An Evening With Levon Helm

Reposted from Nov. 8, 2009

Levon Helm patted Gary and me on the knee when he arrived on stage for his set last night and patted me on the back when he left. Such incarnational moments are surely the stuff of pilgrimages. After he'd given us a big smile, I was so transfigured that I couldn't have cared less about anything else that might have happened. But as a matter of fact, the Band's legendary singer and drummer barely opened his mouth during his two and a half-hour concert last night in his Woodstock studio. A throat cancer survivor, he's still recovering from another scare last summer, when a non-cancerous lesion was removed from his throat.

While he's not yet singing as he works with his vocal coach to get back in shape, he's drumming as powerfully as ever. He powered his 12-piece show band from the right end of the stage, counting four by standing, waving his drumsticks in the air, and mouthing the words. There were plenty of lead vocalists to take up the slack, including his daughter Amy, Teresa Williams and her husband, guitarist Larry Campbell (storied performers in their own right), and, sitting in last night, roadhouse pianist David Keyes, who got to sing this classic Robbie Robertson lyric on "Across The Great Divide":

Standing by your window in pain
A pistol in your hand
And I beg you, dear Molly girl
Try and understand your man the best you can...
Now Molly dear, don't ya shed a tear
Your time will surely come
You'll feed your man chicken every Sunday
Now tell me, hon, whatcha done with the gun?

Helm and his band performed five more Band songs -- "Long Black Veil," a country standard which appeared on their "Music From Big Pink," plus "The Shape I'm In," "It Makes No Difference," "Chest Fever," and "The Weight." Songwriter and guitarist Robertson wasn't there, and Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the group's two best voices besides Helm, died early. All this Band music, but no Band voices? Nobody cared. Nobody cares if it isn't John Wesley singing the hymns he wrote, either.

Robertson is said to have been unappreciative of the Helm-Danko-Manuel-Garth Hudson iterations of the Band that performed without him in the 1980-90s. I guess I can't blame him in view of the fairly showy "goodbye to the road" the Band paid in the film "The Last Waltz." Still, I hope Robertson brings his famous Fender to the Midnight Ramble one time to see how the congregation is doing with his hymns, the classic songs that have entered the canon of American New Orleans-influenced R&B songwriting.

In addition to Band songs, we heard Delta peaches such as Dr. John's "Such A Night," the boisterous "All On A Mardi Gras Day," and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man." The Ramble was in Woodstock without being especially redolent of the Woodstock festival, which was more famous for the Who and Jimi Hendrix than for proto-roots music such as the Band's, whose members looked like Mennonites, not acid rockers. The Band played the festival but didn't especially enjoy it. Nor did a certain other Americana band from San Francisco. Bad weather during their set killed the Grateful Dead's spotlights, so nobody saw them. Literally. They said they'd never played worse.

Appropriately enough, Helm's ensemble has its own links to the greater Dead family, Williams and Campbell having recently toured with Dead bassist Phil Lesh. We heard two Dead songs last night: "Tennessee Jed," which Helm recorded on his new album "Electric Dirt," and the Robert Hunter-Jerry Garcia collaboration "Attics Of My Life." Here the evening waxed from joyful to sublime, with Williams, Amy Helm, and Campbell singing Hunter's gorgeous lyrics, as the Dead themselves did on their album "American Beauty," in luminous harmony:

I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me

Oh regret, oh grace -- oh, baby boomers! We listened in rapt silence to that aching old song, we men and women of a certain age huddled together in a cozy barn, mostly in our fifties and sixties, though there were a few younger people who'd said they learned about the music from their parents. Welcomed with an easy hospitality by Team Levon, which had lit the muddy parking lot with fragrant stove fires and invited us to bring dishes for a common buffet table, we felt like we were going over to an old friend's house. We sipped beer and wine from red plastic cups they'd provided (we were asked to keep the liquor bottles in our cars) and traded stories about concerts we'd seen, albums we'd loved, sights we'd seen around town. Except in church, which comes with a common vocabulary just like rock and roll, I've rarely bonded so easily with strangers. It felt like going to a show when we were 19.

But we weren't 19. Most of our children won't see 19 again. It might just have been a nostalgia trip, but as one of the passengers, I'm looking for a better word than that. It had something to do with the curtain beginning to come down on a storied if self-absorbed generation and trying to savor and honor people and things and memories we love, trying to discern what's really precious and then find the words to explain it.

