So…go figure. Something things amaze. And for good reason…or so I so choose to guess. After DC put out a desert island disc thing on his site…well. It’s always interesting…isn’t it always? The few who chose The Dead…granted a small handful…but in context from across the years of friendship with Dennis it is, indeed interesting! Yeah…it’s a mixed bag growing up being a deadhead…you love ‘em like some weird balm for your world weary soul…and resent them for their mindless following who contributed to an aspect of the demise of descent smart visceral music in the late ‘70’s (in particular, and beyond the beyond). But here I sit across a sea of years and foibles…lost dreams and attained reinforcements…it has not been a “long strange trip” as much as a painful mindful slog on my belly across time. The promise of beauty was washed away by infirmity of purpose. Thrown into the wash during a rainstorm of growing up. Did I ever? No. And whose fault is that? Certainly not Garcia’s. Or the promise of dropped veils that my early teenage trips promised. And they promised a lot, or at the very least gave me a vision of otherness. No. I learned that the questions were far more important than the answers…after all it’s malleable…no?

So I sit old and, yes, freaked out ultimately. I listen to The Dead and the once upon a time promise sits on my knee, crawls up my arm, whispers in my ear and mocks me…not viciously, rather with a bitter sweet smirk…”you could have had it kid!” But I fucking dropped it somewhere. Slowly, bit by bit in some weird perversion of Hansel and Gretel…a Schizophrenic trail across the forest floor of my life. And the bitch is I can’t remember whether it was between that umpteenth line of coke (oh so many years ago) or in a far more pedestrian place …like maybe deep in an accumulated bitterness based upon unacknowledged promise flushed away (again and again and again…but gee the sunset sure is fine)…oh yeah, I always sucked at a good game of cards…our bets laid…my life in the balance…The Loser indeed.

So…yeah…virtual strangers pick the Dead as a component of their Desert Island Disc reality…shocks the fuck out of me! I mean I have had to hide some part of that love away in a prized box that shouldn’t be trotted out into the light of the post punk world that I live in…that gave me an identity no less! No! It’s something that makes me remember myself, shyly and privately…sweetly and sadly. The hippie kid with a reason for living versus the old man who thinks he’s living to die (preferably sooner than later). But it’s Jerry now isn’t it? I mean he’s our man…our template regardless of dope addiction and fucked up death. Including image death…the worst thing for a pop icon to inflict upon their followers…. No? I mean a fat fucked up genius…no…we want beautiful gifted visionaries…proof that they actually saw the beauty and incorporated it enough to become it…that’s the promise after the morning comes…after the induced visions and the resolutions and the tenderness…we can be our own icons in some small fashion. Not fat and fucked up despite the vision and gift of musicality. The genius of the pied piper…The Dead.

So I was just a kid sitting and waiting for the whole thing to go down and it dropped on my head twenty years later…in a desperate fumbling, as if this memory was some girl I didn’t have a clue of how to touch while my hormones said, “move with me kiddo”…a sweet and horrible memory that. Why is that The Dead? Well they were there…the girls…the psychedelic yummyness of a morning after…that girl, the one who shared The Dead and therefore a secret…oh yes, taste. It was about all inclusiveness while at the same time being about exclusiveness…Jerry…like a Jazz god on acid…a sweet understanding gift laid on you with a feather touch. But not Jazz… and that’s an important distinction…no, Jerry was indeed unique. Beyond genre…he and his were their own, something that jumped up from the night illuminated in colored coats of a cut from a very foreign land. Nothing so lovely as that humor dressed in depth.

And yeah, it's about tenderness ultimately. The music is fucking tender. I defy anyone who actually has had a moment that they can’t explain to say otherwise…granted a trip, more often than not, from a shore receded with age at this point (we are, or I am, old after all)...yes, tell me otherwise, please do…and to me, yes, still it resonates like a dream remembered when you were “just a kid”. And that can mean, well, yesterday dependent on your state. A friend told me, “Every year you’ve got to sweep the cobwebs you accumulate away…by virtue of chemistry…no fear…just a recognition”. I am afraid, Jerry. I can’t follow you anymore…I am not stronger that you. Or, really, I am as weak as you. I will end up a dope addict, fat and fucked up. But if I possess your gift for making others feel…I would die too. Is that the end? Is that the lesson? Is that the moral imperative? To be sucked under while others float by on the goodness you generate? Maybe. I sometimes fantasize that therein lies some semblance of truth. But, no, that is dissemblage. Illusion, Maya, the beast of self-gnawing at your foot. I want to be good… I want to be St. Stephen. I want to touch you, and you, and you, and feel something other than how far away I am from reality. But nope, not in this life…or at least not today.

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Shelter
Ashley Hope (2005)