CANDY FLIPPING WITH THE DEAD
I discovered the beauty of music by listening to my father’s Beatles records. Not a bad place to start in the cycle of music education. I’d wrap his enormous, 70’s-style bubble headphones over my skinny skull and listen to those scratched vinyl albums for hours and hours. I also got a steady dose of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix and later on discovered the Ramones and Elvis Costello, then new wave and R.E.M and on and on till I was a devoted music lover of all genres. But one group I never seemed to acquire a taste for no matter how many attempts I made to listen to their music was the Grateful Dead.
This sentiment drew the ire of many of my family members including my uncles, cousins and a small chunk of my close friends. My uncles were HUGE Dead fans, which was evident by the endless posters occupying every square inch of their bedroom walls—skeletons wearing crowns of roses, skeletons with top hats and cigarettes, skeletons with one eye socket and skeletons walking in desert landscapes. It seemed everything they owned was in dedication to the Dead. I could never understand the obsession. Every time I heard Jerry Garcia plinking on his guitar it sounded like the same song. I honestly could not decipher between any song in their catalog, although they seemed to have hundreds of songs because my uncles had countless records with skeletons on them. They also traded live shows on cassette tapes that were meticulously documented… Anaheim, 84 – Frankfurt, 79. The list was endless. One of my college buddies had over 300 live show cassette tapes and I couldn’t imagine when he had the time to listen to them because he was always making tapes and trading them for new ones.
The Dead were notorious for having some of the most successful concert tours in music history. For 20+ years, their concerts were completely sold out from California to Australia, and the crazed hippie kids who were gobbling mind-expanding drugs could always be found following their favorite merry minstrels, searching for a ticket to ride.
My first show experience came at end of June in 1995, just as the dog days of summer were truly about to begin. That summer was a brutally hot one and the nights grew increasingly wild and simmered even hotter than the sun-drenched days. One morning my friend Ian called and said a friend of his had two extra tickets to see The Dead at Giant Stadium in the Meadowlands. A big smile crept across my face. I never really thought much about it, but it was the perfect opportunity to actually see a Grateful Dead show. My uncles and cousins followed them around for years before they ran out of money and gas, kicked booze and drugs, or simply had families. I figured this would be my chance to see what all the fuss was about and perhaps, make me a convert.
The day started around noon on a balmy Saturday. Ian and I loaded my silver Volvo station wagon with a cooler of beer and enough weed and mind-altering treats to last us through a nuclear winter. I was wearing a button down shirt I got at a yard sale that looked as though an oil slick had spilt into a batch of fluffy clouds and accompanied that with a ratty straw hat. Ian wore a pair of bright orange Converse All Stars. I’m sure he wore more than that, but I don’t remember much else in my hazy memory.
We were to rendezvous with some others at a gas station and drive convoy-style to the Meadowlands, where glassy eyed babes would be wandering aimlessly for spare tickets and the meaning of life. My breakfast and the hot weather alone were enough to twist my brain into a tie-dyed puddle when we met our fellow concert-going mates. I couldn’t tell you now who those people were or what they looked like, but they all seemed nice enough. Two other guys hopped in the Volvo with us and Ian took the wheel and I in the passenger seat.
We cruised down the LIE at a good clip while smoking joints and swigging cold orange juice. The cops were out in record force that day as a Grateful Dead show was always cause for alarm for the local and state ‘peace officers.’ You know how savage those hippie bastards can get. Some of them have been know to drive too slowly or show enthusiastic amounts of caring.
Ian channeled his inner pharmacist, taking care of all the necessary drugs, which he dispensed to us with proper timing and care. “We’ll take the Ecstasy now” he said confidently, “and when that kicks in we’ll drop the acid. Should take an hour or so.”