One of the things I love is the Band's live version of the Motown song "Don't Do It," recorded at the Academy of Music in New York City on New Year's Eve in 1971. Levon Helm sings lead. It's lean, sharp as an icicle, almost explosively powerful. That long-ago night in New York was the first time the Band had worked with a horn section. Howard Johnson, who'd played with Charles Mingus and later led the Saturday Night Live band, played tuba and baritone sax. The horns helped make "Don't Do It" a masterpiece. Near the end, Helm and the late Rick Danko take this line as Helm plays a complicated drum pattern which you're amazed he can hold together while singing: "My biggest mistake was loving you too much." Then Johnson and the rest of the horns come back in with a mighty roar.

I'd be surprised if I've heard the song fewer than 1,000 times in the course of nearly 40 years. If I could have just one song, I'd be content with "Don't Do It." As it happened, Howard Johnson also anchored the horn section last night at the Midnight Ramble. After the show, he walked out behind Helm, and I touched him on the shoulder and said, "Thank you. God bless you." He smiled and said, "Thank you." Perhaps presumptuous of me, definitely gracious of him. I felt like I was thanking him for all the music I'd ever loved.

"Mama Tried," Merle Haggard

Beloved of Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, "Mama Tried" is the story of Haggard's checkered early life. Newly re-pardoned by California's governor and feted at the Kennedy Center, Haggard, 73, reflects on meeting Richard Nixon at the White House:

The intelligence of Nixon was impressive. He was able to carry on a conversation with me and introduce me to about three other dignitaries and their wives, and tell me what their kids' names were. He knew all that. And at the same time, tell me a story about how he was in college when I was in prison, and host the whole evening with all these pots on fire.

"Dire Wolf," The Grateful Dead

Did MTV get the idea for its "Unplugged" series from this tasty, almost-all-acoustic performance on the Tom Snyder Show in 1981? According to Grateful Dead publicist and historian Dennis McNally, the song title came from Jerry Garcia's girlfriend, Mountain Girl, who was watching "The Hound of the Baskervilles" with lyricist Robert Hunter one night and called the pooch a "dire wolf":

The wolf, "600 pounds of sin," is also the devil, and the fact that our guy invites him in speaks volumes. By and large, the Dead stood for moral goodness, but later they would also write a song called "Friend of the Devil." The pivotal moment in American blues history had taken place some 40 years before, when, as Son House told the story, Robert Johnson made a Faustian compact and sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play the guitar, leaving the church and setting out on the blues road. The Dead's postmodern, post-Christian cosmology didn't demand that choice.

Radio, Radio

Another reason to love Elvis Costello: His influences, according to Nick Paumgarten's wonderful profile in the Nov. 8 "New Yorker":

His [jazz musician] father turned him on to the Grateful Dead, which became Costello's band, in part because it was no one else's. (While Costello makes no apologies for his Deadhead phase, his biographers always seem to.) It was through the Dead, and subsequently the Band and Gram Parsons, among others, that he discovered the traditional American music they'd tapped into, such as Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. This in turn became the foundation, along with the likes of Van Morrison, for the kind of music he was starting to write and perform himself...The Band's Rick Danko was a major influence on Costello's style of singing.

But He Did Not Shoot The Sheriff

In his history of the Grateful Dead, Dennis McNally describes an unexpected rim shot at the Red Dog Saloon, a now-legendary music venue in Virginia City, Nevada:

On opening night, June 29, 1965, the sheriff stopped by, handed his gun to the bartender, and said, "Check my gun." The bartender fired a round into the floor and handed it back. "Works fine, Sheriff."

Ron>space

Noting my post about a Grateful Dead insider's advice to Richard Nixon during Watergate, a friend replied, "The difference between RN and Ron Rakow is that Rakow really was a crook."

Chrome Heart Shining In The Sun

For Richard Nixon in the deep forest of Watergate, there were several roads not taken. According to official Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally, the band was working hard on his problem at their headquarters in San Rafael, California:

[T]he Dead's best political statement came in a 1974 letter from Ron Rakow, then president of the Grateful Dead Record Company, to President Richard Nixon. Rakow offered the threatened officeholder an idea on how to continue his administration. "We pass our solution along to you with only the remotest expectation that you will carry it out. Since, while it is brilliant, it is not extremely logical. We have concluded that the problems referred to above would disappear, as if by magic, were you to chrome the entire White House."

They Even Have The "American Beauty" Spot

All Tricia, all the time.

