Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  Although the stadium was only about half-full (the attendance was 37,341, to be precise) and the game didn’t count, the Black Hole threw itself wholeheartedly into the game for most of the first half. AC/DC was blaring, and the thrill of the first few snaps of the new season got us all going. We could finally put the Super Bowl nightmare to rest. The game defined crappy—a sloppy 7–6 Raiders win, which, despite the baseball score did not even have much defense to speak of. Three words defined the game: missed field goals. If the teams had had any dignity, they would have given the fans their money back, with interest, or at least displayed some shame that people had paid to watch them stink up the joint. By the second half, the Black Hole was largely disengaged. Old friends were catching up, and people broke one of the commandments and sat down. I saw one man ejected for an undisclosed offense and another man fall asleep in his seat. Far more interesting than the feeble contest on the field was the voodoo priest whose sharp costume made him look just like the character in the James Bond film Live and Let Die. Kelly got a beautiful shot of him with his cute young son and daughter, a nice mix of menace and innocence. We also saw a guy dressed up like Peter Krist in Kiss, with black-and-white makeup, a black leather vest, skull shoulder pads (the Raiders touch), silver-studded leather gauntlets, and dark, flowing rock-star hair. Some people a couple of rows in front of us were drinking whiskey out of a binocular flask. I couldn’t help but think again of a Dead show or Mardi Gras or carnivale. For now, the costumes were a hell of a lot more interesting than what was transpiring on the gridiron. Nonetheless, the Black Hole was jubilant in victory.

  On the way to the BART station somebody started a call-and-response chant, and the happy crowd followed along: “I say Raider, you say Nation.” “Raider!” “Nation!” “Raider!” “Nation!” Somebody was selling buttons with multicolored lights flashing blue, red, green, and yellow. “Look at all the pretty lights,” said a little girl somewhere on the dark pedestrian bridge. On the train back downtown a gaunt, elderly black man turned to an old white guy with bushy white hair who was wearing a Jerry Rice jersey and asked, “Did they win?”

  “Yeah, seven to six,” he replied.

  “It’s the rebirth of the Nation,” the old man shouted like a biblical prophet as he left the train in front of us at 12th Street. “The rebirth of Raider Nation!”

  The next evening we met our friend Scott and his girlfriend Megan at Yoshi’s for sushi and a Pharaoh Sanders show. Originally opened in North Berkeley in the early seventies by Buddhist artists Yoshi Akiba, Kaz Kajimura, and Hiroyuki Hori, Yoshi’s moved to Oakland in the late seventies, eventually ending up in Jack London Square in the nineties. It is heads above the best jazz club in the western United States and the cultural jewel of Oakland. I had called Scott to help me flesh out my bizarre theory about the Deadhead/Raiderhead parallel. Having seen over two hundred Grateful Dead shows and a good number of Raiders games live and on TV, he was, I felt, the man for the job. He and Megan also worked in Oakland and lived in Hayward, the far end of the spine of Raider Nation, so I thought they might have some insights on local culture to share as well. In between pieces of seared albacore and raw salmon, Scott warmed to the subject: “You know, there are obvious differences that both sides would probably emphasize. A Deadhead would probably say, ‘Oh that’s ridiculous. You know, we’re not like Raiders fans. Those guys are carnivores and crazed.’ And Raiders fans would probably say, ‘Oh, that peace and love hippie shit, come on.’”

  “You mean the suckling pig roasters wouldn’t see a common interest with spinning, dancing hippie girls?” I asked.

  “Right, that probably wouldn’t happen, not unless you had a giant eggplant that was slowly turning over the flame, getting ready to be turned into veggie burgers.”

  I asked for confirmation: “So, the one big difference would be suckling pig versus eggplant?”

  Scott explained:

  Yeah, I would say suckling pig versus eggplant, if it makes any difference. And yet, when you think about it, no matter what they’re eating, if they’re carnivores or vegetarians, they are there in the same spirit. They’re there to have a good time. They are there to be communal, talk with the people next to them, the people walking around them. People often see old friends at events like these. They are not necessarily friends you hang out with in real life. They’re friends you see at these events.

  At my first game I remember thinking, “Here I am coming to this place where I’d seen maybe over 100 Dead shows. Oh, this will be a completely different event, more like a baseball game.” I was in baseball mode because this is a sports stadium, but once I got off the BART and into the crowd, into the throngs of it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of being at a Grateful Dead show parking lot because here are all these people all over the place drinking beer and sharing food and everybody is having a good time. It seemed just as important to be in the parking lot as it was to go to whatever event was going to happen. There was a community feeling that isn’t typical. It wasn’t like, “Okay, we’re here, let’s park the car and go into the stadium. Watch our event.” It felt like the community aspect of the whole thing was far more important.