After an hour had passed, the Ecstasy began kicking in nicely. I began to understand the rotation of the Earth as one of our fellow companions strummed his guitar in the back seat. As the Manhattan skyline came into view, Ian started bellowing about Braveheart, which he’d just seen in the theater, and how the flesh was stronger than steel and before I knew it, he was banging the steering wheel with his open handed fist. It seemed to make perfect sense at the time—sort of a spiel about the meaning of life while channeling the philosophy of Conan the Barbarian, but I’ll never be quite sure as I was conjuring philosophies of my own. He ended his tirade with “fuck it, I don’t know” as we glided into Manhattan. We hit the Lincoln tunnel and Ian handed us the acid, which he assured us would rock our world. The club kids called the combo of Ecstasy and acid ‘candy flipping’ and by god I understand why.
Within seconds it seemed we were without a care in the world and rolling into the Meadowlands Stadium parking lot; obtaining a serendipitous spot exactly in front of the main entrance. After a good stretch, I broke from my group and filtered into the swaying camps of VW buses and tents being erected by tie-died teddy bears.
As I wandered, drinking and laughing was ringing through the air and every other person seemed to be plucking at an acoustic guitar. A flower girl approached me and asked me if I’d seen her friends. “I don’t know, why don’t we look for them,” I said. We walked and had some light conversation that streamed in bubbles until they floated away. She spun in the opposite direction and said, “I think they’re this way…” and then she was gone… I continued through the love-fest, grinning ear to ear as the summer sun beat down on my head. I’d given my straw hat to my guitar-strumming fellow car companion who found it quite fetching and truly authentic. I’d simply taken my father’s old straw fedora and ripped the top off it so my hair would stick out. But he looked better in it than I did, so it was his forever. As I wandered back to my Volvo, I saw the lost flower girl that now seemed to have found her friends. I walked up to her and said, “you found your friends, I knew you would.” She squinted at me like I was a thousand miles away—her eyes like two pissholes in the snow. She turned away from me a bit frightened, not knowing who I was. She didn’t remember me, and as far as I could tell didn’t seem to know I existed, even though I had just walked and talked with her not more than five minutes ago.
Some people were full-blown throwbacks to the sixties. Wire-thin Jesus figures with round shades and dirt-black feet. People who looked as though they hadn’t bathed in a decade. Women doing whirling dervishes with naked newborn babies wrapped in slings around their necks; Newcomers who were showing signs of slipping over to the other side—golf shirt clad teens growing beards and wearing necklaces made of hemp and beads; Frat boys and hippies, laughing as one; People looking for tickets; Rose colored glasses and peace pipes puffing; Leather fringed vests and hand drawn t-shirts; Keep on Truckin’ and you have some rolling papers? How ya doin’ and I saw you in Detroit; Rainbow afro and eating an ice cream… Putting it on his head? I got you a tape and Madison Square Garden; You went to that show and it was so cool? Not better then this and Europe 72; Shakedown street and the Mars hotel; Clipping his toe nails and a patio umbrella; Purple tapestry glowing and a smoking grill; I don’t eat meat and you want some chicken? This is him and who are you? I need a ticket! We broke down in Phoenix; What was the cost? I’m broke! I’ve been eating beans for six days straight; Snapping of cans and this is a microbrew; Fractured crystal eyes and India print poncho rug sweater shag.
My trip was just beginning—my face grinning uncontrollably. Everyone was beautiful. Passages of Hendrix floated around my mind like windblown feathers. They made more sense to me now—more than ever before. Listen. There’s Janis Joplin. Now I hear Hendrix again. My favorite, Axis: Bold as Love. Is that Miles Davis? Snippets of the Dead wafted over the crowd of merry pranksters.
I returned to my friends who’d made a campsight of my Volvo. Ian tossed me an orange, which I devoured with child-like enthusiasm. I followed that with a cold beer, which sat in my belly and fermented into my blood. Marijuana was puffed with delight, and soon, we were ready to enter the cold hard interiors of Giants Stadium.
