Grateful Dead of the Day: May 30, 1969 A good read.

Which Zoners attended?

Music links >  https://www.gratefuldeadoftheday.com/05-30-1969?fbclid=IwAR3fMCh32Jveqhs...

Dead of the Day: May 30, 1969

Springer's Inn

Portland, Oregon

★★★★★

Our Dead of the Day comes from a country and western music venue on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon back in 1969. The show gets off to a solid start with a Morning Dew. But, strangely, the Me and My Uncle that follows eclipses it with some seriously toasty guitar work by Jerry and all-around high energy from the band. Doin’ That Rag follows it up nicely with a psychedelic dance sound, a ferocious jam in the latter half, and trippy, almost angry, banter from Jerry at the end. Then, after Pig fronts King Bee, we get a minimally spacey yet scintillatingly rocking version of Dark Star. The Cosmic Charlie that pops up next is a fine and somewhat unexpected interlude between the Dark Star and Stephen, especially because the band picks up right where they left off with the Dark Star, rolling out a luscious jam before finally going into the first verse. Stephen eventually gives way to The Eleven, which is such a treat with its tight, harmonious vocals and sing-song playing that matches the nursery rhyme-like lyrics. By then, everyone was surely dancing like mad, only to have a raging Lovelight turns it up a notch further.

Don't just take our word for it. Listen to the show while reading this phenomenal description from a much longer article about the Grateful Dead in the August 23, 1969 Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grateful-dead-jerry-garcia...

The dance is at Springer's Inn, about ten miles out of town, and they start out about 9:30. A mile from the place there is a huge traffic jam on the narrow country road, and they stick the cars in a ditch and walk, a few fragments in the flow to Springer's under a full yellow moon. The last time they played Portland they were at a ballroom with a sprung floor that made dancing inevitable, but Springer's is just as nice. It's a country and western place, walls all knotty pine, and beside the stage the Nashville stars of the past thirty years grin glossily from autographed photos – "Your's sincerely, Marty Robbins." "Love to Y'all, Norma Jean," Warmest regards, Jim Reeves. "You got a bigger crowd than even Buck Owens," says the promoter and Jerry grins. It is sardine, ass-to-ass packed and drippingly hot inside.

The band stands around the equipment truck waiting for the Bear to finish his preparations. Someone donates some Cokes and they make the rounds. "Anyone for a lube job," Bill calls to the hangers-on. "Dosed to a turn," says Phil. Jerry, already speechlessly spaced on gas, drinks deep. They are all ready.

It seems preordained to be a great night. But preordination is not fate; it comes to the elect and the elect have to work to be ready for it. So the Dead start out working; elation will come later. "Morning Dew" opens the set, an old tune done slow and steady. It is the evening's foundation stone and they carefully mortise it into place, no smiles, no frills. Phil's bass is sure and steady, Bill and Mickey play almost in unison. Then Bob sang "Me and My Uncle," a John Phillips tune with a country rocking beat. They all like the song and Bob sings it well, friendly and ingenuous. Back to the groove with "Everybody's Doing that Rag," but a little looser this time. Jerry's guitar begins to sing, and over the steady drumming of Bill, Mickey lays scattered runs, little kicks, and sudden attacks. Phil begins to thunder, then pulls back. Patience, he seems to be saying, and he's right: Jerry broke a string in his haste, so they pull back to unison and end the song. But Jerry wants it bad and is a little angry.

"I broke a string," he shouts at the crowd, "so why don't you wait a minute and talk to each other. Or maybe talk to yourself, to your various selves" – he cocks his head with a glint of malice in his eyes – "can you talk to your self? Do you even know you have selves to talk to?"

The questions, involute and unanswerable, push the crowd back – who is this guy asking us riddles, what does he want from us anyway? But the band is into "King Bee" by that time. They hadn't played that for a while, but it works, another building block, and a good way to work Pig into the center, to seduce him into giving his all instead of just waiting around for "Lovelight." It is like the Stones but muddier – Pigpen isn't Mick Jagger after all. Jerry buzzes a while right on schedule, and the crowd eases up, thinking they were going to get some nice blues. The preceding band had been good imitation B. B. King, so maybe it would be a blues night, Wrong again.

"Play the blues!" shouts someone in a phony halfswoon.

"Fuck you, man," Mickey shouts back, "go hear a blues band if you want that, go dig Mike Bloomfield."

