(Continued from Part One)

My first Grateful Dead show was at RFK in '91. I was fifteen and knew nothing about making love. I remember the flowing dresses and the flowers and the smell of patchouli and the little toddlers running around in tie-dies and the girl who grabbed me during Stella Blue and started crying and I cried with her. I didn't know why. She had driven all the way from Tennessee for the show "and this is what I did it for" she said as she danced and I danced with her, bodies moving as one, and it was as close as I had come to making love at that point. I was just beginning to get IT and as I felt a pulsating rise in my pants it wasn't the girl or the dance that did it. It was everything. It was the gentle cry of rosebud as Jerry Garcia drifted down the slipstreams of Dark Star, the pinwheeling spinners shape-shifting the hallways, the psychedelic cowboys with their wild honey eyes and their wild honey proclamations, the drum circles and the shakedown alleyways...it was everything.

Up until that point, I had been to concerts before - Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Guns N' Roses...But this? THIS? This wasn't a concert. This was a celebration! A soft eruption of sound coming from the stage, building note by note, moving in and out of everybody present, one by one. There was no separation between band and audience; the music was like a thread, weaving its way through one person from the next. This was a way of making love to life. A mass communion, a giant exclamation mark, an affirmation, a call to the adventure.

By the time I experienced my first Phish show three years later, I had accepted the call and I had eaten the apple. I tasted the forbidden fruit and only wanted more. Beads of sweat formed on Page's forehead. He pounded on the keyboards frenetically, Split Open And Melt built higher and higher into a euphoric release of sound and light, body and spirit and some girl beside me was thrashing her arms wildly as if possessed by Dionysus, clutching onto the chair in front of her to regain her balance, now launching and lunging forward, now twirling and twisting back, the guy in front of her took out a notepad and, clenching a mini-flashlight in his teeth, started writing notes about these bizarre going-ons. I looked over his shoulder to see his assessment and all I saw was this: “You Enjoy Myself.” I didn’t know what to make of it, but I agreed with it I’m sure. Page appeared now to be making faces at the first three rows behind him, he swiveled between keyboards, fingers moving delicately across the keys as he slid nonchalantly into the ending composition of Lizards. Mike bobbed his head in approval and then stood rigid and still like a cactus, universal currents running through his body, making their escape through his bass.

The lights swished and swooshed, the stage was set up like an aquarium, some guy had just jumped chairs to make it to the row behind me and he was now trying to talk to some girl about rodents. “He can’t be talking about rodents,” I thought and turned around to make sure that he was really there at all, and sure enough he was, and sure enough he was talking about rodents and sure enough the girl wasn’t all that interested and wanted to get back to the music and three years later I’d see that guy again at a campground in Morrison, Colorado for the Red Rocks run, and to this day I continue to bump into him from time to time and I even know his name now, I think, although I’m not 100 percent positive it’s him and I’ve never heard him bring up rodents again so who’s to say really.

On stage, Jon Fishman sat Zen-like in his silly frock, limbs moving rhythmically for 90 minutes on end in Tantric meditation; eyes alight, mouth agape. His drums were positioned on stage right, not in the conventional place for a drum set, not that convention mattered here and by now that was obvious to me and the beats he had going on were fantastic. They really were. Trey of course was the most animated throughout all of this, electricity making him a lightbulb, his body romancing every note before he let it leave his fingers and run rampant down the neck of his guitar. He leaned into the measures, pushing for the total knock-out, rocking back and forth, side to side, entangled as a lover's dance before allowing himself to unleash, to hose the audience with bolts of sugar lightning and a sweaty string of tornados and crescendos and just about anything else as Harry Hood finally slammed into its grand finale.

There were silhouettes from the top levels, shadow dancers on the juice, getting squishy and squashy and sprawling about as if to gobble up every bit of free space they could find, on assignment for an Easter Egg hunt or something, I don’t know, but it was glorious to watch and it was moving to behold and it would take me some time before I could purify myself enough to be ascended into their ranks and wise enough to accept their invitation and in doing so I really feel as if I have regained a sort of innocence that by its very nature is pure and true and beautiful and I’m positive beyond dispute that it has added wings where I had none and skies where I thought I saw ceiling.