Almost immediately after entering the packed stadium I lost my friends… Or perhaps they lost me, I can’t be sure. I pondered my ticket carefully but the numbers, sections and tiers made even less sense in my condition then they did sober. I gravitated towards the top and planted myself in a high spot above the standing field crowd. I watched as the crowd buzzed and bounced off one another like a mob of day glow ants. I looked over and saw Ian and his orange sneakers dive over the field wall and scramble into the crowd before security could grab him. He disappeared.
The Dead took the stage and began plucking and hitting their instruments. The lovely sound rose up and washed over me like a cozy blanket… suddenly I was enraptured. I understood. By god I understood! Skeletons? Of course. Flowers? Definitely. The desert? What better place? I was thoroughly enjoying the experience. My body took control and I shaked and shimmied about without inhibition. I even danced during ‘space.’ The music got tighter, the feelings got stronger. The band had magically lifted the stadium into the air with the power of music! We were flying through the outer rings of the universe—whipping through the Milky Way and across a thousand galaxies! I was melting like butter on toast. My eyes were as wide as saucers. My pupils were catching the sparkling light of every gleaming stream of luminescence. The stars were shooting into my eyes and into my brain, firing hollow channels through me like hot coals till they exited through my feet. Then the empty channels filled with the music that vibrated through the floor, vibrating up and filling the channels with tingling music until it shot up and out of my head, out through the ends of each strand of hair like rainbow lightning. The people around me swelled with desire. The pulse of the stadium was throbbing, palpitating, flourishing and surviving. Concrete became flesh and flesh concrete. I was contracting and receding. My head rolled back on my neck as my spine turned to jelly. The hairs on my body turned to wings, lifting me off the ground and massaging me. I smiled without thought, I thought without reason, I saw without looking and heard with feeling. My sweat turned to fruit and fed my skin as the people around me held me steady with their breath and auras. The stage was flowing, glowing, flickering, flashing, switching, on and off and left and right, purple, white, green, orange, red, purple, blue, yellow, green, purple. The set became a beast with eyes like a fly and a mind, in my mind. It controlled my desires and caused my body to respond involuntarily with the music, the light, the feeling… the feelings! The band was the beast’s mouth, which spoke through the music. Each member wiggled like teeth and uttered the truth. Electricity was shooting from the amplifiers, through the air, through the currents and into every nervous system. Every twang of a guitar string snapped like a whip, every beat of a drum rang like a thunderclap—bringing us all closer and closer. There was oneness and harmony. The crowd below me swelled like an organ, a beating heart, delivering effervescent blood, bubbling to every extremity creating efflorescence. They gushed and surged forward and back and around and around. They writhed and moaned moving through each other, around each other like satellites bouncing off the stars and planets… the Milky Way! The gods of the universe smiled down upon me. Beams of light whizzed by me like fireflies. I closed my eyes and felt the cool warm air enrapture me, transport me to the answers of all questions. I opened my eyes to see the crowd blending into one, a complete being, a field of flowers blooming, flourishing, exploding like fireworks in unison. The air grew thicker, the feelings stronger. The people, like fingers swayed and swayed, breathing and breathing with desire, feeling and feeling. The whole crowd was holding, clutching in full throttle for a perfect explosion… when suddenly the lights went up.
I looked down and saw the band waving to the crowd as they left the stage. What the Hell?! I was suddenly back on Earth. “What the heck am I doing here?” I thought. My body was tingling all over. I felt like a man whose woman decided to pack up and leave in the middle of a love-making session. As the crowd filtered out, I found myself standing alone, staring at the stage like a kid looked over at Christmas. The stadium was nearly empty except a few buzzards vacuuming the place for stoner castoff material.
“What the hell is going on here?” I thought. “Get back here! I’m not finished up here yet!” For the first time I actually knew what it felt like to be the people who travel around following The Dead. I imagined myself walking up to Jerry Garcia and the band and saying sheepishly, “Hey you guys. You got room for one more person in that van? Hey Phil, can I be a roadie?”
I felt monumentally ripped off. This couldn’t of happened in the sixties right? Didn’t concerts go on for days back then? Didn’t bands play until their fingers bled? Where’s the encore? Is there another band? This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening! I needed to consort with Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey on this one. Surely they’d have something to say about it.
