- Joined
- Feb 28, 2013
From the word salad: "Shakedown Street" is a Grateful Dead song which lent its name to the main aisle of any given parking lot at a Grateful Dead (and later, basically any other jam band) show, where the majority of the vendors of clothing, food (grilled cheese sandwiches made of white bread and Kraft Singles for $1 each = excellent racket; see also the "kind phatty veggie burrito"), jewelry, stickers, dreamcatchers, ganja goo balls and other pot edibles, and temptations of all kinds held court. Some of this was copyright-violating, of course, particularly t-shirts and bumper stickers, so vendors of merch with unlicensed logos on it tended to vanish as fast as the pot-brownie folks did when security walked through. I'm not sure why Tommy is accusing this free-market capitalism zone of being controlled by a "hippie mafia," unless whatever he did in 1999 that made him so widely unpopular got him walked out of Shakedown Street on sight whenever he turned up. I mean, it could just be... saxophone hatred? Who knows.
He alleges that in 1999, nearly all of the founders of the Rainbow scene (the very same people who are his best buddies but are unanimously conspiring to hide his identity like it was a map to a Humboldt County, CA grow site... because we all know it's very easy to get a roomful of hippies to agree to anything, and thus a conspiracy of this sort would be totally possible) were either the victims of violence or arrested themselves in "Federal cases." Jerry Garcia had been dead for four years by this point, and Operation Dead End (no shit, there was actually a DEA sting operation called that) was long over, so I don't know how all these wise, well-connected Rainbow elders were getting busted by Feds, but okay. These elders were replaced, says Tommy, by ripoff artists and even some Juggalos. Since Rainbows adamantly shun violence, at least in their press statements, and famously prohibit firearms at gatherings, and Juggalos enshrine violence in their weird little mythos, I have no idea what they would be doing trying to take over Rainbow Gatherings. But sure, fine, they each have annual gatherings with "Gathering" in their name, so the clown-painted, Faygo-drinking set must totally be coherent, not drunk, and organized enough to attempt to take over a series of hippie events so large that a cleanup crew has to stay behind and return the earth to a semblance of what it was before the garbage and overflowing shit trenches of 10,000 people came through and flattened a chunk of Forest Service land... that makes perfect sense if you hit yourself in the head a few times, I'm sure.
He alleges that in 1999, nearly all of the founders of the Rainbow scene (the very same people who are his best buddies but are unanimously conspiring to hide his identity like it was a map to a Humboldt County, CA grow site... because we all know it's very easy to get a roomful of hippies to agree to anything, and thus a conspiracy of this sort would be totally possible) were either the victims of violence or arrested themselves in "Federal cases." Jerry Garcia had been dead for four years by this point, and Operation Dead End (no shit, there was actually a DEA sting operation called that) was long over, so I don't know how all these wise, well-connected Rainbow elders were getting busted by Feds, but okay. These elders were replaced, says Tommy, by ripoff artists and even some Juggalos. Since Rainbows adamantly shun violence, at least in their press statements, and famously prohibit firearms at gatherings, and Juggalos enshrine violence in their weird little mythos, I have no idea what they would be doing trying to take over Rainbow Gatherings. But sure, fine, they each have annual gatherings with "Gathering" in their name, so the clown-painted, Faygo-drinking set must totally be coherent, not drunk, and organized enough to attempt to take over a series of hippie events so large that a cleanup crew has to stay behind and return the earth to a semblance of what it was before the garbage and overflowing shit trenches of 10,000 people came through and flattened a chunk of Forest Service land... that makes perfect sense if you hit yourself in the head a few times, I'm sure.
