“Just had that . . . it's weird. Just had that little feeling . . . you ever get that funny little feeling [of] 'vujà dé'? No, not déjà vu. This is vujà dé. This is the strange feeling that, somehow, none of this has ever happened before. And then it’s gone.”

~ George Carlin (RIP George – if anybody deserves some of that RESpecT, you do, too, brother!)

“A life without cause is a life without effect.”

~ David Hemmings (aka “Dildano”) to Jane Fonda in Barbarella (a delicious, existential pun proving axiomatic for her, CSN, et al. in their activism)

“Caught in that sensual music [where] all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”

~ William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Rock IN, Rock UP, Rock ON, Rock OUT . . . Rock AND/OR* Roll! (*With thanks to “Reverend Lovejoy” of The Simpsons for the just brilliant “and/or” that remains, for me, a huge smile.)

CSN’s recent concert in Eugene – and the opportunity to compose this review – arrived at a fortuitous moment. I’d just finished editing the proofs for a physician’s forthcoming book: as I see (read/edit) it, a quasi-memoir presenting plentiful anecdotal prescriptions for seeking alternatives within standard allopathic models for health care in doctor-patient relationships.

Not necessarily my, uh, primary care, because I prefer naturopaths, homeopathy, etc. But I do consider important alternatives, such as universal health care; and I, like C & S & N, tend to think about oh-too-many issues, as you may imagine, and may likewise do while reading this review.

Anyhooo, having finished up that project for now, I was free to digest my CSN concert-going experience, plus take two days exercising what’s left of my wits in service to writing about it.

So, for what it’s worth . . . and, as I was saying: rock IN, rock UP, rock ON, and rock OUT!

On this “9-11” (2012) anniversary, Messieurs (David) Crosby, (Stephen) Stills, and (Graham) Nash rocked all that—and our sensibilities—courtesy of themselves, plus the stellar support band whose personnel includes a cadre of versatile touring pros (seen audience left-to-right, whose associations Nash later introduced): from Stills’ band, jazz organist Todd Caldwell; drummer Steve DiStanislao (David Gilmour); bassist Kevin McCormick (on loan, as Nash teased him, from fortunately-not-touring Jackson Browne); backing lead guitarist – and we learned, Eugene, Oregon’s own – Shane Fontayne (Sting, Springsteen); and Crosby’s son, James Raymond (CSN writer/collaborator on incisive, new songs such as “Almost Gone”).

Such wonderful assemblages, at first glance, probably don’t seem unusual these years, what with make-a-buck, unwarranted “stunt-casting” and cameos in TV and films, and roll-your-eyes, make-a-lot-of-bucks, one-off musical pairings. But for CSN, de rigueur collaboration is a trove of both credited and un-credited historical kinships in discographies. I perused my own collection to recall just how treasured. (I’ll warrant you’d discover more interrelatedness, too, via the good ol’ InterwebbingZ.)

Grab your reading glasses then, and revisit album- and CD-liner notes for various efforts by CSN, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, and more. Partly lost to this history (likely, because these folks and their contemporaries did not insist on namedrop, uber-ego billing for their potluck contributions to the music), these and other artisans’ now-famous, “individual” and/or side-project efforts actually involved, if poorly remembered by us, myriad cross over assists.

For just a few, early-to-latter-day examples: instrumental and vocal combinations of C, S, N elevate Court and Spark (Mitchell); Taylor and Linda Ronstadt illuminate the Harvest Moon (Young); Wonder, with his heaven-sent harmonica, fulfills Taylor’s Hourglass; ad infinitum. Oh yeah, one more-well-known tidbit: the Eagles’ ubiquitous “Take It Easy”? – co-written with UNfortunately-not-touring Jackson Browne.

James Taylor would write, lifetimes later in 1999, as we were (still are) moving, fitfully, into this new millennium – awaiting whatever “rough beast . . . slouches . . . to be born” (Yeats; and cf. Van Morrison): “Those were remarkable days. . . .  Joni, Jackson, CSNY, Eagles, Carole King . . . exceptional was commonplace. The record industry was a labor of love in the service of the music. It was a hoot.”

So, witnessing this evening’s banding together seems, if not familiar to us, then natural for C&S&N, who themselves comprise not only a collaborative effort (and whose still-soaring harmonics require meticulous collaboration), but who have emerged from other historical incubators (some might argue: crucibles), with a hoot-and-a-holler (lots of hollering?!) by way of Buffalo Springfield (Stills and Young), The Byrds (Crosby), and The Hollies (Nash).

I've attended CSN performances several times during 25 years, in venues larger (at eastern WA’s Gorge; S. F.’s Golden Gate Park), and smaller (at The Hult Center, in Eugene), and also in-between, including this week at Eugene's lovely parkland, copper-half-domed, riverside Cuthbert Amphitheater. Although I am certain I do not qualify as a CSN aficionado, this is thus both familiar terrain and musical territory for me, and is doubtless likewise for most of the 5,000 gathered for CSN’s sold-out incantatory revisitation. Welcome!

On another of those occasions, CSN might take a song or three to warm the individual pipes, or to attune the collaborative harmonies that would challenge anyone half their age(s). Not this evening. Notwithstanding CSN’s fleeting kerfuffle with some late-night, late-summer’s eve no-see-ums (including Crosby's mid-second-set bug battle, complemented by hilarious, tongue-in-cheek/bug-in-throat commentary, and alleviated by a generous spritz of repellant  . . . sorry David!), CSN, individually and collectively – instrumentally and harmonically – hit their in-performance strides from the opening notes! Welcome indeed. Woo-hoo!!

So, yes, we enjoyed fitting shares of inviting déjà vu, but we also rejoiced in healthy doses of vujà dé, as the legendary CSN (and company), thus assembled, proceeded to rock our souls' consciousness . . . and our consciences, too.

If I want to anesthetize you by writing, say, a hip-artsy-cute concert review (and, sometimes, you know we all experience just that, because we read/write/see those reviews in assorted print, TV, and online media), I wouldn’t have served you with the preceding appetizer, nor with the following full-course meal. Instead, I would unconsciously (though mindfully, too) breeze through CSN's setlists, encapsulating the order of songs/titles, and thereby seem to convey how I – and now you – grokked the moment and genuinely felt the vibes; . . . that is, somethin' like:

“CSN Carry On with Questions and indictments (Chicago and Long Time Gone), then settle into the mystic (oops, sorry, that's Van Morrison) with Just a Song Before I Go and Southern Cross; next Lay Me Down with a redemptive hymnal, echoed by its thematic kin, Radio; quickly track us along the Marrakesh Express, before purposefully derailing headlong (and headstrong!) into that forlorn abyss of the now-Almost Gone, thanks(-less) to U.S. imprisonment/torture policies, which now include capture and mistreatment of U.S. citizens; then abide, waiting for a moment to arise (not with The Beatles' Blackbird), with Buffalo Springfield’s (Stills’) Bluebird, who likewise yearns "aloft a perch, . . . to fly away . . . home"); and finally, wisely tap into our community's Déjà Vu ("we have all been here before"), and into our communal – if no longer commune-ideal – resolve: not so much to engage in "free love," but to love freely and in peace . . . to Love the One You're With.” Peace and Love – still our finest ideas, dontcha think?!