I stumbled slowly towards the exit. I kicked a few things around and sifted through some discarded items. Maybe the answer was under there, but I found nothing of interest and certainly no answers. I entered the stadium corridors where thousands of aimless souls slugged pointlessly about. I stopped and laid my back on top of a giant industrial pipe that shot out at an angle from somewhere inside the concrete wall. I took a bottle of water and dumped it on my chest, which ran down my entire body in vein-like streams. A girl stared at me with a look of horror. I looked down at my chest, my skin melting off my bones and onto the floor. I started to fuse with the metal pipe I’d used for a rest. The girl continued to stare unblinking—her eyes as big as tea saucers. I got up and continued on with the zombie crowd, leaving the girl staring at the pipe, her mind swimming in far away thought.
I squished my way through the industrial piping and steel of the venue and found my friends waiting for me at my Volvo. I was sweating profusely like everyone else on the East Coast. We’d officially been taken over by a heat wave and there was not much to do about it but ride it out. Everyone in the group thought the next best thing to do was hit the road and go to a diner that someone remembered going to once before. I, on the hand, wanted to roll around in dewy grass and make love to the soil with birds of paradise growing from the surface. Everyone was hungry and a plastic coated diner seemed to be the preference. I didn’t have much choice because I seemed quite unable to operate my own vehicle at that point.
At the diner I ordered a shrimp cocktail, which tasted like wet cardboard while the others noshed on bloody hamburgers—truly terrible in my condition. What the hell was going on? Wasn’t everyone on the same wave I was on? I looked out the window, waiting for a sign to lead me away to another adventure. Perhaps the adventures of my hippie generation forefathers were just as disappointing as mine was that night. Did anyone really get satisfaction? Was everyone just trying to find a new thing or a new vibration? Seeking out the next best thing, a new world, a better life, the next wave, a smoother ride, a different feeling, a new sensation, a new religion? Was it possible to have that feeling? Maybe the same things that happened then are happening now. Maybe they’ll happen tomorrow and in the future to come. Perhaps nobody really got what they wanted. Maybe nobody really got that ultimate feeling of pure freedom. Maybe some people got it once, then spent their entire lives searching for it again—only now they tried to get it in the same way they got it last time, and when they went through the motions, they found it had turned to something else. The only way to get to that level was to try something else—something new. And if you could somehow reach it one more time, you knew that to get there again, you’d have to blaze a new trail.
The ride home was quiet. The air rushing through the Volvo windows was the only source of relief from the heat. I stared out the window and watched as it all went rushing by. Trees, cars, houses, street signs… life. We dropped off the people we needed to drop off en route to Ian’s place.
I flopped down on his couch and stared out the sliding glass door. The rippling waves of his pool danced up and down in rhythmical aqua jumps. I was still wired and ultra-conscious. In lieu of our usual marathon chess matches, Ian suggested a swim. We grabbed a few beers and headed outside. The water was warm—warmer than the early morning air. I floated in the deep end and stared up at the sky. The stars were bursting through the darkness, even as the sunrise began to bleed into the night. Ian slipped out of the water, slumped into a lawn chair and crossed over into sleep. I just floated and waited for something else to happen—or tried to figure out the best way to make it happen.
A month later Jerry Garcia was gone. He died from a long series of maladies—bad health, bad diet, bad sleep, drug addiction and the tolls those things take on the body. I can say with confidence that the show I saw that day was one of the best I ever saw. Whether my mental condition played a part in it or not, I was happy to see the Dead and experience what so many people loved about the whole Grateful Dead show mystique. The band Phish had a following as dedicated and as wild as the Dead, but there was only one Grateful Dead and their contribution to the history of music is more monumental. In many ways I still feel like I’m searching for the feeling I had that day. Sometimes I get there and sometimes I’m bogged down by the weight of life that knocks around the common man.
