Dead & Co. at The Gorge
Well, I ain’t always right, but I’ve never been wrong
Seldom turns out the way it does in a song
Once in a while, you get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right
I never would have guessed I’d become a Grateful Dead fan, much less enough of one to camp out for three days in Central Washington to see two shows by the band’s latest iteration, 28 years after Jerry Garcia died, when I was just starting my junior year of high school. But as some people would write in yearbooks at the time, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
Two of my brothers came out from Arkansas for the event in early July, at the storied concert venue The Gorge, mostly at my behest and urging; they were psyched but it took a little doing. I’m honestly still surprised I was as hype for it as I was, given that I’d never seen any version of the Dead prior, and only seriously got into them a couple of years ago—much like the late-in-life conversion of their most recent guitarist John Mayer, who also seems to have never thought he’d get into the Dead.
My way in started with The National’s big Day of the Dead comp, a 10-record affair on vinyl that Kim got me for Christmas a number of years ago, and which I’d worn out on Spotify prior to that. My even more precise beginning was with the band Phosphorescent, who contributed a version of the timeless “Standing on the Moon” to the comp, as well as Lucius’s gorgeous “Uncle John’s Band.”
Think this through with me, let me know your mind
Wo-oh, what I want to know is, are you kind?
It’s so simple and elemental; it falls off the edge of trite and comes back around to profound.
So we go, and it’s a two-and-a-half hour ride out over the Cascades into the desert of Central Wash., which starts looking disorientingly like West Texas once you get past the mountains. We wait in an hour-and-a-half line to get in while K9 dogs sniff for guns (there had been a shooting at an EDM festival at The Gorge a few weekends prior) and some half-assed measures are made to look for, or at least inquire about, drugs. We get through, maybe 4pm on Thursday, and pull into our campsite and set up camp and meet our neighbors—and there’s nothing to do for a long time; the first show isn’t until Friday night.
Not many people were there yet, and so we went out into a massive open field, soon to be populated by more cars and trucks and Sprinter vans but as-yet empty, and the sun is setting off in the west, behind the Columbia River valley we can’t see quite fully yet, and we’re throwing this palm-sized yellow gravity disc that takes some effort to learn—you have to kind of sidearm it down low, like you’re sweeping off a table—but when you get the hang of it you can place it so precisely and with such little effort that it feels like a magic trick. We’re in a triangle, throwing this silly piece of rubber, with The Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place” on my Bluetooth speaker, and I’m getting the hang of it and—I can’t help the smile that’s spreading across my face, to be playing like kids with the brothers I grew up with 30, 35, 40 years ago, in a setting that just knocks you sideways with beauty.
The Day of the Dead comp got me started, but that was Grateful Dead training wheels for indie-addled ex-hipsters. What really got me into the Dead qua Dead was Europe ‘72, a couple summers back. I don’t remember what made me start listening, but the two songs that really stood out to me were “Jack Straw” and “He’s Gone.” Despite the simple gorgeousness of “Standing on the Moon” and “Uncle John’s Band” that I already knew, these two tracks hipped me to the band’s scene-setting and storytelling:
Leaving Texas
Fourth day of July
Sun so hot, clouds so low
The eagles filled the sky
And their funkiness and enigmatic-ness, for lack of a better word:
Nine mile skid on a ten mile ride
Hot as a pistol but cool inside
Quoting it now doesn’t even make me entirely recall why “He’s Gone” knocked me out so much at the time, but sometimes a song just hits you right, and those songs hit me right that summer.
At the Gorge, the next day was a blur of knocking around doing not all that much: We made breakfast, we went to Shakedown Street, we got high (the weed didn’t hit me right), we made a “cairn” of music (a thing my brothers came up with where each person balances their song atop the one that came before), we met up with my youngest brother’s friend from school who he hadn’t seen in eight years, and his wife—and when the time was right we all started making our way down the long dusty path to the venue itself, through more lines, and the blazing sun and 95-degree heat overhead… until you break out over the ridge to see the Columbia River Gorge itself, of which the night before had only been an intimation, a shadow on the cave wall, and it’s so beautiful it looks unreal; it’s like you’re inside of a painting. Just distances and scale and angles of light that short-circuit your whole perspective.