Phew! Set One. Done. There you be. Unchallenging and mostly unchallenged. Quite tidy. Besides, what else do you need to understand? Because now you are in the know, right? Uh-huh, no, not so much. So I'm glad you asked (though others may not be such). We’ll see.

First, it's intellectually creative but emotionally bankrupt to perform these mostly nonsensical litanies, whether upon CSN or anyone else's sincere musical excursions. (You may, however, survey CSN's setlist at the end of this review.) Second, CSN, in lyrics and in performance, is not among pop culture's anesthetizing, unthinking bands.

More important, though, I would hope you'll agree such lists are far too cursory, and a lazy exposition – especially if we wish (or, Nash quietly implores on this evening and, presumably, at many performances, since we ought!) to bear meaningful witness to inhumane (in-)justices: currently marshaled against a war-crimes whistleblower (via Wikileaks), U.S. soldier Bradley Manning . . . and, as I'll add my voice to CSN’s, against any persons, imprisoned and tortured (e.g., at GitMo, aka Guantanamo Bay), or, likewise, “renditioned” elsewhere to be torture by our U.S. military and military/civilian surrogates.

Leave off the concert and this review, then, for a few moments now or later; and instead check out Nash and Raymond’s Almost Gone lyrics. Then watch their powerful, chilling history-in-context video for this song.

Meanwhile, back at the Cuthbert. . . . Manning's actions are thus neither simple nor reducible to right-or-wrong. (Is it a crime to “betray” a loyalty oath by blowing whistles on war crimes and criminals?) Nash, before CSN launches into Almost Gone, succinctly vituperates, "I don't actually care whether [Manning's] guilty or innocent. Torture is not the way.” Ya think? Cue appreciative applause . . . among several sustained ovations in response to a Nash or Crosby fit-for-the-occasion pronouncement. (Stills, like the audience, clearly allied with them and us; but he was otherwise not given to verbal extemporaneity, at least not on this evening. Among rock’s guitar legends, Stills instead preached through his improvisatory axe . . . and it swore!)

Honestly, how does our cultural-collective, bedrock value – i.e., for which we shouldn't need laws (but for which, thankfully, we have them anyway) – that we do NOT torture other human beings, instead degenerate into official White-House memos (not laws) that codify-as-law that we may (because, hey, here ya go, here’s a how-to memo on ways to) torture human beings?!

These are “the questions of a thousand drea . . .” – no, nightmares – which CSN encourages us to ask. For CSN and for our cultures, counter or otherwise, we’ve not only all been here before (cf. Vietnam); furthermore, in our democracy, so-called, we are also each culpable and all share in the responsibility to hold our elected actors accountable for such, and other, war crimes now. Yes, many of us already realize: War IS a Crime. So too, obviously(?!), is torture.

Really then, now you understand how the sort of titles-as-content review above, without lots of context, would be too superficial and dismissive of these weighty concerns. (There’s plenty unadulterated c-r-a-p and corporate-music-industry crapulence, eh, where you can read-and-write such nonsense. So let's reserve that for reality-TV-bubble-gum-idol-making music.) Not here. Not with CSN, not with legions of serious musicians and musical-poetic endeavors.

Here, such easy cataloguing neither does justice to the band-as-performers, nor does justice to C-&-S-&-N for being among our brethren witnesses (to unique or shared histories) and sometimes chroniclers of the zeitgeist (likewise, for example, Dylan); and thus, does neither justice to an audience's lived experiences and sympathetic, civic-minded dispositions, nor to the very occasions that are CSN performances, both in song and in their interstitial insights and admonitions. (Though, perhaps, not including the flitter-flutter bug-battle-banter).

On this evening as at other of their performances, CSN’s lyrics and presences press us – even for the uninitiated and for many initiates gathering at what they may have thought would be a benign, "fun night out at a rock-n-roll concert" – to rally selves and one another to greater awareness, and, one hopes, beyond awareness to progressive civic action.

Whatever you think you remember, or have forgotten you even ever once knew about CSN, this trio is not now and never was some sanitized-and-innocuous, three-part-harmonies band that our corporate-music overlord greed-heads unceasingly fed us to believe. As Crosby and Nash playfully reminded us at odd-and-even moments, what even they think they remember, they’ve long since forgot. Two Nash-notes-to-Crosby: “I can't remember how @#$% long ago we wrote that [Just a] song [Before I Go]”; and, regarding the many-months-long tour that, for David, feels like three years: “Is the acid just kicking in?!” . . . then laying down a peerless, energetic Southern Cross.

Clearly then, senior-moments haven’t impacted their songwriting, singing, or performances. In other words, per Monty Python alumnus Eric Idle, in the brilliant, titular summation for his one-man (plus co-conspirators) tour, CSN is assuredly not “(Another Stupid Evening On . . .) The Greedy Bastard Tour.”

I should remark, too, like-minded kudos, and aversion to economic corpulence, applies to CSN’s longtime collaborator, Y (aka Neil Young). But this was a CSN-sans-Y performance. Still, it’s worth noting here that, some time ago, Young mused to the effect that his career arc from burgeoning folk troubadour to aging-and-raging rocker perhaps meant that, one day, he’d just explode. (Must locate that hilarious sound-bite.) Observing, listening, really tuning in with CSN the other night, I’ve gotta think they’re on similar trajectories. Keep on keepin’ on, gentlemen!

Not merely by coincidence, of course, but it so happens that CSN also pens and harmonizes several warm tunes, too, although they are hardly innocuous. Alliterative poetry in Helplessly Hoping and cross-generational didacticism in Teach Your Children (which served for bookends, opening the second set and providing the conclusion of multiple encores) require attention be paid to the messages, respectively, of our mystical and familial interconnections.

But oh, okay, then there was “Our House.” Gotta acknowledge the sappy in that. But cut ‘em all – CSN, writer Nash, any of us – some slack. When fortunes smile, plenty have expressed or experienced starry-eyed love. Besides, as Elton John – yet another troubadour from those never-really-were-halcyon yesteryears in a Laurel Canyon that included CSN, Mitchell, and many others previously mentioned – once crooned: “Love is what we came here for.”