More importantly, I got a taste of the Dead and insight to the talent of Jerry Garcia. A true genius of the guitar and a creative trailblazer that hypnotized generations of music lovers to the point where they dropped what they were doing so they could follow him and his band around the globe, grabbed at musical notes and searching for a feeling that’s hard to capture or explain with words.
This sentiment drew the ire of many of my family members including my uncles, cousins and a small chunk of my close friends. My uncles were HUGE Dead fans, which was evident by the endless posters occupying every square inch of their bedroom walls—skeletons wearing crowns of roses, skeletons with top hats and cigarettes, skeletons with one eye socket and skeletons walking in desert landscapes. It seemed everything they owned was in dedication to the Dead. I could never understand the obsession. Every time I heard Jerry Garcia plinking on his guitar it sounded like the same song. I honestly could not decipher between any song in their catalog, although they seemed to have hundreds of songs because my uncles had countless records with skeletons on them. They also traded live shows on cassette tapes that were meticulously documented… Anaheim, 84 – Frankfurt, 79. The list was endless. One of my college buddies had over 300 live show cassette tapes and I couldn’t imagine when he had the time to listen to them because he was always making tapes and trading them for new ones.
The Dead were notorious for having some of the most successful concert tours in music history. For 20+ years, their concerts were completely sold out from California to Australia, and the crazed hippie kids who were gobbling mind-expanding drugs could always be found following their favorite merry minstrels, searching for a ticket to ride.
My first show experience came at end of June in 1995, just as the dog days of summer were truly about to begin. That summer was a brutally hot one and the nights grew increasingly wild and simmered even hotter than the sun-drenched days. One morning my friend Ian called and said a friend of his had two extra tickets to see The Dead at Giant Stadium in the Meadowlands. A big smile crept across my face. I never really thought much about it, but it was the perfect opportunity to actually see a Grateful Dead show. My uncles and cousins followed them around for years before they ran out of money and gas, kicked booze and drugs, or simply had families. I figured this would be my chance to see what all the fuss was about and perhaps, make me a convert.
The day started around noon on a balmy Saturday. Ian and I loaded my silver Volvo station wagon with a cooler of beer and enough weed and mind-altering treats to last us through a nuclear winter. I was wearing a button down shirt I got at a yard sale that looked as though an oil slick had spilt into a batch of fluffy clouds and accompanied that with a ratty straw hat. Ian wore a pair of bright orange Converse All Stars. I’m sure he wore more than that, but I don’t remember much else in my hazy memory.
We were to rendezvous with some others at a gas station and drive convoy-style to the Meadowlands, where glassy eyed babes would be wandering aimlessly for spare tickets and the meaning of life. My breakfast and the hot weather alone were enough to twist my brain into a tie-dyed puddle when we met our fellow concert-going mates. I couldn’t tell you now who those people were or what they looked like, but they all seemed nice enough. Two other guys hopped in the Volvo with us and Ian took the wheel and I in the passenger seat.
We cruised down the LIE at a good clip while smoking joints and swigging cold orange juice. The cops were out in record force that day as a Grateful Dead show was always cause for alarm for the local and state ‘peace officers.’ You know how savage those hippie bastards can get. Some of them have been know to drive too slowly or show enthusiastic amounts of caring.
Ian channeled his inner pharmacist, taking care of all the necessary drugs, which he dispensed to us with proper timing and care. “We’ll take the Ecstasy now” he said confidently, “and when that kicks in we’ll drop the acid. Should take an hour or so.”
After an hour had passed, the Ecstasy began kicking in nicely. I began to understand the rotation of the Earth as one of our fellow companions strummed his guitar in the back seat. As the Manhattan skyline came into view, Ian started bellowing about Braveheart, which he’d just seen in the theater, and how the flesh was stronger than steel and before I knew it, he was banging the steering wheel with his open handed fist. It seemed to make perfect sense at the time—sort of a spiel about the meaning of life while channeling the philosophy of Conan the Barbarian, but I’ll never be quite sure as I was conjuring philosophies of my own. He ended his tirade with “fuck it, I don’t know” as we glided into Manhattan. We hit the Lincoln tunnel and Ian handed us the acid, which he assured us would rock our world. The club kids called the combo of Ecstasy and acid ‘candy flipping’ and by god I understand why.
