Over the course of my life, I have endured the death, pain and passing of many of my musical heroes, John Lennon, shot. David Bowie, Cancer. Prince, overdose…. always a painful reminder of our fragility and mortality. But for me the loss of Jerry Garcia in particular, still weighs heavily.
Music is and always has been an intense emotional experience for me. I am among the number of people who experience musical Frisson, a subject of study among neuroscientists and others in which some people are found to experience “chills” or indeed euphoric feelings when hearing certain music. The band, The Grateful Dead is and was an exemplary source of my euphoric experience. The famous concert promoter Bob Graham of the Grateful Dead stated “They aren’t the best at what they do, they are the only ones that do what they do” a very apt appraisal. My earliest memory of the Grateful Dead was in Springfield where I lived and went to high school, I remember after school taking the public bus near a square downtown, all over there were tents erected and a multitude of “wierdos”, the scent of burnt sage, falafel, and patchouli, long hair scruffy vagrant types decorated the quad near the stop. A mini-Woodstock in my hometown. As we boarded our bus home, A friend replied to a snide comment from another friend regarding their appearance, that “they may look strange but (Deadheads) are the sweetest people you will ever meet”. She said it with such authority and conviction and years later I would realize she spoke the truth.
Sometime in the mid-eighties I became a fan of their track “Touch of Grey” with its cool video on MTV. I later learned that “true” Deadheads derided them as “touchheads” but by that time I was deep into bootleg collecting…a local radio program would air full shows that I would hang poised at my stereo fingers splayed over the play/record buttons to capture some bit of magic on cassette, a mining for gold. At one time I boasted a collection of over 50 shows… My true love for The Grateful Dead came to me through a roommate in culinary school. I caught the “bug” when I heard the bootleg of their legendary live performance at Barton Hall on the campus of Cornell University on May 8th, 1977. The specific date is of importance because listening to the Dead and their penchant for long improvisational jams made it incumbent upon the listener to endure some pretty harsh stuff, but then the stars would align, and the souls of the band would occur. Brilliant, Cathartic, Euphoric…something akin to ‘catching the spirit”. Sometimes a fellow Deadhead would exclaim “Jerry is on!” when, on those rare occasions, his playing elevated to an almost spiritual crescendo, in the stratosphere of sound. That performance is lightning in a bottle, a capture of a specific time where sound in space in time align to create a profoundly impactful performance of art in which the members of the band spoke their truth at 100 Decibels.
I lived for a stint in San Francisco the land of their birth with the legendary neighborhood of Haight Ashbury, the epicenter of the band’s emulsion with the times, the social climate, lots of drugs and free love. I recall gazing at the home where they had spent time, fantasizing at what it must have been like to live in that petri dish of creativity and artistic freedom. While I was not a “true Deadhead, following every show or spinning endlessly at their performances, I saw them live a total of four times, each time an experience to be sure. I was a “Jerry’s Kid’ the appellation given to intense lovers of Jerry Garcia’s solos, at times a plucking, soaring, staccato melodic hymn and others a deep meditation in sonic waves.
Some time passed. In 1992 the news broke about Jerry having been admitted to the hospital. I lamented, a steady countdown began. In 1995 he checked himself into a Rehabilitation Clinic. A low-grade anxiety crept into my mind, but I ignored it, I was busy with life after all.
On the day Aug 9, 1995 I was working in a seasonal restaurant in Cape Cod, my first chef position amid a crisis, all the fixings of a terrible job: predatory sous chef, an owner who exhibited signs that only could be described as evil, difficult staff, a horrible miscalculation as to my kitchen’s ability to execute, undercapitalized and aging equipment…my ego destroyed…the most challenging time of my nascent chef career. And then the hammer fell… Some really bad news to punctuate a really bad year. A lifetime of cheeseburgers, milkshakes constant touring and Heroin at last took their toll and Jerry Garcia died in his sleep from a massive heart attack. It was a loss, for music, for the fans and I did grieve.
The Dead have a song, one of my favorites, entitled “The music never stopped” on that day for me, it did.