In March of '72 I drove (in Louis) with a friend to see a Dead concert at what was then the Academy of Music in New York. It was an OK concert, following which we drove back to D.C. The following morning I noticed that there was this wicked scrape along the passenger side of the car and the body was dented in along its extent. One of the big mysteries of my relationship with Louis concerns the origin of that dent. We hit nothing while we were moving, and we were parked in New York with that side to the curb. The best idea we could come up with was that somebody had been reckless-driving with a hand truck on the sidewalk in the middle of the night.
A couple of months later I was driving around Cape Cod at 7 A.M. with a couple of playful and crazy people. There in South Wellfleet was a guy painting "don't park here" lines in yellow paint on the street in front of the drugstore. He didn't seem to be quite awake yet and he might have thought he was still dreaming when we drove up and asked him if he wanted to paint a couple of stripes along the aforementioned mysterious scrape-and-dent area of Louis. But he did it, and forever after it looked suspiciously like I had flipped my car and rolled it across some road where they had freshly painted a double yellow line. (If you're ever considering painting your car, I highly recommend that highway marking paint, in the 5 years I had those stripes they didn't fade, crack, peel, or bleach, even under the most confusing treatment.)
In July of '72 there were to be two concerts, one in Hartford, Connecticut and one in Jersey City, New Jersey, two days apart. This was my chance to take my high school girlfriend to see the Dead. Unfortunately she had left at the end of June to attend the summer session of Antioch College in Ohio. But I was undaunted, I left D.C., my home stomping-ground to pick her up in Ohio for the Hartford concert which was to occur in 30 hours.
I drove to Ohio boogie-ing and cruising to high energy Dead tapes with which I was well supplied. I got to Antioch and I found my friend, Leni, and we started for Hartford, setting out about midnight. Well, the weather wasn't on our side; it was pouring most of the way across Ohio. We crawled at an exhausting and nerve wracking snail's pace and pulled over to rest for a couple of hours when we hit Pennsylvania. We then resumed our trek. Pennsylvania seemed to grow as we drove through it and by the time we finally got to Scranton where we were to pick up another friend it was already 3 o'clock. This was a very distressing situation, since we knew the concert was to start, in Hartford at 2 o'clock, and Hartford was at least 3 hours away, but we decided to go for it anyway.
Well, we arrived in time to hear the last ten minutes of the concert. We stayed around for a while and helped rake up some of the debris which filled the stadium, then we drove back to Scranton to spend the night. The following morning I left with Leni to drive her back to Antioch. None of this phased ol' Louis, he was still purring. I left Antioch in the middle of the night and made tracks for Jersey City, determined not to miss this concert. Particularly since I had waited for hours in line in June to get good reserved seat tickets for it.
My luck was a little better this time. I parked and got inside with minutes to spare before the Jersey City concert started. 1500 miles and a missed concert in coming to it, I was treated on this occasion to one of the peak, high-energy, sparkly, boisterous concerts I've ever seen the Dead perform. And, in fact, that 7/l8/72 tape is highly prized among Dead-tape collectors. After the concert I drove back to D.C. and slept just like a rock. Louis just hung out in the driveway and acted like nothing had happened.
'73 was a big year for Louis and the Dead. In March I drove with a friend to see them at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. We were filming an amateur super-8 documentary of a trip to see the Dead. The film is what you would expect of first-time-on-a-camera home movies, but some of the travel shots are classic: the before and after shots of service area dinner and the flashing sign in the Harbor Tunnel (Baltimore) whose significance I only fully appreciated later: "Keep up, speed". Also, there's a moment in the movie when the Dead perform, for one of the very first times, a section of one of their songs, later in The Grateful Dead Movie, they show it in one of its very last performances. (The syncopated section at the end of Eyes of the World, '73-'74).
l973 was also the year of Watkin's Glen. Louis didn't make it to W.G. since I had found some other people who were driving and I went with them. I'll never forget though the service areas along the Mass. Pike, (I was coming from Providence, R.I.). They were crowded to overflowing, and everybody was on their way to Watkin's Glen. Every car was blaring with Grateful Dead, or Allman Brothers, or The Band.
