The Last Ever (Allegedly) Bootleg Grateful Dead Tees Are A Miracle

Dead & Company, the final form of the Grateful Dead resurrected by Bob Weir and John Mayer in 2015 played their last show on Sunday. If Weir is to believed (final tours sometimes…aren’t), Saturday’s concert at Oracle Park in San Francisco ended nearly 60 years of Grateful Dead – and The Dead and Dead & Co. – touring. Dead Heads around the world are mourning the end of the music, but the tour also ends a cottage industry that has been thriving for decades in parking lots outside of shows. 

The Grateful Dead Bootleg Tee Industrial Complex has finally been dealt a mortal blow. Almost. Maybe.

Dead bootlegs were always different. Sure, there are sellers outside of Taylor Swift shows, but they aren’t part of the draw. Taylor Swift has a business, not an ecosystem. It was always different with the Dead, who encouraged (or at least happily tolerated) the proliferation of unlicensed merch. No one has ever mistaken a Taylor Swift show for a flea market. But at Dead shows, there have always been fan crafts. Fans hand-drawn incredible art with sharpies; they dye tees into meticulous swirls. They sell masterfully crafted bongs and pipes and hand-rolled joints. And many of the more successful sellers follow the band even when the next performance is in a heavily policed area where hawking is not permitted.

Law enforcement understands the vibe. It is, to put it lightly, non-threatening.

“I’ve been doing this six years now, selling tees along the tour,” says Dan, one of the merchants who showed up to a recent Dead & Co show at Citi Field in Queens, New York. “I started this leg of the tour in Charlotte and I’m ending here in New York. It’s a good group. You see a lot of the same faces around. Everyone’s friendly. It’s a good vibe.”

Dan brought a Toyota Sienna’s worth of shirts he intended to sell. The product he didn’t move would move on with him to the next show and the show after that. The product that didn’t sell before San Francisco, the looming cesura of it all, would wind up at a farmer’s market or on Etsy. 

Dan set up his tent alongside others on an improvised “Shakedown Street.” There were stickers, belt buckles, bracelets, and enough lightning designs to stun Zeus in his tracks. And there we shoppers too, walking around with one finger in the air, a specific form of testimony meaning, “I’m looking for a miracle.”

Certain sounds echoed. “Ice cold.” That was for the beer and the nutcrackers. “Pop!” That was the sound of overinflated nitrous balloons. Anywhere else, the noise would have inspired fear – duck and cover, all of that – but outside Citi field it just felt like percussion. 

Local vendors came for the vibes. Sam, a 70-something year old man from Brooklyn, who normally sells crystals in Union Square, transported his spread for the Citi show. “They serve all kinds of energies, and they’re out here charging in the sun for people,” he explained. “I’ve been a big Grateful Dead fan forever, so I don’t go with the tour but I come here whenever they’re back in town and sidle up next to the other merchants.”

If this is truly the last tour though, getting one of the hand-dyed, and hand-printed bootleg concert tees is a must. There are all kinds of options available down the different corridors that stretch the length of the parking lot. Tank tops with an Incredible Hulk-like version of Weir read “The Incredible Weir.” Tees reading “Last Train, All Aboard!” reference the subway above the parking lot at Citi Field. Some have tie-dye split so carefully to recreate the skull logo perfectly, and some are hand-dyed and then screen printed with Mayer and Weir on stage together with the dates of the tour. 

Most booths don’t offer size options. “I don’t have two XL’s for this one,” Jake, an artisan and vendor, tells me. “I do each of them myself and draw directly into the cotton with colored Sharpie’s. Each one is totally unique.” Looking around the parking lot at all the hundreds of different people, it’s easy to see what he meant.  

A day after the Citi show, there was no evidence of the tie-dyed mall. Grateful Dead bootleg tee sellers are the model citizens of the bootleg tee selling community. A month later, after the final Dead & Co. show, after Bob Weir’s final encore, there were 19,362 Grateful Dead items on Etsy and ticking up. Each of them occupied a clean box on the site, encased in a smokeless jpeg. They sat alongside Taylor Swift tees, available in tie dye for $99, outnumbered roughly five to one. 

What will happen over the next few years? The boomer core of the Dead fandom will get older. The hardcore, band-trailing sellers will move on or move online. That culture that was on display outside Citi Field and Oracle Park and the PNC Music Pavilion would disappear and the thing left will be what it inspired: a culture of creative fandom. 

At the end of the day, those bootleg Taylor Swift tees are also Grateful Dead tees. They are the products of a specific impulse nurtured by a specific group of men and the fans that followed them around in search of a miracle and came home wearing proof that they’d made that long, strange trip.