  In the Dead community, you would often see people at each show, but you wouldn’t see them at other places. It was all about the show. That community existed as a kind of free, anarchic community with no government or whatever. You were just with your people. At the Raiders game it seemed the same way. They were so many people recognizing other people and/or welcoming in strangers. I don’t know if they want us to say this, but there is a counterculture edge to the whole Raiders phenomenon. It helps that they are called the Raiders because they have the pirate outfit image and the fans gravitate toward that. It seems similar to me in that no matter how big the Dead got, they were never a mainstream rock act. No matter how many people were there, it was still a countercultural event on one level or another. And with the Raiders it seems like they’re always fighting against, you know, the fans and the team, even the owner, the mainstream of football. And sometimes they get in trouble. They can be bad boys. They can get into the newspapers in the same way the Dead would get arrested on a drug crackdown or something like that.

  There is even a Hunter S. Thompson parallel: he covered the Raiders and the counterculture, the Hells Angels, too. I don’t have to stretch too far for this because you’ve got Hells Angels and other bikers and some pretty mean, nasty-looking guys in both scenes. People who haven’t been to a Dead show probably think they’re just a bunch of hippies and tie-dyes only, but especially in the early eighties there was a very strong biker scene at Dead shows. I mean it would have actually scared off a typical nineties Dead fan. There it was—you had your bike, your dog, and the wife—hanging out behind you—ready to go. So the scenes share that element, and yet somebody who looks mean and scary just might turn out to be the friendliest guy in the world once you start talking to him.

  Interestingly, once I got into the stadium, there was this giant poster of Jerry Garcia as I’m walking in. The average sports stadium does not have huge portraits of Jerry Garcia and Bill Graham. So just when I was about to dismiss the comparison of Deadheads to Raiders fans as a frivolous thought, there it was again. Once I got to my seat I could tell I was at a football game, but when halftime came and I started milling around, God, I felt like I was between the first and second sets of a show. Everybody had to stock up in between. They had to go get their beers, their food. They had to walk around and meet people. I ended up talking to all kinds of people that I never would talk to if I were just walking around the street. But you’re in line and suddenly they are your best buddies in about five minutes.

  There is also the level of extreme inebriation. That is the fascinating thing about both kinds of events—some people are going up and others are coming down. At the Dead shows it might literally be coming up and going down in a drug sense, but at a Raiders show, it is those people who started drinking really early in the parking lot, and you don
’t think they are going to make it through the third quarter. Then there are the other ones that got in late and really want to start piling on now at halftime. Alcohol actually plays a bigger role in the Dead scene than many people think. There are probably a lot more people drunk at shows than on acid, if you took a poll of everybody. There can’t be too many Raiders fans on acid. That’s a very interesting concept. It looks like this year there’d be some pretty bad trips going. There is a lot of speed in the speed metal scene. That seems to fit. And I did smell a lot of weed in the hallway. I would say it’s a positive thing that there is weed going on at Raiders games overall. It might actually take the edge off.

  Speaking of people being “out there,” the costume thing is another parallel. I’m sure you’ve come across a lot of that. At a regular concert you would hardly ever see people in costume, unless you were going to a Halloween show or something. But at Dead shows it was common to have some guy walking around in an Uncle Sam thing or running around like some kind of gnome. Wizards were quite common. There were always wizards. And Yoda. Yoda was a big favorite for a while. We always had a Yoda spotting. People just did whatever struck them. And it’s the same with the Raiders. Some of the costumes are influenced by the silver and black and all that, but some of the others are just out there. They really don’t have anything much to do with the Raiders. It’s just creativity going on.

  “You mean gorillas don’t have anything to do with the Raiders?” I interrupted, laughing.

  “As far as I know, there weren’t any gorillas who were active pirates—or Raiders,” Scott replied.

  “What about Señor Raider Man?” Kelly interjected. “The guy with the silver-and-black sombrero?”

  “Yeah, I met that guy in a bar once, and he’s something else. I mean, he’s got it all going at once, you know. He’s worked really hard on that exterior, but I’m not so sure about the interior. Of course, he seems like a nice enough guy, firm handshake.” Scott ate another piece of sushi and continued on:There is this whole carnivalesque thing. I was an English major so I occasionally have to use a word like “carnivalesque.” I won’t say Bakhtinian or anything like that. But anyway, “carnivalesque” is a term that the average English professor was using even if they didn’t know how to party. Still, I always liked going to places like Key West or New Orleans or a Dead show, places or events that had elements of the carnivalesque. Mardi Gras is probably the ultimate example in the United States. Every Dead show and every Raiders game has a Mardi Gras edge in a way. They play with death symbols. If you look at the Grateful Dead, of course, death is symbolized but the skeletons are happy. And at the Raiders games there are a lot of death symbols—in the makeup, the skulls and things like that. It’s actually similar to the Mexican Day of the Dead, in that people at Dead shows, Raiders games, and in Day of the Dead festivities all use death symbols positively. These events are rituals. They’re actually not afraid of death; they’re celebrating life of which death is a part. It’s a mockery of pretense as well, a leveling of sorts. We’re all it in together, nobody’s any better than anybody else in the face of death. It’s a healthy awareness of death. These symbols that might usually be purely negative or would be used in some stupid horror movie or something like that are transformed. It’s like, “Hey, we’re partying like crazy here, and yet we know we look like skulls and death faces. And today everything is permitted.” It goes all the way back to the Bacchanalian and Dionysian stuff. It’s some serious Wine God insolence. It’s a letting down of inhibitions. That would probably never happen at other public events.