Within seconds it seemed we were without a care in the world and rolling into the Meadowlands Stadium parking lot; obtaining a serendipitous spot exactly in front of the main entrance. After a good stretch, I broke from my group and filtered into the swaying camps of VW buses and tents being erected by tie-died teddy bears.
As I wandered, drinking and laughing was ringing through the air and every other person seemed to be plucking at an acoustic guitar. A flower girl approached me and asked me if I’d seen her friends. “I don’t know, why don’t we look for them,” I said. We walked and had some light conversation that streamed in bubbles until they floated away. She spun in the opposite direction and said, “I think they’re this way…” and then she was gone… I continued through the love-fest, grinning ear to ear as the summer sun beat down on my head. I’d given my straw hat to my guitar-strumming fellow car companion who found it quite fetching and truly authentic. I’d simply taken my father’s old straw fedora and ripped the top off it so my hair would stick out. But he looked better in it than I did, so it was his forever. As I wandered back to my Volvo, I saw the lost flower girl that now seemed to have found her friends. I walked up to her and said, “you found your friends, I knew you would.” She squinted at me like I was a thousand miles away—her eyes like two pissholes in the snow. She turned away from me a bit frightened, not knowing who I was. She didn’t remember me, and as far as I could tell didn’t seem to know I existed, even though I had just walked and talked with her not more than five minutes ago.
Some people were full-blown throwbacks to the sixties. Wire-thin Jesus figures with round shades and dirt-black feet. People who looked as though they hadn’t bathed in a decade. Women doing whirling dervishes with naked newborn babies wrapped in slings around their necks; Newcomers who were showing signs of slipping over to the other side—golf shirt clad teens growing beards and wearing necklaces made of hemp and beads; Frat boys and hippies, laughing as one; People looking for tickets; Rose colored glasses and peace pipes puffing; Leather fringed vests and hand drawn t-shirts; Keep on Truckin’ and you have some rolling papers? How ya doin’ and I saw you in Detroit; Rainbow afro and eating an ice cream… Putting it on his head? I got you a tape and Madison Square Garden; You went to that show and it was so cool? Not better then this and Europe 72; Shakedown street and the Mars hotel; Clipping his toe nails and a patio umbrella; Purple tapestry glowing and a smoking grill; I don’t eat meat and you want some chicken? This is him and who are you? I need a ticket! We broke down in Phoenix; What was the cost? I’m broke! I’ve been eating beans for six days straight; Snapping of cans and this is a microbrew; Fractured crystal eyes and India print poncho rug sweater shag.
My trip was just beginning—my face grinning uncontrollably. Everyone was beautiful. Passages of Hendrix floated around my mind like windblown feathers. They made more sense to me now—more than ever before. Listen. There’s Janis Joplin. Now I hear Hendrix again. My favorite, Axis: Bold as Love. Is that Miles Davis? Snippets of the Dead wafted over the crowd of merry pranksters.
I returned to my friends who’d made a campsight of my Volvo. Ian tossed me an orange, which I devoured with child-like enthusiasm. I followed that with a cold beer, which sat in my belly and fermented into my blood. Marijuana was puffed with delight, and soon, we were ready to enter the cold hard interiors of Giants Stadium.
Almost immediately after entering the packed stadium I lost my friends… Or perhaps they lost me, I can’t be sure. I pondered my ticket carefully but the numbers, sections and tiers made even less sense in my condition then they did sober. I gravitated towards the top and planted myself in a high spot above the standing field crowd. I watched as the crowd buzzed and bounced off one another like a mob of day glow ants. I looked over and saw Ian and his orange sneakers dive over the field wall and scramble into the crowd before security could grab him. He disappeared.
