Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Which "all" was this?  It always seemed obvious to me that coke turned 
people into assholes faster than anything else.  Did you Boomers (har har) 
really feel some kind of permission for excess flowing from the excesses 
on the stage?
  

    

>coke turned people into assholes faster than anything else

Well, my experience was that coke turned assholes into louder assholes.
I knew plenty of people who did it and didn't experience much in the way
of radical personality change. They just cycled through their multiple
personalities faster, is all! ;-)

I'm just happy and relieved that I found it, after a very short while,
to be a profoundly boring drug.
  

    

> Which "all" was this?

Pretty much everyone in my Deadhead social circle.  I should have added that
limiting language.


> It always seemed obvious to me that coke turned people into assholes faster
> than anything else.

By the tiem I figured that out, I was pretty deep into it.  Took me a while
to get clear.


> Did you Boomers (har har) really feel some kind of permission for excess
> flowing from the excesses on the stage?

Yeah, I think so.
  

    
the "all" included everyone in my Deadhead social circle as well.  a big
reason why there are a lot of parts of the Closing of Winterland I just
don't remember at all...
  

    

guess it shows that I did my Deadhead Days in the mid through late 80's huh?
Gee, you old people.  Who needs to be all amp'd up on coke, man?  Sheese...

I don't think my junkie friends and I got into stuff *because* Garcia et 
al were into it.  Strangely enough, I can't remember alot of the details 
about why and when and all that for when it all started.  I do remember 
though being absolutely stricken when Brent died.  I was still pretty 
recently rehab'd, but the thought that one of The Boys could *die* from 
drugs... that was a big part of my staying straight. I'm glad there are 
people like Max who are writing about it though.

Speaking of that, I had to put the book down for a night or two.  When I'm
reading one passage/paragraph about 142 times and can't move on, I figure
it's time for some headspace clearing.  I'll finish it tomorrow I figure.  
I want to get to the Mr. Benson line!

and hey, I'm feeling pretty much like an old-school Deadhead now for 
getting that line right off.  
  

    
i wasn't saying that anyone i knew got into this stuff because the band was,
it just didn't surprise is, is all, because i knew about usage by the band
before i ever noticed it in the crowd, or was offered it by sellers in the
parking lot.  made me yearn for the days when i only head "doses" muttered
by roaming vendors...
  

    

I was never offered smack in the parking lots or pre/post show scene.  but
it sure happens nowadays at festivals!  I'd have thought those days were
long gone, but nooooooo.......
  

    
I was.  And have been at Phish shows, as well (not anymore, though, since I
only go in Philly and maybe MSG!).
  

    
Yeah, when I was around, smack wasn't a parking lot drug, and neither
was blow. If you wanted it, you asked around to see who had it. But it
was all there, of course.
  

    

Hi, Max. Welcome, and thanks for the great read. It's a real contribution to
contemporary literature and the ever-expanding world of Deadiana.


I was quite struck by the passage where Jason shares his father's wisdom:

"'Never live in a small world,' my father used to say to us. 'That's where
people get to fearing and hating each other, because the world they live in
is small and doesn't account for the full range of possibility the real
world will always present. People think they're free of prejudice only until
they're faced with something truly unexpected.'"


This is both eternally profound AND critically appropriate to many of the
underlying causes for the increasingly violent world we are all living in
today. The citizens of the American Empire live in a benighted bubble,
certainly. But so do those being indoctrinated in Islamic madrassahs and in
other tightly strictured belief systems. Hatred and bigotry are inextricably
tied to ignorance. Contemporary conflict is the result of these self-
righteous smallnesses. The lesson of the wide-path mind is crucial to our
future survival, I think. A broadness of knowledge, a depth of
understanding, a more avid cross-pollenation of cultures seems to me to be
the only hope for us to make it past the middle of the century.

Ironically, I often found the Dead scene to be a horrifically small world.
For all of its inclusionary overtures and "be who you are" tolerance, at
least on the surface, I was often troubled by the vastness of the ignorance
I came across at shows, swarms of people who, to some degree, were only
capable of appreciating one kind of music (I know this is a generalization,
but one that I witnessed often enough to bring up) to the snide dismissal of
everything else. I say ironic because Jerry Garcia, whose pedestal loomed
over the scene with such tremendous sway, had the widest pair of ears
around and was capable of digging anything that had "claritas."

