Don’t Thank Me. Thank Jerry: Part I

Editor’s note: The following is Part I of a three-part series on Jerry Garcia, written by Eric Francis, that was first published in Planet Waves Astrology News on Friday, July 29, 2005. It is now a part of the Planet Waves archives, a feature that is available to subscribers. Part II and III will be published at 6 pm EST on Saturday and Sunday.

I MISS JERRY GARCIA.

The Grateful Dead hold a special place in my life because it was in their presence that I first experienced happiness. I did a lot of fun things in the 22 years before I showed up at a show on July 4, 1986 at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, actually to see Bob Dylan play later in the day.

Before then, I’d had some exciting adventures, started a magazine, played politics and did a few too many drugs. There were some hot, creative girlfriends. I was well on the way to being a writer. Great rock concerts were not exactly something new; I grew up 45 minutes from Madison Square Garden.

And, emotionally, there always seemed to be some weight or sense of burden I could never get out from underneath.

It was in the presence of the Grateful Dead that I had my first experiences of pure, unmitigated joy, the kind you can’t explain. When I started going back to Dead shows soon after, this happened over and over again: the band would come out, there would be this energetic sense of a sudden upward rush, like all the weight of the world was lifting off of everyone all at once, love would flood in, and I would cry through most of the first set.

This did not solve my problems. But it’s what Hakomi therapy calls a missing experience: I was able to feel the existence of a state of being that I had no reason to believe existed before. And that’s a really good start.

My involvement with the Deadhead community has come with many strange synchronicities, fun miracles and in hindsight, incredible turning points. There was a long time when I could account for nearly everyone and everything around me as having some involvement or being some consequence of an association with the Deadhead karma. It was at a show in Pittsburgh that I met a little Leo named Kirsten, who brought me back to a guy named Mikio (I was born on his birthday, we discovered in our first conversation — the fifth such person he knew). That encounter led me straight to New Paltz, where I knew I was home from the first time I passed through town a few weeks later.

Even my work writing about PCBs and dioxins benefited. One of my biggest stories was based in Las Vegas (it involved the Nevada Power Co.), where there were annual shows in the early 1990s. A vendor/friend in New Paltz bought me an airplane ticket to Vegas (at a time when I could have never even considered such a prospect) if I would only work outside the shows, essentially telling young women from every corner of the country how beautiful they looked in silk dresses. Then I saw one of the shows and, from there, spent a week at a plaintiff’s law firm, copying the files of GE, Westinghouse and Monsanto that formed the basis of my reporting.

Fun little miracles like that.

The Grateful Dead had about a dozen official members over the years, all of them awesome talents. But among them, Garcia stands out as the face we know, the voice we remember, and most of all, the creator of those magnificent, intricate, soaring lead guitar performances that are part of why Bob Dylan said outright, “He had no equal.” His presence, his passion and the feeling of his soul reaching, indeed, blazing out to the audience, were like nothing, no one, I have ever imagined, seen or felt; you had to be there to sense that psychic presence that once seemed to me like cool oxygen blowing into the room from another dimension.

For those who did not get to be there, they are in fact the best-documented musical act in history. There are some impeccable recordings easily available, to which I’ll refer you later in this article.

The Onion, in its fabulous book of news parodies called Our Dumb Century, has a small article about the Grateful Dead gearing up in 1965, in the peak of the Haight-Ashbury ethos and the true sweet spot of the Sixties — in the time and space where it all began. I must paraphrase, as the book is in storage. The Dead’s then-West Coast promoter, the late Bill Graham (alias Uncle Bobo), is quoted as saying something like, “We’ve had enough of the boring three-minute rock and roll tune. Everyone get ready, we’re now going to give you one long, outrageous, amorphous 30-year song.”

That’s exactly what they did, rumbling out of the glowing social morass of San Francisco like UFO, carrying that energy with them around the country hundreds of times, vibrating it into theaters and stadiums, and collecting a tribe of three generations of fans, most of whom would have gone to every single show if they could. I went to 35 of them, and I feel like I just had a little taste.

At the same time, they brought back to popular culture the nearly two centuries of the traditional American music (and Irish ballads and much besides) they were steeped in, intermingled with their own compositions that stand out for their poetry and musical excellence. Working in the background of Garcia was the poet Robert Hunter, whose archetypal downtrodden characters, morality tales enacted by legendary villains and Elizabethan turns of phrase carrying metaphysical insights Garcia embodied with his gentle, grainy voice.

For example:

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn
and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

Hunter’s lyrical pen, the writer said, was sparked to motion by Dylan’s 1966 Blonde on Blonde album; it was that record (With “Visions of Johanna” and “Just Like a Woman”) that demonstrated to many who played it to vinyl shreds that rock lyrics could be intelligent.

There’s simply no way to categorize this band, and everyone admits the name “Grateful Dead” is a little off-putting till get used to it, or till you hear the legend of the traveler who comes across the corpse of a man who can’t afford a decent burial. So he pays for the funeral, and some time later, when he’s confronted by thieves, the spirit of the man he’s buried scares them off and saves his life. That term, a grateful dead story, fell out of the Funk and Wagnall’s Dictionary one day when the band had to change its name, realizing there was another Warlocks out there somewhere.

The Dead had their roots in bluegrass (starting as a jug band), were influenced equally by the blues and old American folk and show tunes, adopted many of the conventions of jazz, improvised telepathically, practically invented acid rock, were the masters of electric rock music, composed haunting, Celtic-styled ballads, adapted and wrote western-styled country songs, experimented with world-beat rhythms with two drummers behind them, played spirituals the like of “And We Bid You Goodnight,” and as it worked out, made one of the most awesome contributions ever to American folk music.

The amazing thing is they could take you through this diversity of styles, eras and genres in the space of a 90-minute set without missing a beat, merging song into jam into song, good enough to sell out ten nights in a row at Madison Square Garden, closing up the show with a Chuck Berry tune or Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” like it was the Homecoming Dance.

Rock music is folk music, and in this respect, Garcia’s peers are not just his 60s contemporaries (Santana, Janis Joplin) but also Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, The Carter Family and long-gone greats of American folk I’ve never heard of but should have. Garcia said that John Coltrane showed him how melody could portray an entire inner landscape with every emotion represented. Of every composer-musician whose work I’ve heard, Coltrane’s saxophone pieces come the closest to the spaces that Garcia could reach with his guitar, or perhaps vice-versa.

Many people who are not into the Dead have criticized Deadheads for being a bunch of Sixties nostalgia freaks. I’ve never seen this debunked by anyone better than Steve Silberman, in his article, “A Place of our Own” (included with the So Many Roads boxed set).

“As you became more familiar with the Dead’s music and its evolution, you realized that the mainstream stereotype about the band and its fans — that they were stuck in a tie-dyed time warp, married to a form whose time had come and gone — was the opposite of the truth. The band’s sound pushed relentlessly into the future, shunning past success and building on itself from night to night, tour to tour.”

He continues, “They played as if the entire human heritage of music-making — from goatskin drums turned over fires in the desert, to a lone singer on a street corner with his hat full of coins, to electric guitars employed as lightning rods for unholy fire, to late 20th-century digitally generated thunder — was their playground, their ‘instrument’.”