What I Ate Growing Up With the Grateful Dead
10 min read
I have beenstaring at this silver dish of fried chicken for what feels like hours but what really, actually, has been days. Twenty-three days, to be exact, over the course of the three-month Dead Forever run at the all-new, all-American pleasure palace—the Las Vegas Sphere.
I grew up on the road. First on the family bus, traveling from city to city to watch my father, Mickey Hart, play drums with the Grateful Dead and Planet Drum, and then later with the various Grateful Dead offshoots. When I was old enough, I joined the crew, working for Dead & Company, doing whatever I could be trusted to handle: stringing strands of plastic Grateful Dead–bear lights; ferrying tie-dyed tapestries, extension cords, and gaffer tape by golf cart; helping VIP-ticket holders smuggle ziplocks filled with vegan sandwiches and granola into the venue. Then, late-night, drinking whiskey from the bottle with the techs, sitting in the emptying parking lot as the semitrucks and their load-out rumble marked the end of our day.
But this summer, for the first time in the band’s history, there would be no buses; there would be no trucks. Instead we stayed in one place, trading the rhythms of a tour for the dull ache of a long, endlessly hot Las Vegas summer.
It’s a new way of doing things, one with just enough of our former existence to keep it comfortable and just enough change to keep the road forward exciting—even if the road is now an illusion, stretching out below an AI-generated sky. The Grateful Dead had been famous for its Wall of Sound—about 600 speakers painstakingly assembled by the crew at each venue, then just as painstakingly packed back up for the next stadium or concert hall. The Sphere is a wall of light : a 160,000-square-foot display programmed to transport the audience members, their necks craned upward, as the band plays below, a little dot against the expansive animated horizon.
Before that high-tech spectacle can begin, however, a very old, analog tradition must be observed: dinner. Sometime between sound check and the show opener, everyone sits down for a shared meal. The monitor tech and the bassist, the head of security and the lighting director, the man selling merch and the man playing drums—we all shuffle forward holding the same white dinner plates and napkins, arms outstretched, ready to receive whatever food is served, like kids in a cafeteria.
The catering options rarely differ. Almost always, there’s a salad bar with every possible variety of Newman’s Own dressing. There are sandwich fixings. There’s a soupy fish dish and a vegan pasta that congeals into the shape of its serving tray, like Jell-O in a mold. At the end of the table, inevitably, a giant chunk of meat waits to be carved.
Still, I always looked forward to certain venues. For the old hands on the crew, the Shoreline Amphitheatre, in Mountain View, California, was notorious for having been built on top of a landfill—methane from the decomposing trash would seep out of the earth, leading to flaming eruptions when audience members lit a joint. But for me, Shoreline meant soft serve. Old, decrepit, but functional, the machine was hidden in the far-left corner of backstage hospitality. I’d fill a bowl with ribbons of ice cream, topping them off with a downpour of chocolate sprinkles.
Here at the Sphere, dinner is fried chicken—again. Every night, chicken is prepared in the same fryer, seasoned with the same spices, and delivered by the same person. It’s placed on an identical white tablecloth with serving utensils angled at matching degrees. This is life in a corporate commune.
Staring at the serving platters, I have an idea. I try the fried chicken in a new combination. I take some salsa from the empanada platter on the left, some mac and cheese from the platter on the right. It’s still fried chicken, but it works—something new made from something familiar.
I have a memory of a birthday in some Midwest backstage. I think it was my 9th, but it’s hard to say for sure. I had been craving cheesecake for weeks. Out of fear of sending some runner on a wild-goose chase, I told no one. I was perpetually terrified of becoming an inconvenience, a feeling I imagine is pretty common for kids who grow up on the road.
There was the glow of a birthday candle, my mother’s hand cupped over an obscured slice of cake. The stagehands sang “Happy Birthday” as I shrank into the couch cushions, embarrassed by the attention. My father played a drumroll on a toaster as my mother handed me the plate. I looked down. The cake was giant and oozing rich frosting and most definitely, 100 percent … chocolate. I smiled and blew out the candle. I made a wish—for cheesecake.
Later, both band and crew migrated to catering for dinner. I walked down the row of long plastic tables, wondering if the package of sourdough bread was the one I had opened in Milwaukee the week before, or if it was just an identical one. I imagined an old Grateful Dead road case stuffed to the brim with sandwich materials—mustard and mayonnaise in the stick drawer, a series of plastic-wrapped tomatoes where the drum pads should be, a head of lettuce stuffed inside a cajón. It was possible. We brought just about everything else with us, even the lights and the stage.
On one table sat a large plastic bag of Kraft shredded cheese—the Mexican blend, with little cheddar and Monterey Jack worms flattened against the clear casing. I grabbed the package and pushed it under my shirt, then walked back out toward the stage casually, like an expert jewel thief.
I collected the chocolate-cake slice and took it underneath the stage to the below-deck depths where the riggers set up hammocks for naps after sound check. I looked around to ensure I was alone, then I removed the cheese from under my shirt and poured all of it onto the cake plate. I tore off the end of the slice, stray cheese falling onto the cold cement floor, and greedily shoved it into my mouth.
