a kind memory from heckleboy @ phantasytour.com:
I don't know how ten years have managed to pass since Jerry died. In a way it's almost easier to believe that it has been over seventeen years since I first stood in the same room with him and listened to him make music. Those years chasing the Grateful Dead around seemed like they lasted forever. So many moments.
You're really, really lucky when your first show is at Hampton. On the day your school battles its way into the Final Four. And it's the day before you turn 20. And your friend has a fat sandwich bag full of MDMA. Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go. Except through the wormhole.
That night, when Jerry wished he was a headlight on a northbound train, and that train thundered through the mothership, the hair on the back of my neck stood up straight (I am not exaggerating), and my DNA mutated. I was born again in the Church of the Cosmic Misfit. I don't care how stupid it sounds, even today. Jerry Garcia unburdened me.
Five long months and at least 50 bootleg Maxells later I was back again at the Capital Center. I knew enough to know that Ripple was something rare enough to be treasured, and managed to work my way down onto the floor in front of Jerry. "If I knew the way," he said, and I raised my fist. "I would take you home," he said, and raised his, shooting me a smile.
I felt like a moth who'd just flapped headlong into a bug zapper.
So it went for years. So many roads and so many shows. I took a lot of acid, and a lot of mushrooms, but Deadheads will tell you this: they were sacraments in that context, not party drugs. You remember. We did it to learn things, to reach for and grasp at understandings and ideas and connections that we couldn't even put into words, but that shaped who we were becoming.
My last shows were at Shoreline in 1995. The last itself, well, that was unremarkable except for the fact that it was my last and I sort of sensed that. But the second to last, I was alone in the very front row. I had been puddled, heavily, by a gentleman sitting beside me, and spent most of the show trying to hold my marbles in. For the better part of the second set, Jerry was plainly, obviously smacked out, and you could see the consternation on the faces of every bandmate, particularly Phil, who was dropping bombs in a mostly futile attempt to wake Jerry up.
Then came Stella Blue.
I don't know how he did it. I guess it was predictable; this was his time every show to reach for it. And he looked up as he played the first few arpeggiated notes of that diminished E chord, and the rest of that performance remains burned in my memory:
All the years combine
They melt into a dream
A broken angel sings from a guitar
In the end there's just a song
Comes crying up the night
Thru all the broken dreams
And vanished years
Stella Blue
When all the cards are down
There's nothing left to see
There's just the pavement left
And broken dreams
In the end there's still that song
Comes cryin' like the wind
Down every lonely street
That's ever been
Stella Blue
I've stayed in every blue-light cheap hotel
Can't win for trying
Dust off those rusty strings just one more time
Gonna make them shine
It all rolls into one
And nothing comes for free,
There's nothing you can hold
For very long
And when you hear that song
Come crying like the wind
It seems like all this life
Was just a dream
Stella Blue
Well, that was it. I lost it. And I had to sit down and bury my head in my hands and just let go, right there in the front row of a Dead show. I know he must have seen me. It was fairly obvious. If I were him I would have probably blocked me out of the mental picture as a needless distraction to the job I needed to finish. All too much.
But out he comes for the encore. And starts plucking Liberty. The song gets dissed frequently, but I'm a shameless patriot, and I always loved it. "Sake of my baby, I'd die for love"? That I can get behind. And so I started singing, because I knew every word. And down looks Jerry. And sees me singing. And he starts to kick his feet. And all of a sudden I realize I AM SINGING LIBERTY WITH JERRY GARCIA and our eyes are LOCKED ON EACH OTHER. And I start laughing, and he smiles. "He's going to look away any second," I keep thinking, as I get self-conscious. But he doesn't, and
neither do I, and we sing the entire song together. As he leaves the stage, he waves to me.
As the house lights come up, the guy who puddled me turns to me, lays a hand on my shoulder, understanding the magnitude of what just went down (at least on my tiny universe), and says, "It's gonna be all right, man."
I took my first breath in about six minutes at that point, and said, "Oh, I know."
Ten years? Can't be. It's like he's still here.
I'll never be grateful enough for Jerry's influence and inspiration on my music.
