Satellite's Gone

Satellite Motel
Omaha, Nebraska

Above the waves... misguided Greeks, Stephen Hawking, and Terry the Tramp... the Dead go to the bathroom, the Angels to go Pizza Hut, we all go to lite jazz hell... waves crashing violently in some kind of terrible storm, eventually subsiding to a gently lapping... spitting through out teeth on the banks of the Mississippi... cutting through the storm and ending up in a round room in lovely Omaha...

People said at the outset of tour that I'd come out it despising Phish, spitting black bile on their name and reputation. I didn't, but I saw the dark waves creeping. If I'd wanted to, they'd've been damn easy to ride. I wonder if it's fair to say that there's a large chance I'll come out of this trip hating America. I didn't want to hate Phish. I see the distinct possibility looming, curling back like the hideous calm before a tsunami. I see the same thing happening in a lot of people I know. I've been thinking a lot about waves lately; as a social form, as an astronomical form, as a psychological form.

One of the earliest known theories of creation, courtesy of the ancient Greeks (who, despite being evolved in their own way, still tended to run around like rabid anti-evolutionists) involved waves. Accounting for the rigid and unchanging universe, they figured that life on Earth had existed for all eternity, wiped back to the beginning every thousand years or so by floods, plagues, Hell's Angels, unwed mothers, or any number of other evils. But mostly floods. When it comes right down to it, assuming one buys into the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory, that might not be too far off: civilization could expand and expand and expand, and - in a cosmological blink - get wiped right back to void and begin again.

It's a damn apt metaphor anywhere. "San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch the sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... so now, less than five years later you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back" (Thompson 66-8).

Whatever it meant, it might still. Who's to say? There's a picture of the Dead in first volume of "the Grateful Dead Taper's Compendium" labeled "tripping in the Marin Headlands, 1967". The sun backlighting the band, who are almost exploding in glorious color, bodies in motion. It's the closest visual approximation I've ever seen to the sentiments expressed in "Fear and Loathing".

Yesterday afternoon, I wandered into a rest stop in mid-Indiana. As I stood in front of a urinal, I heard whistling slapping back from the porcelain behind me. After a pause, I realized that I was quite consciously whistling along to the music that was slowly leaking out of the ceiling -- Touch Of Gray by the Dead. It neither surprised me nor really upset me, though - regardless of the fact that I was still about eight years away from being a Deadhead when the song came out - it still boggles me to hear it in public places.

It doesn't seem so much like a bastardization of a subculture rather than a small co-opting, which is quite different. It's like a film crew that came in and made a documentary. For a brief moment, what once had a semblance of respectful quiet was suddenly beamed whole into a mass consciousness, whether they understood it or not. Whether they were still genuinely representatives of a counterculture in 1987, when Touch was a hit, the Grateful Dead were - at one point in their careers - symbols of something alternative to the mainstream.

Hearing the refrain "we will survive" in the bathroom of a rest stop drove that point home. It was almost this cry of endurance for the matured, somewhat settled, counter-culture that was its undoing. They almost didn't survive; and, certainly - with the denigration of the Grateful Dead organization into what seems to be, on almost every level, a genuine American corporation - one could make a convincing argument for the fact that they didn't, rather they got assimilated whole into American culture which, thirty years down the line, isn't markedly different from where it was when the Grateful Dead came into existence.

Either way, the Grateful Dead were part of a wave of dissent which crashed a long time ago. They continued to move along for 20 or so years, a smaller wave system, before they seem to have been channeled through some sort of power station and filtered out, by way of rest stop PAs, to the masses, becoming almost a recognized symbol of rebellion. Wanna rebel? Go on Dead tour. Like it or not, a lot of that social weight still carries over to Phish.

A lot of things were part of that wave. As I walked out of the bathroom, I nearly crashed smack dab into a band of Hell's Angels, who strutted into the rest stop in full colors. Few people, other than maybe a kid or two, batted an eye. They seemed to be regarded as little more than a curiousity, not something to genuinely fear. People seemed to happily accept the Angels as colorful, filling a requisite quota, so that they don't have to be.

And where are these waves now?

The rest stop I was in looked like every other rest stop in the country. The layout was standard, the stock was not of any local origin, and the employees - working for huge corporations - couldn't care less. In a tittering moment of paranoia, one might consider what anybody has to gain by standardizing everything. It makes things simpler. There's less of a shock when traveling because things pretty much seem the same everywhere, which is precisely the effect it has. If someone sees that things run the same way in Arizona as they do near his home in Iowa, then what's the point in traveling when they can stay home, work, make money, and see the same things they'd see everywhere?

Are things really the same, though? Or does it just look that way from the highway?

***
This afternoon, we sat in front of a row of funky houses and dangled our feet in the Mississippi River, about a mile down the road from the bridge connecting Illinois to Iowa. Soon, we saw lightning in the distance. Within an hour or so, the sky was split neatly into two parts. To the left was a silken storm cloud, colored a rich oil-paint like gray, which spat thick lightning bolts at the ground and at other clouds every minute or so. To the right, beams of light cut through clouds, sending clean shafts slicing through a blue sky just before sunset. Right down the middle was the highway.

I might not believe in signs or omens or augury or dream interpretation, but I was never one to resist a good metaphor -- the difference between the two categories lying in a fatal fatalism. To the left, it stormed darkly. To the right, the land was lit from the heavens. The highway curved to the left. At the same time, the car - which probably needs some kind of wheel realignment - will drift to the right if the wheel is left unattended for even half of a second. Where were we going? Smack through the heart of the storm, of course.

After some minutes of deep rain, we saw sunshine in the distance -- the same kind of heavenly light cutting through clouds as we saw before. Fuck, man, what other option was there? Could the storm possibly continue on forever? While I can't resist a good metaphor, I'm happy to piss on undue omens. It was just sunshine. And if the storm continued on, so what? We weren't in any hurry. There are no shows to get to, and no destination other than the west coast to attend to. Both Jon and I are perpetual worriers with little to worry about. If we get lost, so what? What're you gonna do? Get lost, of course.

We pulled off the highway just over the Nebraska state line and followed the directions in the soon to be tattered "Let's Go" guide to what seemed like a normal motel called the Satellite. It wasn't a chain, so we decided to go for it. As we approached, I reread the description: "a round satellite look-a-like. Clean, wedge-shaped rooms...". The room, with the bathroom, is a triangular. A fundamental change in architecture does wonders for the psyche.

There was some architectural philosopher somewhere along the line who wrote a series of treatises about how round buildings would promote better air circulation and whatnot. They never quite caught on, though there are some interesting examples. I'm sitting at a table in the middle of the room. Looking up, where my eyes expect to see straight lines meeting at 90 degree angles, I instead see cross beams shooting in every direction. If there's a 90 degree angle here, it's almost incidental and that much more visually effective. The whole thing feels like one is seeing the world from the warped perspective of a David Hockney photo-painting. It's twisted, but it's a relief.

Visually and conceptually, it's a huge change from the kinds of places I've been staying, and expect to stay for the duration of the trip: neat, packaged, standardized hotel rooms with two beds, a television, and a phone, all in a very precise and neat order that's pretty much unchanging from hotel to hotel, as it seems it's been for all eternity -- a similar kind of sturdy stability that the Greeks were trying to prove in their own world with their theory of waves. Yet, somehow the Satellite Motel slipped in. It was clearly built sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, when product standardization seemed to come to the forefront of popular culture. It was an exception then and it's an exception now.

It says the most that neither Jon nor I will lift pillows from here to replace the ones we accidentally left at our respective homes.

Works Cited

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. New York: Vintage Books. 1971.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Previous tour journals are located here.