Good for Nash, then . . . and good for all of us. Nash: “Who shall we dedicate this to [on this evening]?” Crosby: “How about [Mitchell, for whom Nash originally wrote it]?” Nash: “For Joan.” (La, la; La-la-la-la, La; la-la. . . .) A sweet, audience-sighing sing-along and late-second-set intervention into the evening’s otherwise more serious musical proceedings.

Because, substantially and substantively, CSN songs require quite a bit more from us, on this and any night. Sorry. Warm, yes, but seldom cutesy-fuzzy. Rather, following Stills-and-co.’s early-second-set, beauteous rendering of Dylan’s “Girl of the North Country,” Crosby, once again smiling, but not so tongue-in-cheek, demurred, "They say we're a political band. . . ."

Ya got that right! I recall, at that moment, wondering how lengthy each of their (and, likely, many audience members') clandestine-F.B.I. files must be. I wasn’t thinking this in, say, the For What It's Worth encore's sense of "paranoia strik[ing] deep . . . when you're always afraid," but rather contemplating this notion through the historical lens of a legitimate awareness that our authorities-in-power always fear, and regularly seek to quash by any means necessary, citizens’ question-authority articulations. No matter how peaceful—and, too often, as we've experienced or witnessed firsthand, they’ll freak out precisely because of (in inverse relation, and disproportionate, to) emergences among peaceable but heretofore subjugated peoples. (Think: civil rights, feminist, indigenous peoples’/developing nations’ movements. Discuss.)

Decades of CSN's brilliant songwriting and performance setlists have thus, no doubt, landed CSN in other playbills: not cataloguing their compositions, but making composites of them – namely, on U.S. government "enemies" and "watch" lists. For example, Ohio, although often performed but not on this night, remains CSNY's scathing antiwar anthem, which generally targets the Vietnam War, but also specifically discredits a would-have-been (was!) autocrat, Richard Nixon (who, as you’ll recall, had his very own, now-infamous "enemies list”), and indicts the National Guard's murders and wounding of Kent State, OH, students/civilians on the heels of Nixon’s secret bombings of Cambodia. Thus, Ohio still resonates in contemporary (anti-)war contexts. (Can you say: Bush trumps-up WMD in Iraq to fuel a U.S.-led invasion?)

Nor did we hear Military Madness. I do not think these songs' absences were felt, however, or at any rate not by me, because we were exposed early in the first set to kindred villains and selfsame villainies with Chicago (“. . . change the world!”), plus abundant correlatives in the second set, via In Your Name, Daylight Again/Find the Cost of Freedom, and the new What Are Their Names.

Nash, still standing, lamented with knowing derision that he wrote Chicago “forty years ago, and it's still true today – that sucks!" before sitting down at his keyboards to punch the song’s sonorous opening chords in forceful reminder that "you're brother's bound and gagged; . . . in a land that's known as freedom, how can such a thing be fair?” Good, if rhetorical, question.

Not too difficult to surmise whether this Chicago – originally, CSN’s late-1960s commentary on the trumped-up Chicago 7 trial and desultory Democratic National Convention (although, recall they were in fact eight, before “brother” Bobby Seale was indeed bound and gagged, and ultimately removed) – now is CSN’s transfigured comment on current poverty, murders, other crimes, and mass injustices plaguing that city (with vituperative, my-way-or-no-way former White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, serving as Democratic mayor . . . and doing little to stem Chicago’s slide into violence’s abyss, though he’s siding against striking teachers/workers).

Or whether the song is now also possibly a harsher critique of another White House denizen, Chicago’s South Side native-politician and our current U.S. president, Barack Obama, whose volitional continuation of warrant-less wiretaps and other constitutional encroachments, not to mention, as above, torture and assorted war crimes, rivals criminal Bush administrations.

But I think both are fair guesses. I attended Dylan shows in late-April 1992, coincidental with the day of (and riots proceeding from) the original "not-guilty" verdicts stemming from the infamous trial of four white L.A. police officers who brutally assaulted Rodney King.

[NB: Notwithstanding an already biased system – a white judge and, later, predominantly white (10 of 12) jurors – the original judge, Bernard Kamins, felt compelled to stack the deck even further, and had to be removed from the case by the California Court of Appeals, who agreed with the defense that Judge Kamins had, in so many words, assured prosecutors of favorable rulings. Thus, observing Judge Bernard Kamins with Rodney King (1991); and then Judge Julius Hoffman with Bobby Seale and the Chicago 7 (1968): the more things change. . . .]

And so, when Dylan, amid the historical injustice transpiring south of us that April 29, opted (per usual, without prefatory comment) to perform several masters-and-their-victims elegies or invectives, including “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” I grokked (still do) – rightly or wrongly – that Dylan was simultaneously inveighing against that contemporaneously prevailing injustice. So too, then, Nash’s Chicago of the late ‘60s, now part of CSN’s 9/11/12 performance, conflated Chicago’s horrible past with Chicago’s (and this nation’s) surpassing horrible present.

That, dear readers, is the power and the promise of poets-cum-songwriters, whom 19th-century poet, Percy Shelley, deemed “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

CSN (perhaps, specifically, the non-native, and thus more vulnerable, Englishman Nash(who later added American citizenship), or the ever-Canadian Young) has no doubt been long aware, however, if not also forewarned, that power such as theirs, amplified through their musical genius and poetic faith – and especially where empowerment, in turn, empowers others – quickly exasperates those in power. (Just ask John Lennon or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

For “Madness in great ones must not [go] unwatch'd,” ruminates murderous King Claudius while he plots to dispatch (i.e., first to deport, and later to murder) Prince Hamlet. Our body politic has since confirmed from declassified documents that Lennon, Dr. King, and others not only knew about the powers-that-be attempts at deportations and defamations . . .  but, more’s the pity, came to know, too, Hamlet’s “undiscovered country” (in their deaths and assassinations). And yet, they have thus given what Lincoln called “the last full measure [for their] devotion,” in nonviolent causes for peace – the truer, nobler “cost of freedom buried in the ground” that CSN, midway through the second set, solemnly intoned in Daylight Again/Find the Cost of Freedom.

C&S&N, of course, are not legislators-of-the-world themselves per se. Like presidents and legislators (and more so than most of us), however, they enjoy the bully pulpit (i.e., platforms and megaphones to reach mass audiences). Unlike those other (mostly) frauds, though, CSN upholds that sacred bond between poet-performer/reader-audience (first defined by another 19th-century poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge), whereby we participate in a willing suspension of disbelief. CSN continues to honor this covenant well, with (hi-)fidelity in their poetic faith.