The Dead took the stage and began plucking and hitting their instruments. The lovely sound rose up and washed over me like a cozy blanket… suddenly I was enraptured. I understood. By god I understood! Skeletons? Of course. Flowers? Definitely. The desert? What better place? I was thoroughly enjoying the experience. My body took control and I shaked and shimmied about without inhibition. I even danced during ‘space.’ The music got tighter, the feelings got stronger. The band had magically lifted the stadium into the air with the power of music! We were flying through the outer rings of the universe—whipping through the Milky Way and across a thousand galaxies! I was melting like butter on toast. My eyes were as wide as saucers. My pupils were catching the sparkling light of every gleaming stream of luminescence. The stars were shooting into my eyes and into my brain, firing hollow channels through me like hot coals till they exited through my feet. Then the empty channels filled with the music that vibrated through the floor, vibrating up and filling the channels with tingling music until it shot up and out of my head, out through the ends of each strand of hair like rainbow lightning. The people around me swelled with desire. The pulse of the stadium was throbbing, palpitating, flourishing and surviving. Concrete became flesh and flesh concrete. I was contracting and receding. My head rolled back on my neck as my spine turned to jelly. The hairs on my body turned to wings, lifting me off the ground and massaging me. I smiled without thought, I thought without reason, I saw without looking and heard with feeling. My sweat turned to fruit and fed my skin as the people around me held me steady with their breath and auras. The stage was flowing, glowing, flickering, flashing, switching, on and off and left and right, purple, white, green, orange, red, purple, blue, yellow, green, purple. The set became a beast with eyes like a fly and a mind, in my mind. It controlled my desires and caused my body to respond involuntarily with the music, the light, the feeling… the feelings! The band was the beast’s mouth, which spoke through the music. Each member wiggled like teeth and uttered the truth. Electricity was shooting from the amplifiers, through the air, through the currents and into every nervous system. Every twang of a guitar string snapped like a whip, every beat of a drum rang like a thunderclap—bringing us all closer and closer. There was oneness and harmony. The crowd below me swelled like an organ, a beating heart, delivering effervescent blood, bubbling to every extremity creating efflorescence. They gushed and surged forward and back and around and around. They writhed and moaned moving through each other, around each other like satellites bouncing off the stars and planets… the Milky Way! The gods of the universe smiled down upon me. Beams of light whizzed by me like fireflies. I closed my eyes and felt the cool warm air enrapture me, transport me to the answers of all questions. I opened my eyes to see the crowd blending into one, a complete being, a field of flowers blooming, flourishing, exploding like fireworks in unison. The air grew thicker, the feelings stronger. The people, like fingers swayed and swayed, breathing and breathing with desire, feeling and feeling. The whole crowd was holding, clutching in full throttle for a perfect explosion… when suddenly the lights went up.
I looked down and saw the band waving to the crowd as they left the stage. What the Hell?! I was suddenly back on Earth. “What the heck am I doing here?” I thought. My body was tingling all over. I felt like a man whose woman decided to pack up and leave in the middle of a love-making session. As the crowd filtered out, I found myself standing alone, staring at the stage like a kid looked over at Christmas. The stadium was nearly empty except a few buzzards vacuuming the place for stoner castoff material.
“What the hell is going on here?” I thought. “Get back here! I’m not finished up here yet!” For the first time I actually knew what it felt like to be the people who travel around following The Dead. I imagined myself walking up to Jerry Garcia and the band and saying sheepishly, “Hey you guys. You got room for one more person in that van? Hey Phil, can I be a roadie?”
I felt monumentally ripped off. This couldn’t of happened in the sixties right? Didn’t concerts go on for days back then? Didn’t bands play until their fingers bled? Where’s the encore? Is there another band? This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening! I needed to consort with Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey on this one. Surely they’d have something to say about it.
