HIPPIE HOMAGE

Wakarusa Festival just wrapped up. So the hippie-bashing by 20-something know-nothings (and others) is in full gear. I hate hippie-bashing. I mean, honestly, how can anyone hate a hippie? What's there to hate? I can see being slightly annoyed with some aspects of hippie culture — I won't list them, lest I undermine my point here — but hate? Come on. There's this 20-something at work who knows nothing about American culture or politics or history or social movements or civil rights or religion or literature or anything, really, except computers and action movies and beer specials, and he came up to me over the weekend and started angrily bagging on hippies. If a contingent of Nazis had marched down Massachusetts Street, he couldn't have been more offended. I kid you not. Whence this rage? He was carrying on as if the thousands of Wak Fest hippies — who really are just fun-loving kids, when you get down to it — were a plague of locusts on our fair town. I finally cut him off by saying, "I don't like hippie-bashing." He gave me a startled look and said, "What?" I coldly repeated myself, and he slinked away.

But my affinity for hippies is only spiritual. Rick's is real. I asked him about his experiences seeing musical festivals around the country, and this is how he responded:

When KC told me that she was starting a blog, she said that she didn’t want it to just be a diary with forced and boring entries: “Breakfast this morning was two eggs over easy with burnt toast. The dogs continue to chew up the left foot shoes while ignoring the right.” I had no fear that it would go as badly as all that. And indeed, she has created appealing essays that are based on personal experience that fill out larger themes. So while there is no bemoaning chips in the new china, there is also a refreshing lack of abstract policy statements and political rants that fill much of the blogosphere.

No surprise then that the subjects KC has proposed to me seem to call for responses in a similar personal style. Not easy though. What out of the messy sprawl of experience are the illuminating tidbits? When you have spent years doing something, what is there to say? We will soon see how all that goes. But all I know at the moment is here is where I must start:

9 August 1995

Climbing and the Grateful Dead have long been linked in my mind and in my road trips. On this hot day I am stuck in an hours long traffic jam on Interstate 80 in western Wyoming. We will soon learn that it was caused when a double trailer semi truck clipped a road work truck, jackknifed, spun, took out a couple of cars, and then set the whole scene on fire. It was still a grim sight when we finally drove past hours after the fire was out. But while we were sitting in the jam, I had my leg up on the window trying to keep it elevated to minimize swelling because a couple of days earlier I had taken a long lead fall climbing and crushed my heel bone. My brother was driving me back to KC. As we sat there, I was washing ibuprofen down with some good homebrew beer—it is painful to crush your heel. Then the announcer for the NPR news started in like this: “Jerry Garcia, founding member of the Grateful Dead....” That was the end of the Dead. 9 August 1995 was not one of my favorite days.


The first time I saw the Dead was 3 August 1982 at Starlight in Kansas City. I don’t know that I really remember the show, but I know that the date is right and that they opened the show with “Mississippi Half-Step." The Dead was never about the albums but always about the live performance. From very early on people were noting the playlists and passing around reviews of the shows. It is now all on the Internet. So while I saw four or five shows at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, during the '80s, I do know that it was the 13th of June 1984 show that had the big lightning storm. The Grateful Dead are the most thoroughly documented and annotated cultural experience from before the age of the Internet. Or maybe ever.

I didn’t do much climbing, or see many Dead shows until I went to California in the early '90s. I found there were several kinds of climbers and several kinds of Deadheads and a wonderful kind who were both at once. I tried to avoid climbing too much with the computer programmers; the medical types were a mixed bag—doctors were iffy, nurses were great; my favorite partners were the Deadheads.

Most people can imagine the somewhat spaced-out, New Age spiritualist Deadhead. But the variety of fauna at a show went well beyond that. For instance, there were also the redneck, libertarian minded fans. They chose to be Deadheads instead of Bikers because they preferred pot to beer, and they preferred dancing to bar fighting. But otherwise they were the same. “U.S. Blues” was a song for them:

I’m Uncle Sam/that’s who I am
Been hidin’ out/in a rock-and-roll band
Shake the hand/that shook the hand
Of P.T. Barnum/and Charlie Chan

Shine your shoes/light your fuse
Can you use/ them ol’U.S. Blues?
I’ll drink your health/share your wealth
Run your life/steal your wife

Wave that flag
Wave it wide and high
Summertime done
Come and gone
My, oh my

Some of the Deadheads were geeks. The Grateful Dead not only allowed fans to tape their shows, they encouraged it. There were special tickets sold to the tapers, and they got the space right behind the soundboard. The view of the stage wasn’t any good, but nobody would yell or scream in the tapers’ section. And most important of all, they didn’t dance. Everywhere else there were arms and legs flying, but the tapers would never do more than a bit of slow swaying, mindful as they were of their mics and cords. And like any self-respecting geek, they always had the best gear. There were several years where the tapes might be marked “Betty." That meant the original recording was made with a modified Betamax videotape recorder. Cutting edge. A lot of the Deadhead climbers were tapers or at least heavy into trading recordings. They built their own worldwide precursor to online trading by mailing around flyers.

