"Ripple In Still Waters"

Jeremy Sutton

When I finally get to my island, when I see it rise up out of the unfathomable depths and poke above the blue tarp, I'll be eager. I'll have everything I want, if not everything I need. In fact, I won't even be alone. The Grateful Dead are a crowd, one cannot listen to them without a van full of hippies pulling up with grilled cheese sandwiches and living rock and roll (Marsh 1996). There will be angels, gods, clowns, cowboys and people from right around the block. No, you cannot listen to the Grateful Dead and truly be alone. But the band also gives me a hammock of lullabies to fall into when those desert island nights become too much. The Dead bring a box of rain to a parched and lonely throat with more than enough to go around. I want the Dead because I want something like me. I want the comfort of people I can talk to. I do not profess to have any musical talent, to have been through all the worlds that the Dead have, but I do say that I can feel the Dead in ways that only best friends can. The Dead have always been there. I can slip inside their lyrics and sit down like a warm, dim room. I wasn't listening to the Dead when I met my girlfriend, when I graduated high school, when I got accepted to college. But the Dead fill up the nooks and crannies of my existence. They throw away the dark of a sinister evening and provide shade under a harsh tropical sun. As John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." They help me through life and give me eternal hope for love and peace in our time and for the rest of time. That is why, if left with one album, I would take the Grateful Dead. And for the sake of naming an album, how about Europe '72?

A strange mystique surrounds the Dead. Everybody's heard of them, like a whisper in an alley or a greater force that is only spoken of in awe. They rise above music, above even themselves sometimes. They take off, becoming angels. The Dead can lift you up just for sheer beauty (Lichtenstein 1996). Even their songs evoke power and heavenly light: "Estimated Prophet," "Saint of Circumstance," "Dark Star," celestial messengers sent to teach the world of love and fellowship between all peoples. As the Grateful Dead say themselves in "Terrapin Station," summing up eloquently what they are about: ". . . the storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice, his job is to shed light, and not to master" (Robert Hunter, 1977, track 4).

The Grateful Dead are one of the few bands that could take an entire generation, or rather group of people, and capture them. The Dead played from 1965 to 1995, ending thirty years of music and touring with the death of lead man Jerry Garcia in that final year. They were at their prime in the flower power sixties but continued strong on into the disco/punk seventies, the pop eighties and grunge nineties. The Dead kept a little segment of that peace, love and magic era alive for those who were there and for those who never experienced it. I could take them to the island and have a traveling show with me, closing my eyes and silently listening to the rhythmic blast of music and waves. It is a Dead show in my head. The whole concert scene, hippies on the sand selling blankets, art, pipes, anything they had. Everyone drinking and stoned, ready for the big band on the other side, "one of the great, great insane bands of all time" (Bill Graham, 1969, track 1).

And what is the crowd like? The Grateful Dead started and maintained a culture, a following. The Deadheads are people that live the Dead, in their ideals and musical taste. They are like the band in that they don't have any necessary definition. There are rich Heads, poor Heads, intelligent, dopey, hyper, calm, those that give up their lives to "go on tour" with the Dead and those that have to stay home to feed the family. You cannot classify them past their love of this one band. But it is this band that makes black and white, liberal and conservative, old and young come together on this island with me. There is no animosity at a Dead show. The Grateful Dead propagate peace, and to break that peace would be sacrilegious in the temple of the concert. No one wants to knock the balance off; they are having too much fun to worry about the physical, mental and social -barriers of this world. The Dead provide a beat for these people's lives (Tosches 1996). The Dead and their fans upend the earth, a little Utopia on our island, a Utopia not unlike the times the Dead grew up in, a time machine that takes you back to flower power, peace, love, everyone happy in the one thing that brought them together, the band. Because the show is a chance to escape, to go places fond and places new (Suntree, 1994, p. 541). A transcendental experience that leads to the wilds of Venus and the beauties of the stars over African plains, it would allow you to rise up out of yourself, "until things we've never seen seem familiar" (Robert Hunter, 1977, track 4). It is about the people, the band, the music and the love that flows all around the world. There is not any one thing that makes it a true Dead show (Suntree, 1994, p. 541). The whole thing requires a magic of sorts, and the Dead were the most magnificent magicians around.