Not that Crosby’s following admonition (mostly verbatim, partly a paraphrase) undermines such power elites. “Vote! And if you think you're vote doesn't count, vote anyway!” . . . Plus somethin’ to the effect of proving bastards in power they're wrong.) Little wonder Crosby laughingly, but knowingly, opted soon after to self-censor. Unfortunately, pronouncements such as these likely earn him, you, me, et al. more redacted pages in our F.B.I. files.

You don't think so? Well, perhaps not. But first check out and dig into Republican Party age-old and up-to-this-minute regional and national attempts to disenfranchise otherwise eligible (and – duh! – Democratic) voters, to disqualify them from voting. Then get back to me and we can discuss further. Meanwhile, don’t neglect your Monty Python bible verses: “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

W.B. Yeats observed that “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” If you’ll please pardon my telling you what to think here about another writer’s work, what Yeats means is often easily misunderstood as an indictment of “passionate intensity.” But no, it’s not that. Instead, he laments that the worst of us are, uh, full-of-it!, while the best of us, amidst the horrors, regrettably are not.

You see, then, were it otherwise, the worst would lack all conviction (to do ill), and our best would, laudably, be filled with passionate intensity (to do well). Unless, of course, you – as I do – also frequently wish to subscribe to Thoreau’s admonition we “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” But let’s save that one for another time.

Sadly, we must still contend with all the many false “American Idol(s),” and ignominious preachers and politicians of every stripe – as Nash, immediately following CSN’s doleful memento mori, Daylight Again/Find the Cost of Freedom, exclaims in his Cathedral: “Too many people have [lied/died] in the name of Christ.” Though, of course, not just Christ. And, as Nash/CSN later implored in the plaintive In Your Name, “. . . Are you listening, to a prayer from a simple man: Can you stop all the sadness? Can you stop all of this madness? Can you stop all of this killing in your name?”

But thankfully and laudably, Crosby, Stills, and Nash are among our best, and they remain full of passionate intensity and wise convictions.

Let us, if we do not also legislate, acknowledge such troubadours, poets, and their poetics. And may those of us who yet abide in the church of rock-n-roll, keep faith!

Steely Dan ‘Jamalot—[a Lot!]—Ever After’: The Show Biz Kids Are Still Pioneering Music on the New Frontier

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  ~ Percy Shelley

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
~ Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode,” Music and Moonlight [emphases mine.]

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
~ Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
~ epigraph to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
(originally in John Milton, Paradise Lost)

I was benevolent and good—misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
~ the unnamed monster, to Victor Frankenstein

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night....
~ Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Look, we all go way back, and uh, I owe you from the thing with the guy in the place.
~ Ted Griffin, Ocean’s Eleven

I had fully intended to present a high-minded penetration of Steely Dan’s opening toke on their “Jamalot Ever After” tour; and, per the preceding epigrammatic head-notes, I still shall. Trust me. Or not. Because if I had wanted to go for the quickie ‘money shot,’ I would have prematurely, though pointedly, entitled this review: “Steely Dan Fucks Us Hard!” (And yes, Mesdames et Messieurs, they wholly did.)

Before essaying that more earnest effort, however: Since neither the recitation of comparatives nor a litany of superlatives suffice to ascribe the unbearable lightness of bearing witness—of being privy—to the Steely ones’ current live-in-performance mastery, let me instead begin by invoking this single, elongated evocative high praise: FUUUCK!

Of course, that particular expletive is, ahem, hardly mislaid here, given that we—well, or at least Don and Walt’s generation of sole survivors—know a “steely dan” originally was, c/o William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, the moniker for a dildo, and remains so c/o Steely Dan’s successful figurative iterations of this sobriquet.

Here, though, an extended “fuuuck” will indeed have to suffice, to supplant whatever I might and shall otherwise endeavor to convey vis-à-vis impressing upon us the musical-lyrical genius we have listened to for decades, then experienced live, and now gyrate to once again, as Messieurs Donald Fagen and Walter Becker ... and their ever-impeccable orchestral coterie have kicked out the jams at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, to inaugurate the über-delectable for their “Jamalot Ever After” tour.

Jamalot? No. They jammed exclusively in this—the most recent, and still light years ahead of its time!—sweet-saucy-unsavory incarnation of nocturnal rhythmic emissions that is: Steely Dan.

Concert promoter and impresario Bill Graham’s singular honorific famously anointed The Grateful Dead thusly: “They’re not the best at what they do; they’re the only ones that do what they do.” Likewise, it must be said, of Steely Dan ... except that I should emphatically recommend that, not only do the Dan do best what only they do, but what is more—to crib writer David Wild’s witty if ultimately insufficient comment on the universe of Steely Dan’s obscurantist lyrics and landscape: “We often don’t know what the hell the people in the songs are actually doing, but we’re pretty damn certain that they shouldn’t be doing it at all.”

Wild’s observation, if pithy and perhaps accurate, nevertheless lacks a gravitas that comes, okay fair enough, not from always knowing what’s going on, but yes, from the capacity for intuiting the cultural zeitgeist and sifting through the intellectual and emotive sum-of-the-musical-lyrical-parts. For examples, protagonists in two of Dylan’s rhetorical inquisitions—“Like a Rolling Stone” (“How does it feel to be on your own?”); and “Ballad of a Thin Man” (“Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? ... ‘Here is your throat back. Thanks for the loan.’”)—do not know what the hell is going on, but the singer/songwriter-as-narrator does want us to know ... does want us to figure it out ... wants us to grapple and to grok, and, perhaps with the less-odious, to reckon with “world-losers and world-forsakers” whom O’Shaughnessy observed in his latter-19th-century poem and who populate Steely Dan’s mid-late 20th-century (and now, too, their 21st-century) arch-visionary oeuvre.

For another example, there is a fullness of meaning in screenwriter Ted Griffin’s elliptical, rhythmic anapest (poetry-speak for: unstressed-unstressed-stressed metric foot), which reduces what must be a con’s (actor Elliot Gould’s) otherwise fascinating novel-of-a-story to its essential elements: “... from the thing with the guy in the place”—at once vaguely sinister and humorous, simultaneously utterly baffling yet somehow completely understood to the other cons (George Clooney, Brad Pitt) and those of us who grok not the words themselves, but the gestalt (context, rhythms, dynamics, etc.).

Thus, like the eponymous protagonist in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Griffin’s con man, Donald and Walter adopt a needful, seemingly impenetrable façade; their lyric ‘antic dispositions’ ‘feign madness’ to “catch the conscience of the King” (and court—i.e., us), lest through some guileless candor they and we would betray ourselves easily, thus fall prey to any contemporaneous gallery of rogues who rule through robes ... and thence, as the unfortunate kin to wretches in Ginsberg’s jeremiad, neither hearing nor heeding our musician-poets’ clarion call, instead drag ourselves through the streets, certainly mad if not also starving hysterical naked. Thus too, like the poets of Shelly’s aphorism, Steely Dan confidently legislate; but like the oracular seer behind the veil in Dylan’s and Ginsberg’s narratives, Don and Walt’s agenda, however melodic, is assuredly more cryptic. They’ve been hip-deep observers of the long con from the get-go; and, ever more so with the vantage of several additional decades, Don and Walt, like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, have devolved from being hip- to now neck-deep in it. So, Becker must think given his commentary later in the evening’s proceedings, have we all.

