Living in Two Worlds
A couple of years ago I reached an age where I wanted to make some sense of it all – where I was, how I got there, and most importantly, where I was going. I suppose that I am no different than a few billion other souls on the planet; each of us on our own journey and each of us with our own take on the path we’ve chosen or the one that was chosen for us.
There’s nothing particularly unique about the route I’ve travelled, but I did pass through some interesting territory and some interesting times along the way. I also paid attention to the scenery and took some pretty good notes. Looking back, I only wish I had paid more attention to what was going on inside me. Perhaps that’s the point of all this.
A couple of the forces that shaped my path were obvious to me even at the time. One was my 40 year intermittent infatuation with the Grateful Dead; their music, their culture, and all that surrounds it— including, if not especially, the mind altering drugs that were an essential part of the experience. I never went on tour to follow them, and except for brief stretches during my early 20’s I never became a fully, credentialed Deadhead. I was like a frequent visitor to a foreign land. I knew the language, had many friends among the natives (I even knew a woman who rode the actual Bus with Ken Kesey and the others) but I never gave up my citizenship in the “real” world.
The second, and maybe more important influence, was the rarified academic/artistic Petri dish of a town where I came of age. I was raised in Princeton by my theoretical mathematician father and my mother, a 1950’s housewife who I watched through my childhood years gradually become a brilliant and sophisticated artist whose paintings now hang in private collections all over the world and in University buildings and public spaces around town. I grew up in a world populated by brilliant scientific minds and artists, along with their unconventional personalities and sometimes bizarre behavior. Many had an impact on society, a few were famous, but almost all of them had a unique perspective on what constituted the nature of reality.
And then there was the War.
Almost every American generation before us had had a war, only ours was the first one that America lost. And because we lost, the world I entered as an adult was informed not just by the war itself, with all of my age group– depending on where we were situated– trying to win, to survive, to avoid, or simply to end it, but we were also deeply affected by its aftermath and the psychic toll that 50,000 useless deaths took on how we looked at America. In some ways, those deaths took atoll more profound than what the 400,000 casualties two decades earlier did to my parents’ generation. It broke our trust. It drove some of us crazy and it made many more of us cynical and self-absorbed.
I didn’t go to Vietnam and neither did any of my friends, but I was still caught in the crossfire between the generations. While the kids I went to school with marched and protested against the War, my father and many of his mathematical colleagues broke codes for NSA and the Defense Department in a top secret research facility buried in the heart of the University campus. Many considered my father’s work evil and did their best to drive him and the organization he worked for out of town. It confused me and taught me to keep my mouth shut, to hedge my bets, and not to choose sides unless absolutely forced. I was caught in the middle between the two cultures – the one that started the War and the one that ended it, never really being at home in either.
Eventually I left Princeton for Cambridge Massachusetts, and then rode a slow escalator up to a relatively high perch in the Corporate Palace. I lived through the 80’s and 90’s in privilege, peace, and relative comfort, but I had almost no ideals or higher purpose to guide me. About the only thing that gave me a hint of something to believe in, was the magic of a Grateful Dead concert, and the values that the Deadheads still lived by. But then Jerry died and all I could do was to run back to where it all began – to the hills of Berkeley California, where I had lived as a toddler before moving to Princeton for good. Since moving back, the contrast between the two ways of looking at reality has only grown more stark and yet my need to find a way to reconcile the two has grown more acute.
I’m not still not sure how to integrate it all, but least I now know how I got here.
I started listening to Grateful Dead albums in 1973 and bootleg reel-to-reels in 1975, but didn’t “get on the bus” until April 23, 1977, when it pulled into Springfield, Massachusetts, for a brief stop on its cross- country travels.
Forty-one years ago, my roommate Alan and I, filled with anticipation and curiosity, huddled in the cold rain with a crowd outside the Springfield Civic Center waiting for the doors to open.
Alan, a conservative Jewish boy, had grown up in Houston, where hippies were still considered a strange and dangerous band of outlaws. I, on the other hand, was an east coast preppie brought up in a sheltered academic household, enjoying, for the first time, the crazy freedom of being 20 years old with no one to answer to.
Just back from a year off from college where I had spent the past few months ski bumming in Colorado, I was now hanging out back at school, visiting old friends and figuring out what to do next.
Alan and I had DJ’d our first Grateful Dead radio show on the college station the year before, but we had never actually gone to a Dead show. It seemed to us very wrong to continue our broadcasts without having had that experience, and so we had made it a priority to complete that part of our “education”. Alan had found us tickets and with my car still (barely) running after its 2000 mile trip from Colorado we made the two hour drive from Cambridge to finally visit this world that we’d only known through stories from the road and listening to poor quality tape recordings. The drive itself had been stressful enough. I hated to drive, wasn’t very good at it, and to make matters worse we didn’t know exactly where we were going. It was also raining hard.
On the ride we thought very little about the concert itself, but instead focused on the task of getting to Springfield. Anxious and “sensible”, we not only drove stone cold soberly, but had been careful not to bring any weed or beer with us in the car. We arrived early, jittery and wholly unprepared for what was waiting for us.