  It can be as simple as talking to the person next to you. In a way, we often go through life without hardly ever talking to the person next to us, whether it’s somebody on a bus or somebody you live next to, or somebody walking down the street. At Dead shows and Raiders games and other carnivalesque events you can strike up the best friendships with people you may never see again. You might scrawl a number on a piece of paper or something like that, but what really counts is what happens right there, that breaking down of social inhibitions and then that larger sense of self. This doesn’t happen to everybody, but in extreme cases it is the breaking down of all inhibitions, and the manifestations of this freedom can be positive or sometimes negative. At Dead shows, sometimes someone would scream out at an inopportune moment, “We’re all dying!” Or somebody at a Raiders game just loses it and does some crazy shit. With a sport there’s going to be more fights because there is that adrenaline going.

  You know, it’s amazing what similar crowds we’re dealing with here. I’m sure there are lots of people who have gone to both. There’s one other thing that unites the two scenes, the concept of trekking, caravanning down the highway and camping out together. That’s certainly a link between Deadheads and Raiders fans. How could I forget, “We are everywhere” was a phrase that Deadheads would always use. “We are everywhere, we are everywhere,” and that seems the same with Raiders fans. What other fans are so spread out and travel such long distances to go to games the same way Dead fans would go five hundred miles or a thousand miles to see one show? People would look at them like they were nuts: “Why didn’t you wait for them to come to your town?” It’s the same way with Raiders fans. They are going to travel. I see all those people camped out by the freeway waiting in vans and campers. There is one big difference. The VWs would all be pulled over to the side because they broke down on the way to Dead shows. But the Raiders fans are cruising through. They are going to make sure their vehicle doesn’t break down before a game. If you can introduce me to a Raiders fan in a VW, then we’ll know that we’ve found the missing link between to two cultures.

  Scott stopped to have a sip of beer and another piece of sushi, and Kelly and I told him about our trip all the way down East 14th Street through Oakland and into San Leandro. He stopped and thought about it and said:There aren’t many people who would take that route the whole way, maybe you guys, but not many. But it’s amazing how it is all connected. It’s like the center of the various communities. I mean once the street turns into Mission in Hayward, you have Muffler Man, always a sign of definitive culture. I cruise Mission all the time to go to thrift stores and cheaper stores. And it’s pretty much Mexican families, a few Anglo housewives, and me. There are a lot of Raiders decals around in the middle of the day there. But there’s not as much cross-filtration [between Oakland, San Leandro, and Hayward] as you’d think. People from Oakland tend to stay in Oakland. It’s one of those things. And people in San Leandro are afraid to go anywhere else. And people from Hayward, which I happen to be from and I’m going to favor, are a bit more open minded and get around a bit more. And it’s not just black and Latino Oakland versus white Hayward. That’s a major misconception, that areas like Hayward and Fremont are somehow all white.

  At this point Megan, who grew up in Hayward, jumped in and explained how the demographics had changed over the years:It is more of a middle- and working-class place. The people who moved out of Hayward moved into the valley region. There were a lot of people who did stay, you know. The people who moved out, though, left room for others to come in. So over the years, the city has gotten a lot more multicultural and more diverse in other ways than it originally was. In the fifties the suburban communities like San Leandro, San Lorenzo, and Hayward were built on former ranches, and that is where everybody is moving to. They were living in the big city of Oakland, and now they were moving to these little suburban communities, and after a while people outgrew that, and immigrants moved in, and people who didn’t feel comfortable with it—you know, the immigrants and the area, or were looking for something more flashy—moved up to the valley area where they felt like, “Oh, I can build my ‘X’-scale home here. It’s not this little twelve-hundred-square-foot box.”

  Scott jumped in:

  I happened to have seen the 2000 census for Hayward, and it’s unbelievably diverse. It’s like 33/33/33: 33 percent white, 33 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 33 percent Asian
and black. There are a lot of Pacific Islanders as well, and many of them are into football. A lot of Filipinos are into the Raiders. You’ve also got big communities of people like Samoans, and there are a lot of Samoan Raiders fans. So Hayward is really diverse, and it surprises people to hear that sometimes.

  When I first moved to Hayward, one of the first things I noticed is that people liked to do weird things with their yards. So I started taking walks and trying to actually chart where the various animals were, and that’s when I noticed these people had carved the Raiders insignia into their lawn, and then they painted their houses silver and black. Instead of having a couple of flamingoes out there, why not just carve up the lawn and do the Raiders thing? I guess there are crazed sports fans everywhere who might do something like that, but it seems like it fits in a little more in this area because there is something about the lawn decoration thing that is this last clinging to suburbia. I’m not an expert in this area. It takes a while to really immerse yourself in this kind of roadside Americana. But it is something that I have found in Hayward and San Lorenzo, and it is especially strong in San Leandro. And the Raiders thing kind of fits in with that because Raiders insignias are everywhere, but to put it on your house, that takes it much further.