Grateful For Wikipedia's Discretion

Making my way through el mes de Los Muertos thanks to a friend's gift of an anthology of Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia CDs, I went searching for information about the late Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, blues singer and Hammond B-3 player who shines on Dead songs such as "Hard to Handle" and "Turn On Your Lovelight." About his northern California secondary school education, our cloudopedia is circumspect, taking care not to speak ill of a Dead:

In his early teens, McKernan left Palo Alto High School by mutual agreement with the school's principal.

'Spite Of All My Sunday Learnin'

A crackling Grateful Dead recitation of the story of Merle Haggard's early years, "Mama Tried," recorded at Duke University in April 1978. If you can, listen with headphones or earbuds. The audio is rocking.

From Dead Into Life

When I arrived on Capitol Hill from Dulles early Wednesday evening, my dinner companion, who has a fascinating international portfolio that need not concern us further, slipped me a small shopping bag containing 12 CDs (actually, more than that; most are double albums). They ranged from 1967, when Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh spun and talked about their favorite records on a radio show in San Francisco (it's astonishing the tape of the show exists) to a concert Garcia and mandolinist David Grisman performed at San Francisco's Warfield Theater in February 1991. My friend said the recording of the second set would be one of his ten desert island discs. You know the concept: If you were stranded on a desert island forever, what albums would you take (in case you couldn't take your iPod)?

Garcia's first instrument was the banjo, which my friend said he took up during what he called "the Great Folk Scare" of the early 1960s. For several years he and Grisman tailed Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, and taped his concerts (the way people would later tape Dead shows). The 1991 set in question, which my friend played in the car, begins with "The Thrill is Gone," a 195os blues song popularized by B. B. King and belted out by Garcia in a husky but sonorous voice I'd never heard from him before. It continues with some country standards ("Old Rocking Chair"), a few Dead songs, and Irving Berlin's "Russian Lullaby."

So I have a feast of several weeks' music to listen to, including a Dead concert my buddy and I attended on Sept. 15, 1987 at Madison Square Garden. It includes "China Cat Sunflower">"I Know You Rider" (ask your local Deadhead what ">" means), which also appears on the Dead's commercially-released three-disc "Europe '72." My friend winces when I proclaim that the album captures them at the height of their powers. They played about 2,000 concerts, and he knows far better than I when the high points occurred. Indulgently, he also gave me a complete recording of a London show from May 1972 that comprises part of "Europe '72."

With the Dead dispatched, over a long dinner at a French restaurant about ten minutes' walk from the Capitol, we talked about friends, love, politics, Nixon, and synchronicity. Earlier in the week, I'd listened to a radio interview in which mandolinist Ricky Skaggs talked about performing with Bill Monroe, and here was my friend talking about Garcia's Monroe tapes. On my flight from Long Beach, I'd just read Terry McDermott's New Yorker profile of the enigmatic sociopath Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who dreamed up the Sept. 11 atrocity and marketed it to Osama bin Laden. In the original plan, he was going to hijack ten planes, use nine as bombs, and land the tenth safely, climb out, wave, and hold a press conference. McDermott writes that KSM also conferred with and helped fund the Jersey City-based architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. When I mentioned all this, my friend said that his and his wife's favorite picture was taken in Jersey City, with the World Trade Center in the background, and that while they'd been friends for years, their affection had deepened in the traumatic aftermath of the attacks, resulting in their marriage.

Once we'd turned to matters of faith, I learned that these little non-coincidence coincidences mean a little more to me than to my friend. When they occur I usually experience a frission of alertness, as if something has locked into place. I find, for instance, that if I think of someone and then call him, it was usually the right thing to do at just that time. That doesn't mean it's magic, since these days calling someone is probably always the right thing to do (instead of e-mailing or Facebooking or, worst of all, doing nothing). And yet I do see them as little evidences of the sovereignty of God. No less spiritual but perhaps somewhat more democratic, my friend is inclined to think that noticing any coherence amid the universe's seeming chaos and prevailing cruelty means that one has learned to observe creation "with the third eye open."

After dinner he dropped me at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where I was due this morning for a meeting of the governing board of the National Association of Episcopal Schools. I'd never been here before and tried to find someone to guide me, but by 11 all the gentle seminarians appeared to have said their prayers and gone to sleep. I soon found my way across a broad, dark lawn to the snug campus guest house.