Immediately after Watkin's Glen, (by the time we finally got out of bumper-to-bumper traffic and made it back to Providence, where I was living for the summer) I drove down to D.C. and then back up to Jersey City for Dead concerts on July 31 and August 1 (Watkin's Glen had been July 28). On the way up to Jersey City, as I was driving up the N.J. turnpike, there was something in the road, a fender or something like it. In rush hour traffic I couldn't swerve around it so I went over it. I heard it thump against the underside of my car but then it was passed. I breathed easy, thinking that what might have turned out to be a very messy situation had waned trivial. Well, when I was ready to downshift while pulling into a service area, I discovered that I had no clutch. My clutch pedal was just floppy; I could push it to the floor and it would bounce back, but it had no effect on the transmission. I had heard about straight-shifting (shifting gears without using the clutch by matching engine rpm's to gear rpm's) but I had never tried it. When we were ready to leave the service area (it had been easy enough to glide into it and brake into a parking space) a hitchhiker and myself pushed Louis and got him rolling then I slammed into first gear and as I cruised around the parking lot in first the hitchhiker jumped in and we were off. Somehow I managed to let the hitchhiker off and get to the toll gate at the exit. I knew that if I stopped I was lost because you can't engage first gear without stalling when the wheels aren't moving. Fortunately the end of the ramp off the highway is a long downhill and somehow I made it without the clutch. Fortune was with me, there was a gas station about a hundred yards from where the turnpike dumps one into Jersey City. I knew I was at the mercy of the gas station people and that they would charge me an arm and a leg to fix Louis, but I had no choice. With the help of some amiable passersby (in Jersey City?) I pushed Louis to the gas station and hitched across town to the concert. Sure enough, and arm and a leg later, I mean two hundred dollars and a new clutch gizmo later, I was off and two concerts the wiser.
There were more concerts in September of '73. A trip in Louis to the Providence show came off without automobile incident (except the usual push-starting with which I was perennially familiar). On the 20th and 21st , there were to be two nights of concerts in Philadelphia. I drove down from school in Massachusetts with a longtime companion and fellow Dead concert enthusiast named Bob. I was troubled at this time by an ornery brake mechanism. My right front disc brake seemed to want to slow me down when I was trying to go faster. Finally in fury and desperation, as Bob sat and read the Times, I stopped the car, yanked off my wheel and proceeded to look at the brake caliper (technical term for the gadget that clamps down on the disc to slow you down). Now just about all I could do was look at it since I didn't have any tools and didn't really know how it worked. But in a fit of inspiration, after removing the caliper from the disc so it was just hanging by its brake fluid tube, I got in the car and jumped down hard on the brake pedal. Now the caliper didn't care whether the disc was there or not, the two sides of it shut together like a vise, and when I tried to put the caliper back on the disc, I couldn't force the sides apart to go around it. The best efforts of my pliers and screwdriver were hopeless to get that brake mechanism mounted back on the disc. Finally I put on my wheel again and just left the caliper swinging by its brake fluid tube. At least the rebellious creature wouldn't brake against me when I was accelerating, though I did anticipate having to counter a leftward pull whenever I braked since my front right brake was rendered ineffectual.
For a couple of miles things were fine, better than before, the pull to the left wasn't difficult to master. But then I was driving along and suddenly there were no brakes. Fortunately, it wasn't a critical moment when this was first discovered. An inspection, upon gliding to the shoulder, revealed that the swinging caliper had swung too close to the spinning disc while we were moving and this had sliced the brake fluid tube. Naturally, all the brake fluid had leaked out immediately and my inside brake pedal was useless. I knew the hand brake was mechanical (fluidproof) and testing revealed that it was indeed effective (in conjunction with my 3-month-old clutch gizmo downshift) at stopping the car. It was getting dangerously close to concert time and we vowed to see if we could make it. Suspense was added by the fact that hand brakes come unadjusted with use; I don't know if the cables stretch or what, but I had always found that my handbrake required tightening up every couple of months. I was sure that relying solely on the handbrake would accelerate the deterioration process. With all of this in mind we started toward the concert. I will never forget careening much faster than I wanted down the long sloping Philadelphia side of the Walt Whitman bridge looking at the line of cars between us and the rapidly approaching toll gate. I was ready to hit the horn and jerk to the left through a barricade at a closed tollbooth rather than hit another car if the brakes didn't work...All the while I was yanking desperately at the parking brake handle.
The parking brake held out and we managed to stop at the toll gate. Conveniently the Spectrum (Arena) is just a (very tiny) stone's throw from the bridge and we got there O.K. At the concert we ran into a couple of friends and made arrangements of some sort to ameliorate the difficulties, but, as luck would have it, when we went to their vehicle after the concert two of their tires had been slashed. While Bob waited with one of our friends, I went with the other, driving in Louis, with only the handbrake, around Philadelphia, in the middle of the night, in search of an open gas station which looked like it wanted to sell us some tires. Worrying about how long my brakes would hold out, and not knowing where to look in this unfamiliar and pretty grim looking city for a middle-of-the-night tire merchant, we returned to our friends, and, in Louis, slowly, and with much trepidation and prayers drove back across the bridge to the available residence of one of slashed-tired friends. (This time the tollbooth was on the uphill side of the bridge and presented no difficulty.) We crashed out (went to sleep) and the next day I deposited Louis at a nearby gas station to get his brakes fixed. The Dead weren't around when my wiper motor went. So, in spite of all the times I drove around with my arm out the window moving a squeegee back and forth in front of my face in the pouring rain, never was I on my way to a Dead concert.
