Sunshine Daydream

I listened to “Sugar Magnolia” for the first time in forever. That song, along with a plethora of other Grateful Dead material, used to be a signal and then occasional soundtrack to summertime activities. And since it hasn’t really felt like summer for the obvious reasons, I haven’t brought out the Dead.
Reggae is another familiar summertime favorite, although I’m more apt to spin that genre when the mood hits. It’s great during the winter. It makes you long for the summer, or at least an isolated beach, a joint, and a bottle of Red Stripe.
The Dead were simply entrenched in summertime tradition: the never ending tours and the chance, even for just one show, to immerse yourself in this stinky, quasi-Utopia society where everyone sold enough grill cheese sandwiches to get to the next town. I understand that they carried a ton of baggage with them.
Later on, the vast majority of fans seemed to be living in this make-believe bubble that looked the part on the surface, but underneath, you knew that their trust fund would bail them out of any dire straits should their ride get searched for drugs on the way to the Hartford show.
It was also a glutton for scam artists, selling the paper tops of cigarette packs as blotter acid, baking soda as cocaine, and ditch weed as high-priced Afghani sativa. It was fuckers like this that eventually brought the pigs around, snatching up drug users like fish in a barrel, putting relatively innocent people behind bars for merely shaking their bones. These opportunists brought somewhat of a dark cloud to the festivities, a reoccurring reminder like Altamont that the sixties were over, and you needed to watch your back at a Grateful Dead show.
But who could resist the temptation of tens of thousands like-minded people traveling into a city with one common purpose? I remember the traffic jams and remember not being too upset about the delays, mainly because I was one of those journeying to the show. I can’t speak to those impacted by the traffic otherwise, but I can certainly understand their frustration.
I can also understand why people, including many of my own friends, didn’t “get” the appeal. The Dead could be pretty awful on occasion and if you weren’t wired for extremely long forays into improvisational jamming, then you would certainly be unimpressed at a Grateful Dead show. But if you could allow yourself to acknowledge the incredible impact that this band, seemingly isolated from anything modern, had on literally hundreds of thousands of people and the fact that they did it in their own, skewed solo way, and then you may have been able to count yourself as a fan.
You may have even been able to tolerate the nightly jaunts into “Drums/Space.”
I was one of those. And at the moment I started to schedule part of my summer plans to include a Dead show or two, the band disintegrated. The photo you see was purchased from a bootleg vendor after the last show in Soldier Field back in ’95. I bartered with the guy to get two shirts for $20. After some resistance, he agreed, probably to get me away from him. It was the least I could do, as the band gave a completely lackluster performance; they got my ticket money (the band had one of the best mail-order programs ever) but I would be damned if they got anything extra in their merchandising, considering how poor the performance was. Garcia kept fucking up solos and forgetting words; you knew something was wrong with him. But Jerry was a resilient dude, and you figured that he would address his issues and be well in time for the next summer.
A month later he died, apparently from trying to get a handle on his demons and failing in the process. It wasn’t until the next season when his passing really hit; the endless tour had ended and the search for a replacement began.
That band, Phish, provide me with a few years of suitable facsimile, but there was stylistic differences and, more importantly, huge reefs in the community compared to the Terrapin crowd. At nearly every Phish show, I saw a heavy police presence, I saw fans younger than me under, dismantled under the influence of illicit drugs, and I saw very little in terms of actual camaraderie outside of the small cliques of concertgoers.
Not only did Garcia appear to be the de-facto leader of the Dead, he also appeared to be the figurehead for the followers own morality tale.
And on occasion, particularly during a summertime spinning of American Beauty or some other Dead album, I reminisce about that brief Utopian encounter and wish others could experience it too. This year, it was during a spin of a Hartford, CT show from 1983 where the band goes from the obligatory “Drums/Space”>”The Other One”>”Stella Blue”>”Sugar Mag.” While trying to repair some leaking plumbing, hearing that set made me think at how great it would be at that show instead of under that sink.