This afternoon, during a conversation about the challenges facing Episcopal schools and parishes, I remembered something else my friend had said at dinner. Once a daily-mass Roman Catholic, he's taking a break from Rome because of its handling of the sexual abuse scandals. He praised the Episcopal Church for facing up to issues of gender and sexuality that most of Christendom ignores. Since Episcopalians are sometimes more inclined to wring our hands than ring our own bell, I repeated to my colleagues what my friend had said as evidence that our beloved, sometimes beleaguered church may yet end up as the most logical safe haven for the west's substantial cohort of enlightened orthodox. "And the thing about my friend," I added, "is that he's a Republican!"

The seminary playing host to our two-day meeting has been training Episcopal priests, deacons, and laypeople for nearly 200 years. These eminences include my bishop diocesan and our St. John's rector, Jon Bruno, and second-year seminarian Shivaun Wilkinson, a postulant for Holy Orders in the Diocese of San Diego. She's shown here with her classmate Laura, a postulant from Nebraska. Shivaun's parents and sister attend St. John's, so I thought I'd better check up. Plus she and her husband, Chris, are expecting their first child in February, and I wanted to get caught up on all all the news.

We made arrangements to meet at the daily Evening Prayer service in the campus chapel. Those who planned the liturgy combined the beautiful service in The Book Of Common Prayer with folk-style songs led by a four-member combo featuring guitars, bass, and mandolin (could've been Garcia, Lesh, and Grisman about 40 years ago; coincidence? I don't think so). We were 25 worshipers in all. As we sang the verses from Ecclesiastes first set to music by Pete Seeger in his song "Turn Turn Turn" and made famous by the Byrds, my eyes met those of a four-year-old girl who'd come to church with her mother, and I felt that frission again, this time the grace of knowing as a matter of absolute certainty that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, and, this evening, doing it with the brave, talented, faithful young people who will lead our church far into this century. And what a church it is! Before we walked out of the beautiful old chapel into a warm September drizzle, we heard this old, beautiful prayer:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen.

"One More Saturday Night," The Grateful Dead

The greatest jamming roots band ever, and at the height of their powers, playing in Copenhagen in April 1972, the tour that resulted in the sublime "Europe '72." I'm dating myself here, but if there's a better live album, please tell me about it.

This Bob Weir song, in which poet-lyricist Robert Hunter may have played a role, kicks into tenth gear at 3:19 with one of the coolest instrumental bridges in rock and roll. Listen to Phil Lesh's bass (he's the one who says at the beginning that his monitor's not working) as a lyric instrument.

And did you catch that Nixon reference? Next time we're having a beer, ask me about Tricia Nixon and the radio commercial for "American Beauty."

Different Kind Of Tea Back In The Day

From a New York Times article about FreedomWorks, the Washington, D.C. libertarian group that's helping organize the anti-government tea party movement:

[A] portrait of Ayn Rand hangs on the office walls along with one of Jerry Garcia.

Bent Ears

Levon Helm patted Gary and me on the knee when he arrived on stage for his set last night and patted me on the back when he left. Such incarnational moments are surely the stuff of pilgrimages. After he'd given us a big smile, I was so transfigured that I couldn't have cared less about anything else that might have happened. But as a matter of fact, the Band's legendary singer and drummer barely opened his mouth during his two and a half-hour concert last night in his Woodstock studio. A throat cancer survivor, he's still recovering from another scare last summer, when a non-cancerous lesion was removed from his throat.

While he's not yet singing as he works with his vocal coach to get back in shape, he's drumming as powerfully as ever. He powered his 12-piece show band from the right end of the stage, counting four by standing, waving his drumsticks in the air, and mouthing the words. There were plenty of lead vocalists to take up the slack, including his daughter Amy, Teresa Williams and her husband, guitarist Larry Campbell (storied performers in their own right), and, sitting in last night, roadhouse pianist David Keyes, who got to sing this classic Robbie Robertson lyric on "Across The Great Divide":

Standing by your window in pain
A pistol in your hand
And I beg you, dear Molly girl
Try and understand your man the best you can...
Now Molly dear, don't ya shed a tear
Your time will surely come
You'll feed your man chicken every Sunday
Now tell me, hon, whatcha done with the gun?

Helm and his band performed five more Band songs -- "Long Black Veil," a country standard which appeared on their "Music From Big Pink," plus "The Shape I'm In," "It Makes No Difference," "Chest Fever," and "The Weight." Songwriter and guitarist Robertson wasn't there, and Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the group's two best voices besides Helm, died early. All this Band music, but no Band voices? Nobody cared. Nobody cares if it isn't John Wesley singing the hymns he wrote, either.

