me to come back to Los Angeles and move in to her apartment. They wanted me to find another psychiatrist. I found psychedelic therapist Dr. Robert Newport online at the Island Group in Santa Cruz, referred by Bruce Eisner, but my sister fought with him and he lost his license for prescribing medications, including Risperdal, without seeing the patients. I called him and he said, "Did your sister let up on you yet? I'm not a psychiatrist any more, I'm a painter." So they took me to Dr. Lisa Fine, who also gave me Risperdal, which gave me diabetes. Laurie got it too, from Seroquel. They found the diabetes when a cardiolgist wanted to do an emergency heart surgery,an angiogram and an angioplasty. My brother drove my sister-in-law's Ford Escort to L.A. from Sedona. They said they were going to give it to me. He showed it to me and said, "This is your car." They said they were going to give it to me after the surgeries, but they changed their mind and never did. My car had totally broken down at a job interview in Irvine just a few days before my appointment with the cardiologist, who decided I was going to have emergency heart surgery. When I recovered I stopped by at some friends from the Cubensis shows and they talked me into starting going to shows again, to the Phil Lesh and Friends show and the Ratdog show at the Wiltern, and the Ratdog show at the House of Blues. I'd told Richie on the phone I'd stopped going to shows when Jerry died and he'd said, "I did too." They had a picture of them with the 4 original members in an airport on the way to a concert called The Dead. After that, this psychologist Eric Asa-Dorian from the Life Adjustment Team, probably a drug rehab, they said her mother called, shows up in our living room, posing as a Deadhead, except with more, better tickets than me. Then they got me to go to LAT and I never knew it was a drug rehab, it was disguised as marriage counseling or something. In the end they took the $60,000/year except for meds, medical bills, Anthem Blue Cross PPO, SSI, and put me in Brentwood Manor board-and-care home for two years, I think illegally, before I had learned how to treat the diabetes, so it had developed another complication besides the heart disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetic neuropathy, or diabetic nerve pain, or "burning feet". When they moved me out of Laurie's apartment 12 years ago with the Comcast that was the last time they let me have cable, except for a brief period. No police, no arrest, no charges, no hearing, no trial, no sentence, no jail, no prison, no due process. No evidence or proof that *I* ever did anything wrong, as far as I'm concerned, frames and smears I've never heard, let alone allowed to answer. I said I'd sue all of them for $2 billion for attempted murder, elder financial abuse, false imprisonment, psychiatric torture, medical malpractice, emotional anguish, pain and suffering, and my attorney, Bruce Margolin, who'd been Timothy Leary's attorney (I went to a fundraiser they had at Timothy Leary's house in Beverly Hills when he was running for State Senator), said, "Where'd you get the $2 billion?" so $200 million is more in the range, I think. I had to get a job selling Sprint phones B2B to small businesses in the South, work my way out of there and get some financial aid from Cal State East Bay. I'd been a junior Computer Science major at Cal State Northridge when I was living with Laurie before the surgeries. And Tina Kimmel, a Cal Ph.D. in Social Work I met at the New Mexico Hog Farm after Woodstock got my sister to give me a $68,000 annuity that my dad left me, so that was pretty good, so I got to go to Monterey and Camp Winnarainbow, and they're paying for a lot of things now. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it. I'm still a senior Computer Science major and pre-law. Afterwards Alberto died, I called Richie from the board-and-care, he called my sister, I called him back, and he had terminal liver cancer. Alberto flew out and carved his tombstone, and he picked out wood for Tinker to make his coffin, but my sister wouldn't give me $100 to visit him at Camp Winnarainbow before he died. Steve had died of hep C. Then Hunter Thompson committed suicide. When I was going to the LAT psychiatrist to whom they forced me to go, I emailed Cap'n Skypilot to post something I could show him on his office computer, and he wrote a story about a man whose parents he said were responsible for the death of Ken Kesey and the assassination of JFK. When I got up here Vince Welnick committed suicide. I ran into Lou Todd, then he got sick and died, and then Tinker, who I once saw drive the Furthur bus. Charlene said her landlady wouldn't rent her house anymore, she moved in with her daughter; her other daughter got accused of murder, and she didn't do it. Laurie's elementary schoolteacher friend's apartment caught on fire and they blamed her. My Deadhead lawyer friend said his SUV caught on fire. I can't figure out the reason for all this. I would be interested if anybody, especially with legal knowhow, had any helpful advice. I'm thinking of appealing to my Yale classmates, to see if any of them are big-time lawyers yet, and I don't think any Democratic politicians have seen it, since most of them don't have email addresses. They were telling people I was dying, but the doctors said my numbers were good, so you can't die from controlled diabetes, maybe it was just wish-fulfillment. And Jerry famously died of a diabetic heart attack in a drug rehab, maybe someone got ideas. While I was in Brentwood the lawyer sent me a copy of the trust instrument where my parents had initialed that when my mom dies, the inheritance, which it originally says was divided into thirds between me, my brother, and sister, they rubbed me out and divided it in half between my brother and sister. She'll get my mom's house worth about $2 million, and she has a $4.3 million house in Bel-Air, and a house in Telluride, and my dad bought my brother a house in Sedona. I was living in Laurie's apartment. My brother will get my dad's commercial property in Oakland, a tire and party store. And there's some money they'll divide in half. Eric Abrahamson Yale University Class of '71 Pierson College