The Night Jerry Garcia got stuck in an Ann Arbor riot celebrating a National Championship.

Toasting the University of Michigan's National Championship jarred memories of the last time students took to the Ann Arbor Streets. Let me tell you a story, boys and girls.

Jerry photo by Jay Blakesberg

A friend in Ann Arbor sent me some videos of celebrants in the streets Monday night following the University of Michigan’s victory in the college football National Championship game. It got me thinking about the last time my alma mater was the undisputed national champs in a major sport – the 1989 hoops title team - and a story that involved Ann Arbor revelers and Jerry Garcia. Bear with me for a moment. It’s worth it.

The Grateful Dead played at Crisler Arena on April 5 and 6, 1989. U-M defeated Seton Hall 80-79 with Rumeal Robinson’s two free throws late on the night of April 3. Late that night, the Dead flew from Pittsburgh, where they had played the Civic Arena – where I first saw them in 1981- into Detroit Metro airport. Runner vans picked them up to drive them to their Ann Arbor hotel, but the driver of a van carrying Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir did not know where he was going and the lead driver said, “Just follow me.” Bad idea.

This is a lesson about pre-GPS, pre-pocket computer travel, kids. The driver had no idea where he was going, took a wrong turn and ended up on South University St, on the campus’s southern edge. It was one of the center points of wilding celebrants, even hours after the game had ended. Stuck in the midst of a virtual riot – coverage at the time used the word - they sat there and watched the edgy revelry unfolding all around them. It was not a happy or secure feeling.

Things were truly out of control in the streets. The Ann Arbor News headline read “Victory Celebration Turns Ugly As Fans Rampage” and said, in part, “The crowd broke windows, damaging cars and businesses and caused multiple injuries... Police estimated the total damage at $84,000.” (You can read it here.) Now imagine adding a Jerry Garcia sighting to the mix.

Photo - Dina Regine

Dennis McNally, then the band’s publicist and now one of their main biographers, nodded off and woke up when they stopped. When he found out why they were not moving, he scanned around for options.

“It was 1 in the morning, we’d played that night, and it was time to go to the rooms,” he says.  McNally found a nearby cab, also parked and asked the driver if he knew where the hotel was. He did, and the van slowly extricated itself from the masses and followed the taxi to their lodging.

“We backed out and went to the motel, which was on the highway on the edge of town,” says McNally. “Thank God for the tinted windows.”

At the time, he was pondering one simple thing. “Imagine,” he thought, “if these kids knew that Jerry Garcia was sitting amongst them.”

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Alan Paul’s fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, will be published July 25, 2023, by St. Martin’s Press. His last two books – Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and  One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band  – debuted in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List. His first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about his experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions.  He is also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.