Unfortunately, as I was not in a cave on another planet for the last two weeks, like everyone else, I was forced to consider the death of Michael Jackson. And more than that, the all too common cautionary tale of the artist lost early – one more creative mind ground to dust in the showbiz machine. That’s the romantic spin. Vulnerable, sensitive soul driven to an early grave… Well, there’s obviously a lot more to it than that, but who the hell wants to go there? From every angle, it’s a dull, tired narrative. The better story’s the impact, what it felt like when you heard someone as ubiquitous in our culture as The King of Pop kicked the bucket so suddenly. Where you were sitting and how it was all personalized in your head.
I didn’t care much about Jackson, considering him, as most did, a once brilliant long washed up talent with appalling private appetites. But I still won’t forget where I was and what I was doing when I heard he’d died. The image of the moment sticks in your head, changing the commonplace activity you were engaged in at the time into an oddly resonant context. And it brought me back to some other notable deaths, in particular one of a legendary rock star who was, through my late teens and early twenties, omnipresent and, to borrow a phrase used to describe the Clash, “the only [guitarist] that matter[ed].” And so here’s my take on a death that occurred nearly fourteen years ago – the passing of Jerry Garcia.
No, I didn’t write this today. Among the numerous other things I did instead of attending classes, during law school I managed to write a 200 page book, mostly a slop of barely connected college recollections and a couple law school anecdotes. I figured I’d put a few coherent bits of the thing on the website this summer, and with Jackson’s death, now seemed as decent time as any to post some text about Garcia dying. I tried not to clean it up too much, to preserve the eye and voice I had at the time.
August 9, 1995
I returned to the Holiday Inn – where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms – to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday’s refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.
-Living in the Time of Alger, Greeley and Debs,
The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson
Holy shit. Is this real? The television held a still picture of Jerry Garcia with the dates “1942-1995″ below it. The only time it’s good to have numbers below your name is if they’re listing your playing years – if you’re a professional athlete being admitted to the Hall of Fame. In any other situation, it means you’re dead.
His ticket’s punched? At first I figured it might be a rumor. Television stations show a small photo of the allegedly deceased in the corner of the screen until they get the confirmation from someone connected to the coroner’s office. Then the station went to commercial, using a graphic of Garcia smiling as the fade-out image. Once the face fills the whole screen in the commercial cut, you know it’s official.
I remember hearing of Kurt Cobain’s suicide a year and some change before and thinking “That sucks. I kind of liked Nirvana.” But this? This was different. Not surprising, of course. Garcia’d nearly died several times before, most of them in recent years. And according to the news, predictably, the years of heroin, blow, chili dogs, milk-shakes and Camel straights had finally taken their due. Simple cardiac arrest. Acquaintances of Garcia tried to create the perception he’d been on the mend, but the stress of the awful summer tour of ’95 had put the old man under considerable pressure and he just didn’t have the constitution to come through it again as he had rebounding from a diabetic coma in ’86 and a nasty bout of heroin addiction in ’92. “Just when he’d committed himself to getting healthy his body gave up on him.” “What a cruel irony.”
Right. He looked so healthy…
But there was no use in critiquing the fallout. No one speaks ill of the–well, you know what I mean… And this was history, more than the loss of a disposable packaged and marketed rock star. More than the loss of a studio-created movie star. This was the figurehead leader of a movement, an entire way of life, however much Garcia loathed and shrank from that legacy. However much he said in his each and every interview, much like his close friend Dylan, that all he did was play music.
Whether you were Pat Robertson or Robert Hunter or Bill Clinton or Howard Stern or Billy Joe Bob in Southern Arkansas with a second hand Sam Donaldson hairpiece under your polyester Skoal hat and a five hundred pound wife in the trailer, you knew who Jerry Garcia was. I couldn’t consider myself anything approaching a Deadhead, but even I understood Sen. Patrick Leahy when he said he felt as though he’d “been kicked in the stomach” hearing the news of the death. Having stumbled out of college with absolutely no direction, straight into the jaws of law school, and knowing it was all so wrong, Garcia – what he was and what followed him – represented one of the last fading concepts of total personal autonomy in what felt like an ever more complex and increasingly invasive reality. As the man himself admitted in the countless clips playing on every news channel, the Dead were one of the last “circuses” you could follow around this country with no destination in mind. No career. No car payments. No mortgage, rent or health insurance premiums. And it wasn’t that I or any of the people I knew ever planned to actually follow the band. It was just knowing someone else was – that somewhere, somebody was attempting, however immature and ludicrous it seemed, to live out one of Peter Fonda’s rambling speeches on “freedom” from Easy Rider.
