Night Beat (61 page)

In the hours after I learned of Garcia’s death, I went online to the WELL, the Bay Area computer conference system that has thrived in no small part due to its large contingent of Deadheads. I wanted to see how the fans were doing, and what they were saying, in the recognition of their loss. For the most part—at least in those first hours that I scanned the messages—what I found were well-meaning, blithe comments, people sending each other “beams” (which are like positive extrasensory wishes) and fantasies of group hugs. They were the sort of sentiments that many people I know would gag at, and I must admit, they proved too maudlin for my own sensibility. Still, one of the things I had to recognize about the Deadheads years ago was that this was a group of people for whom good cheer wasn’t just a shared disposition but also an act of conscious dissent: a protest against the anger and malice that seems to characterize so much of our social and artistic temper these days. The Deadheads may sometimes seem like naïfs, but I’m not convinced their vision of community is such an undesirable thing. After all, there are worse visions around. Consider, for example, the vision of our recent Republican Congress, which would scourge any community of the misfit or helpless.

In any event, for my tastes I saw far too little attention paid—by both the Deadheads and the media—to just how much darkness there was that made its way into Garcia and the Dead’s music, and how strong and interesting that darkness was. For that matter, there was always a good deal more darkness in the whole sixties adventure than many people have been comfortable acknowledging—and I don’t mean simply all the drug casualties, political ruin, and violence of the period. There was also a willingness to explore risky psychic terrain, a realization that your best hopes could also cost you some terrible losses, and I think that those possibilities were realized in the Dead’s music and history as meaningfully as they were anywhere.

In fact, the darkness crept in early in the Dead’s saga. It could be found in the insinuation of the band’s name—which many fans in the early San Francisco scene cited as being too creepy and disturbing as a moniker for a rock group. It could also be found deep down in much of the band’s best music—in the strange layers and swirls that made parts of
Aoxomoxoa
such a vivid and frightening aural portrayal of the psychedelic experience, and in the meditations about death and damage that the band turned into hard-boiled anthems of hope on
Workingman’s Dead.
And of course, there was also all the darkness in the band’s history that ended up bringing so many of its members to their deaths.

Not all darkness is negative. In fact, sometimes wonderful and kind things can come from it, and if there’s one thing that was apparent to everybody about Jerry Garcia, it was that he was a good-humored man with generous instincts. But there was much more to him than that, and it wasn’t always apparent on the surface. In a conversation I had several years ago with Robert Hunter about Garcia, Hunter told me: “Garcia is a cheery and resilient man, but I always felt that under his warmth and friendliness there was a deep well of despair—or at least a recognition that at the heart of the world, there may be more darkness, despair, and absurdity than any sane and compassionate heart could stand.”

In his last interview with
Rolling Stone,
in 1993, Garcia had this to say about his own dark side: “I definitely have a component in my personality which is not exactly self-destructive, but it’s certainly ornery. It’s like . . . ”Try to get healthy’—’Fuck you, man. . . . ’ I don’t know what it comes from. I’ve always clung to it, see, because I felt it’s part of what makes me
me.
Being anarchic, having that anarchist streak, serves me on other levels—artistically, certainly. So I don’t want to eliminate that aspect of my personality. But I see that on some levels it’s working against me.

“They’re gifts, some of these aspects of your personality. They’re helpful and useful and powerful, but they also have this other side. They’re indiscriminate. They don’t make judgments.”

Garcia, of course, made his own choices, and whatever they may have cost him, I would argue that in some ways they were still brave, worthy choices. Maybe they were even essential to the wondrous creations of his life’s work. His achievements, in fact, were enormous. He helped inspire and nurture a community that, in some form or another, survived for thirty years, and that may even outlast his death; he co-wrote a fine collection of songs about America’s myths, pleasures, and troubles; and, as the Grateful Dead’s most familiar and endearing member, he accomplished something that no other rock star has ever accomplished: He attracted an active following that only grew larger in size and devotion with each passing decade, from the 1960s to the 1990s. You would have to look to the careers of people like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis, or Charles Mingus to find the equivalent of Garcia’s musical longevity and growth in the history of American band leaders.

Most important, though, he was a man who remained true to ideals and perceptions that many of the rest of us long ago found easy to discard—and maybe in the end that is a bigger part of our loss at this point than the death of Garcia himself.

My favorite Grateful Dead song of the last decade or so is “Black Muddy River,” written by Garcia and Hunter. It’s a song about living one’s life in spite of all the heartbreak and devastation that life can bring, and in its most affecting verse, Garcia sang: “When it seems like the night will last forever/And there’s nothing left to do but count the years/When the strings of my heart begin to sever/Stones fall from my eyes instead of tears/I will walk alone by the black muddy river/Dream me a dream of my own/I will walk alone by the black muddy river . . . and sing me a song of my own.”

Those were among the last words Garcia sang at the Grateful Dead’s final show, at Chicago’s Soldier Field, in early July. Not bad, as far as farewells go, and not bad, either, for a summing up of a life lived with much grace and heart. It is a good thing, I believe, that we lived in the same time as this man did, and it is not likely that we shall see charms or skills so transcendent, and so sustained, again.

NOT EVERYONE, of course, would agree. As I noted earlier, Jerry Garcia’s death was met with a massive and spontaneous outpouring of grief and praise, but all this respect for a hippie-derived popular hero also rankled a fair amount of social and political critics. In the
Washington Post,
liberal critic Colman McCarthy wrote: “The media’s iconic excesses matched the self-indulgence of Garcia’s brand of hedonism. This was someone who in the 1960s fueled himself on LSD and touted the drug for others. . . . As memories fade, that decade [the 1960s] needs to be linked with people, events, and ideas on higher levels than an unkempt druggie musician. . . . Rock bands and the Woodstock mud holes to which they drew their aimless fans were marginal to the genuine challenges to the culture of that time.” Writing in the August 21 issue of
Newsweek,
columnist George Will shared a similar disdain, from the haughty conservative point of view: “The portion of popular culture that constantly sentimentalizes the Sixties also panders to the arrested development of the Sixties generation which is no longer young but wishes it were and seeks derivative vitality.”