The sun’s still high when the band starts playing, and the next three-and-a-half hours are some of the most beautiful, ecstatic, thrilling, boring, weird, and forgettable music I’ve ever heard. Did we hear some “big tunes”? Yes we did. (A soulful “Sugaree,” a soaring “Bird Song.”) Did we hear some songs that I, as a relative Grateful Dead neophyte, didn’t much know or care about? One hundred percent. (“Black Peter,” “Mr. Charlie.”) But most importantly, did we hear some songs that, while I may have heard them before, I hadn’t really heard before? Yes—and that’s the rub. “Estimated Prophet” struck me, Bobby yowling “Cali-FORN-ia” in the second set, not long after the sun went down and the wind near-simultaneously came up; “Black Muddy River” closing out the night, an epic and timeless American folk tune that was written in… 1987. It’s really wild.
When the last bolt of sunshine hits the mountain
And the stars seem to splatter in the sky
When the moon splits the south west horizon
With the scream of an eagle on the fly
Eagles and moons, sunshine and mountains; rivers, light, and darkness. It’s stuff so simple and elemental that it should be trite—but somehow through force of belief, or open-heartedness, or even repetition (and this may be the most important) it takes on layers of meaning that only deepen over time.
And then you get up the next day and you do it all over again. This is really what never made sense to me about the Dead and the people who would follow them on tour. (And here I am reminded of one of the best things I ever overheard on the street in New York, said by a girl talking into her phone as I passed her in a crosswalk: “So I said to him, ‘You’re not on tour! The band is on tour!’”)
But it occurred to me, as we performed the stations of the Grateful Dead cross on Saturday—getting high, visiting Shakedown, listening to music, walking around handing out burning sticks of Nag Champa incense to our neighbors (“dosing the quads,” in my brothers’ parlance), and finally setting out again along the same dusty, winding path to the venue—that the point of a pilgrimage isn’t the destination; it’s the effort it takes to get there.
We got to the venue earlier on Saturday, in an effort to get a better perch on the almost comically steep hill overlooking the venue—and as a result we had to endure even more of the blazing sun than the day prior, standing with our backs to the river before the band came on, flexing our calf muscles to stay upright. When the band finally took the stage, they too seemed sunstruck and lethargic, kicking off a first set that, at least for me, never got much out of first gear.
But notes of something interesting began to show, marked by a tease of The Talking Heads “Take Me to the River” within “Loose Lucy”—something bouncy and afropop or Caribbean, something loose-limbed and joyous; something that fully took off after the sun went down and the band came back for the second set, kicking off with a defiant “Playing in the Band” into “The Wheel” (with a tease of Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” to extend the afropop nod) back into a reprise of “Playing.” Then came a full-throated “St. Stephen” followed by what was, for me, the revelation of the weekend: “The Eleven,” a song I don’t think I’d ever heard before. It’s actually one of the Dead’s oldest songs, a Phil Lesh composition in 11/8 time dating from 1968, featuring largely nonsensical lyrics by Robert Hunter. The song’s middle part features a gibberish-y countdown along the lines of “Partridge in a Pear Tree,” or any number of other children’s rhymes:
Eight-sided whispering hallelujah hatrack
Seven-faced marble eye transitory dream doll
Six proud walkers on jingle-bell rainbow
Five men writing in fingers of gold
That sort of thing. Nonsense, but very fun to say and sing. But the song’s opening lines, which I couldn’t place at the time but have since returned to again and again, are what really struck me:
No more time to tell how
This is the season of what
Now is the time of returning
The way Bob sang it, though, is by running the second and third lines together, singing, “This is the season of ‘what now’?” I imagine that he and the band, as they approached the end of the tour and, as they’ve said, the end of this iteration of the Dead entirely, might have been particularly feeling that “what now?” And I have as well: This past year has been the hardest of my career, having young kids is tough, and I’m 43. So what now?
What now, at least in the song, was Bob getting mad at the quality of his vocals and smacking down his mic, as I’ve since read he does every so often. And John coming to his rescue and helping his elder get his mic stand set back up and back into the song. But during all this, the percussion section, led by bass player Oteil Burbridge, took the opportunity to take the song in a more syncopated direction, opening up into a buoyant jam that had our whole group, myself very much included, dancing with outstretched arms and upraised palms, pilgrims getting shown the light.