I stumbled slowly towards the exit. I kicked a few things around and sifted through some discarded items. Maybe the answer was under there, but I found nothing of interest and certainly no answers. I entered the stadium corridors where thousands of aimless souls slugged pointlessly about. I stopped and laid my back on top of a giant industrial pipe that shot out at an angle from somewhere inside the concrete wall. I took a bottle of water and dumped it on my chest, which ran down my entire body in vein-like streams. A girl stared at me with a look of horror. I looked down at my chest, my skin melting off my bones and onto the floor. I started to fuse with the metal pipe I’d used for a rest. The girl continued to stare unblinking—her eyes as big as tea saucers. I got up and continued on with the zombie crowd, leaving the girl staring at the pipe, her mind swimming in far away thought.
I squished my way through the industrial piping and steel of the venue and found my friends waiting for me at my Volvo. I was sweating profusely like everyone else on the East Coast. We’d officially been taken over by a heat wave and there was not much to do about it but ride it out. Everyone in the group thought the next best thing to do was hit the road and go to a diner that someone remembered going to once before. I, on the hand, wanted to roll around in dewy grass and make love to the soil with birds of paradise growing from the surface. Everyone was hungry and a plastic coated diner seemed to be the preference. I didn’t have much choice because I seemed quite unable to operate my own vehicle at that point.
At the diner I ordered a shrimp cocktail, which tasted like wet cardboard while the others noshed on bloody hamburgers—truly terrible in my condition. What the hell was going on? Wasn’t everyone on the same wave I was on? I looked out the window, waiting for a sign to lead me away to another adventure. Perhaps the adventures of my hippie generation forefathers were just as disappointing as mine was that night. Did anyone really get satisfaction? Was everyone just trying to find a new thing or a new vibration? Seeking out the next best thing, a new world, a better life, the next wave, a smoother ride, a different feeling, a new sensation, a new religion? Was it possible to have that feeling? Maybe the same things that happened then are happening now. Maybe they’ll happen tomorrow and in the future to come. Perhaps nobody really got what they wanted. Maybe nobody really got that ultimate feeling of pure freedom. Maybe some people got it once, then spent their entire lives searching for it again—only now they tried to get it in the same way they got it last time, and when they went through the motions, they found it had turned to something else. The only way to get to that level was to try something else—something new. And if you could somehow reach it one more time, you knew that to get there again, you’d have to blaze a new trail.
The ride home was quiet. The air rushing through the Volvo windows was the only source of relief from the heat. I stared out the window and watched as it all went rushing by. Trees, cars, houses, street signs… life. We dropped off the people we needed to drop off en route to Ian’s place.
I flopped down on his couch and stared out the sliding glass door. The rippling waves of his pool danced up and down in rhythmical aqua jumps. I was still wired and ultra-conscious. In lieu of our usual marathon chess matches, Ian suggested a swim. We grabbed a few beers and headed outside. The water was warm—warmer than the early morning air. I floated in the deep end and stared up at the sky. The stars were bursting through the darkness, even as the sunrise began to bleed into the night. Ian slipped out of the water, slumped into a lawn chair and crossed over into sleep. I just floated and waited for something else to happen—or tried to figure out the best way to make it happen.
A month later Jerry Garcia was gone. He died from a long series of maladies—bad health, bad diet, bad sleep, drug addiction and the tolls those things take on the body. I can say with confidence that the show I saw that day was one of the best I ever saw. Whether my mental condition played a part in it or not, I was happy to see the Dead and experience what so many people loved about the whole Grateful Dead show mystique. The band Phish had a following as dedicated and as wild as the Dead, but there was only one Grateful Dead and their contribution to the history of music is more monumental. In many ways I still feel like I’m searching for the feeling I had that day. Sometimes I get there and sometimes I’m bogged down by the weight of life that knocks around the common man.
More importantly, I got a taste of the Dead and insight to the talent of Jerry Garcia. A true genius of the guitar and a creative trailblazer that hypnotized generations of music lovers to the point where they dropped what they were doing so they could follow him and his band around the globe, grabbed at musical notes and searching for a feeling that’s hard to capture or explain with words.