By Eric Francis

Silvio, I gotta go
find out somethin' only dead men know
-- Dylan and the Dead

I was in Las Vegas, Nevada at my first Grateful Dead show in the western U.S., and, it turned out, at the last one I would ever see. It was a magnificent May afternoon, the music was incredible, the energy was warm and peaceful, and the sea of dancing bodies swirled around me on the stadium floor.

But I was feeling forlorn and lonely. Depressed. I used to get that way a lot, and it didn't really matter where I was. Sometimes being in a happy place made it worse: all those ecstatic people...all those beautiful men and women everywhere...and I was all alone, or so it seemed.

Then, suddenly, I had a revelation. Like someone had turned on a light switch in my mind, it occurred to me that I deserve love, and that if I open myself up to it, it will come to me. Within perhaps one second of having this thought, with timing more precise than if someone had given her a cue, a beautiful Deadhead ran up to me and wrapped her spacious arms around my neck, holding me for a fleeting, endless moment in her embrace, rippling with me in the waves of music.

There is a fascinating karma surrounding the Grateful Dead and the community of Deadheads, and by karma, I mean the law of cause and effect and the intricate interplay of intertwining fates. The name of the band, which was divined from an Oxford English Dictionary which fell open to the phrase, is a kind of folk tale in which a man passes through a town, and learns that a pauper has died and cannot be buried because his debts have not been paid. The traveler spends his last penny paying the man's debts and for his funeral, and continues on his way.

A little while later, his life is threatened by thieves, and out of nowhere, a stranger appears, scares away the thieves and saves the man's life. The stranger turns out to be the ghost of the dead man. That's a story about the law of karma, and that law was a beautiful thing to watch unfold on tour, where it always seemed to be especially visible.

At one of my first shows, I met smiling Deadhead named JJH. One of the most spiritually devoted and joyous people I've ever known, JJH was also a "taper-head," a Deadhead who specializes in the service of taping shows. He had taped many hundreds of them, and, as he put it, "spun them off" for his friends all the time. We were supposed to meet one night at Hot Tuna show in the city, where there was sure to be a predominantly Deadhead crowd - which was kind of like the summer camp winter reunion.

Wandering around the club, I couldn't find him anywhere.

So I broke out my Tarot cards and decided to "look" for him that way, staring down at the pack and pulling out cards one by one while bumbling around the room.

Soon I stumbled into the place where some other tapers were setting up, introduced myself and asked if anyone had seen JJH. I figured, they were tapers, so maybe they'd know him.

"Yeah, I'm JJH," said this guy, who was clearly not my JJH, but who also turned out to be a legendary taper.

"No you're not," I said.

"Yes I am," he said. "But I've been looking for the other JJH for years. Do you know where he is?"

From behind me, a voice said, "I'm right here."

And so he was. As if in a dream, I knew my pre-ordained next line: "JJH, meet JJH." I watched them shake hands, shook my head in disbelief, and felt the great wheel turning.

Then there's the ticket thing.

Everybody has their ticket karma stories. JJH and I had driven all the way to East Troy, Wisconsin one year to see the midsummer Alpine Valley Music Theater shows. We had no tickets, and had driven the 20 hours on pure faith. No big deal. Driving up to the theater, we were backed up in a mile-long, single-lane traffic jam. Suddenly I had this little hunch that some of our tickets were in the car ahead of us. Seeing that no cars had been coming from the opposite direction, I told JJ he should pull up next to it. Extra tickets for the first night's show, sold to us at face value and with a mutual thrill, were there waiting in their hands.

One of the rules of ticket karma is never scalp tickets, on the buying end or the selling end. Dead tickets almost always sold outside shows for their face value or less; of course, there was always the occasional sleazy scalper or two hanging around for those people who didn't t respect the spiritual traditions of the tribe - or the traditions as they were explained by JJH, anyway.

I had always adhered closely to this, giving away a lot of tickets as gifts and never buying or selling a single one for more than its face value.

