Grateful Dead

A Long, Strange Trip: How a New 14-DVD Box Set Turned Me On to The Dead. by James Parker

It’s on Wednesday that I feel, for the first time and with a perverse sense of relief, the great sadness of Jerry Garcia. The disc is called Dead Ahead, and it features an October 1980 show at Radio City Music Hall. Garcia is gray-faced, with gray in his beard, and the lilting, tilting almost-reggae of “Fire on the Mountain” (lyrics by the Dead laureate Robert Hunter) becomes—rather magnificently—not just a study in but an enactment of complete artistic burnout/befrazzlement. You’re playin’ cold music on the barroom floor / Drowned in your laughter and dead to the core … Garcia’s voice is plaintive and pure, his guitar-playing still almost obsessively pretty, but this must be the undertow, the downside, the shadow of the Dead. Improvisation has its hazards, in life as in art. And having cultivated over 15 years a unique state of exposure to the music, and to everything that goes with the music (“The existential reality,” he said once, “is note to note”), Garcia is paying the price: Almost ablaze still you don’t feel the heat / It takes all you got just to stay on the beat … Intolerably sad, yes, but it makes me feel better about the Dead and their people. I knew there had to be a low in there somewhere. Drug-tingles and swoopy dancing will only get you so far. To make the big-time connection, the one that lasts, you must confess to brokenness.