When it gets dark on my little chunk of sand, and the crowd has started to rest for the night, and I am truly alone, I'll crawl up into my hammock and remember the first night that I was truly taken away by these magicians of music. We had gotten high outside, Dave, Travis and I, three friends now distant with college. We went inside and having little to do that weekend but smoke more pot, we put on some tunes. Dave picked up American Beauty and we sat, high and oddly expectant, to listen. And at first we talked and joked over the music, but we gradually got more and more into it. And there, all of a sudden, it came through. The Dead ripped open their bellies and spilled it all out for us to look on in hushed amazement. It was "Brokedown Palace" if I can recall correctly. "On my hands and my knees I will roll, roll, roll. Just like the river roll, roll, roll" (Robert Hunter, 1970, track 7). I was in shock. We all were. Imagine all your truths suddenly validated. All you believe in affirmed, on one night, high and with your best friends. A soft crooning voice, whispering at times, breathing softly in my ear like a lover. Jerry can make my soul shed tears over pure eloquence. A guitar played to a random perfection. Bob Weir so sure of his talent and direction that he rarely need pay attention to technicalities. Just going along, feeling the song, just like I was. A bass played by Phil Lesh so smooth and so underground that it was hardly even there, but you could feel it. The deeper current of the song, something persistent and eternal. Drums doing their thing, a little separate from the song sometimes, Mickey Hart making his own voice with percussion. And then the lyrics coming through, the great story of country, journey and coming back home. Robert Hunter, the Dead's poet-in-residence. Every twist and turn of phrase, the little words that could mean so much and the astronomical implications of it all. I keep repeating songs, playing back phrases, concentrating on just one word and how it could be the crux of a whole story, the golden thread in a castle wall tapestry. The smooth rhythm rolled. It rolled, rolled, rolled. Getting caught up in a larger force that was part of all of us, and yet to which we could come alone and dip our feet at times and attain peace. It seemed like that night the Dead knew some how what we were doing and played even harder, if that is possible through a CD (I was there and for myself believe it true). And on such a mystical night I came into the Dead. I listened and listened.

I'm still listening, in fact. Not too long ago, before I was constrained to this litter box in the sea, I can recall when the aforementioned Dave and I went off to "have a laugh" after work. We drove and smoked and laughed at the day's previous folly, happy now in pure friendship. We drove forever that night, just letting the Dead fill us, allowing them to rise up in our consciousness, removing all worldly concerns and handling us like little children who have just taken their first barefoot steps in a new yard. "Cherish well your thoughts, keep a tight grip on your booze, cause thinkin' and drinkin' are all I have today" (Bob Weir, 1974, track 8). Pleased and proud, we could connect with the Dead. They offer companionship and understanding, a comforting voice to those troubled or at rest.

The Grateful Dead truly are a long strange trip. It comes up and down, high and low, back to forth. Weaving in and out of my life, our lives, all of us who listen to the Dead, all of us on this island in the sun. Like the fishers of men, great nets were cast to a sea of people with just a little different mentality and there we were caught, willfully being dragged to the cosmic boat of what would be for us the best damn music in the world. Back alleys, bars and tiny islands. It's certain songs and certain rhythms that just set your heart flying. The Dead are a drug themselves, you get a taste and you are hooked. Never again will any other band do it quite as well as the Dead do it. You come back for more, you throw your life into this one thing, this crowd of tie-dyed people, and not for one second do you ever think twice. It's home on the island, it's where I belong, where we all belong.

Suntree, S. (1994). The grateful dead. Theatre Journal, 46, 539-541.

Shenk, D., Silberman, S. (1994). Skeleton key: a dictionary for deadheads. New York: Doubleday.

Hunter, R. (1977). Terrapin station [Recorded by the Grateful Dead]. On Terrapin station [CD]. San Francisco: Arista.

Hunter, R. (1970). Brokedown palace [Recorded by the Grateful Dead]. On American beauty [CD]. San Francisco: Arista.

Weir, B. (1974). Mexicali Blues [Recorded by the Grateful Dead]. On Skeletons from the closet [CD]. San Francisco: Arista.

Graham, B. (1969). Introductions [Recorded by the Grateful Dead]. On Grateful dead: 2-11-69 [CD]. New York: Arista.

Percy, W. (1993). The loss of the creature. In Message in a bottle (pp. 47-63).

Tosches, N. (1996). The seas endless, awful rhythm & me without a dirty picture (3-10). In Marcus, G. (Ed.) (1996). Stranded: rock and roll for a desert island. New York, NY: Da Capo Press.

Lichtenstein, G. (1996). Desparado (84-92). In Marcus, G. (Ed.) (1996). Stranded: rock and roll for a desert island. New York, NY: Da Capo Press.

Marsh, D. (1996). Onan's Greatest Hits (219-227). In Marcus, G. (Ed.) (1996). Stranded: rock and roll for a desert island. New York, NY: Da Capo Press.