For the encore, the band held the audience in a gentle caress with Amazing Grace, a prayer for the ones who after much searching had finally been found, and the acapella harmony allowed people to come back into themselves and reacquaint themselves with hands and feet and stomachs and appetites and all of that boring logistical stuff before heading out into the cold New England snowstorm that awaited outside.

I had forgotten that there even was an outside. I was so far in, inside, that I needed to stay in my seat and wait patiently until I came to. I would like to say I made love to the music but in reality it was the music that made love to me. Afterwards, I smoked the best cigarette of my life. Next to the one I smoked after losing my virginity.

You see, I want to dash mad-like through the hidden coves and the dimly lit pockets of the Wetlands Preserve and through the run down staircase that leads backstage at the Trocadero and take it out to the hardened concrete alters of Phish lot, motionless despite geography, yet ever moving and breathing, a living entity that exists like foreplay before curtain time, like a long cool drag from the lips of this great continent. I want to be on the run from a Stratocaster as it chases hungry hearts down Interstate 55 from Chicago blues rooms down to juke joints in New Orleans. I want to do it to the bars and nightclubs of America like Henry Miller did it to the cafes and whorehouses of Paris, France.

I'm calling for an end to cliff notes and prime time, and up with nights spent reckless on a blurry-sighted Bourbon Street, or Beale Street, or Canal Street, or Main Street in Northampton, Massachusetts where the people shuffle cow-like and silent after a great show at the Iron Horse or the Calvin or Pearl St. and there's no where to go, no where to take that energy, and why? Why silent? Why cow? I want people to be screaming in the streets, leading circus-like parades past the marketplace, spilling jazz out the doors of the Haymarket...I want to live life like the top of a teapot being pushed open by heat and by steam and I want music to be the steam. I want it to be so that I can't contain myself...so that YOU can't contain yourself...I want it to be that you leave the Fillmore Auditorium or the Somerville Theater or the Crystal Ballroom with water boiling through your skin and steam coming out of your lids.

I want to take notes from John Scofield who has a way of making his guitar sound like red wine and candlelight, from Trey Anastasio who makes angels out of amplifiers and from Bob Marley who sounds great being played at full volume out of dormitory windows and onto the quads where, long after his death, he can still make the kids sweat and smile and sing along. I want to hear Miles Davis give it to me like gospel and I want to see Marshall Allen and Michael Ray at odds as they battle out Sun Ra sermons in a shady side bar, tossing in Tweezer teases for the young ones.

The job of a song-and-dance band is to entertain. The job of a jam band is to interact - to allow the notes and the melodies to touch base with God and return with the Jedi.

Certainly not every jam band does this although ideally, all of them try. Many of them, in attempting to drink of the sacred elixir and slide slippery like through holy canals, end up somewhere just past hugs and kisses yet short of reaching the pearl. They entertain us for an evening in bars for a five spot cover and we dance for a couple hours and do the hopscotch with friends and this is all fine and dandy for candy but as much as I enjoy a bit of fooling around, I'm after the whole shebang I guess.

I've seen how many bands that can make me put down my beer and dance, make me laugh with friends and say "I'd see them again," make me ask the tapers if they'd be willing to trade? But what I really want is a band that will wrap their legs around me and ask me to crawl inside.

I think of leaving the Wetlands at dawn after an all night fuck-fest from The Disco Biscuits, or of the great herds of people sweating on each other and past each other on their way out of the gates of Hampton Coliseum after Phish has landed. I think of a set I saw from the Slip in a basement in Boston back in '96, and of Galactic screaming their way through a masquerade in New York this past Halloween and there's a million bands out there that I have yet to hear, yet to even hear of. That excites me.

You see, when you make love to life, you end up finding the right soundtrack. And so I will continue to do-si-do in and out of bars and venues, across cities and entire states, caught up like Walt Whitman as I sing the body electric. And I will find many bands that will entertain and a few that will do a whole lot more. It is the search for those bands that keeps me renewing my membership in a scene that is still in search of a definition.

Enjoy the bands that blow you kisses from the stage, but search, really search, for the bands that can do more...I know I will.

Part Three – soon!