Among the Intellectualoids/Jerry's Kids
Carnegie, M. D.
Jerry's Kids by M. D. Carnegie 4 4 'm not Beethoven," Jerry Garcia once said, and he wasn't kidding. The aptly nicknamed Captain Trips was just shaking off a five-day coma, and it has come down...
...The aptly nicknamed Captain Trips was just shaking off a five-day coma, and it has come down as part of his immense legend that the remark meant something like: Losing me wouldn't have been like losing Beethoven, but boy, am I glad I'm still alive...
...Stephen" and at least four- or five-dozen more...
...But even coming close, in the scheme of things, means that you're pretty high up there—and that's where old Captain Trips pretty much liked to be...
...The M. D. Carnegie is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Many a Deadhead was strung out on LSD at the shows just like their idols, some for the hundredth or more time, feeling the intensely interconnected tendrils of the universe looping around their fried-out craniums, and hoping that they'd timed the dose just right, so that when the Dead would start the space, noodle noodle noodle noodle, the acid would kick in full-bore and a 27-foot-high Yahweh would appear out of the speaker tower in a sparkling velvet robe and pull their heads right through the sub-woofers...
...At Serenity...
...He'd checked into Serenity Knolls, a $5,000-a-month "rehabilitation facility," hoping to atone for the bodily harm he'd been committing since the wow-man-heavy sixties, when the first order of each extremely beautiful day was to transform the human consciousness into a psychegroovadelic mind-mush that would make that day still more extremely beautiful...
...None whatsoever...
...Well, maybe not...
...The suburban parents who packed their freshly-scrubbed daughters off for college each fall with new sweaters of every hue visible to the human retina and a tin of Mummy's special oatmeal-raisin-coconut swirlies and a nuclear stockpile of crisp twenties and fifties that Father thought ought to last until Christmas break but in fact had a half-life of just two road-trips and finally ran out the weekend of the Oktoberfest kegger at Phi Gamma Blotto—those folks had no idea about Jerry Garcia...
...Sometimes the seeking of that togetherness became so important that they would just drop out of society altogether and follow the band around from place to place...
...Even in the highly competitive category of Massively Self-Destructive International Rock Gods, Garcia was one of the darkest stars of all...
...In 1990 a girl, tripping her brains out behind the wheel after a show, ran head-on into a pregnant woman and killed her...
...But the kids sure knew...
...Garcia detested the corporate marketing and the empty suits of the music biz, and they liked that, too—how you could just go to the concerts and tape the music for free, because the music, Jerry said, belonged to everybody...
...0 The American Spectator October 1995 57...
...Psilocybin, peyote, weed, uppers, airplane glue, coke, 'shrooms, acid, booze, mescaline, smack, the fumes off a '72 Barracuda with dual exhaust—if God truly sees every thing that we do, even He must have been mightily impressed...
...Definitely bigger than Elvis," gushed a not atypical online elegy, "but maybe not bigger than Jesus...
...Lots of rock bands have maniacal admirers, but the Grateful Dead were a bona fide world religion—with Garcia as its usually very high priest...
...They could tell you the names of the keyboardists in the band that died of overdoses...
...They might not have even had a definite sense what time English 2b met on Thursday mornings...
...As Garcia himself said after the infamous Altamont concert at which the Hell's Angels ran amok: "Bummer...
...They had a foundation that gave away money, for Chrissakes, and anyway everyone agreed it was really all about bringing different people together—even if the everyones agreeing were as distinct as the members of the Cos Cob Junior League...
...In recent years, though, the drugs started to turn the love-fests sour...
...Blues" and "Sugaree" and "Fire on the Mountain" and "St...
...The 53-year-old multi-millionaire kicked the bucket in the middle of August, in the middle of trying to kick just about everything else...
...They knew all the words to "Sugar Magnolia" and "U.S...
...The feds finally realized that the parking lot of a Dead concert was an ideal place to boost arrest statistics, and some unfortunate guys just trying to commune with the beyond found themselves contemplating serious time, if not infinity, from inside the pokey...
...The tone is detached yet reverent, and the vowels flattened out and held a bit longer than natural: "Duude, I caught the B000ulder shoow and they did this eeexcellent spaace, maaan...
...Well, he was grateful then, but now he's dead...
...Initial statements to the press have claimed that the Dead will continue without their beloved Jerry, too, but Garcia is surely not so replaceable—especially in the hearts and souls of the band's faithful following...
...They might be a little sketchy on the capital of Wyoming, or who Dean Rusk was, or whether or not a huarache chucked out the window accelerates at the same rate of speed as a two-by-four...
...Going "on tour," it was called...
...But by God they knew about Jerry, the mythic and mystic Jerry, a hyper-legend even among the hyper-legends...
...He had a heart attack in the middle of the night...
...Knolls, his system surely never knew what hit it...
...And from time to time some reveler would get it in his mind that if he jumped off the cliff he was standing on, he could just kind of soar out over the beautiful blue water below, and all would be bliss...
...ocean breeze, the spring water, the fresh-cut fruit, the quiet—it must have shorted out whatever was left of his inner circuitry...
...F or many people, most of them born before or during the Second World War, the news stories about the national mourning marked the first time they'd ever heard of "this Garcia fellow...
...Garcia claimed that he had no control over the Deadheads, and that was true in the narrowest sense...
...And the drugs...
...They would hitchhike, or pack themselves into vans and campers, and trail the Dead from city to city sometimes for years, supporting themselves if they could by peddling handmade bracelets, T-shirts, earrings, and whatever else they could muster up—all to be near the blissful transcendence they felt from the music and the love and the good vibes and the togetherness and the noodle noodle...
...when the Dead's keyboardists shuffled off their tie-dyed coils, the band always found a replacement and carried on...
...Jeerry was cruuuisin...
...It wasn't just with the reefer that the kids kept stashed away in their oatmeal-raisin-coconut swirlie tins, either...
...Maybe not bigger than Jesus...
...And which of the thousands, or tens of thousands, of bootleg tapes have a good space jam, what they referred to more readily as "space"—that quintessential bit of Deadness in every concert, when the group would abandon all pretense of musical structure and just sort of noodle around for a very long period of time, not going anywhere but that was the point, noodle noodle noodle noodle, no point besides the communication and the good vibes and the love, noodle noodle, and everybody feeling absolutely, totally, majorly righteous...
...But ever since the band gained its first national notoriety—as the musical entertainment for the LSD extravaganzas held by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, so memorably recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—doing the mind-mush was part of their lore and lure, a sacrament that few thought should be scanted...
...Like all strict adherents to a demanding faith, the Deadheads accumulated their own set of rituals, their own specialized and arcane body of knowledge...
...Dope is a part of many parts of American life, for sure—but with the Dead, drugs were almost a requirement to appreciate the experience, even if people liked to deny that this was so...
...56 The American Spectator October 1995 Talking about space is a kind of Deadhead trademark...
...The one that died from the bottle...
...Their acolytes became known as Deadheads...
...Factor in a diet of mostly Cheez Blurts and Yumbos and ChocoMalt Whibblers—Garcia was also diabetic—and the fact that he kept on truckin' into his fifties seems nothing short of a miracle...
...Even though the Dead were grossing more than $70 million per annum by the end of it all, peddling software and bumper stickers and ski equipment and just about anything you could imagine corporate marketers corporately marketing, the widespread belief persisted that the Dead were against all that nasty profiteering...
...The last time "Dark Star" was played in concert...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