Most of us could never do that. We were college kids from solid, upright upbringings, too rigidly trained to Succeed to ever fully let go. Spoiled and shot on the idea of giving it all up. Growing up with a safety net of support as long as we stuck to some of the parameters set by our families, our communities and the strictures of our paranoid classes had soured and limited us. Or at least that’s how it could feel. While others were off to join the circus, we were saddled by the realization that circus work didn’t pay very well.
But everybody needs a fantasy, a seditious indulgence of the notion that perhaps, if you got sick enough of the thing you’d been shunted toward, under the right set of combustible circumstances, you might just Walk Away. That other people did it, and if it came down to needing a home, you could find a carnival to follow. That as confining as it all might seem, there was a Door Number Two, and the place it led you to, at least for a little while, was as far from Door Number One as anything could ever be.
That’s probably what made it so sad to know Garcia was finally Gone. The Dead were a thing of their own, self-made, self-run and as such mostly uncorrupted. Who’d be left to take that place? Neil Young? Dylan? The list was shorter each day. You couldn’t follow those acts as they didn’t tour twice a year, and even if they did, it was never going to be the same. As anyone who’s ever been there would certainly concur, even at their worst, the old saying held – “There [was] nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.”
I looked around and people’s faces were distorted… lights were flashing everywhere… the screen (sheets) at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been… the band, the Grateful Dead, was playing but I couldn’t hear the music… people were dancing… someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eyelids (I really think this happened… I asked and there was such a machine)… and nothing was in perspective, nothing had any touch of normalcy or reality… I was afraid, because I honestly thought that it was all in my mind,
and that I had finally flipped out.
. . .
“Acid Rock”– the sound of the Beatle’s Sergeant Pepper album and the high vibrato electronic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and many other groups — the mothers of it all were the Grateful Dead.
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
It’s easy to criticize the use of that quote here, that the Dead anyone my age saw bore very little resemblance to the band of the book. I see it a little differently. As he often tends to do with whatever subject he’s addressing, I think Wolfe nailed the timeless essence of the band. Nothing had a touch of normalcy or reality, and that kind of temporary respite’s worth any ticket price.
As much as MJ accomplished in his life, it’s getting quite tiring hearing about him, because we only ever hear from the media, and they literally can’t tell a meaningful story about an icon passing the way that a truly devoted (or at least understanding) fan could. As a guy born in the mid 80′s, it took me a bit longer to understand some of the deeper appeal in the Dead, and I could only do it with my father as a proxy.
He was a Deadhead at heart, since he couldn’t follow the group everywhere they went. He scored tickets to what would be their last show ever at Soldier Field, amazingly thanks to me(My childhood best friend is actually a nephew to Phil Lesh). Before this show, he hadn’t been to one of their concerts in years. He came back full of that youthful experience again. He was so ecstatic and in his old mindset that woke me up, smelling of cheap weed and booze, when he got back home and asked me what I thought of a piercing he had gotten at the show. When Garcia died, this aura of happiness he was exuding just got crushed.
Sorry for the length. I guess I’m just taking a roundabout way of saying that there is one artist for every person that will make them wake their son on a school night, drunk and high, and ask them if they thought that Grateful Dead ear stud was “totally bitchin.” And when they die, we’re going to formulate thoughts of our own about it, and not need 24 hour coverage of anything related to their life, because we’d probably know most of it already.
PL: I don’t have a comment on something that personal except to say, “The Dead” will tour again in some incarnation. Lesh can’t survive without touring. Buy your old man a ticket to that. It’s sloppy, I’m told, but they’re pulling out crazy old stuff like “Viola Lee Blues” and “Cryptical>Other One” interpolating “The Eleven” and such.
