Walk Me Out

Casa d'Chernaik
Portland, Oregon

Technology damns us and dawns on us and binds our galaxy together... the sun breaks through artificial cycles and pounds gently... the Haight in 2000... situational music comes as hard as it goes... crackling energy sends us hurdling back across the Bay Bridge and up the stairs at Maritime Hall, where we encounter a pack of jackals worshipping Garcia... Sector 9 for a better future...

The past four or five days has been marked by a series of minor technological and communications disasters -- wires failing where they shouldn't, connections collapsing where they definitely shouldn't, and people (myself included) dropping off the radar with nary an explanation that would satisfy even the most tolerant editor. I've spent the past few days somewhat liberated from the Medusa-like beast of technology capped by thousands of trailing and fiery strands of fiber-optic cable.

It's also made me acutely aware of the enslaving effect some of this stuff has been having on my brain. As the sun set on the campground in Big Sur and the wine neared the bottom, I alternated between a drunken dizziness at a night without email and a dangerous imbalance I felt creeping into my psyche. As far as camping goes, we were pretty darned cushed out. It was a step or two down from a motel. Even so, it all but forced us back into the sun's cycle. Jon and I woke up soon after sunrise, the sun just beginning to turn the tent into an oven.

We scraped ourselves off the nylon flooring early on the morning of August 1st and washed the grime off our faces. wandering outside, we blinked at the blinding light of early morning. The night before, we had purchased a small block of cheese to nosh on. I wondered what we would do with it if we didn't finish it. Somewhere in the evening, it got forgotten. When we climbed out of the tent, the empty wrapper lay near the picnic table, ravaged by wild life; an easy solution.

The drive to San Francisco was easy, if a bit boring. We were to be staying with my friend Rachel at a CO-OP in Berkeley, but she didn't get off of work until 4:30. Without too much conscious design, we ended up in the middle of Haight-Ashbury, the tacky shopping mall at the end of the hippie highway. Overpriced head shops with small (and occasionally tasteful) shrines to the neighborhood's famous ex-denizens littered the streets, punctuated by hip clothing outlets. I suspect that the Haight in the sixties wasn't too different -- overpriced head shops and trendy clothing stores.

Being August 1st - Garcia's birthday - we walked over to 710 to pay our respects. With the exception of a small flower wedged into the gate, the place was devoid of observers. If spirits flew, they didn't make their presence known. Cassady, Garcia, Pig, and any other former residents of 710 seemed to stay far away, perhaps knowing that whatever they might've meant to people had nothing to do with specific place.

***
We trundled down Market Street on the way to the Bay Bridge and Berkeley. Suddenly, we found ourselves stuck in traffic at the corner of Van Ness. "Shit," I mumbled, and went flipping through my CD book. "I hope you don't mind I'm doing this," I announced to Jon, and threw it "Irresistible Bliss" by Soul Coughing, cueing it up to White Girl, which begins: "White girl / Market at Van Ness..."

We've been doing it for the whole trip: Soul Coughing's Is Chicago (Is Not Chicago) speeding out of the Windy City, the Grateful Dead's Cassidy burning out of Denver, Soul Coughing's Screenwriter's Blues driving up the Pacific Coast Highway in Los Angeles late one night, moe.'s Californ IA going up the coast the next day, and Zappa's "We're Only In It For The Money" on the way into San Francisco. It's a somewhat easy and cliché thing to do... but what are ya gonna do, really? It's fun.

In places, it's worked wonders, becoming almost like an ambient counterpoint to our surroundings. Mark De Gli Antoni's throbbing orchestral electronica, covered with the gentle warm crackle of aged film, seemed to mirror the waves lapping on the shore moving along side us at 70 miles an hour. In other places, it's been somewhat ineffectual (such as Is Chicago from the same SC album). At Market and Van Ness, it worked well, the light changing about one second after the line flashed by, just enough time for us to get moving and for the girl of the song to move eastbound outta sight.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, we killed more time in Berkeley while we tried to establish contact with Rachel -- the first sign of our descent into a wireless-less world. After a quick foray to a Sushi joint around the block, we climbed up onto the roof of Rachel's CO-OP and watched the sun set over the Bay while listening to some Phish from this summer. Normally an east-coaster, Rachel dropped herself in the Bay for the summer with nary a plan to go see Phish. Our tapes were her first viable connection to the events that went on without her, and she took to them with an immeasurable glee that was absolutely infectious. We danced on the roof and watched the clouds shift through various colorations over the hills of Marin County.

