Dead Time

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I have my own deadhead time that kicks in right around Bealtaine. It’s a sense of time steeped in the dark, rich, damp soil that’s as expansive as the mycelial networks that extend for thousands of miles spaciousness. No substances of any synthetic or organic origin are needed to drop into it. It’s a biorhythm that takes over the minute the spring rains come and bring our high desert plain ecosystem to life. For a short time, the entire world around me is the vibrant green that I used to know living in Ohio. Flowers bloom and I am able to ramble on my bike allowing 50 year old dead show recordings to spread my wings as I fly around witnessing the wonders of nature.

I don’t shrink from this dead time. I relish it. I devote time to listening to countless renditions of the first Weather Report Suites from fall of 1973. I can’t think of many songs that so perfectly capture that moment of endless potential when the world emerges again from the barren dearth of a rocky mountain winter. Listening to the beautiful bass tone of Phil Lesh on these records in this season, the truth feels evident that another cycle of rebirth is bubbling to the surface in that black dirt from the seeds left behind from the harvest season:

“Broken ground, open and beckoning to the spring; black dirt live again”

Grateful Dead — Weather Report Suite (Pt. 2 “Let It Grow”)

This truth is a full-body knowing that is sensed directly through touch, smell, taste, and hearing. It’s not some intellectual process that you can read yourself into. One needs to be called to bear witness by returning bird song, by seeing the trees leaf out their canopy, by smelling the sweet Hyacinth blooms, and by touching the sweet silkiness of the season’s first blooms. Yes, it’s our collective calling to heed these messages and plant ourselves in that black dirt to witness again the great ouroboros unfurl itself again after it has eaten its tail.

One might ask: Why do I hold the dead to be so sacred so as to almost take on the quality of being a hymnal? Well, they were the soundtrack to one of the most consequential rebirths. In spring of 2019, I listened to a lot of metal, sure, but I also listened to every dead show in the fabled spring 1977 tour on the day the show originally occurred, a tour many point to as the best period for the dead in their entire history. Reflecting back now, I don’t know if I walk barefoot out of that canyon in Abiquiu, New Mexico a changed person in November 2019 without having logged all that dead time in the spring of 2019. I don’t think I become the animist wizard that I am today without having gone on my own mini-dead tour, seeing Dead & Co, Dark Star Orchestra, and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead in the summer of 2019. In short, I can’t untangle what it means to be who I am today without understanding the role the dead have played in making all this earth worship and magic possible.

Each spring when I drop into this dead time, I also return to those 1977 shows that started it all for me. I make a ritual of it. I drop out of other music listening and just let the dead take over the soundtrack. In a culture that is hellbent on imposing corporate or christian holidays on me to the detriment of labor or earth-based rites, it’s a relief to be able to demarcate my own celebration of Bealtaine. I let those recordings take up as much or as little space as they want in my life. I listen to them intently or let them float in the background. Regardless, I let those shows occupy the space and time that they deserve some 47 years after they were first performed. I let one of the finest contributors to the Great American songbook have it’s say.

Every year brings a show that shines through and has some lesson to offer. This year it was 4-30-1977 in New York City at The Palladium.

This show starts off with a spirited, tight performance of “The Music Never Stopped.” Bob Wier croons:

“No one's noticed but the band's all packed and gone
Was it ever here at all?
But they kept on dancing

…

The music never stopped.”

As the band moved ono their classic song Bertha, it occurred me with the benefit of hindsight the music still hasn’t stopped for me either. No, these classic songs and performances that are almost 50 years old are as still as vibrant a force for change and meaning in my life as they were to me in 2019. I think this band and these shows are the missing link to understanding a lot of how I was able to stare down my own OCD, come to terms with my own broken family, and become the father that I wanted to become. Yes, I want to give credit where credit is due. The Grateful Dead took me by the hand and helped me through some of the most raw death work I have ever had to do and helped me become the dad I am today. I will be forever grateful to this band for that.

It is not lost on me how funny it is that I’m fixated on listening to 50 years old recordings rather than hyping up the Dead & Company shows at the sphere that started this week. Bob Weir is still very much crooning, but I don’t want to get on a plane and stay in Las Vegas. I am content laying in bed, eyes closed, with my head phones on listening to these shows year after year. That’s the introverted hermit in me that doesn’t always want to deal with the pomp and circumstance of all the dead-related rituals of shakedown and the show, especially in a city \where Hunter S. Thompson so clearly identified the heart of darkness at the center of the American experience. Look, I just want to craft my own gnosis with the music. Sometimes that’s best done far away from the site of the ritual with a person sitting in the quiet by themselves, enjoying and finding meaning in the classics. So, no, I won’t be going to the sphere. I will be staying at home and listening to 50 year old Dead shows on the internet archive.

Photo Essay — Fire Hydrant Fashion and Other Misc. Local Color

Thanks for being here, dear reader,

James