Robertson is said to have been unappreciative of the Helm-Danko-Manuel-Garth Hudson iterations of the Band that performed without him in the 1980-90s. I guess I can't blame him in view of the fairly showy "goodbye to the road" the Band paid in the film "The Last Waltz." Still, I hope Robertson brings his famous Fender to the Midnight Ramble one time to see how the congregation is doing with his hymns, the classic songs that have entered the canon of American New Orleans-influenced R&B songwriting.

In addition to Band songs, we heard Delta peaches such as Dr. John's "Such A Night," the boisterous "All On A Mardi Gras Day," and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man." The Ramble was in Woodstock without being especially redolent of the Woodstock festival, which was more famous for the Who and Jimi Hendrix than for proto-roots music such as the Band's, whose members looked like Mennonites, not acid rockers. The Band played the festival but didn't especially enjoy it. Nor did a certain other Americana band from San Francisco. Bad weather during their set killed the Grateful Dead's spotlights, so nobody saw them. Literally. They said they'd never played worse.

Appropriately enough, Helm's ensemble has its own links to the greater Dead family, Williams and Campbell having recently toured with Dead bassist Phil Lesh. We heard two Dead songs last night: "Tennessee Jed," which Helm recorded on his new album "Electric Dirt," and the Robert Hunter-Jerry Garcia collaboration "Attics Of My Life." Here the evening waxed from joyful to sublime, with Williams, Amy Helm, and Campbell singing Hunter's gorgeous lyrics, as the Dead themselves did on their album "American Beauty," in luminous harmony:

I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me

Oh regret, oh grace -- oh, baby boomers! We listened in rapt silence to that aching old song, we men and women of a certain age huddled together in a cozy barn, mostly in our fifties and sixties, though there were a few younger people who'd said they learned about the music from their parents. Welcomed with an easy hospitality by Team Levon, which had lit the muddy parking lot with fragrant stove fires and invited us to bring dishes for a common buffet table, we felt like we were going over to an old friend's house. We sipped beer and wine from red plastic cups they'd provided (we were asked to keep the liquor bottles in our cars) and traded stories about concerts we'd seen, albums we'd loved, sights we'd seen around town. Except in church, which comes with a common vocabulary just like rock and roll, I've rarely bonded so easily with strangers. It felt like going to a show when we were 19.

But we weren't 19. Most of our children won't see 19 again. It might just have been a nostalgia trip, but as one of the passengers, I'm looking for a better word than that. It had something to do with the curtain beginning to come down on a storied if self-absorbed generation and trying to savor and honor people and things and memories we love, trying to discern what's really precious and then find the words to explain it.

One of the things I love is the Band's live version of the Motown song "Don't Do It," recorded at the Academy of Music in New York City on New Year's Eve in 1971. Levon Helm sings lead. It's lean, sharp as an icicle, almost explosively powerful. That long-ago night in New York was the first time the Band had worked with a horn section. Howard Johnson, who'd played with Charles Mingus and later led the Saturday Night Live band, played tuba and baritone sax. The horns helped make "Don't Do It" a masterpiece. Near the end, Helm and the late Rick Danko take this line as Helm plays a complicated drum pattern which you're amazed he can hold together while singing: "My biggest mistake was loving you too much." Then Johnson and the rest of the horns come back in with a mighty roar.

I'd be surprised if I've heard the song fewer than 1,000 times in the course of nearly 40 years. If I could have just one song, I'd be content with "Don't Do It." As it happened, Howard Johnson also anchored the horn section last night at the Midnight Ramble. After the show, he walked out behind Helm, and I touched him on the shoulder and said, "Thank you. God bless you." He smiled and said, "Thank you." Perhaps presumptuous of me, definitely gracious of him. I felt like I was thanking him for all the music I'd ever loved.

Wish-I'd-Known Songs: "You're The One"

Steve Kimock and Crazy Engine, performing in April 2009

I have no idea about the song, nor, I'm ashamed to say, had I been aware of the artist, nor his deep links at all levels of the Grateful Dead community, until my music buddy Boom Baker suggested we see Kimock at the Bearsville Theater in Bearsville, New York during our upcoming pilgrimage to Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble (about which much more later).