In any event, Fagen and Becker’s dealers, killers, and myriad other post-modern roués who litter the Danscape would not be sole survivors, now would they, were they to overtly divulge their misdeeds a cappella. Such missteps would inexorably lead to exile, or to a takedown and a mugshot, or—if you’re a bookkeeper’s son who “crossed [your] old man back in Oregon”—to being holed up with a case of dynamite in an all-night standoff against a SWAT team. (Note: “Don’t Take Me Alive” was not on the Portland setlist.) We listeners-cum-confidants instead necessarily must delve into multi-layered cantatas (i.e., bare lyric plus musical strata) for resonances to make meaning.

Thankfully, Don and Walt have consistently provided rich imagistic veins full of metaphor, pun, wit, and wisdom—anodynes to the ‘angry fix’—to indulge and reward our mindful, earful investigations.

Exhibit A (... or, really, most any Steely Dan music-with-lyrics exhibition will do) in a pantheon of their antiheroes: the seemingly innocuous mellifluidity of “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies”—“a tune,” said Fagen six songs deep into the set, that “we haven’t done in a while,” and whose amiable moderate tempo belies the narrator’s observation of one Mister LaPage, whose own natural good-humor (“always laughing, having fun”) obscures, though barely and much less so than ne’er-do-wells in other Steely Dan songs, that this particular antihero is the neighborhood perv: a porno peddler and presumed pedophile.

But wait. Six songs into the set? That’s rushing ahead, isn’t it? (Yep, just like a man, eh!) Mea culpa. Alrighty then—first, some more foreplay:

Historically, our dildo-licious ensemble comprised Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, plus a revolving stellar cartography of luminous studio-session savants who meticulously co-conspired to convey the post-beatnik impresario duo’s delightfully dissolute lyrical sights and imagistic sounds via multi-layered tracks of instrumental jazz-rock, replete with moribund ironies, sardonic badinage, and the ubiquitous, lurking, enervated characters that peopled Steely Dan’s amoral shadow worlds.

Steely Dan’s present-day—and now, for the most part, long-standing—orchestral incarnation comprises a band of equally savvy-sinewy-sexy-and-sinister musicians and singers, with Mr. Becker holding down guitar rhythms and trading up lead-lines with a principal lead guitarist, and with Mr. Fagen inveigling us via alternately (com-)plaintive and imperative keys plus incisive lead vocals which underscore bullwhip-street-smart lyrics that continue to infuse Steely Dan’s, uh, poetic portrait-vignettes (I seem to recall reading, but perhaps not, that Walter called them “miniatures”)—and their inscrutable menagerie of wizened grotesques—with plenary, ever-evolving connotative insights that resist rooting in firmly established denotations but which ironically reward our efforts to root them. Thus, our listening adventures into the “willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith” are seductively effortless vis-à-vis harmonious jazz-rock instrumental arrangements, while we are simultaneously challenged via the considerable efforts required to penetrate the lyrics’ symbolism or allegory ... or both ... or neither. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Stage-laden accoutrements await to accompany the large ensemble, who, minus Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker, enter the boudoir and, as house-and-stage lights dim, charm the anticipatory audience with a jazzy instrumental jam (from stage right: lead guitar, a four-horns section, drums, bass, grand piano, and Babylon sisters trio backing vocals) that promises an evening of up-tempo, sultry stylistic seductions.

From stage-right strolls Walter, taking up his axe downstage—alongside fellow lead guitarist extraordinaire Jon Herington. Behind the pair, upstage on risers, an effervescent quartet comprising Roger Rosenberg (baritone sax), Walt Weiskopf (saxophone), Michael Leonhart (trumpet), and Jim Pugh (trombone). Meanwhile, Donald saunters in from stage-left to assume the position at keyboards, his impresario mantle fronted, per usual, by an oversize photo, circa Harlem Renaissance, of Duke Ellington (the Steely Dan avatar?!) seated at the piano, girded by his own orchestra. Fagen sits downstage from the nonpareil Keith Carlock (drums) and the melodious Jim Beard (piano), and in between the wicked backbeat provided by Freddie Washington (bass) and, also on risers, the sine qua non triptych of Carolyn Leonhart-Escoffery, Cindy Mizelle, and La Tanya Hall (backing vocals), who, throughout the evening’s affairs, provide sensual harmonies, including the outros to “Black Cow,” “Hey Nineteen,” and many more ... not omitting, of course, “Babylon Sisters” (“... You got to shake it, baby, you got to shake it, baby, you got to shake it”).  Yes ma’am(s)! We all most certainly did do. (Moreover, early evening, Mr. Fagen turns the mike over to Ms. Leonhart-Escoffery, who performs dusky, revelatory lead vocals on “Dirty Work.” Yowzah!)

Sure enough, the cast assembled, the crowd fully attuned, the instrumental jam transubstantiates into the opening bars of “Black Cow” (“... so outrageous!”—band and audience concur), followed by “Aja.”

Wait! What? Black Cow > Aja. Could the gang be working through the Aja album?! Alas, ‘twas not to be. But not a whit of disappointment, though, as cascading horns and crescendo drumming of “Aja” provide both climax and denouement, and leave us squealing and humming in sweaty delight ... whereupon, following extended exultations in our ovations, Mr. Washington drops in his nasty bass-line to announce the third-coming with “Hey Nineteen.” Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, and Christ!—we’ve barely recovered, I am joyously near tears, and the night has barely commenced—hey, I’ve got some news: “... slow down, I’ll tell you when. I may never walk again!” But no. No. Don’t stop. And don’t slow down.

Still, let’s pause here for a moment to acknowledge that, whether you’re a Steely Dan aficionado, or generally a music aficionado, or a drums aficionado in particular ... or none of these, nevertheless you can appreciate the estimable quality of Steve Gadd’s drumming on the studio album version of “Aja,” in which you may clearly hear every nuance in his kit. How, then, is it humanly possible—or, rather, I’m here (hear!) to tell ya that, indeed, it happened just so—that Keith Carlock’s virtuous, dexterous precision throughout the evening, and not merely or especially during his take on the “Aja” outro solo, perfectly rendered every last syllable. For many, the short list of rock-drummers-extraordinaire includes Ringo Starr (The Beatles), Neil Peart (Rush), and for me the duo/dual dynamism of Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann (The Grateful Dead), and, likewise, Rodney Holmes (Steve Kimock Band, et al.). Please consider adding to this or any other list of great(-est) drummers ever: Mr. Keith Carlock. Honestly. Wow!