I remember during the Shakedown Street era, when Jerry was also doing shows
with Reconstruction, all of these Deadheads grumbling about "Disco Dead" and
"all this wah-wah funk shit," when in fact the music was consistently
dazzling.

And somewhat related to the passage above is the marvelous Homeric allusion
closer to the end of the book, when Jason is driving with his mangled hand
and, in the intensity of the moment, remarks at the zombified nothingness of
the lives that he's passing by:

"None of them lived life as the spontaneous odyssey it was meant to be. I
looked at them as they slid slowly backward past me, their bored faces. None
of them allowed danger into their lives. In fact their lives were devoted
almost completely to minimizing danger in one form or another, I could see
that. I thought of Odysseus having himself tied to the mast so he could
listen to the sirens. I felt a kinship with him. There were those who would
plug their ears, and those who couldn't resist the opportunity of hearing
something beautiful, no matter how painful or dangerous it might be."

Yum.

And, again, ironically, the heroic/romantic adventure of Dead Tour was
sometimes a cheat, an empty myth, with any number of heads, to my
obervation, not awake to the reality of existence at all, not facing down
the impulse-energy life in all its richness, the heart and the edges of
mortality (so eloquently being sung to them from the stage) but instead were
deeply anesthetized and hiding from Life.


Loved the book!
  

    
Beautiful post, Mr. Smolin.
  

    
 boy does that last paragrpah ring true to my ears shmo
  

    
Fantastic post, Barry.
  

    

Thanks!
  

    

Was anybody else sometimes bothered by the narrowness of Deadheads, the very
folks you'd think would be least narrow?
  

    

I think the quality of Deadheads varies in relation to when they got on the
bus.  When I heard the GD in 1972, they were playing great songs and taking
deep, deep excursions into the unknown, and althugh there were some set
pieces there were also long, long stretches of no-song-in-particular.  The
band members really seemed to be functioning (as Phil put it in "Anthem to
Beauty") fingers on a hand.  Jerry made eye contact with people in the
audience, often for long stretches (Parish told a story about this in our
recent interview, posted at http://www.gdhour.com/parish.030924.html ).

By the mid-'80s, the band was bigger, older, less adventurous, and much more
ritualized than they had been before.  The musical interactions were less a
matter of mind-melding and mutual musical insinuation then of increasingly
rigid sequences that lurched forward rather than evolving through sweet
melodic intertwining or consciously-developed dissonances.

Also: I felt I was at the gate of a magical, mysterious place whose secrets I
would have to divine by considering the partially-exposed inscriptions on
such songs as "Greatest Story Ever Told," "China Cat Sunflower," "Jack
Straw," etc.  What was "Hell in a Bucket" teaching the new Deadheads?
  

    
That was my experience, too. The Dead at Fillmore West in 1970 was an
absolutely and completely different experience than was the Dead at the
Oakland Coliseum in 1994, as different as, say, Louis Armstrong's Hot
Five recordings are from "Hello, Dolly" -- to me, at least, the
difference was that profound. By the end of the Grateful Dead's long
run, it had gotten to the point for me where Drum Space had become the
only really interesting musical segment of the shows -- everything else
just plodded, though even into the early 1980s I still heard some
shows that as a whole were musically very adventurous and fascinating. 

The "Dark Star" on Live/Dead is still one of the most amazing records
ever made by a rock and roll band, and the segue following it, "St.
Stephen" -> "The Eleven" -> "Lovelight," is so frenetic with energy
that it's as if the band is rushing from corner to corner searching for
the real raw blues. I don't think even Little Richard made a livelier
record than that "Lovelight." 

It has occurred to me that perhaps the Dead in the 1967-74 period
burned so hot with so much energy they burned themselves out by the end
of those days, like a high-performance auto driven very hard for the
first 100,000 miles, then loses its zip and gives a nice but
undangerous ride for the last 100,000.  

And to respond to Barry's question posted in #65: Yes, absolutely.
Indeed, the amazing conformity of so many of these supposed
non-conformists struck me as supremely ironic and quite anti-Dead,
given the huge range of interests and tastes of the band members. 

I was always into the band for the music, never for the drugs or, I
guess you could call it, "the experience." Jerry et al. were such fine
musicians that they seemed to me to have earned the respect of my full
attention. I mean, I would never, ever have gone to a Duke Ellington
concert and gotten drunk. 
  

