When Push Comes to Shove: Real Life on Dead Tour - Hollie A. Rose

Published 2024

It took a particular sort to thrive on Dead Tour; one part spiritual mystic trickster, one part intrepid seeker, and one part entrepreneur.

Raw and real, When Push Comes to Shove presents the unfiltered Grateful Dead tour journals of Hollie A. Rose. Spanning 1988 to 1992, her entries capture the messy and sometimes contradictory reality of life as a “tour rat,” truckin’ from venue to venue in pursuit of magic through music and the long strange, sustaining alchemy of the Dead community.

What makes these journals remarkable isn’t just the constant backdrop of broken-down vehicles, empty wallets, buds, doses and constant specter of getting busted, it’s that Hollie had the discipline to put pen to paper night after night. Because these are true personal journals, there’s no performative polish for readers. Instead, we get immediate, unfiltered reflections from the road during the band’s most commercially successful—and culturally fraught—years.

We Tourheads were a transient city so large it was impossible to know everyone intimately, or even to know everyone’s names, but we recognized the faces and the energies that were Us. We knew who we were, and we knew, when we looked at each other, that we shared fates, shared futures. And, we knew too, why, and how, each of us had gotten here.

Hollie and I both caught our first show at the New Haven Coliseum and ended up at dozens of the same stops in Eugene, Cal Expo, Hampton, MSG and the Warfield. Our paths most certainly crossed-- two wide-eyed Deadheads traveling through the same parking lots and venues. But, where my orbit revolved around tapes, tapes, tapes, Hollie’s world spun in different circles, ones she chronicles with candor and grit. 

This isn’t a book for newcomers, nor is it meant to be. But for Heads who lived through this paradoxical era of mass popularity and societal disdain, Hollie’s cinéma vérité style will ring familiar and true. Her journals may not carry the literary gravitas of Anaïs Nin, but the courage it took to publish them is undeniable. In the thick of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s War on Drugs, her pages are shadowed by friends being arrested for marijuana and LSD, the specter of heroin addiction and the emotional toll of a scene under siege.

The result is a time capsule: a vivid portrait of the magic and strain of a fandom both ecstatic and devouring itself, like the ouroboros devouring its own tail.

Hollie’s Flamingo Hippie website is worthy of exploration! In addition to photos, a great glossary and a thoughtful memoriam, she spotlights the works of Deadhead authors who self-publish. As stated on every page of this site, writing and publishing a book is exceptionally difficult. To support these authors, we encourage you to purchase directly from their websites or from your local bookshop. 

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BIG RAILROAD BLUES 10/15/83 Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT

For a tiny state, Connecticut punches way above its weight class in Dead history—multiple nights across the thirty year run are stone cold classics. My first show didn’t land until 1984, but Hollie got on the bus in New Haven in 1983. Considering it’s barely a blink between New Haven and Hartford, I like to imagine she caught this one too—same year and same little corridor of chaos and possibility.

China Doll and the recently returned St. Stephen get the headlines. Deserved. But if you ask me, the Big Railroad Blues from 10/15/83 is where it’s at. Jerry latches on and will not let go as if he’s trying to run the engine off the tracks. Buckle up, kiddies! It’s time for 7 minutes and 40 seconds of nonstop Jerry runs.