You hit the nail on the head. For as long as I can recall I have despised The Dead. It took me about 15 years to realize that I actually hated the people that were able to reject the boundaries created by our parents and society and live a lifestyle that every human craves to live. I really do envy people who can just say fuck it, and let go. Stupid hippies.
PL: Well, unlimited devotion to anything – any band, movement or creed – is no golden road. But to the extent one does have to have a certain level of guts to chuck it all, even temporarily, hippies do command a good deal of respect. And I have to admire the ones who later assimilated and succeeded in the systems they’d previously rejected. There’s something uniquely amusing in the story of a person having the cake and eating it.
Anyone who can step out of the box and look at a situation objectively is going to be better off than someone who can’t, regardless of whether they work in a massive corporation or follow a band.
Idiots who talk about the Dead or Timothy Leary like they had all the answers are just as annoying and backwards as people who were convinced Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. were invincible.
But that doesn’t make the music any less relevant.
PL: Indeed. And there are worse things to follow than a band that could transport you so far so quickly. You just had to be disciplined enough to remember that inevitably you had to come back down to earth for a while.
I wish there was a musician that managed to get that kind of reaction out of me. Don’t get me wrong I love music, I play it constantly and take an interest in artists as well as theory. It sucks though, that I can’t name anyone that I can say has changed my outlook on life or would push a response out of me bigger than “Dude that sucks” if they were to die.
PL: I’d quit every vice, almost everything in my life, before I’d give up music. It’s a window to our better halves. Ask yourself this… Have you ever met an interesting person who didn’t like music? I’m not sure I could even trust such a person. Jerry Garcia’s but one of dozens I’d say impacted the way I think and write. I can’t dance for shit, but the lyricism I occasionally fall into here and there with words I think comes from listening to a lot of music. Gives rhythm to your prose, expression, your speech and inflections. People say it’s an opiate for minds who don’t like to concentrate – that it gets in the way of lucid thinking. If that’s true, here’s to remaining a scatterbrained recdivist music-addict until the day I die.
Phily-
It was sad when Jerry died but I was so lucky to have seen them two weeks earlier at RFK right after I moved to DC (interestingly I was in LA the day Jackson died, LAX was a zoo with the media vultures). So I felt blessed. I was more bummed at Bonham’s death when I was 10, since I had never seen Zeppelin and was hoping they would be my first concert (alone of course, not like the lame boomers who take their kids to shows with them today, what is wrong with these people!)
Speaking of the Dead, Siruis’ Dead Station is amazing. Last week they played a show from Giants Staduim in 89, and I was like I was there! I could never have imagined even if I was on all the drugs in the parking lot that I would be a regulatory lawyer working on K Street 20 years later, what a long strange trip it’s been. Some mornings there will be an epic jam and I will just drive around downturn for a few more minutes before going into the office. Pretty soon I may just keep on truckin the whole day.
PL: I saw them at RFK a few years before that. People were passing out from heat exhaustion in the parking lot.
On the Bonham thing, thanks for making me not feel like the oldest motherfucker here. I was still listening to Van Halen I, Ozzie and my folks’ Stones, Beatles, CSNY and Gordon Lightfoot records in those days. Zeppelin didn’t enter the picture for me until a a couple years later, and then, oddly, through “In Through the Out Door.” Not the usual intro to the band. Don’t recall Bonham’s death.
As to just driving – past the office, over the bridge, out into the country and just Ahead, with no aim in mind but Away – it was many a morning traffic would break on the Schuylkill Expressway outside Philly and I’d round this wide left passing the city to my right where if you just kept going straight and didn’t take a sharp exit ramp into town you’d just keep going South, down 95 into the Baltimore/DC corridor and from there who knows where. But I always took the turn into town. Amazing how our country’s economy, our society really, holds together on the thin promise that of all the tens of millions of people who have that same “Why not just say quit?” conversation every morning, few, if any will ever do it. What would happen if you reversed a lot of those numbers? I’d love to live through a day where instead of taking the right and parking the truck in the basement of the office tower, people just drove on ahead. Just to see the reactions. A national skip day. Palahniuk or somebody like that has to have a pulp book about such an event in him. Probably be a decent screenplay.