***
The day before, I found out that Sector 9 - a band I'd seen back east a bunch of times - would be playing in San Francisco on the night of our arrival. The information was sketchy at best -- something about an after-party for a new documentary about the Dead. I remembered reading something about the film, so it wasn't too hard to discern that it was "End Of The Road". A friend whose opinion I trust told me that the film was, to say the least, pretty atrocious. I didn't feel too guilty for missing it.

Sector 9, it should be noted, are part of the new wave of electronic influenced jambands, playing definite dancing music with little audible connection to the Grateful Dead, bluegrass, blues, or many of the other vernaculars the music usually finds its roots in. It's a night kind of music, the kind you hear racing towards a skyline at night, neon yellow lines pulsing down the road and humming under your car like a ribbon or a wave and exploding behind you in a trail of cubist stardust.

The night seemed to be invested with that same kind of pure energy that Sector 9 seems to encapsulate in their music. A sheer kind of momentum began to build as soon as we found out where the band was playing and held us firmly in its grip right up through Sector 9's set. The weird energy shot through us, like the first waves that rush over a body after eating mushrooms, cheeks and tongue twitching nervously and spasmodically, waiting for something to happen and half wondering if it already has. It was a night where it seemed like energy flowed in every direction, like one could end up anywhere and damn well imagine that everybody would be having as a grand a time as he was.

Climbing the stairs at the Maritime, I discovered that Jerry's Kids - a Bay Area GD cover band - were playing in celebration of Garcia's birthday. Bursting into the main room, Merl Saunders was on stage, being Merl; singing old blues chestnuts and reminiscing fondly about his old buddy Jerome. The music was comfortably tepid, and pretty much what anyone - Deadhead or cynic alike - would expect from a band of older Deadheads in San Francisco five years after Garcia's death. It didn't push any boundaries, and it wasn't expected to either. "THANK YOU, JERRY!" they screamed as they left the stage.

Confusion and mayhem seemed to grip the setbreak by the balls. Wandering around the hall, stone cold sober, the same relentless energy still seemed to seethe electrically between the audience members. I couldn't quite figure it out. Chet Helms, one of the proprietors of the Family Dog Collective, spoke about his experiences with Garcia. It became clear that the people at the gathering were of the mindset of interpreting Garcia's work as a body of somewhat literal lessons of "What would Jerry do?", usually offering up their own opinions in the bargain.

Justin Kreutzmann, the son of GD drummer Billy, showed video footage of an interview he conducted with Garcia himself on the topic of Deadheads. The crowd watched the screens enraptured. Meanwhile, one of the members of Jerry's Kids found himself in front of the microphone encouraging the crowd to sing "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" to Chet Helms, who was himself turning over a year at midnight. Some members of the crowd started to sing, while others tried to "SSSSHHHHH" them because Garcia was talking on screen -- being fairly inarticulate, at that (somewhat odd for him). Still, the room crackled.

I didn't expect the crowd to last very long in front of Sector 9. I love the music of the Grateful Dead, and I love the music of Sector 9, but - as I thought at the start of the evening - there seemed to be something intrinsically incompatible about them. I couldn't imagine that a crowd who would go see a cover band on Garcia's birthday would gain much from Sector 9. By the time Sector 9 had wound their way through three-quarters of their mostly improvised set, the crowd had - indeed - halved. But less people left than I thought would.

Beautiful people of all shapes, sizes, and ages whirled, twirled, and danced to the grooves, which hovered somewhere just above minimalistic. An older Deadhead man in front of me spun happily for the duration of the set. The music was organic sounding and, in a highly illogical way, seemed at the time to represent some new product of the Grateful Dead universe.

The promise of the sixties was a more sensible world. The reality of it is that it didn't happen. Industry still encroached on culture, wars still happened with no real moral justification, and all those other mean, nasty, and ugly things that spawned the truly radical movements of the day pretty much went on undaunted except in small ways. Sector 9 seem to be a modern reappraisal of that, some kind of middle ground between the beckoning of an industrial future and a human race.

The show got out at a little after two. As we headed back over the Bay Bridge with the windows rolled down, it felt like morning.

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