    
Wow, lots of great stuff posted!

Thanks for that big, astute set of thoughts, Barry. I love that you
brought up the scene where he listens to Steely Dan in the car, which
was an important one for me. The problem for Jason is the same as the
one in "Home at Last", having tied himself to the mast he, unlike
Odysseus, has no crew to untie him when the sirens stop singing. Or
something like that. 

I remember feeling some of the same things you guys are talking about,
even in the 80s. Of course there were plenty of heads who were
musically blinkered, but so many more who were not. ALL of my old tour
friends are huge, eclectic music lovers of different sorts. Even in the
80s, I think, for many of us the Dead fostered a love of
improvisational and inspired music in general. I found my appreciation
for jazz grew as a result of listening to the Dead. 

I also agree that the 80s-90s Dead was a far more rote affair than the
recordings I've heard from earlier (my first show was in '81, aged
13)--you had to really wait for the electric moments, but they were
still there every so often.
  

    

> you had to really wait for the electric moments, but they were still there
> every so often.

Yes.
  

    

I'm a little suprised to hear some of this.  The shows
I went to in the 70's had a psychedelicized yet almost
wholesome vibe to them.  Even though I did not go out
of my way to identify with the scene after that the
tapes I continued to hear, sounded like the Dead
were continuing to deliver something along the lines
of what Gram Parson's called Cosmic American Music.

Didn't the Dead shows continue to be a combination of
'Space', C&W rock, and a handful of standards from
a variety of the U.S. R&R/R&B canons?
  

    
You're right, Darrell. I think this stuff may be coming off too harsh.
There were a lot of great shows in the 80s, and I'm sure in the 90s,
though I wasn't at them and haven't heard them. But one thing I meant
by "rote" was that the setlists had a certain level of predictability
they previously hadn't--not just what songs might be played, but
exactly where in the order they would be. I guess this also made the
little and big surprises they still did deliver that much more sweet,
though (that's me looking on the bright side). I did always like the
idea that there were, generally, first set tunes and second set tunes.
I liked that the first set was rockin' and fun, with maybe a nod toward
the spacey here and there, and the second set was where "anything"
could happen. I include the quotation marks around 'anything'
purposely, since I think its definition as far as the Dead's music went
did very gradually become narrower over the years--of course with the
occasional random spontaneous expansion. 

This narrowing was not ALL bad. It might have focused them and allowed
some of the leaps they took in technique and tighness (though
tightness was intermittent). In my opinion, the Dead at their best were
always one of the great live bands on the planet--not just at their
best era-wise, but in each of their eras. I still think when they're on
they're a kick-ass band, with plenty for the inquisitive musical mind
and heart to latch onto.
  

    
One interesting thing about the Dead musically, I think, is that in
the later years they learned to play blues really well. The versions of
"Little Red Rooster" from the '80s and '90s are much more interesting
than earlier versions, I think. 
  

    
I think they did okay w/ the blues in the Pigpen years, too.  Bob Weir
revived a lot of that repertoire in the '80s, with mixed results.
  

    
I agree with most of what has been said here, with the additional 
suggestion that, if you want to hear the Later Dead playing as 
adventurously as the Early Dead, check out what happened during the fall 
of '89 and here and there for a couple of years afterwards, when the 
ballsy outrider spirit had a brief renaissance.

Two reference points:

The "Dark Star" from Miami 10/26/89.  The singing is from hungah, but the
little intro jam is one of the prettiest things they ever played, and the
lengthy jam that follows the first verse stands in my mind as one of the
high points of 20th century music, up there with anything Miles or Ornette
did for sheer weirdness and fierce beauty.  It's 23rd century music.

The jamming throughout the second half of the second set on 6/17/91 at the
Meadowlands (I *think* this is the right show -- it's the set that begins
with a thunderous MIDI-heavy "Saint of Circumstance").  They're 
interweaving themes from "Uncle John's Band," "Dark Star" and "The Other 
One" with seamless fluidity -- sometimes playing two themes at once!  I 
think of the music in this set as the last Terrifyingly Magnificent GD 
music.
  

    
Thanks for the references, Steve.

As an outsider to The Scene, I'd appreciate a small handful of other such
sonic signposts that might help orient me.