I chewed my cheesecake proudly, nodding to myself like I was a judge on some fancy cooking show. “9.5!” I announced, my voice echoing in the empty space below the stage. “Half a point off—no whipped cream!”
I knew the cake was terrible. It didn’t matter. I loved it. I had made my wish come true.
From an early age, I could taste a tour route as soon as I saw it. Tracing the list of cities with my index finger, I knew the roads we’d travel and the meals we’d eat. Show nights meant dinner in catering, but even the relentless schedule of a Dead tour had the occasional off night, a chance to escape the venue and seek out old favorites.
Madison Square Garden always, without compromise, meant orange chicken and water chestnuts, the fat that falls off the edge of spare ribs, and duck-sauce stains on old merch shirts. Madison Square Garden meant New York, and New York meant Wo Hop.
Established in 1938, Wo Hop is, as far as I can tell, the most famous dive in Chinatown. My father first went there in the 1960s, when, as he remembers it, it still had sawdust on the floor. It was known for its midnight clientele—John Belushi, Patti Smith. It’s the hidden gem that everyone thinks they’ve discovered.
For our family, Wo Hop represents the frayed tether connecting East Coast to West Coast, our past to our present. Though my parents made their home in California, my lineage, on both sides, comes from New York. My Jewish great-grandfathers lived and worked in the same city while inhabiting entirely different worlds. One opened Ohrbach’s, the Manhattan department store where knockoffs of Parisian couture were sold to eager housewives. Around the same time, somewhere in Brooklyn, another great-grandfather got his cab medallion.
The first thing I do when the buses drop us off in New York is start walking. I like to think about my great-grandfathers when I do, imagining what their days looked like and what version of New York they knew.
In the summer of 2023, on what was billed as Dead & Company’s final tour, I went for a very long walk, crisscrossing the city. I passed the former site of the Fillmore East, Bill Graham’s famous music hall, which had once been my family’s second home, and where some of the greatest live albums of the ’60s and ’70s—notably, ones by Miles Davis and the Allman Brothers—were recorded. It was now a bank. I gave $5 to a man sitting outside with a long gray beard and a sign that said We all get old but at least I saw Jimi Hendrix.
Eventually, as the sun began to set, I found myself at 17 Mott Street—deep in the heart of Chinatown—standing at the steps that lead down to Wo Hop. There’s something about the red tiles that line the walls to its lower entrance, the light from neon signs bouncing across them. The pull of Wo Hop is so strong that I always end up there, even without intending to, like I’m following its siren song across the city. Wo Hop is like a familiar refrain: You know you must return to it a few more times before the song is over.
I sat down and gestured to the waiter that I was ready to order. He walked over, pen and pad in hand.
“Welcome to Wo Hop,” he said with a smile. “Have you been here before?”
On show days, the sushi arrives at 3 p.m., just before sound check. It’s been there all my life, a kaleidoscopic swirl of salmon pinks and opalesque creams, with a slight variance in quality depending on the distance to the ocean. It comes in shiny cellophane wrapping that sticks to the outer edge of the sashimi and twinkles under the harsh fluorescent lights overhead.
It’s pure protein, a source of energy smooshed across a six-inch tray. The sushi is in my father’s rider:
Assortment of Sashimi upon arrival at 3:00 p.m.
(6) Ika
(6) Salmon
(6) Toro
(6) Hamachi
(6) Unagi
On tour, it’s easy to forget that you need to stop and eat, or to see eating as a mere obstacle to putting on the show. Sometimes, it’s just a question of priorities—waking up in a hotel room and knowing that if you don’t shower now, it’ll be three days on the bus before you get another chance. So you skip the continental breakfast and drink coffee from the machine in your room. You arrive at the venue before catering opens, and by the time it does, you’ve moved on to some task that requires crossing the length of the venue and back. Rider food is insurance, a contractual guarantee that there will be something to keep us going.
It’s not until week three or four, when we’re near the midpoint of the tour, that the sushi starts to morph into something else. It’s a bizarre turn—we begin to resent the sushi platter, blame it for the monotony of our lives. (“Maddening,” my father likes to say.) But we still go after it every night, tearing off the cellophane and grabbing at the raw fish like black bears at a salmon stream. Sometimes, a funny little fishhook smile appears on my father’s face after the last of the sushi is gone, an acknowledgment that, in his words, “we all got to eat.”
There is a specific kind of emotion that comes with the end of a tour. All the decisions that were once in someone else’s hands come raining down as normal everyday life returns. It always hits at the airport after the last show, when suddenly no one’s telling you where to go. You’re in charge, in control of your own schedule, and for the first time in a very long time, you have to decide what you want to eat.
After all the moaning about postshow pizza and stale pasta, all the daydreaming about things you’d eat if you were back home, the reality is that those first steps into the world of free will rarely feel anything other than lonely.
At the end of the summer, I wander around Harry Reid International Airport, surrounded by the glow of the slot machines, until I see a to-go food counter, walk over, and stare at the menu.
“What can I get you?” the person behind the cash register wants to know. My eyes scan across what feels like an endless abyss of options. “Do you have any cheesecake?”
This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “One for the Road.”