If you keep going, make sure it’s a nice day – nice enough to roll down the windows, peel back the sunroof and crank an old live “Statesboro Blues.”
When I was 10 years old Garcia died. I was away at camp and my counselor told me. I had NO idea who he was, but I will never forget when he died. Same is true of Jackson. His music was great, but enough already! Can I please watch something else on tv?
PL: Yes, now you can watch a pack of senators who are supposed to be questioning a Sup Ct nominee make alternatively sappy and grandiose speeches about their humble upbringings and devotion to the institution of justice to try to get favorable soundbite coverage in the nightly news. That or out of sheer delusion voters actually watch the hearings. The only one who hasn’t embarrassed himself by demonstrating gross ignorance on the issue of what a judge actually does or spewing a slop of self aggrandizing horseshit has been Franken, probably because he’s new and hasn’t found his sea legs there yet.
Just like the freaks ruin any nostalgic or retrospective look at MJ that I may have had after he died, the fucking hippies ruined my connection with JG soon after his passing. I remember saying “wow, too bad I wish I could have seen him live…” and to get back a “fuck you if you think that then you dont know what JG and the Dead are all about”. Oh, well then fuck me and thank God I dont.
When HST checked out, I got a bottle of Chivas and an 8ball and locked myself in the house for a few days.
kill your heroes.
PL: As your attorney, I advise you to watch a Simpsons episode called “The Joy of Sect,” if you haven’t already yet. And tell me if, from the hordes of testimonials on the Internet lauding self help books on everything from how to get rich in six months or how to “hack” the circadian rhythms of your body so you never have to sleep to the religious loons who believe Jesus is going to appear in Israel sometime in the next decade and do battle with the Antichrist, we aren’t regressing into colonies of miseducated infants… that 80% of society isn’t a pack of what that Simpsons episode refers to as “movementarians.”
And we wonder why Wall Street and Washington do as they please. We’re all busy fixating on nonsense. Keep your head in the sand, or more aptly, up your ass, and someone will steal all of your silverware.
I still can’t get over how great of a recommendation Mutations is. I’d be interested to hear which tracks are your favorite. I’d go with 8-10 (Bottle of Blues, O Maria and Sing It Again).
PL: I was driving to some business this morning thinking Beck was an underrated songwriter. Cash’s version of “Rowboat” was playing and it struck what a great all around song that is. Anyone could sing it and it’d be decent. Of course, Cash’s strong voice makes that version special, but Beck gave him the framework.
Only problem with “Mutations” is it’s so godawful depressing. My wife almost threw that out out the window on the way to Long Beach Island a bunch of years ago. She strongly disagreed with the suggestion it was anything approaching beach music. I was also being a dick about demanding to listen to it. We probably settled on Sublime, the world’s greatest summer band.
Fuck Brad Nowell for dying. That guy was a motherfucking genius. If you want to hear some crazy, emotionally raw stuff, buy a disc called “Sublime Acoustic” and listen to this tune called “Pool Shark” (I think it also might be on “Robbin’ the Hood”). It’s really short, but the dude melts down, and the tune’s structure is also fragile… You get this picture in your head of a guy totally unable to handle his talent. It’s creepy, but really exceptional. As ominous as Cobain’s blistering “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” on the “MTV Unplugged” disc.
I was nine years old when Garcia died. I remember, though, because that’s the day my schooling of The Dead began. It was my only way for me to figure out why my parents and their friends were so fucking bummed about this fat dude with a beard had died (who also happened to have a lousy tie line).
Ten years later (two years ago), I had the chance to see Phil Lesh’s band play. And, this past year, I saw The Dead and the Allman Brothers do a pro-Obama show. Allman Brothers were fantastic; spot on as usual. The Dead was a mess. Their jams were indistinguishable. Sounds like the hadn’t played together in ten years (which they probably didn’t). Now, the only stuff I revisit happily are Dick’s Picks Volumes 1 – 10. Do you have a favorite live show bootleg?