For The Love Of Children

If you want a shot of energy, sit next to philanthropist and businesswoman Sandy Segerstrom Daniels for lunch, as I did today at Scott's Grill, in the shadow of Costa Mesa, California's mighty South Coast Plaza. We lucky Orange Countians (including my other lunch companion, former County Supervisor Tom Wilson) were serving as judges for "Season of Caring presents the Possible Dream," the annual fundraising drive by the Orange County Register and South Coast Plaza on behalf of the county's charities benefiting children in need.

Sandy launched the Festival of Children Foundation in 2002 and serves as its executive director. As a leading supporter of the Register-South Coast Plaza tie-in (carefully nurtured by my longtime colleague Noah McMahon, a trustee of St. John's School, shown here riding around in circles to finish off last year's drive), Sandy graciously presided over today's working lunch along with the ever-resourceful Jackie Saragueta, who oversees the Register's own annual holiday drive, Season of Caring. It's raised over $6 million for local charities since former Register publisher N. Christian Anderson (my St. John's Church brother) launched it in 1999.

Since we judges gathered this time last year, Daniels' passion for helping non-profits that care for children has gone national. Earlier this year, former Supervisor Wilson, now handling the Festival of Children Foundation's governmental relations, helped Sandy persuade Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina to join with California's Diane Feinstein and their opposite numbers in the House to designate September as National Child Awareness Month to draw further attention to children's charities. The Daniels-Wilson team is now getting to work persuading Orange County's cities to follow suit, and the timing couldn't be better. These charities need and deserve all the attention they can get as kids are whipsawed between crisis unemployment levels and government's dwindling resources.

If children unite us, so does music. Another member of Sandy Daniels' team is Cassady Taylor, Festival of Children's director of marketing and public relations. He's named after Neal Cassady, a seminal Beat Generation figure who appears under another name in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Cassady's father, John Taylor (no relation, except in a larger sense), was an audio technician for the Grateful Dead, which in John's day was known for having the finest sound system every designed for a rock and roll band.

To make all this perfectly clear to any Republican Deadheads who may still be reading, Cassady is not named for the Bob Weir-John Perry Barlow song "Cassidy," which appears on Weir's 1972 album, "Ace" -- though Weir and Barlow are said to have had Neal in mind along with another Cassidy, daughter of a band archivist. And to end up, as we so often do, with politics, Cassady Taylor's stepfather is a son of President Nixon's late friend and former advance man, Jack Drown, and his wife and Mrs. Nixon's best friend, the late Helene Drown.

So like I said: Donate to "Season of Caring Presents the Possible Dream"!

Just Because Songs: "Hard To Handle" (1968)

The Grateful Dead in 1970. Vocals by Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. Two drummers on the stage and nine fingers on Jerry Garcia, who plays an exceptionally lucid solo. I think that's the future CEO of American Express in the audience. Song written by Otis Redding, Al Bell, and Allen Jones.

Dead Songs: "When I Paint My Masterpiece" (1971)

Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia, Letterman show, September 17, 1987; song by Bob Dylan

Hat tip to Paul Matulic, with whom I saw the Grateful Dead perform at Madison Square Garden two nights before. (You were perhaps wondering about the set list that night?) I remember thinking that the boys looked old. Yet in this video, they look relatively young (Weir more than Garcia, of course, who never looked exactly young).

I was President Nixon's chief of staff at the time. When he called my home that evening (to "check a few things," as he often did) and was told I was at a Grateful Dead concert, he may have concluded that I was at the funeral of an unpleasant person.

Arrows Of Neon And Flashing Marquees

When I sent a Grateful Dead video to my Nixonian congressional Deadhead friend Paul and noted that vocalist and guitarist Bob Weir had flubbed the first line, he took a break from solving all the problems of the world at the office on Saturday and wrote:

I really cracked up when I saw this clip. You will appreciate this now: Bob Weir flubbed the lyrics to "Truckin'" -- without a doubt, the Dead's best-known song -- more times than any other song. It was a well-known source of humor for the Deadheads. (I was always amazed that he could remember every single lyric to a long piece like Dylan's "Desolation Row," while regularly flubbing "Truckin'.")

Creation Story Songs: "Truckin'" (1970)

Grateful Dead

I found this gem from their 1972 European tour (during which the meticulous and sublime "Europe '72" live album was recorded) after the discouraging experience of seeing the Dead, the band's post-Jerry Garcia iteration, tonight on Letterman.