There were other voices of derision from other quarters as well. Several times in the days following Garcia’s death, I received comments—either in conversation or by e-mail—from rock fans who couldn’t fathom the bereavement they were witnessing. “What’s all this about?” one friend wrote me. “It isn’t like Jerry Garcia was John Lennon.” Another said: “Maybe now all these Deadheads will be forced to get a life. God knows it’s way past time.” This last from somebody who, only a year and a half before, had been terribly hurt by the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

These sorts of sentiments were hardly uncommon, and they say much about how we have come to judge the worth and relevance of the people that we call our pop heroes. Because Garcia and the Grateful Dead had not been seen to participate in the ongoing flux of pop-music culture—because they chose to record few albums of newly written material, were not prominent on radio, MTV, or in the mainstream press, and because they elected to play largely for their own partisan following—many rock fans, critics, and casual observers had come to see them as a band whose time and importance had long faded: a “dinosaur” band. In a way, this sort of displacement of yesterday’s rock heroes and values can be a healthy and revivifying thing—as we saw in the punk revolt of the late 1970s—plus it’s simply the inevitable order of pop culture evolution. It is good to remind previous generations and their artists that they hardly hold a franchise on legitimate modes of rebellion or invention, and it is also good for each new era or movement to determine its own heroes, styles, and concerns and not be forced to grow only in the fading light of days gone by.

At the same time, much about the anti-1960s sentiment—particularly when manifest in the pop world—is unfortunate, unthinking, and, at best, plainly hypocritical. For one thing, it plays into the hands of critics like William Bennett, Newt Gingrich, and William F. Buckley (who also wrote a column denouncing Garcia’s influence)—pundits with too much unchallenged voice in today’s media, who are attempting to assert the monolithic view that the progressive risks and experiments of the 1960s have amounted to the undoing of our culture: that the whole period was a shameful mistake that must now be redressed and never allowed to come to pass again. Regardless of the excesses and lapses of that time, we should remember that in the 1960s, many of our best cultural iconoclasts made some brave, smart, outrageous, and wonderful moves that had the effect of spreading a spirit of courage and defiance not just among the youth of one generation, but that also helped serve as an even greater impetus for many of the brave activists of the last decade or more. After all, it was hardly an accident that the soundtrack of choice at Tiananmen Square, in Berlin as the Wall came down, and in the streets of Czechoslovakia as communism fell, was the soundtrack of 1960s American rock & roll.

In particular, the 1960s rock revolutionists—including Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead—expanded the possibilities of what music might sound like, what it might say, and how it might matter in our lives and our society. These are notable and noble victories, and several of the best post-’60s rock-related movements, such as punk, rap, techno, and the many various dance schools, have exploited the promises born in those times, and have thrived greatly from them.

All these considerations aside, though, what made Garcia’s lingering presence so valuable—and what made his death so consequential—was precisely the meaning that he and the Grateful Dead held for a
modern
audience. Indeed, for the Dead’s fans, the band was not simply another popular phenomenon that spoke for any one certain moment, nor merely a band that achieved a temporary place of fame and commodity in the ongoing chronicle of pop music. To the group’s believers, the Dead were something much bigger and more lasting, as well as something virtually unique in postwar musical history: a band that functioned as an ongoing, binding central point in a large-scale alternative music scene that viewed music as a crucial means of expressing a vision of a better, more hopeful and open-minded society.

To tell you the truth, the Dead’s audience was frequently the part of the Dead’s shows that I liked the best. For me, the band’s music had lost much of its best edge and momentum many years before, which isn’t to say they still weren’t a protean or considerable ensemble; certainly I saw passages in various shows that were simply extraordinary. For all their musical imperfections, one sin the Grateful Dead never committed was to perform their own music with too much staidness or reverence. Rather, the Dead always played their best songs as if those compositions were still fair game for transmogrification, and as if running a collective risk—the risk of either fleeting transcendence or comic ruin—was the only way the band’s members could imagine making it through life.

Still, it was the Dead’s following, and its yearning for something that might unify and uplift it, that I became particularly attached to. I saw that crowd (with the band, of course) at speedways and in open fields, in stadiums and arenas, but for some reason, the setting I remember best was at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. It was the early autumn of 1988, and the Dead were playing a nine-night stand at the arena—the biggest series of concerts ever presented in New York’s history up to that time, and as it turned out, also the biggest American pop event (and money-grosser) of 1988. Yet even so, this fact was not acknowledged in what little local press the concerts received—just another sign of the massive disregard that the Grateful Dead suffered from most mainstream media, until the day of Jerry Garcia’s death.

A giant inflatable rubber replica of King Kong, outfitted in a huge tie-dyed T-shirt, loomed above Seventh Avenue. Below it, thousands of young Deadheads—many also wearing tie-dyes—roamed the streets around the Garden, some looking for tickets for the various shows, some looking to buy or sell drugs, shirts, necklaces, and knicknacks. Most of them seemed to be circling the block simply to check one another out. There was nothing surly or competitive or hostile about this congregation. Indeed, it was so nonaggressive that many of the hundreds of policemen who had been assigned to cover the event seemed plain bored by their task. If anything, these kids just seemed to be milling in order to assure one another that they were all part of the same moment, the same conviction.