San Francisco Examiner
Tuesday, December 20, 1994
BY SCOTT WINKOUR
Santa weaves through a Grateful Dead audience at the
Oakland Coliseum Arena, and I'm following, a working man dead on his feet.
First time I saw the Dead, at the Fillmore East in Manhattan, men had
not yet walked on the Moon, so I must be old enough to be the father of
most of the Deadheads around me. Ouch.
Well, I admit it: Time, the ravages of metabolism and the L.L. Bean company have transformed my appearance utterly. No way the Deadheads will know, or care, that I was
once one of them.
Nonetheless, I cry out from deep within my boggy
brain, "I'm like you!" No one answers. The Deadheads are too busy
tripping out to the hyper-amplified music. Their indifference is mute
comentary on the futility of clinging to a youth long gone.
Santa, my guide, is a similarly superannuated Deadhead, but more in touch with
reality. A pretty young woman in a velour dress stands before us,
whirling in circles, eyes closed. I think: sex. He thinks: potential
overdose.
"When I started going to Dead shows, she wasn't alive," he
says, dryly.
Santa doesn't try to make contact. In fact, he's trying
to prevent contact
- with drugs, with the Highland Hospital emergency room, with bummers
both traumatic and psychedelic.
Santa is bearded, rotund Bob Student,
a San Francisco computer tech and Jerry Garcia look-alike in a Santa cap.
Student, 45, belongs to Rock Medicine, a group of mostly middle-aged rock
concert volunteers who are part of the legacy of the late promoter Bill
Graham.
More than 20 years ago, Graham began to pump money into the
Haight Ashbury Free Clinics for the purpose of providing on-site medical
care at concerts. Since then, a "RockMed" subculture of some 300 medical
and nonmedical types has developed - doctors, nurses, paramedics,
emergency room technicians and interested lay persons (all CPR-certified)
from throughout Northern California.
RockMed teams of up to 80
descend on concert venues from Sacramento to Los Angeles days before the
shows and set up M*A*S*H-like hospitals behind the scenes. If a
concertgoer is hurt, bummed out on drugs or otherwise discombobulated,
someone is there to make it better, free of charge, thanks to Graham and
RockMed.
Student and I are trolling for casualties of the good time
being had by all. At heavy-metal concerts, broken noses and lacerations
might be expected from mindless roughhousing known as "moshing." But at
comparatively sedate Dead shows, the biggest problems are overdoses from
psychedelics.
So far, however, we have come across only people with
minor injuries from dancing - sprains, blisters and an occasional
dislocated toe. Later in the night, Student assures me, there will be
victims of what's known in the medical literature as "acute dysphoric
reactions from the use of hallucinogens" - bad trips from LSD and
extra-powerful weed or hashish.
In extreme cases, the afflicted will
be injected with small doses of anti-psychotics and tranquilizers, then
talked down to earth in a quiet, comfortable, tie-dyed place away from the
music and the dope.
About 25 people will require treatment in an audience of 10,000.
"I'm in charge of making sure the barf buckets
are clean," says Student.
He's kidding. Student is really a sort of
avuncular scout, one of several on the concert floor. As he checks the
dimly lit arena for over-the-line weirdness, kids flock to him. "Hi,
Santa!" they shout, eyes glazed by drugs.
Student and others in RockMed once were into the music and, in many cases, the head food, too. Now they're older and wiser; instead of acting like kids, they're caring
for them.
"I started doing this because it was a way of making sure
my five kids, who liked going to concerts ware all right," says Don
Solomon, 51, a Sonoma County physician.
"Back in 1972," says Skip Gay, 63, the Jamestown anesthesiologist who helped found RockMed after joining the Haight clinics nearly 30 years ago, "I had a handshake
agreement with Bill Graham to provide organized medical care to the
concertgoers. I think Bill gave us $100 for the first show.
Today, RockMed operates on a budget of about $100,000: it has a full-time staff
of one - director Glenn "Raz" Raswyck, 47, a friendly sort who's into the
softer sound of Nanci Griffith these days
"People get older," Raz says. "I don't drink and howl at the moon as much as I used to. Our
motivation? Music is part of it, but at any given show 50 percent of the
volunteers couldn't say who's playing."
RockMed people have published
articles in professional journals on the treatment of overdoses. One is
subtitled, "I've Tripped and I Can't Get Down."
"We're loosey goosey," says Gay, gesturing with his hands, which are heavily tattooed,
"but we're professionals underneath."
The group's mottos are, "Non-judgmental, non-punitive medical care," and, "Common sense,
consideration, communication and cold beer at the end of the show."
No doubt there are legal, insurance-related and public-relations reasons
for RockMed, but during this Christmas season, I'm stuck by the charitable
aspect of it all.
I also think of Erik H. Erikson, the late, great
Marin County psychoanalyst whose principal contribution to psychology was
the elucidation of the characteristics, requirements and pitfalls of each
of the stages of human mental development, from cradle to grave.
The mature person needs to be needed, Erikson wrote.
"Generativity. . . is primarily the concern for establishing and guiding the next
generation."
Rock Med people, then, are doing what middle-aged people
should be doing at their stage in the life cycle, I decide. By giving,
they grow. Their gift at Christmastime (and all year long) is the gift of
care, which they give to nourish themselves.
"I feed on the energy of young people," says Gay.
In their boggy middle-aged brains, RockMed
volunteers are crying out, "I'm not like you." But the lost youth thereby
acknowledged doesn't bother them. They've moved ahead in their lives.
They've kept on truckin'.