For one thing, we didn’t know that a Grateful Dead concert begins in the parking lot. Some might say that an entire Tour is one long concert, but more importantly, we didn’t understand that the time/space continuum of the Deadhead world is not defined by the entrance to the venue or the moment that the Band takes the stage. In fact, Alan and I were foreign bodies who had invaded the ecosystem inhabiting the entire area around the Civic Center – a living, breathing system full of individual Deadheads, but with a collective sentience that is very hard to understand and believe in – unless you’ve been part of it.
Like the unobservable Dark Matter and Dark Energy that collectively comprise 95% of the physical Universe, our experience and senses couldn’t comprehend the nature of the environment into which we had injected ourselves, though on some level we certainly felt out of sync with everyone around us.
If I hadn’t seen at least a dozen similar “miracles” in my 40 years of following the Dead, I might consider what happened next to be simply a wild coincidence, but at the exact moment when I started to think about how to find some weed and “straighten” out my head, a somewhat road-weary Deadhead with mud spattered jeans and long unwashed hair approached us and asked “Would you like a tab?”
Alan, a doctor’s son raised to respect both the law and the need to stay safe, immediately refused.
But I hesitated. As I looked into his kind blue eyes, he said “Don’t worry man. It’s clean”. He had answered my unspoken question and was posing one of his own. Could I trust him and was I willing to take a leap of faith?
I accepted his gift.
Soon my mind began to meld with those around me and as the doors opened I became part of the flowing liquid mass of bodies streaming into the hall, settling into pools and eddies that collected in various spots and filled the vessel beginning at the floor near the stage and gradually rising up the sides until the hall was completely full of bodies, minds and a collective energy that was no longer Dark, but instead full of Light and colors, both tie-dyed and un-nameable.
As luck would have it, the concert was “General Admission” and no seats had been assigned. As a general rule Deadheads view seat assignments as an unnecessary relic from the (un)real world though they are happy to use them as an informal guide to what section of the arena they should head to before the show begins. In this case, even that loose constraint did not apply and each member of the audience, like Carlos Castenada’s Yaqi guide, magically and peacefully found their way to their own individual “spot”. For me it was in the surprisingly sparse space just to the left of the sound board in the middle of the floor about 30 yards from the stage.
And then the music began.
As the rest of the band ambled to their instruments my eyes fixated on Jerry Garcia walking slowly to center stage. After a few minutes spent tuning their instruments, there was a charged silence. Jerry stood nearly motionless and then began to slowly and methodically conjure and spew forth musical colors from his bright white guitar.
Like the difference between looking at an old faded photograph of Niagara Falls and feeling the power of the place, the roar of the water and cool primordial mist on your body, the words and notes of Sugaree washed over and through me, taking control of my mind and body, carrying me though impossibly rocky rapids, finally depositing me safely on the bank, miles from where I started; lost but somehow at home and wanting nothing more than to get back in the water to see what was around the next bend in the river.
On and on it went, Jerry’s only slightly gray bushy beard covering all of his face except his smiling eyes, the rest of the band following Jerry and occasionally pushing him to go further and further into the unknown space between the melody and the soul of each song.
I found myself among friends that I hadn’t yet met; “tapers” who, with the Band’s blessing were trying to capture and bottle the magic. One “connected” taper was hooked directly to the Soundboard and served as the head of a surreal snake of 10 or 12 other Deadheads who in turn were recording from the taper in front of them. The music flowed invisibly from the soundboard to the speakers and out into the hall itself while at the same time another output ran though the machines of the self-selected few who had smuggled their equipment in, chosen not to dance or party, but instead performed the holy work of recording as the music travelled instantaneously from tape deck to tape deck leaving a trace of electrons on each before dissipating into the ether. I was a welcome guest in this sacred electronic space, watching, learning and understanding for the first time where the “bootlegs” I had been listening to had come from.
Eventually the show ended, and as we left the Civic Center, it occurred to me, that this was a world I wanted to be a part of, no less real than the one that I had grown up in and one that I had now visited for the first time. I wanted to get on the Bus. The doors were open, and all I needed to do was leave the rest of my life behind, climb the steps and take a seat. The driver knew the road, if not the destination and more importantly to focus on how and not where to go. But I was not ready, I had too much to lose, and in any event I was not alone. I gathered my things, and took a long look around while I waited for Alan to find me.
High as I still was, all the anxiety about finding our way back to Cambridge had disappeared. Maybe I (or the show) had affected Alan as well, because he wasn’t worried either. He had found his own spot as well as some friendly Deadheads who shared their weed. He also knew where I had parked myself so finding each other was (and usually is at shows) surprisingly easy. We made our way back, slowly and with intention.
We had no idea where exactly we were. The roads in suburban Massachusetts are twistyand counterintuitively arranged, full of unexpected “roundabouts” and sudden angular and inexplicable turns. We decided on a simple method; we would head east when we could and every time we saw a sign that said “Boston” we would follow it. We reasoned that if we did that long enough, eventually we would get somewhere that we recognized and could make it home from there. Well before dawn we arrived at Alan’s dorm room and I collapsed on his couch feeling that my world had suddenly become much bigger.