If you know any Deadheads (one-time followers of the Grateful Dead,) then you are no doubt frequently regaled with epic tales of concerts past. The generation which followed this band around the country were as possessed with a religious fever as any heretic of the dancing mania which swept Europe, but their belief was in the trinity of Sex, Drugs and Rock, not the certainty of a sudden Apocalypse. Mark Adam, Pacific Rim artist and Deadhead, spoke frequently to me of one such big show at "the meadow," on the Oakland side of the bridge from San Francisco to the East Bay. Mark would talk repeatedly about the "dead zone," or parking area for the Grateful Dead concerts which to him were the bazaars of old Araby. Adam believed these parking lot/ campgrounds to be magical places where the laws of customary doctrine were set aside for a time of egalitarian exchange, plus "you can't keep the music in," so he seldom bought a ticket. Each dead zone was a barter fair on wheels, existing in a culture where cash money must be reserved for necessities (concert admission and gas money) while everything else was obtained through a barter economy expressly designed by and for followers of the Dead. For Mark this meant every van and psychedelic school bus was a potential customer for his imaginative and unofficial Dead graphics. The Dead are dying now and Mark no longer visits me from his Northwest studio. The spill of activity depicted beneath a fragment of bridge against which the young pregnant figure is silhouetted is an impressionistic swirl of marks made to represent the energies Mark described and those I have myself experienced. The young pregnant woman is an ever-present reminder of these events, I got this image off the internet, vaguely asian she is a symbol of the new generation of rockers and those yet-to-be, a refreshing contrast to the seminal icons represented by the actual laminated VIP pass to the 1992 Stadium Tour by Metallica and Guns n' Roses which accompanies the piece.