Lefty, you'll like this: After I read your post, Mrs. F.L. and I got into the car to go somewhere, and we turned on the radio. Wouldn't you know: "Truckin'" was playing, and we immediately heard the most oft-quoted line in Dead history: "What a long strange trip it's been". Not only that, but I was looking at the grid of photos from the NYT project you mentioned, and I clicked on one at random. It was from the Oxford Speedway, Maine shows in July of 1988--the first time I ever saw the G.D. Wow, man. (No, but seriously, you gotta admit that's a little weird). There were probably, oh, 90 thousand people at that show. Pretty overwhelming. I only ever saw 'em one other time, at the Cap Center outside D.C. that same year. I remember meeting the Rainbow People, who kind of freaked me out. One of them was stirring a huge pot of stew or something, and he was using a canoe paddle. (There's an image that'll stick with ya). My friends and I were staying in a tent, and somehow I got stung by some sort of caterpillar while I was tripping. I remember looking down and seeing a huge welt on my arm. (I'm serious--it really happened. It wasn't a hallucination or anything. Really.)...I guess that would qualify as a "bad trip". I think the first time I heard the Dead was when the older of my two sisters was living at home for a while after graduating from college--she had the two-record Long Strange Trip best-of collection, and she would play it from time to time. I must've been a freshman in high school. I remember hearing the line "We can share the women, we can share the wine" and thinking "That doesn't seem right..." but I liked the music anyway. Later on in my high school years a friend made a tape of Live Dead for me and I listened to it quite a bit. I went through an anti-Dead period after getting into other stuff, but I eventually came back around and wound up really liking American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. I have to say, "Box of Rain" is one of my faves. I guess I've always been more of a studio-album guy instead of a bootleg-tape guy (although I do have a copy of the Oxford Speedway show somewhere).
I like this cover a lot (it was on the Masked & Anonymous soundtrack). Some nice guitar work from ol' Jerry. Quite lovely, really.
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When I went to college in Maine, I used to hear from all the heads about how "legendary" those late 80s Oxford Speedway shows were. You'd hear the guys with long greasy hair and overalls (forestry majors) talking about it at the hippie parties. As a result, I always felt like I'd arrived about five years too late. I agree about American Beauty and "Box of Rain." That's my favorite studio album (incidentally the only one I heard front to back on LSD). Thanks for sharing, Frankie. Mr. Poncho?
btw, the bit about your moral hackles going up on the "we can share the women" line absolutely cracked me up.
btw, you can listen to the very show you attended right here.
That's great, because I can't remember a single thing about the show (except for the fact that Little Feat opened, and it was hot).
Ok, man, it's gonna require some serious primal scream repressed memory cortex excavation to get anywhere close this one. It's formative for me, in ways that are almost frightening, sometimes shameful, still mysterious. It's got family, god, sex, sin and redemption, playing with poo, and death all mixed up in it for me. It's gonna take a lot. Let me just say that I started getting into the Dead when I was in 6th grade, about the same time I started getting into Black Sabbath. I saw my first Dead show when I was in 8th grade. We drove hours to Richmond ("Crazy Fingers" opened the second set). My brothers were both Dead heads and all of their friends were. It was a way for me to be tight with them, but it was also a way to see the worlds of freedom and abandon and madness all up close. I ended up basically going to the show by myself -- I lost everybody I was with. And so I was sort of scared, but thrilled. Seeing the devotion and ecstasy was kind of like witnessing a holy roller service or a COGIC baptism. Except not. The next night we went to Greensboro, where my mom had driven up to see the show too -- she figured if 80 percent of her children were basically joining this music-cult, she wanted to see what it was about. She was hip to speaking in tongues and bacchic release. During intermission there was some dude who was so "at one with himself" from whatever psychedelics he'd ingested that he basically started wanking off, right there on the coliseum floor. A small circle of people formed around him of people who more or less just turned their backs to him. ... I've got a lot more.
I had a transformative communion with my first bottle of Perrier after a show at Merriweather Post Pavilion. I've loved fizzy water ever since. There are so many threads to untangle. The Dead were that launching pad that introduced me to so much great music - improvisation, all the Mississipi Shieks, the Woody Guthrie, the old time shit, that they were mining. The guest appearances by Hamsa el Din. The footnotes and reference page were better than the book. (I like it too. I'm like a kid who was raised catholic and then spent like 20 years lapsed, hating the church, and now I've returned, with the fervor of a priest.
I like the idea of the Dead as "launching pad," not only into other music, which it was for me as well, but basically into life as an autonomous adult. It's like you went into this circus machine and tasted all the sweetness and filth of freedom and were offered this sacrament of self-knowledge and then Jerry winked at you during Chinacat-Rider and you were officially indoctrinated in the club of alt-America, the countercultural connective tissue having bonded you to a whole history of thoughts, tastes and ideas (Woody Guthrie, bluegrass, Buddhism, Kerouac, wheatgrass juice, comfortable shoes, etc). I remember standing in the parking lot and looking out over the whole cacophonous big top and thinking, "Amazing that this big machine just rolls around the country forming its own cultural perimeter every day and letting people have this messy American religious experience inside, not excluding side effects like bad trips and foul odors and passive-aggressive hippie sexism and personal meltdowns and delirious self-absorption." And wanking off on the floor of the coliseum. It was a rite of passage but not a sustainable way of life. Still, it's definitely a permanent thread in my personal DNA. In a practical sense, it was how I integrated into life in the northeast after having moved to Maine from Texas. NOBODY listened to the Dead in South Texas. But almost everybody did in Maine. By the time I left the "circus," I was fully bonded.
And then the alt-America became just plain old America America. Now if he'd only legalize pot.
Mr. P, I love the fact that your mom went to a show to see what the fuss was all about. That's just so awesome. On the other hand, I was perturbed by the thought of you being left behind by your brothers...I don't know how much my parents knew, or cared, about the Dead & the "scene", but I remember one time when I had some friends over for dinner--high school, 1986-87?--my dad surprised me by talking about Jerry's diabetic coma. I guess it had been in the news, but I wasn't even really aware of it. I talked to my brother--the Human Memory Bank--and he informed me that we saw the Sunday, July 3rd show at Oggsford Speedway, and that I got excited when they launched into "Tennessee Jed" (foreshadowing?) He said we were an hour and a half late to meet our friends before leaving to go to the show, and one said, "You guys are the Able brothers--Barely and Hardly." I kinda think they achieved what Dylan, the Byrds, Gram Parsons were trying to do in that late '60s-early '70s period, with Workingman's Dead, American Beauty, etc. Somehow it has aged better, oddly enough. (Or maybe I'm just saying that I'm much more likely to still listen to Workingman's Dead than Nashville Skyline or Grievous Angel).
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