Ten years ago today, the less-than-surprising failure of Jerry Garcia's bloated, heroin-addled body put an end to history's longest drum circle/guitar solo, also known as the Grateful Dead. While the band had, in all fairness, released three or four decent studio albums, they also gave rise to the patouli-scented, retch-inducing creature known as the Deadhead. Hackeysack, dreadlock, veggie burrito, smelly, blah, blah, blah. And the jamming. Oh mercy, the endless live jamming that would put Yes and Genesis and ELP to shame!
Personally, this date represents the ten-year anniversary of one of my fondest college memories. Let's take a look back, shall we?
This would have been shortly before the start of my senior year at Berkeley, a school -- a community, in fact -- that had been ravaged by the Grateful Dead phenomenon. There was a 24-hour drum circle in the heart of campus...
literally. Between the actual hippies, the student hippies, and the fraternity/sorority pothead contingent, the dominion of the Dead (and their jammy prodigy Phish, Widespread Panic, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, etc.) ran deep and foul. [Confession time: I even attended a Dead show once at the Oakland Coliseum. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.] In addition to my anti-crunchy prejudices, my taste in music ran (and still runs) more toward the three-minute mark -- four if it's really good, like the Stooges, maybe, or The Smiths -- and I was pretty active in Berkeley's
other big scene: punk (especially of the Gilman Street/Lookout Records strain). Anyway, at that time the death of Jerry Garcia felt to me and my friends like a cause for genuine celebration. So we threw an impromtu party that consisted of drinking, playing dominoes, and listening to gangsta rap and Dead Kennedys and other stuff that included no jamming whatsoever. It was like Punk Bastille Day.
In the long run, as with the death of most tyrants, Jerry's death simply allowed other forms of tree-hugging tyranny to move in and fill the void. For the upwardly mobile, Dave Matthews is the jam king. For the traditionalists, Rat Dog and Mickey Hart's Planet Drum (or whatever the fuck it's called) have kept on keepin' on. Hell, there are even festivals with names like Bonnaroo and Sasquatch. I guess as long as pot and magic mushrooms grow somewhere, some idiot is going to keep "lookin' for a miracle." And, really, none of this comes as any surprise. It's almost depressing how the hippie dream "living on" has
evolved into a model example of modern capitalism.
Still, on that day ten years ago, it was fun and morbid and hilarious-but-not-really to throw a "Jerry's dead" soirée. So thank you for dying, Jerry Garcia, and I hope today you're chilling out on a cloud with an endless supply of really primo heroin. You deserve it.
Now would you please tell Bill Walton to shut the hell up about the Grateful Dead during NBA broadcasts?