PL: I heard the same thing from people I know who went to that PSU show. I’ve heard they were much better in the recent shows, accruing from rehearsal time in the interim, no doubt. The Obama show was a sudden, very slapdash thing.
As to shows I like? Anything from the early psychedelic Pigpen era. Not because I like Pigpen, but because my favorite Dead tunes are the stuff from “Aoxomoxoa” and “Anthem of the Sun.” The Tahoe show on DP 22, DP 8 and the Fillmore 69 boxed set stuff are my favorites. There are so many killer Elevens in those sets, and as I think I’ve note before, in that Tahoe show Jerry sounds as good as any guitarist who’s ever lived. Some of the runs he goes in that show are mind boggling.
I like the later stuff as well, but its kind of a different level, I think. Sixteen is a killer Dick’s Pick. The jam in the middle of “Not Fade Away” is silly good.
Basically, anything in their catalog from the days the band was into uppers and psychedlics is great. Everything from Jerry’s Persian heroin days is lackluster.
“Three From the Vault’s” a nice way to bridge the gap. It’s got a good bit of the “Garcia” record on it (one of my favorite studio discs, period) mixed up with some holdovers from the “St. Stephen>Eleven” days. Great version of the “Pump Song” that later became “Greatest Story Ever Told.”
Great article. Being from a younger generation, I’ve often wondered what it’s like to lose a national/personal hero. Not someone like MJ–really, who gives a shit– but a Garcia or Lennon or Hendrix. I can’t think of a death that would really rattle me like one of those giants would if I had grown up listening to them.
And on another note completely, what do you think of Frank Zappa? I just saw Zappa Plays Zappa (tribute band by his son Dweezil) and the music was so electrifying that I’ve been desperately scrounging through my old collection of Zappa CD’s my father imparted to me when I was 12. It’s a goldmine. The man was so talented and unique that I think–if I wasn’t 4 when he died– I would’ve mourned his death.
I only ask because a gentleman of your refined tastes must have an opinion on the man.
PL: I admire Frank Zappa for not only his bizarre but brilliant writing and arrangement, but also because he threw Lowell George out of the MOI, which caused Lowell to go and form Little Feat, and subsequently rip off four astonishing studio masterpieces and one of the greatest live records in history. (Tying threads, Lowell also happened to produce the Dead’s “Shakedown Street,” but he gets no points for that, as that record is an utter piece of shit.)
Garcia was not a “hero” of mine, by the way. I admired and respected his genius, and the fact that he was “real” in that the guy didn’t give a flying fuck about marketing or his image or anything else. He just wanted to play music (odd he got along with Dylan, who’s as much a shrewdie as he is an artist). But I’d never want to be Garcia past 1977. Guy was a disaster and frankly, it’s kind of embarrassing to be so incapable of giving up any of your vices. Garcia died as much from bad diet and smoking as anything else. You’d think at some point he’d have been able to have given up at least one of his bad habits.
Funny you mention Garcia, the movie Festival Express documenting The Deads and Janis Joplin trip on a train to Canada touring on IFC. Watching as we speak.
PL: I have to see that sober. Or at least not a a hundred miles out of my head. People say it’s a great flick and I know I’ve seen most or all of it, but the recollection is so damned blurry. Mixed up with boxing video games, the sound of bootlegs playing the background and some other stuff. It’s one of those things I might have vividly recalled for a day afterward, but is now mixed up, mere blurs of Jerry walking around the train and playing guitar with Janice or something like that.
I saw the Dead a few weeks ago and it was actually really cool. However, I think you’re forgetting a more important death – B Mothafuckin Nowell! Anytime the sun’s out, I want to listen to Sublime, to this day. (I would also recommend Pepper’s “No Shame”; less social insight but they’re a good sublime rip-off.) Sublime is a lot more accessible as far as party music goes, because there isn’t any random noodling and dragging on.
The reason I’m commenting is my issue with Mr. Wolfe’s quote. Sgt. Peppers is one of the best albums of all time, and it started the shit. The Beatles created new genres AND made Charles Manson think there was gonna be a race war. Awesome.
p.s. Pelosi did the first rational thing of her life recently and shot down the MJ bill.
