Remember Captain Trips

Jerry Garcia died ten years ago today.

At the time, I attended prayer services regularly with a group started by a man who had once been a manager of the Grateful Dead's road crew. He had a picture of Jerry on his wall, along with a picture of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the singing rabbi. I was told that a good many people thought of Jerry as their first rabbi - not that he taught anyone Torah or led traditional prayer services or anything like that, but he encouraged his audience to seek enlightenment and find God in their lives. And, let's face it, he looked Jewish. Because of his last name, there was even a theory floating around that he was descended from "hidden Jews" who converted to Catholicism in Spain during the Inquisition and continued their Jewish lives in secret.

I believe that someone eventually disproved that theory - Jerry Garcia was no more a Jew than Pope John Paul II, another great Gentile - but it was a nice idea while it lasted.

At about the same time, George Will wrote an op-ed piece in Newsweek regarding Jerry and the whole Deadhead culture. I can't find it on-line, unfortunately.

He began by saying that the Grateful Dead could not be held accountable for the actions of their fans, and proceeded to tell the story of a couple of hippies who abandoned their baby somewhere in California so they could go see the Dead unencumbered. This, he said, was the logical conclusion of the whole 60s counterculture, represented and advocated by the Grateful Dead - it was infantile, completely uninterested in anything but the satisfaction of its appetites, regardless of consequence to anyone or anything else.

I call this poppycock, myself. Saying such things about the various movements in the 1960s is a little like saying that the American values trumpeted so loudly by Will and his kind are utterly worthless because they sometimes led to child abuse, racist segregation, murderous imperialist adventuring, and lives filled with existential despair. George Will is a tunnel-visioned, pencil-necked geek; Jerry Garcia, for all his flaws, was a much-loved dreamer of humanistic dreams. You do the math.

But there's really no use ranting, I guess. The world we live in now, for better or worse, is a world that the Grateful Dead helped build, and I can sympathize with George Will because I like it this way and he obviously doesn't. Then again, he has survived it, and so have I. Whether he was born too sensitive or damaged himself beyond his ability to cope, Jerry Garcia did not survive, and neither did the dream of the 1960s for a better world. I grieve for them both.



Benshlomo says, Hey Jerry, save me a front-row seat.