111493 Jerry Garcia Band, Syracuse, NY

On November 14th, 1993 I saw my second and final concert by the Jerry Garcia Band.  Tragically this sort of magic ended when Jerome John Garcia left our living planet on August 9th, 1995 and though I would be fortunate enough to have three more dates with Jerry in my future courtesy of the Grateful Dead’s 1995 summer tour, a friend of mine who thinks he’s usually right about such things once told me that a Jerry show was worth three Dead shows and I’m inclined to not disagree.  

And so I continually grieve that there are no more Jerry shows and that every incarnation of The Dead that comes along will forever have to involve some sort of suspension of disbelief.  And though this saddens me I can always be gladdened by remembering the experiences I had at the shows I did see.

This one was in Syracuse; I drove down with some of my best Ottawa friends in a rental car.  I owned my van at this point so I have no idea why we would have been in a rental, but I’m sure not travelling in my hippie-dippied Toyota minivan helped us slide through the border with relative ease.  

The lot was a feast.  I was fairly new to the jam scene and Shakedown Street was still a novelty.  I wandered the labyrinth of pop-up stands amid stand-out weirdness with my starved senses soaking up the whole wacky travelling circus.  The smells of grilled cheese, crusty-bread pizzas and strawberry kush mixed with the taste of goo-balls and dollar beers under the glow of black lights and tie-dyed everything, my fingers ran over psychedelic felt-marker posters and feathered boas while my skin jittered with excited anticipation.  There were hippies full of smiles and handshakes, lot rats with shifty eyes, clowns and jesters selling all manners of weird things, while hissing snake charmers lurked between parked cars trying to hide their big, colourful balloons.

I had a dream where I saw a line of wooden doors stretching right and left to infinity.  They all swung open at once and through them I saw The Meaning Of Life revealed to me plain as day, and it made me laugh.  It made me laugh so hard I couldn’t do anything else.  I couldn’t talk; I couldn’t breath…and I knew this condition wouldn’t change as long as I knew what I knew.  With The Meaning Of Life in all its futility laid bare before me I knew that I would never stop laughing, could never stop laughing, and that meant trouble. 

In my dream – so vivid and real – I realized that I had reached the end of sanity.  To know the truth, the real and ultimate truth: This is why the Dalia Lama is forever quietly giggling to himself.  This is why raving lunatics in rubber rooms drool and snicker so much they are unable to form rudimentary sentences, and even if they could, why bother?  These people must have somehow managed to dream what I now dreamt.  If so, I was at a cosmic crossroads and I had a serious choice to make, and fast.

In this dream I metaphorically swallowed the blue pill, Matrix-style, and re-entered the blissful ignorance of illusion.  I struggled to force all of the doors closed again, and as they swung shut in unison I successfully blocked The Meaning Of Life out of my memory.  In doing so I was able to rejoin my friends back in the reality that has been feigned around me, awakened in a Syracuse parking lot ready, willing and able to enjoy a great, great concert at the hands of the very talented and not immortal Jerry Garcia.

And It Stoned Me, Run For The Roses, The Maker, Deal, Stop That Train, Let It Rock; the setlist could stand as a description of my pre-show shenanigans.  Back in those days it was unthinkable to book a hotel room so it’s pretty likely that I instead fulfilled Jerry’s concert-closing prophetic double-shot (The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Midnight Moonlight) by driving us all back home to Ottawa after the show (under the midnight moonlight, no doubt).  Further proof of Jerry’s magic.

sigh

I can’t tell you how I wish I had more stories to tell about seeing the great Jerry Garcia.  He’s probably giggling somewhere behind that wall of doors right now. Perhaps I’ll see him again someday but I won’t hold my breath, despite the fact that holding my breath would probably speed things up considerably.  

But you know, if I was weak enough to choose the blue pill I might as well just try to enjoy this illusion as long as I can. 

(It may or may not be irrelevant, but it bears reporting that my friend had a dream of his own just as I was waking from my reverie, and in his dream my head had split open and emitted a cloud of butterflies.  So there’s that.)