PL: I can’t even comment on Pelosi. She’s too ridiculous to warrant consideration.
As to Wolfe’s quote, I wasn’t offering it for the competition it potentially raised. It’s just a great quote and, truth be told, if we’re talking about live music, the Dead crush the Beatles to dust.
And if you look in the comments, I think I got to Brad Nowell. I assure you, no one appreciates the man’s genius more than I do. I consider them one of the all time great classic bands. Not much of a catalog, but what they did do outshines what most long running bands do over several decades.
Though I was never a Deadhead, I like their tunes; it makes for great chill music. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of Garcia dying, and within 10 minutes, my diehard Deadhead friend was in tears out on the front lawn hammering a “Honk if you miss Jerry” sign into the ground. With regards to Jackson, his death pissed me off, not just because you couldn’t get any other news for over a week, but also because I had to watch these legions of phony people bawling uncontrollably, as if they actually knew the guy personally. I doubt a lot of these people (many of whom I’m sure hadn’t listened to a Jackson album in years) would have been having that kind of breakdown unless a camera was pointed at them. And these celebrities who exclaimed Jackson was their ‘idol’, ‘hero’ or ‘inspiration’ (yet wouldn’t testify as character witnesses when he needed their help) made me puke. This was the biggest ‘remorse bandwagon’ ever. The only solace I took was when I switched over to catch the end of his funeral, for the few minutes when they focused on his casket; I was praying that he would pull an Andy Kaufman stunt, jump out of the casket dressed in his full makeup and outfit from the Thriller video, and start eating the audience members. That would have been the prank of the century.
PL: Certainly would have revived his career. Personally, I think the MJ shit was a bunch of media wind. He’s been quite quickly forgotten, and the focus has rightly shifted back to his music – his real talent – and away from his sordid, sad life. People will buy a bunch of his discs now and that’s a good thing. The guy had some amazing songs, and that’s the best way to recall him. And only way anyone ought to recall him, considering the rest of what he was.
This wasn’t going to be what I wrote about, but I got sidetracked in the comments again. Have to concur that Mutations is brilliant — Beck’s finest, and one of the top 5 albums of the ’90s. You think it’s depressing? Maybe, but not nearly as bad as Sea Change, which was largely cloying except for “The Golden Age,” which has one of my favorite opening lines of all time: “Put your hands on the wheel, let the golden age begin…” Sad, but wry, sarcastic and defiant as well.
PL: True. “Sea Change” is downright maudlin. His best record, in my opinion, is still “Odelay.” Funky shit. A Dust Brothers, right?
I really don’t want to piss on the grave of a beloved and respected artist, but there was always something about that scene that I found ridiculous and faintly insulting. I couldn’t put my finger on it, until you said the following: “Garcia – what he was and what followed him – represented one of the last fading concepts of total personal autonomy…”
Sure, Jerry and the band had as much personal autonomy as a human could ever hope for. But their followers merely left one world (the “straight” one), with its rules, rituals and hierarchies, for another world whose rules and rituals were no less hackneyed than the ones they left behind (and in many ways, less conducive to artistic innovation). The scene had a lot to recommend it. People were genuinely kind to each other. The music was occasionally great. But everyone chose to express their counterculturalism in pretty much the same way. By the end, it felt less like a collective grounded in the music than a vapid marketing exercise — a brand movement, not an idea movement.
I am, of course, talking partially out of my ass, and would happily listen to any counter-arguments.
PL: The “echo” effect is inescapable. People inevitably copy people. But I don’t think the Dead were cynical enough to deserve the word “marketing.” This was a band that nearly went bankrupt buying the famous “Wall of Sound” set-up they used in the 70s (the Cow Palace Dick’s Pick was one of it’s 1st uses, I think) and drove Warner Brothers nuts with expensive, utterly non-radio-friendly records like “Anthem of the Sun” and “Aoxomoxoa” then turned an pissed on the psychedlic scene with “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead,” which accidentally made them famous by sheer power of the amazing writing, playing and production of the records. And it that wasn’t enough, simultaneously they diluted the band’s marketing thrust by demanding Bobby and Jerry get to do solo records. This, of course, led to another oddity in that Garcia’s “Garcia” turned out to be the greatest studio record they ever did, and the song platform for many of their live shows going forward.
