The other day my Facebook feed started filling up with Happy Birthday Jerry Garcia posts. And it got me to thinking about his death and whipsaw of the sixties — how it keeps biting back long after the last note rang out over the hills.
I remember going to shows and seeing him down there on the stage, with the music ringing out and the hippies all dancing and thinking, “That’s him. The Great Garcia. In the ample flesh. The bringer of tunes. The living embodiment of the freak era.” Candace Brightman in her book on The Dead — Sweet Chaos — one of the best books about them incidentally — wrote of the Dead as the “Keepers of the Grail,” nurturing and protecting the flame of the true sixties into the Seventies, Eighties and and even beyond. Sort of.
That’s true, to an extent, but Garcia also embodied the other side of that coin, chain smoking, drug addicted absentee father driving his BMW around Golden Gate Park at midnight, high on smack with a briefcase full of Persian Brown next to him. Dead at 53 from an exploded heart trying one last time to get out from under the heaviest addiction of them all. Which is the real version of that golden era? I think the peace and love hippies 60s-era lasted from about June to September, 1966. Four months. Maybe five. The whole thing basically happened on a ranch up in Marin County. Half-naked hippie angels riding horseback through the mountains at dawn. That sort of thing.
No doubt the shock waves from all those minds blown are echoing louder than ever. But for a long long time it has been because the repeater-towers of the media industrial complex keep the gain on high and keep telling people — they got theirs. You gotta get yours too. It’s only fair. You understand, back then American media culture was in its first frenzy, —TV, LPs, Time, Life and Playboy magazine — and they needed something to write and talk about. And man oh man, here comes naked chicks, dope, bikers and long haired freaky people right on cue. Heaven-sent, photogenic and they pissed everybody off.
Madison Avenue spotted it right away and a year later we had the “Summer of Love.” And believe me, when an ad person comes up with a tag like that you can bet it’s the exact opposite. And so it was. And then it was over. But back in the 1980s we still felt the old buzz walking into any one of a hundred places where we went for just another taste, a peek in, a trip on the time machine. You could still see it but you had to squint. If you opened your eyes all the way it was hard to miss the bummers, the criminals, the cops, the utterly wasted, the lost and the perma-fried. Whoopsie. Too much of everything turns out to be way too much. Even Garcia missed that one.
So when I was on line at Barnes and Noble last spring and the “special issue” Grateful Dead commemorative Rolling Stone was there on the impulse rack by the register — with that cool Red, White and Blue skull logo full-page — I picked it up without a thought. It was like $11 and turned out to be just a rehash of the old stale RS photos and blather — filler really — for the tie-died in-the-wool over-the-hill geeks like me looking for one last hit of the old wow. I bought it and regretted it about 30 minutes later. Just like the RS execs knew I would. They’ve been comfortable with their sell-out for decades now... the more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Yadda, yadda, yadda....
But anyways, Happy birthday Jerry. And thanks for the memories. It was a helluva ride…
Guest Blog entry contributed by reviewer "Captain K"...