Overarching the Steely narratives’ forlorn-aspirational or arch-villainous vendors are countless more estimable exemplars of the Dan’s stunning musicianship that serves as counterpoint to the sinister lyric with the savory melody and sexy beats, and the one-and-only Mr. Herington’s muscular, meticulous lead guitar. The band’s collaboration in melody, harmony, rhythm, pace, and poetry have fully seduced us, and wide open to the possibilities, down the rabbit hole we go! (Or, in this post-modern era of The Matrix, I should write that we gleefully swallow the red pill; or, in a concomitant post-modern era of Viagra, I should write, too: gleefully down the blue pill. Oh well, spit or swallow; “Aja” merely counsels us, “Throw out the hardware, let’s do it right.”)

Though we cannot quite resolve that misery has made Steely Dan protagonists ... and antagonists ... and agonists inexorably fiendish, nor, too, should we presume that some present or future happiness, however tenuous, might by turns make them virtuous. No. Donald and Walter, like Victor Frankenstein, have indeed erected the “Adam[s and Eves] of [their] labours”; and we should expect these piteous, if not pitiable, misanthropes to excoriate Fagen and Becker for being promoted, from clay of an undifferentiated alphabet, into molded metaphors: characters, with tone, setting, and narrative fates or follies of circumstance.

Perhaps. But what, then, is our part in this pageant of the irrevocably damned and irredeemable? Walter seemed to be asking that question (on this night more than any other? at the concert Seder table)—though his tongue was also at least planted firmly in cheek—when the band, prior to the outro chorus in “Hey Nineteen,” broke into a quiet instrumental accompaniment to Becker’s monologue. Walter approached the mike, welcomed us all to the moment, and then segued from government-weather-control to climate change to those lost seeds you’d likely find long-buried in the sofa lining (... hm, is he channeling Terence McKenna here?!), as you and the object of your desire try, in a world run down, to make the best of what’s still around (now invoking Sting?), and reach for that tasty tequila whose name Walter feigned he couldn’t quite remember ... what was it called? ... just as the female vocalists and band kick back in to full voice, launching incantatorially to remind him: “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian, make tonight a wonderful thing.” Say and sing it again! And of course, as you already know, unless you don’t remember the Queen of Soul, they do so.

From there we were treated to Bad Sneakers; Black Friday; Everyone’s Gone to the Movies (after which Donald teased the Portland crowd: “So what’s new? There’s some kind of TV show about you guys, right?”); Show Biz Kids; Time Out of Mind; Dirty Work (again, with Carolyn Leonhart-Escoffery handling lead vocals for a yummy, slightly more downbeat version from the studio original, in which she conveys just the right je ne sais quoi sultry musk to the narrative’s affairs when “... your man is out of town”—expertly done!). Then, Bodhisattva (Carlock kickin’ ass on the drums yet again), Babylon Sisters, and more. A bit later Walter introduces the band, at the last invoking his half-century friendship and musical partnership with Donald in clearly heartfelt terms. The audience, but for standing ovations having been relegated to wiggling in our chairs--de rigueur per indoor concert-hall seating—now were collectively on our feet and remained so, boogieing hard (well, many of us were) to the final handful of tunes: Josie, Peg, My Old School, Reelin’ in the Years, and for the finale, Kid Charlemagne. If I have not done justice to the brilliance of lead guitarist Jon Herington, Becker’s playing, and Fagen’s vocals, keys, and melodica, let their musicianship on these songs be set aside for the time capsule ... yes, ever after.

Those who are, per the “Hey Nineteen” wise, if lamented, dictum, “... just growing old,” do remember Steely Dan, but not nostalgically. There are bands whose names—whose members’ names—whose lyrics—are not merely imprints on dung piles of history, but who were, who are, who shall remain, to represent not only the zeitgeist at once sanctified both in our cultures’ and in our personal narratives, but also to stand for shibboleths: watchwords whose invocation evokes an unseen-unsaid but knowing wink-and-a-nod among the diaspora of, well, at least the terminally hip and their eternally hip progeny.

What must be the unparalleled pleasure, I imagine, to reside in such musical pantheons: to be the bands, or to be in the bands (or now, in successive generations, to be in the band that learns to cover the bands) who nightly inhabit the lyrical worlds of, say, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Carole King, James Taylor ... and, for at least one more example, who may immaculately re-conceive the Steely Dan catalog. For one stellar example, practice and foreplay in those years-long efforts are evident in the Dead tribute band Dark Star Orchestra. Who in our generations will pay tribute to the musical-lyrical genius in Steely Dan’s collective—as well as in Fagen’s and Becker’s solo—efforts?

As for me—just a Jewish kid from San Francisco Bay, with bad sneakers and, yup, a transistor (radio) ... ears and inner-sight-seeing exposed yet enslaved, attuned to whatever crumbs early-to-late ‘70s corporate radio imbeciles let sieve through “their” sanitized airwaves. No wonder Steely Dan’s subversions were cryptic. Amid all that commercial mindlessness, happy accidents treated me to the few bits of Steely Dan that successfully pierced the censorial FM: Do It Again, Dirty Work, Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, Aja, Deacon Blues, Kid Charlemagne. Little did I realize then that behind the patina of putatively acceptable music for mass consumption (and sufficiently obscure lyrics to foil would-be censors) lay undiscovered countries of star-crossed characters snared in fateful milieus by choice or by chance; and that beneath those seemingly innocuous lyrical templates for post-modern-jazz-rock lay the lovelorn and forlorn, grifters and vipers “crawl[ing] through the suburban scene, mak[ing] love [to those of us aching to listen], languid and bittersweet.”

Ironically, perhaps the best thing I wholly unintentionally did was to take a several-years-long hiatus from listening to Steely Dan. By the time I left for college, they, too, were taking what turned out to be a decade-long break. So perhaps our intentions were not in synch, but somewhat overlapped. That hiatus turned out quite well for me. After all, I could have spent years hearing without listening ... to Dylan, The Dead, Steely Dan, et al. ... and then (i.e., now) mistakenly come to consider that music merely nostalgically rather than with a full heart and mind. Instead, again only as a matter of luck rather than too much a conscious choice, I did not reacquaint myself to Steely Dan until later in college and throughout graduate school, and yes, Ever After.

