RIP Jerry Garcia

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A friend I never met but I feel we were buds.

Good good good mother fuckin times Sir.

8/9/95 a day I will never forget.

My boss called me on the company radio and told me to pull over and he broke the news, told me to go home if I needed to. I'm a working man and finished the day and it was a very rainy afternoon in the summer. I stopped the work truck right on I-95 next to a big cow field I never explored and bolted out and within 5 minutes I had a shopping bad full of boomers.

My friend Fish came over and we went to West Palm Beach for no particular reason and ate all the boomers and EVERY bar and club in WPB was playing the Dead. WPB is not a dead town it is a dance high society top 40 shit, but not on that night.

Thousands milling around, swirlin, twirlin, crying, laughing and just doing what we do.

RIP sir it was an honor to see and hear you play. 200+ times.

Thank You For A Real Good Time.

From the corner of my eye I saw the sun explode
I didn't look directly 'cause it would have burned my soul
When the smoke and the thunder cleared enough to look around
I heard a sweet guitar lick, an old familiar sound
I heard a laugh I recognized come rolling from the earth
I saw it rise into the skies like lightning giving birth
It sounded like Garcia but I couldn't see the face
Just the beard and the glasses and a smile on empty space

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A premonition 

8/7/1995. I was finishing up this bench I was making and I decided to “grateful dead” it As I had borrowed a router and wanted to play with it as I have never used one

 

I had this really intense vibe and energy come over me and became obsessed with finishing it working till about 1 AM

Unfortunately, it made sense a couple of days later

Long live the memories, they will never fade away

Does anyone know of a version of Brokedown Palace that Jerry sang 'fare THEE well'?

About to drive over the Golden Gate to Garcia's hometown.

I'll be thinking of him.

I was lucky enough to meet the man a couple of times and my lasting impression will always be how comfortable he made me feel.  I remember thinking that Bowie or Jagger would never make me feel like that.

Can't even imagine what my life would be like without his influence.  Impossible to even consider at this point.

RIP

My boss broke the news to me, too... and told me to take the rest of the day off. 

Jerry lives in all of us.

Good listening today --

Stella Blue from 3/21/94

https://archive.org/details/gd1994-03-21.140296.set2.dsbd.wise.miller.cl...

So Many Roads from 10/1/94

https://archive.org/details/gd1994-10-01.mtx.seamons.95066.sbeok.flac16/...

Black Muddy River -> Box of Rain -> Fireworks (with Hendrix Star-Spangled Banner on the PA) from 7/9/95

https://archive.org/details/gd1995-07-09.147057.walsh.suraci.at835.flac16

(That one cuts off before the end of the fireworks, this one doesn't sound as good but has the end: https://archive.org/details/gd1995-07-09.schoeps.wklitz.95445.flac16/gd1...)

Boss broke it to me too, and I opted out of work the rest of the day. Called friends to do some proper remembering, then my oldest brother called and needed help putting in hay at his farm, the same brother who was the 1st in our family to bring home Beauty + Workingman's - so helping him on that particular day was totally meant to be.

There's a banjo moon in a tie-dyed sky

Hippies dance and babies cry
Church bells ring as a silver-haired angel look down
And the blood of his music runs through the veins of our guitars
Bright lights, Dark Star

Brother J !! 

I saw this on facebook yesterday. Funny I'd never seen it before, and I don't know the date of when he put it out there, but not surprisingly it's good.

Losing Jerry

— John Perry Barlow

In the time since Jer shuffled off his sorry old meat and flew away, I have found myself incapable of writing about it, or even talking about it very much.

I’ve been silent as a flat coon on this, one of the most important deaths of my death-shadowed life. I’ve received hundreds of e-messages from my fellow bereaved, nearly all of them more eloquent in their grief than I could be in mine, despite their never having personally known the guy.