In the summer of '74, I drove from school in Massachusetts to a concert in Hartford, Connecticut (at the same place I had missed all but ten minutes of concert in '72). Louis was lugging a capacity crowd that day: three in the front seat, four in the back seat, and one in the trunk. The trunk was in the front of the car and opened on a hinge (pivots) along the front edge of the car body (at the corners of the trunk). As we were driving to the concert, whenever we stopped at a light, the fellow who was riding (not uncomfortably) in the trunk would raise the lid a couple of feet and wave to nearby motorists.
Both of my two encounters with law enforcement officers in Louis were related in some way to the Dead. (Through no fault of the Dead!) The only speeding ticket I ever got came about when I was so busy expounding upon the virtues of G.D. to a hitchhiker that I failed to notice the motorcycle-clad policeman behind me. The other event occurred on the way to a Dead concert in Philadelphia in June, l976. I was discovering the frustration inherent in a several-mile stretch of city streets with a light at every corner and a total lack of inter-light synchronization. We were probably going to be late to the concert anyway and I didn't want to waste any more time than necessary. I sleazed through a light as it turned from yellow to red. Naturally, there was a policeman there who happened to see it. I maintained that it was yellow when I went through it and his response was, "That was shaky." But he didn't give me a ticket. (And he didn't haul us out of the car and search us, which might have been disastrous!)
Louis went through many stages of decoration, from the time we were sitting in a drugstore parking lot and had the inspiration to purchase some crayons for the purpose of decorating the ceiling upholstery, to the later cosmetic renovation of Louis' growing bald spot by the application of all-weather alkyd house paint. But one of the significant phases of ornamentation involved a series of hood ornaments. The first was a plastic felt-covered sitting ape piggybank. It was mounted to the hood (trunk lid) by means of a toggle spring wing inserted into the bottom of the ape, through which was threaded a bolt coming up through a hole in the hood. At one point I drove into a gas station and the attendant was enough surprised by my decoration that he called out to his fellow gas station attendant, "Hey, this guy's got a gorilla!" The second attendant didn't seem enthusiastic, but sourly replied, "Sit on it, Frank". The primate protuberance lasted a couple of months, but at a Dead concert (again in Hartford, and very close to where the other two had been held) on 8/2/76, the mascot monkey disappeared. It was liberated from my auto at some time during the concert. The toggle mounting system remained intact however and a few days later, while exploring a new field of available shopping centers we found a replacement in a toystore. The second hood ornament was a little kiddie squeeze toy. It was a Putrescent Pink caterpillar of molded rubbery plastic with an appealing expression and a molded-on blue bow above huge somber (not compound) eyes, when squeezed it would utter forth a plaintive squeaky wheezing noise. It was just the thing for Louis. We rushed right out and mounted it on the car. As if to establish a pattern, this second hood ornament lasted until the next series of Dead concerts.
In September ('76), I drove down from school in Massachusetts to meet a friend, Bob, (of the Philadelphia no-brakes adventure) at Trenton State College in New Jersey. I parked Louis there and rode with him to two concerts in Williamsburg, VA and Washington, DC. When I returned to Louis after the concerts, my caterpillar was gone. I had been so pleased with the caterpillar that I soon found a similar squeeze-toy to replace it. This one, Louis' final hood ornament, was an orange snake. It was mounted like the caterpillar had been, by removing the noisemaking device from the bottom and inserting the toggle spring-wing through the vacated opening. The snake had (as snakes are prone to do) a long neck, and when I was going faster than 40, the elevated head would deflect back and wave around in the wind. On the day I graduated from college there was a Dead concert, (again in Hartford, do you believe it!) and this was Louis' last. As I drove down the ramp of the multi-lever parking structure after the concert (my 50th), I was forced to screech suddenly to a halt as this guy jumped in front of Louis and kissed the snake.
As I mentioned, that was Louis' last Dead concert. Two months later, in the middle of Iowa, Louis' engine blew up en route to Oregon. Needless to say he never saw Oregon. I look forward to going back someday and looking in on him where he sits and suns himself in Newton, Iowa.
I didn't tell of all the times I push-started Louis after a concert: uphill, downhill, backwards, backwards with another car pushing, etc. Or the time I zoomed around Boston at 2:30 in the morning with my accelerator cable frozen "on" all the way, and unable to turn off the engine because I wouldn't be able to get started again. and as I careened around with my engine screaming at the top end of second gear not daring to going into third, hoping I would find the gas station that had lent me the jumper cables on my lap and dreading that I would happen to turn into a one way street or a dead end at 30 or hit something in the unfamiliar city with my windshield fogging up...or the time I was busily tripping and I thought I could unstick my stuck throttle by sticking my fingers in the fan...or the time I opened my door and it fell on the ground...or in the middle of the night, with no hill, with my battery too weak to turn the engine over, finding that cranking the car by turning the jack handle inserted into the proper hole actually DID start the engine... Well, I guess these are stories for Volume II.