I know this sounds maudlin or cliché, but writers, poets, and singer-songwriters I’ve mentioned in this review, plus others, have genuinely rescued me from a calloused, mean-spirited world. Like Beckett’s tramps in Waiting for Godot, I have incessantly contemplated existential absurdities; and also like Didi, Gogo, and yes, Hamlet, too, I thought quite rationally about ending “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” were it not that—ha!—like them I apparently lacked the courage in such convictions. Or perhaps I—may I say “we”—learn that mortality, not ironically, is forever. As Fagen croons in his latest solo effort, Sunken Condos, “They may fix the weather in the world / ... but tell me what’s to be done / Lord ‘bout the weather in my head.”

So to Donald and Walter here, and to many others in the musical universe, I can only continue to express simple, though believe me it’s a profound, thanks. Don. Walt. Peace and gratitude for making your joyful, soulful noise. You don’t know me. Hell, I don’t know you. But I’ve been deep into the music; and, like the man says: We go all the way back; and sure enough, I do owe you from the thing with the guy in the place.

What? Don’t fret. They get it. We don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows.

Getting to Terrapin: Notes from a northwest corner, where we too sing a rare and different tune....

“Let my inspiration flow in token lines suggesting rhythm that will not forsake me till my tale is told and done....”

Like Terrapin Station—the narrator’s tale replete with metaphor and imagery while also serving up commentary on narratives and sense-making—I’ll endeavor to make some meaning of this past weekend’s reconvening of the Grateful Dead and the assembled ‘Heads, but meanwhile leave you each and all largely to glean whatever senses you may from the experiences.

I would, however, recommend we all do well to avoid or wholly ignore mainstream blitzkrieg banalities now tiding the print-broadcast-Interwebbing waves, which already have dumbed-down our tribes and vibes with bigoted clichés: for one among numerous examples, the Associated Press’ (lack-of-)insight that we’ve gathered to don our tie-dyes one final time.

Aargh. Dead music and lyrics—and the creative movements (artistic, psychedelic, countercultural, spiritual, et al.) that simultaneously birthed the Dead and that the Dead, in turns, birthed—may also be theater, but they are not theatrics. In any event, the magic, movement(s), and yes, even the earliest tie-dye, predate the Dead per se (cf. Merry Pranksters).

The Grateful Dead and we who have for decades co-piloted this shared experience in music and culture (... and yes, that includes tie-dye) were never minstrels in blackface. Tie-dye was never a fashion statement to be worn at a Dead show; and “peace” was not an advertisement.

What media in the main still doesn’t grok is that we—most of us—are genuinely here to re-commune with the vibe: our tribes (families and friends—old and new) nourishing on the music and lyrics and tour- friendships old and new that sincerely convey a shared hope through mystery and metaphor and wonderment to seek Peace, Love, more Consciousness ... to tap back into that rarefied sense that “... once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

As Mickey instructed after Sunday night’s proceedings, take this positive energy from the show out into the world. (Or as we’ve likewise been advising at the Oregon Country Fair—site of the Dead’s “Decadennal Field Trip” in 1972 and 1982—reflect and multiply the positive energy we create during the Fair back out into the “unFair” world during the rest of the year.)

Thus, the Steal-Your-Face flags high atop the stadium are emblems of that movement, along with the lone rainbow flag (historically a symbol among hippies and in the peace movement; in more recent times, appropriated as—and appropriately—a symbol of the Gay Rights and marriage equality movements ... especially relevant on this night following the Supreme Court’s ruling affirming gay marriage as a Constitutional right).

Likewise, our expressive colors and tie-dyes ... and “rings on our fingers and bells on our shoes” ... are emblematic: collective and individual expression that acknowledge that I, like you (... and that: I like you!), recognize that we each respect in ourselves and in each other our individual difference and, simultaneously, our shared humanity—that “sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.” This is our ethos, not a marketing slogan.

“The storyteller[‘s] job is to shed light and not to master”

I felt both presences and absences throughout the weekend, and often the two senses commingled. Garcia’s absence, though always present, has morphed for me and for most during these twenty years into a scar that has healed while always reminding us of a once-vulnerable open wound. The reemergence of old friends—tour friends, lifelong friends—heartens; their absences along the way, some temporary, many permanent, conversely disheartens; and now, these experiences and memories, to share among those still with us but not present for the shows, encourages anew.

The Grateful Dead (minus Jerry Garcia and others; and plus Trey Anastasio, Jeff Chimenti, and Bruce Hornsby) took the helm at approximately 7:30 p.m. Saturday evening. Given the many well-traveled openers to engage us, they opted for “Truckin’” and “Uncle John’s Band,” thematically an autobiographical nod to themselves and a biographical nod to the congregants: that here we are once again, reconvening as we’ve done throughout their and our past half-century, one last but never final time imbibing the music, and traversing and transitioning along our individual and collective long strange trips.

“... Light the song with sense and color”

SATURDAY NIGHT – In the GA Pit, Audience-Right

Unfortunately, there were plenty of fits and starts throughout Night One, no doubt due to the mix of rust and anticipation and the hype and expectations of a foursome who’d not set sail as a foursome now for many years. As noted, kickoff was nearly 30 minutes tardy, and, following a 65-minute first set, the set-break was fully an hour. (But Ha! That brought back some memories.)

However, as I was in the GA pit, and thus fairly close to the stage, I could make out that Phil had joined his techs and at one point strapped on his bass. Hence, the very looong set-break likely occurred in part due to technical difficulties. Perhaps that also explains Phil’s stage presence, where he was alternately engaged or peeved at several junctures. The gang flubbed a verse (during Born Cross-Eyed?), requiring Bobby to step back from the mike, spin a raised arm to signal a redo, and bring everyone back to the task. In the parlance of the concurrent Women’s World Cup soccer tourney, the band played on through with no stoppage time. Professionals all the way!!

But these are minor complaints, and in any case are part and parcel of the Dead’s historical excursions: The song titles and musical architecture may be fixed, but the songs themselves were more malleable—scaffolding for exploratory jams and shifting orations, ever open to new interpretations ... and yes, subject to ill-timed misses, but also so frequently aspiring to and reaching cosmic, X-factor breakthroughs that made the live-Dead experience always a show-to-show adventure, irreducible to mere setlists, recordings, journalists’ accounts, or even deadheads’ catalogs of recollection.

Following the stand-alone Truckin’ and UJB were: Alligator (nice mid-tempo intro), a rollicking Cumberland Blues, Born Cross-Eyed, a rocked-out Cream Puff War, and Viola Lee Blues (complete with the de rigueur crescendo jam—much tighter and in-time than the Truckin’ climax).

At least, that’s the official setlist. Missing, however, is the clearly audible “Turn on Your Lovelight” instrumental jam/tease (fully rendered in Set 2), but which then kinda-sorta oddly simply faded to set-break. No matter. Jerry made his presence known in those moments, as the cosmos delivered a full-spectrum rainbow across the northwest corner of the stage, arcing northeast (i.e., from audience-left to audience-right) over the stadium. More will follow on the rainbow.