After “Drums” and “Space,” and a smoldering “Althea”—the song that originally got Mayer into the Dead—the show ended somewhat abruptly, with a single-song encore of “Another Saturday Night.” (We later learned that, due to curfew issues, we missed out on hearing “Touch of Grey,” one of my brothers’ all-time favorites.) And then goodbye to the neighbors we’d met and befriended during the show—what’s up Fritz, Justin, and BJ!—and back down the path, an hour to camp, shoulder-to-shoulder shuffling with my hand on my brother’s shoulder to stay together.
The next morning, one set of our neighbors were gone before we even got up at 7:30am. The others disappeared when I was taking a shower. And soon the fields began to clear out entirely, as dark clouds loomed from the south, threatening rain. I didn’t feel so hot; the comedown is real. But it’s also part of it. Jerry Garcia was once asked by band lyricist John Perry Barlow why they allowed the Hell’s Angels to hang around their shows, when that group was “committed to darkness.” Garcia replied, “Well, you know, good wouldn’t mean much without evil.” Barlow was taken aback, but left with “an enduring lesson,” according to the SFGate story I read about the exchange: “The integration of the shadow and the light and the complete seamlessness of both is to me so fundamental to my philosophy,” Barlow explained. “The reason we had those Angels around was so that I could learn that.”
For us then it was back over the Cascades in the car, me jittery and worse for the wear at the wheel. But over the coming weeks, as I went back again and again to that run of “Playing in the Band” through “The Eleven,” the latter song especially, I felt lighter and changed, molecularly altered. And though the feeling now has passed, or perhaps receded from view, like the sun going down behind the mountains, it’s out there—on tour, yes, but also other places. I don’t know where. But I’ll keep trying to look at it right.
Punch-Drunk
The shelved number of unfinished notebooks
quite frankly assaults me, accusatory: quitter.
As does diving back into one, like so, like…
a punching bag too dumb to know he’s beaten.
Stay down, man. Averted eyes & shaken heads.
But the sorry dumb drunk used to could
throw a punch, lustily woo, get all worked up
in a lather over whichever girl of the hour,
see meaning-pregnant patterns
in weird light thrown through spring windows.
Now mostly the rain just patters, patternlessly.
The traffic lights clack-clunk colors
unheard at empty October intersections.
Train cars crash into stations
in a manner which does not imply sentience,
to say nothing of madness or exuberance.
Yet the drunk won’t stay down, despite
being shacked-up and cigarette-less
his frowning half-grin firm or tight
recalling the smell of July 4th cordite
an ice-runway goodbye, pale downy inner thighs
Austin ring-road four-door revolutions
an inability on occasion to get it up
cocky as fuck with the right cross to back it up
and all the radioactivity thereunto appertaining.
So back to training.
Long Time No See
But I got a lot of problems with you people! And now, you’re going to hear about them.
What follows are probably the four more mystifying and disheartening paragraphs I’ve ever read, from a story in today’s Times about chain stores coming to Williamsburg — including, and this was especially depressing news to me, probably a Starbucks taking the place of the Bagel Store on Bedford and N. 3rd:
Shari Lind, who maneuvered a baby stroller occupied by her son Sawyer out the doors of Duane Reade, said she was elated by the chain’s presence. “Please, can you bring in Dunkin’ Donuts too,” she said. “I also want a Bank of America.”
A newcomer to Williamsburg from Manhattan, Ms. Lind said she found the neighborhood to be very inconvenient. Many of the chic stores refuse to take credit cards. And, she said, the quaint gourmet coffee shops charge too much. She said she sent an e-mail to Food Emporium imploring the company to open a supermarket in Williamsburg.
“For some reason,” she said of her neighbors, “they don’t want corporate stores. They don’t want convenience.”
Ms. Lind, on maternity leave from her job at Victoria Secret’s headquarters, said she wanted to move back to the Upper West Side.
Just, wow. Wow.
America: Now Dumber Than Ever!
I’ve had this New York Times Opinionator blog post sitting in a tab in my web browser since mid-last week, with the intention of posting it to either Facebook or my blog. It seems now, in light of my last post, about Glenn Beck’s D.C. revival this past weekend, and the stunning ignorance on display at same, even more germane.
