Dead members plan tentative reunion tour

Attention, Deadheads: Please behave yourselves. If you don’t, you won’t get to see the remnants of the band tour this fall. So says a statement from the group, whose principal members are reuniting this weekend for the first time since Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995 at a two-day rock festival in Wisconsin.

On the Grateful Dead’s website, the reunited musicians list 15 tentative dates in November and December in which they would play various Midwest and East Coast arenas as The Other Ones. But there’s a catch: The band says it will tour only if the ”family reunion” at the Alpine Valley concert stage in East Troy, Wisc., this weekend goes off smoothly. In other words, don’t crash the show if you don’t have a ticket. The concert was already canceled once by local officials worried that gate-crashing Deadheads would overrun the small town, as they did during a Dead show there back in the ’80s. Only when promoter Clear Channel promised to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on extra security was the show reinstated.

So the fall tour dates ”are conditional upon a safe and positive outcome of Alpine Valley. What this means is that the request for only people with tickets to come to the show has to be strictly adhered to,” the Other Ones say. ”Failure to comply with this simple request will put these tour dates in serious jeopardy. As always your cooperation is appreciated.”

Still, ticketless fans will be able to hear the show live via a webcast at Dead.net. Or they can wait until their friends return with tapes to trade.