Another punch in the mouth, but the moment is there, and the audience's stunned silence just makes the opening gong of "Dark Star" more ominous. In that silence music begins, steady and pulsing. Jerry as always, takes the lead, feeling his way for melodies like paths up the mountain. Jerry, says Phil, is the heart of the Dead, its central sun; while they all connect to each other, the strongest bonds are to him. Standing there, eyes closed, chin bobbing forward, his guitar in close under his arm, he seems pure energy, a quality like but distinct from sexuality, which, while radiating itself outward unceasingly and unselfishly, is as unceasingly and unselfishly replenished by those whose strengths have been awakened by his.

He finds a way, a few high twinging notes that are in themselves a song, and then the others are there too, and suddenly the music is not notes or a tune, but what those seven people are exactly: the music is an aural holograph of the Grateful Dead. All their fibres, nuances, histories, desires, beings are clear. Jerry and his questing, Phil the loyal comrade, Tom drifting beside them both on a cloud, Pig staying stubbornly down to earth; Mickey working out furious complexities trying to understand how Bill is so simple, and Bob succumbing inevitably to Jerry and Phil and joining them. And that is just the beginning, because at each note, at each phrase the balances change, each testing, feeding, mocking, and finally driving each other on, further and further on.

Some balances last longer than others, moments of realization that seem to sum up many moments, and then a solid groove of 'yes, that is the way it is,' flows out, and the crowd begins to move. Each time it is Jerry who leads them out, his guitar singing and dancing joy. And his joy finds new levels and the work of exploration begins again.

Jerry often talks of music as coming from a place and creating a place, a place where strife is gone, where the struggle to understand ends, and knowledge is as evident as light. That is the place they are in at Springer's. However hard it is to get there, once there, you want to cry tears of ease and never leave. It is not a new place; those who seek it hard enough can find it, like the poet Lucretius who found it about 2500 years ago:

... all terrors of the mind 
Vanish, are gone; the barriers on the world 
Dissolve before me, and I see things happen 
All through the void in empty space... 
I feel a more than mortal pleasure in all this.

The music goes fast and slow, driving and serene, loud and soft. Mickey switches from gong to drums to claves to handclapping to xylophone to a tin slide whistle. Then Bob grabs that away and steps to to mike and blows the whistle as hard as he can, flicking away insanely high and screeching notes. The band digs it, and lays down a building rhythm. The crowd begins to pant, shake, and then suddenly right on the exact moment with the band, the crowd, the band, everything in the whole goddam place begins to scream. Not scream like at the Beatles, but scream like beasts, twisting their faces, trying out every possible animal yowl that lies deep in their hearts.

And Jerry, melodies flowing from him in endless arabesques, leads it away again, the crowd and him-self ecstatic rats to some Pied Piper. The tune changes from "Dark Star" to "St. Stephen," the song with a beat like bouncing boulders, and out of the din comes Jerry's wavering voice, "Another man gathers what another man spills," and everyone knows that means that there's nothing to fear, brothers will help each other with their loads, and suddenly there is peace in the hall. Phil, Bob, and Bill form a trio and play a new and quiet song before Mickey's sudden roll opens it out to the group, and "St. Stephen" crashes to an end with the cannon shot and clouds of sulphurous smoke.

Out of the fire and brimstone emerges the Pig singing "Lovelight," and everyone is through the mind and down into the body. Pigpen doesn't sing; Pigpen never sings. He is just Pig being Pig doing "Lovelight," spitting out of the side of his mouth between phrases, starting the clapping, telling everybody to get their hands out of their pockets and into somebody else's pocket, and like laughter, the band comes in with rock-it-to-'em choruses. The crowd is jumping up and down in witness by this time, and one couple falls on stage, their bodies and tongues entwined in mad ritual embrace. They don't make love, but in acting it out, they perform for and with the crowd, and so everyone is acting out sexual unison with Pigpen as the master of ceremonies. The place, one body, built in music, fucks until it comes, the cannon goes off one final time, and Mickey leaps to the gong bashing it with a mallet set afire by the cannon, and it makes a trail of flame and then sparks when it hits the gong, the gong itself radiating waves of sonic energy. Bill flails at the drums, Phil keeps playing the same figure over and over, faster and faster, and Jerry and Bob build up to one note just below the tonic, hold it until, with one ultimate chord, it all comes home. The crowd erupts in cheers, as the band, sodden with sweat, stumble off the stage.

"We'll be back, folks," says Jerry, "we'll be back after a break."

Bob laughs as he hears Jerry's announcement. "It's really something when you have to lie to get off the stage."

Because it's over, gone, wiped out. They gather by the equipment van, and all but Tom, still cool and unruffled, are steaming in the chill night air. The moon has gone down, the stars are out, and there is nothing more to be done that night at all.

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