[F]ully half of [Republicans] believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
It’s well worth reading the entire post, which tracks just where and how these people have obtained their seriously ill-informed ideas (hint: one of the disseminators has called our Secretary of State a “feminazi”).
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?
But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?
The Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Heard
What follows is a quote from a New York Times story about today’s utterly surreal and, in my opinion, near-blasphemous Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall, on the 47th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I don’t think I could come up with a more off-base interpretation of what Jesus stood for if I tried:
Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Fla., because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ, and he is our savior.” Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with what she called the redistribution of wealth in the form of the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare. “You cannot sit and expect someone to hand out to you,” she said.
Oh really? How’s about this, from 1 John 3:17–18:
If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
Or any of these Bible verses concerning how one should treat the needy.
These people are seriously out of whack.
Well, This Is Rich
Seems to me that I remember many on the right moaning about welfare layabouts defaulting on their mortgages, and asking why we should have to help them? What ever happened to self-determination, and bootstraps, and all that?
Well, turns out it’s not the poor or middle-class who specialize in defaulting on mortages: Rather, it’s the wealthy (or those who aspire to be), according to research compiled for the New York Times by CoreLogic, a real estate analytics firm (also, if you think that everything in the Times is false and made up, and would like to comment thusly, just save it — I don’t want to hear it). Here are a relevant few lines from this story:
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
The question of whether or not god exists is far too weighty for anyone to believe they have figured out any earlier than five minutes before they die.
One thing that heartens me is that I will never want for a good book to read, by myself, at lunch.
What is the true mark of a god-seeker? The ability to hear holy bells in the sound of keys tied to a jogger’s shoelaces.
Republican Hypocrisy, Part the Zillionth
Tell me what’s wrong with the following sentence, from today’s Times:
“But critics were not mollified [by President Obama’s accepting responsibility for mistakes made in handling the BP oil spill crisis], and Republicans kept up their efforts to equate Mr. Obama’s problems in the gulf with President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.”
Got that?
” … and Republicans kept up their efforts to equate Mr. Obama’s problems in the gulf with President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.”
But I thought Bush had done a GOOD job handling Katrina? At least, Republicans did. Here’s a snippet from the results of an ABC News poll, published Sept. 12, 2005:
|
Bush’s Response to Katrina
|
||||
| Approve | Disapprove | |||
| All | 46% | 47% | ||
| Democrats | 17 | 71 | ||
| Independents | 44 | 48 | ||
| Republicans | 74 | 22 | ||
Huh. Seventy-four percent of Republicans approved of Bush’s handling of Katrina. “Republicans kept up their efforts to equate Mr. Obama’s problems in the gulf with President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.”
Doesn’t make sense, does it?
It’s just like Jon Stewart said a few weeks back (thanks, Joe, for alerting me to this on your Facebook page): “It’s like no matter what happens during the Obama administration, there’s the perfect Bush fuck-up for the occasion.”
Here’s a link to the Daily Show video, which is about Republican outrage over, and comparison to Bush’s own failed nomination of Harriet Miers, the nomination of Elena Kagan for Supreme Court justice.
I Bet You Can’t Guess What This Paragraph Is About
“Others, mostly in various forums, have demonized people who speculate in mythics, buying a bunch of mythics they believe will go up and stockpiling them for some time until they sell them off at a profit. The argument is that speculators are artificially increasing demand (and thus prices) and are doing so for selfish reasons. This argument is flawed. First, shortages occur because prices are too low. Speculators move prices to equilibrium more quickly. Second, speculators actually provide liquidity, because they are willing to sell their mythics when many players would prefer to keep them in their decks. Speculators actually help to obviate shortages.”
Springtime — and due to moving
everything you own has been reduced to:
one fork, one knife, one plate, one cup.
When in the kitchen, at the cucina,
squeezing honey onto cornbread,
you — I — realize this, what it once was like
comes back in a rush: waking up un-hungover
(though you should be) in an empty dorm room
in fragrant early May;
Feeling very light and terribly free.
But the boxes stacked
in another room reproach you.
fighting fire with unlit matches 