On the 19th of October in 1995, with my foot still in a cast, I went to my first Phish show at Municipal in Kansas City. They opened with “Cars, Trucks, Buses.” Probably having learned from the Deadheads, the Phish fans were writing it all down and recording everything. It is now all out there on the Internet. That fall the band was playing a running chess game with the audience—there was huge chessboard up along side the stage. Between sets when the band made their move, they talked some shit about how the game was going. After the show, there was a knot of earnest chess geeks gathered to plot the fans' next move. Want to know who won the game? It is still on the Internet.

It didn’t take me long to discover that Phish were better musicians than the Dead. The Dead, of course, had the bigger cultural footprint, starting as they did in the San Francisco of the '60s instead of the Vermont of the '80s. But while the Dead were sometimes dodgy in their playing, they did have a perfect fit with the lyricist Robert Hunter. Almost all the best Dead songs were Garcia songs, and almost all the best Garcia songs had lyrics by Hunter. He was the hidden soul of the band. He wrote the poetry that told what the Deadheads were all about.

From “Eyes of the World”:

Sometimes we live no particular way but our own
sometimes we visit your country and live in your home
sometimes we ride on your horses/sometimes we walk alone
sometime the songs that we hear are just songs of our own

Or from “He’s Gone”:

Nine-mile skid
on a ten-mile ride
hot as a pistol
but cool inside
Cat on a tin roof
dogs in a pile
nothing left to do but
smile, smile, smile

I’m less of a fan of the songs that Bob Weir sang. But he did do two or three of my favorites. During a show you would often find people who, from the music, from the chemical assists, or from both, had just found nirvana or some place passably close. A few of these enlightened ones were going to tell you all about it. They would insist that they tell you all about it. They knew you wanted to hear all about it. Bob noticed them.

Here’s his song, “Estimated Prophet”:


California, I'll be knocking on the golden door
Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light
Rising up to paradise, I know I'm gonna shine.

You've all been asleep, you would not believe me
Them voices tellin' me, you will soon receive me
Standin' on the beach, the sea will part before me
Fire wheel burning in the air!

You will follow me and we will ride to glory
way up, the middle of the air

Phish did a lot of songs where the lyrics were silly or maybe little more than nonsense to fuel the kickass jam that the song was really about. They could, perhaps, have used a Robert Hunter. But they had their gems, too.

From my favorite of the love songs, “Waste”:

Don’t want to be an actor pretending on the stage
Don’t want to be a writer with my thoughts out on the page
Don’t want to be a painter cause everyone comes to look
Don’t want to be anything where my life’s an open book

A dream it’s true
But I’d see it through
If I could be
Wasting my time with you


So if I’m inside your head
Don’t believe what you might have read
You’ll see what I might have said
To hear it

Come waste your time with me
Come waste your time with me

And one of the most cool things they did was for their Halloween shows. Instead of covering a song, they would cover an entire album. I think the best they did was for the ’96 show where they performed Talking Heads' “Remain in the Light." This was an inspired interpretation of the best album from the '80s. They stretched the 40-minute original out to just over an hour and did a classic Phish style jam on “Crosseyed and Painless” that went for ten minutes:

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to

This song so fits the ethos of Phish, maybe David Byrne should have been a lyricist for them.

I never saw an indoor Dead show, but I saw Phish inside a few times. The Fillmore in San Francisco was good. But my favorite place was at the Gorge Amphitheatre near George in the state of Washington. This is an even better venue than Red Rocks because it is out in the middle of the desert in central Washington. The stage balances on the edge of a steep cliff, and far below is the drowned and bloated remains of the once mighty Columbia river now enslaved to the barge traffic. But it is a beautiful setting nevertheless. Phish would always play two nights there with the shows starting just as the sun was setting in the clear cloudless desert sky. The Gorge is a long way from the cities, so only the most enthusiastic fans would buy tickets, which means a high energy crowd that knows all the songs. You would drive in the day of the first show and camp two nights. Nobody was driving out at night after a show, so there was little police presence. Just a couple of days of hippies getting sunburnt in the hot sun, capped with amazing nights of live music.