The Dead were a mess and they didn’t start out with any plan but to play the music they wanted to play. The movement they morphed into was a later construction and yes, they used it commercially to their advantage. But even at their most crass, the band was uniquely legitimate in everything it did. That it’s followers did what followers of anything will do is sad, but expected. But that wasn’t the band’s ethos. The Dead told no one how to act and dress. They just played music and people did what they did around them. Wasn’t Jerry’s fault his fans let themselves be marketed. Hell, he never even talked to them. Wouldn’t even speak from the stage for the last decade or so.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music…
Tom Wolfe wrote something to the effect that the Dead sounded like a band playing music under a waterfall… I agree.
Considering all this Michael Jackson bullshit, I will only say that if Jackson was a visionary and a pioneer that deserved the hullaballo that he got on his death, we’d better fucking burn down the Haight when Bob Dylan dies… PIZZA! PIZZA!
PL: Where’d you get the first line? Did you just flip that off? That’s awfully, well… profound.
I don’t know who’ll laud Dylan when he’s dead. He’s so inscrutable, contradictory, uneven and “unempowering” worst of all… And though that’s what we’re all like, in this new millenium of self-help, self-analysis and irreducible confusion and umbrage at the fact that we can’t have it all, all the time, if we just will ourselves to positive thought – or follow someone else’s glorious narrative on how to succeed beyond our wildest dreams – well, people might just say good fucking riddance to a voice like Dylan’s. He’s got no ethos! Not only no direction home… No direction at all. What does he stand for?
As if it matters. The music’s good.
And speaking of good music, check this out. I know you’re not a fan of Beatles music, but watch Neil play this, and watch who comes on stage three or four minutes in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6SSR3YY-rc
This is a little off topic, but the mentioning of the Obama show reminded me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask you, PL. What do you think of the current Allman Brothers line up? I’ve seen the post-Dickie Betts ABB live several times, but it’s all I’ve ever had access to since I’m only 20. Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks are both fantastic, and their shows still have the artful highs and lows that make an Allmans concert such an experience, but sometimes when I’m on a long Fillmore kick, I feel like there’s a huge Something missing. I guess I’m not being fair though, comparing the current band to a time when Duane was still alive– my father still shudders at some of the shows he saw in the 80′s.
PL: I saw the group with Dickie and can say only this of Warren: He’s not Dickie. He’s great in Mule, but in my humble opinion, he ruins the Allmans.
The Allmans are supposed to have a sweet sound and Warren makes them way too heavy. He also writes horrid songs and forces the band to cover some awful old blues standards. Which is hard, considering most old blues standards are at least decent. But that’s Warren – he can find a nugget of shit in a vein of gold anyday. He should stick to doing jazzy/heavy shit with Mule. That’s where he shines.
Aldous Huxley, fool!
“And say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, but at least it’s an ethos… I mean nihilists, they don’t believe in ANYTHING…”
PIZZA! PIZZA!
PL: I’m becoming more and more fond of this short exchange:
“Dieter doesn’t care about anything…” Cut to man in leather on raft in pool. “He’s a nihilist.”
I was six years old when Jerry died. And only knew him as Jerry, the man who played beautiful guitar, and who’s music I had already heard live countless times. My parents were those people you speak of, leaving convention, following the circus up until the very end. And for a while, as a child, so was I. I remember my dad cried when Jerry died, and I didn’t really understand that it actually changed life for him. It was fascinating to read this article for several reasons. And I think much of what you say probably is true. But I was most interested because I’d never really thought of the Dead from an outside perspective like this, only as the music that is pretty much mixed in with my DNA. I never thought of Jerry as a symbol, just a genius with incredible talent. Certainly the Dead started out as people just playing the music they wanted to play, and that, to me, is pretty damn awesome.
*whose. Sorry. Couldn’t go without correction