These folks never had the delight of engaging him in mind-play, where he was as light and agile as a child Baryshnikov on springs, perfectly capable of juggling concepts taken evenly from Kirkegaard, Coltrane, and comic books into the same sentence or three. They never experienced the great skeptical arch of his eyebrow, never benefited from his uncanny talent for popping the self-inflated, even while extending to those thus reduced his most enthusiastic support for their real talents and virtues. They never heard him exclaim in delight, “That’s a fat trip!” when he himself was the fattest trip there was. They never heard his acerbic cackle. Never watched close up the cycles of his wild internal weather, rolling in and out, blackness and radiance, winter and spring, until finally spring promised, then failed to return, as we all know would happen someday.

They hadn’t lost these personal things like the rest of us here inside the Village of the Dead, and yet they mourned their loss far more movingly than I have been able to do.

Of course, in some dimensions, we have all lost the same things. We have all lost the glistening, piercing soar of those notes he played, dancing like electricity over the dense sonic jungle arising from his fellow Dead. We’ve all lost the redeeming sorrow in his straining wail, the brief but bottomless silence between his notes.

We’ve all lost the Grateful Dead

Something may or may not assemble itself out of these perfectly great spare parts he leaves. The living Dead might play again. If they do, they may even have the ability to invoke the Holy Who-Knows which sometimes was there in the space between the Deadheads and ”The Boyz.” Hell, it might be as good, whatever that means. It might even be better. But it won’t be the Grateful Dead.

Losing the Dead is terribly hard. The Grateful Dead have been my tribe for 30 years. Their religion, where the only dogma was music, was my religion. They’ve been the only thing that was always there. Through many other beginnings and ends, and many other deaths, the trip just got longer and stranger. Now we don’t know what is coming. It’ll be a trip, undoubtedly strange, possibly long, but it won’t be that trip.

Even having lost all this, I can’t seem to feel it properly or weep over it like I want to, or find the right thing to say. And it’s not like I don’t have practice. Seems like I’ve been practicing for this event a long time, eulogizing Pigpen, Keith, Brent – whose absence still tears at me hard – and a lot of others, inside and out of this dangerous place with death in its very name. It’s not at all like me to say nothing at the funeral of someone I loved. Or remain silent later.

Somebody asked me, in an interview right before he died, what it was like to know Jerry Garcia. The question hit me strange. I thought about all the ways in which he and his various manifestations had woven themselves into my life over the last 30 years, and I said, “God, I can’t imagine what it would be like not to know Jerry Garcia.” Now I’m there. I should be able to imagine it easily now that it’s real, but I still can’t. It’s too big. I can’t wrap my mind around it. Or my heart.

In a way, it feels as if my inability to mourn him as I have others is appropriate. Jerry would not want to be mourned. He hated the fuss he generated in life. He would have been appalled by the fuss made over his death. He kept his emotions for his music.

But still, I miss him. I miss him in the ways it will take me years to figure out.

who else is gonna bring you, a broken arrow?

I was panning on the Shasta River in N. California, had my best pan ever, several grams, woot!  Then had an odd feeling, so hiked back up to the rig, turned on the AM radio, and heard that Jerry had passed on the right wing stations.  (They kept emphasizing his business acumen with his ties, lol).  So drove back to Cornholio, had a hundred messages on the phone (happens when you play lead guitar in the closest thing to a dead cover band in town).  Was a sad few days, but amazing how even a small town like ours had a such a large vigil for him, very heart felt.  

Jerry's gold (and garnets)

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Thanks for posting that Lance, Barlow cuts right to the point....

"Hell, it might be as good, whatever that means. It might even be better. But it won’t be the Grateful Dead."

I was working as an administrator at a NYC hospital, in those days we had beepers kids, not many had cells yet. My beeper went off 8 times, all different numbers including my gf at the time who hated the Dead but heard it on the radio, sorry but I never even thought of taking the day off

I have to admit, after that 95 summer tour, the news of Jerry's passing was not a huge surprise.

Still hurt , but not a shocker.