The Dead's mail order department was always the most reliable way to get tickets -- beautiful, small, sparkling ones, not those ugly computer printouts -- and after a while, you could really get the hang of it. By "hang of it," I mean sending in the mail order stuff filled out correctly (it was rather complex), and getting the postmark on the right day, and also doing the whole ritual with the right mental attitude. It was very reliable.

One day my mail order tickets arrived, and to my shock, I had gotten fifth row floor for Madison Square Garden on a Friday night. On the right side, directly in front of Jerry Garcia. I kept this a well-concealed secret from my then-lover, Ginger, and gave her magic ticket to her the morning of the show in a sealed envelope, asking her not to open it until after work. We would meet at the seats.

Well, she opened the envelope at the right time, and was so excited that she held the ticket in her sweaty hands so she wouldn't lose it, riding the train into the Garden from New Jersey. But incredibly, she lost it...and it became a one-by-four inch slip of paper floating somewhere beneath the feet of the teeming rush-hour crowd of Manhattan's Penn Station.

Ginger is a very faithful person, and she decided to look for it, wandering through the swarm of people. I probably would have given up immediately, but not Ginger. Looking down at the floor, she searched the sprawling train station, and eventually, she came to a staircase.

And there it was, on one of the steps, waiting just for her.

In Albany earlier this summer, I really wanted to see the show -- it had been a few years -- so I out-bid someone by $5, offering $40 for a $35 ticket which the guy stubbornly refused to sell at face-value.

It turned out to be the first counterfeit ticket I had ever held in my hands, which I discovered when I got to the gate and they took it away and promptly routed me back to the street. And then, a "friend of a friend" refused to sell me her extra ticket because I didn't quite have enough cash left after getting ripped off, couldn't get to a cash machine because it was minutes until show time, and they wouldn't wait until after the show for the money.

Something was changing, or something had really changed...

It's true that since the late '80s, the scene had become more than a little stressed out, and eventually the negative energy started to really infiltrate things. The feeling I had leaving Albany was that it had all become so impenetrable that I could no longer even pass though the barrier from the street to the show. Later, I heard that there were some bottle-throwing scenes outside the Albany shows (reportedly druggies vs. cops), and there had been an ugly gate crashing episode and other violent rumblings earlier in the tour.

In response, the band posted a letter on the Internet. It said, "Want to end the touring life of the Grateful Dead? Allow bottle-throwing and gate crashers to keep thinking they're cool anarchists instead of the creeps they are. Want to continue it? Listen to the rules and pressure others to do so."

I was stunned to hear this paternalistic, authoritarian attitude coming from the Grateful Dead of all people, the paragons of freedom, of mellowness, of a "live and let live" universe. The band was threatening to quit! Maybe it was time.

Jerry Garcia - Birdsong by Robbi Cohen. Full size image here.

Which brings me to Jerry Garcia. We know from this letter that he and the band felt all the negativity outside the shows, and we also know they were distressed by the growing list of cities that no longer welcomed them.

We also know Garcia was tired, and that his body was stressed out from advanced heroin disease, from too many cigarettes, from too much cream soda, from too many insulin shots, and too much food. We know he survived on the love and the incredible flow of psychic energy he exchanged with the millions of people who respected him, who were inspired by his intently serious but equally exuberant performances, and who, as I do, have so much to thank him for.

Jerry Garcia is gone for now, but the Dead are part of something a lot larger than themselves, and that something still exists. The wheel keeps turning, and the band has survived the deaths of three other musicians.

Having seen how few accidents there are in life, I suspect that Garcia may have felt it was time to check out, time to get off the bus. I don't think he had it in him to just quit. Regardless, he's dead now, which may not mean too much anyway. Remember, the band's skull emblem comes with a flash of lightning across the brain cavity -- the flash of the eternal spirit -- and the skull itself is the ancient symbol of that which survives when the physical body is gone.

So let's bury him with dignity, keep on rolling, and see what happens next.++