Set 2 headed in more mystical and jamming territories: Cryptical Envelopment > Dark Star > St. Stephen > William Tell bridge > The Eleven > Turn On Your Lovelight > Drums > Space > What’s Become of the Baby? > The Other One > Morning Dew; and to conclude, Phil’s donor rap followed by a Casey Jones encore.

[No offense intended Phil, because here in Oregon I’ve been a registered organ donor for decades (it’s the “D – anatomical donor” listed on state driver’s licenses), but just in the name of good fun Prankster-ism: In all the years you’ve been recommending that we turn to our loved ones and say, “If anything ever happens to me, I want to be an organ donor,” instead I’ve said to them, “If anything happens to me, I’m coming after your organs!” J]

Although Saturday night was fun, it left me wanting. I saw old friends and made new ones. I danced and enjoyed. But musically, there were muffs and miscues, with Trey (either on his own or perhaps at the direction of Phil/Bobby) seeming tentative. As always, such matters are to be determined and experienced firsthand and individually. I can get off on almost any rock-n-roll gig. But at a Dead show, I’m not looking to get off; I’m looking to LIFT OFF!—to experience the ineffable and evanescent ... or to quote James Joyce, to surmount “the ineluctable modality of the visible.”

But Night One was always going to have a lower-case x-factor in folks’ minds. The Grateful Dead band—the music, the musicians, and their musicianship—has always been an evolution. These were not studio-session musicians performing repetitively to a singular sounding perfection. Rather, the perfection of the Dead was/remains in the exploratory adventures. That meant “off” nights as well as “on”—and I mean ON!—for a band and music that always was not a work-in-progress, but rather was/is a progress-in-their-work. What that meant in the reality of their considerable efforts: Touring.

Well, this ain’t a tour, sisters and brothers, and we would be mindful to keep the faith. After all, we are aware this would be “merely” a two-nights-on, four-off, three-on gig. Any sort of knots—whether personal, professional, technical, collaborative, or other—were bound to form and need some kneading, both onstage and off. That’s fine. ‘Twas always thus during the Dead’s 30 years on tour. But I’m fairly certain the pressures (not just of economics, given the transitory but justifiable ill feelings for ticket-prices, pricing schemes, and related snafus, but ultimately of utmost significance to the band and tribes, the pressures of history and of legacy) were not only external but largely internalized—as Bobby timelessly intoned to the audience during many a ‘70s show and beyond, to get things “just exactly perfect.” So I always approached the opening night with great hopes but few if any expectations.

Thus, absence of the upper-case X-factor(!) on opening night, if apparent and disappointing at various times, nevertheless was not too worrisome. Jeff Chimenti and Bruce Hornsby were little used, and Hornsby’s vocals and keys were often barely audible in the mix. That coulda been me, given that I was upfront on the floor. But nope. I checked-in afterward with friends and others who’d been seated throughout the stadium, and they heard (or, rather, likewise could not hear) Hornsby. Again, just a bug to fix. But also, again, this was not the inaugural to a summer tour, and there’d be only one more chance for those of us attending these left-coast shows for the band to get it just exactly perfect.

“... From the northwest corner”

The weather—aaah, the weather—was...: Just. Exactly. Perfect. Cool seventies, light Northern California south S.F. Bay breezes, with blue skies and wispy clouds that would gather and darken. A welcome shift from Eugene, Oregon, high-90s we’d escaped for the weekend. (Climate change has likewise morphed our Willamette Valley’s annual 9-10 months’ rain-cycle into a drought.) Santa Clara’s darkening skies never really threatened rain, but heavy moisture was occasionally palpable.

That moisture gifted us a rainbow ... a double-rainbow, in fact!—though the double was barely perceptible—which arced northwest to northeast from behind and atop the stadium stage-right (i.e., audience-left). The rainbow appeared just at the “Turn On Your Lovelight” tease that concluded Set 1, making even more dramatic for me the collective thought we later shared that Jerry was making his cosmic appearance! Yea!

[Aside: Also, like the Gay Pride flag atop the stadium, the rainbow might’ve signified our tribe’s rebuke to the previous day’s lunatic ravings by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in his dissent opposing the Court’s affirmation of gay marriage, wrote: “Whoever thought that intimacy and spirituality ... were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.” Well, I dunno if I’m the nearest hippie, but close enough. Jesus, Scalia! I honestly want to respect you as a fellow human being, though I certainly do not respect your professed inanities from the judicial bench. But you’re such a constipated asshole. Eat a bran muffin or somethin’. Your “constitution”-al thinking definitely lacks fiber!]

“Some rise, some fall, some climb, to get to Terrapin”

SUNDAY NIGHT – In the 200-Level Seats, Audience-Right

Yowzah! Yowzah! Yowzah!

Beautiful weather again: sunny, breezy, few clouds, cooler at night, a bit of a sunburn from the afternoon festivities at Shakedown Street. Missed the Shakedown on Saturday, but located it Sunday ... far and away. (Levi’s Stadium charged $60 plus fees to park. Thus, a stadium “shakedown,” but no Street.) Instead, Shakedown occupied a large grassy field a few blocks down the road, abutting a golf driving range. Packed with folks, ticketed and non- and Miracle-seeking. Good vibes and impromptu high-quality Dead songs and jams that would not make either night’s setlists. Eventually headed back to the venue and into the show.

The boys exercised better timing both on and offstage, racing out of the starting gate closer to 6 p.m. and limiting the set-break to a respectable somethin’ or other, but less than an hour. Or perhaps it was an hour, but given that I had a seat on this night, I didn’t pay as much attention.

“Feel Like a Stranger” (“... let’s get on with the show!”) signaled what would be a fairly tight, if not muscular, and crowd-pleasing first set: then New Minglewood Blues, Brown-Eyed Women, Loose Lucy, Loser, Row Jimmy, Alabama Getaway, Black Peter, and Hell in a Bucket.

Set Two on this second night was far and away the bees-knees-for-me. Mississippi Half-Step > Wharf Rat > Eyes of the World > He’s Gone > Drums (with unannounced guest Sikiru Adepoju on talking drum) (no Space) > I Need a Miracle > Death Don’t Have No Mercy > Sugar Magnolia; and for encore, Brokedown Palace.

Wharf Rat. Eyes!!! He’s Gone. Among Robert Hunter’s numerous, gorgeous poetic narratives: first- or third-person tales of loss, of wonder, of gratitude for Being ... before the inevitability of Nothingness.

The “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” dirge and “Brokedown Palace” lamentation would become especially poignant shortly after I returned home to Eugene, Oregon, on Monday afternoon.

About a mile away from the neighborhood where I’ve spent the better part of the past 30 years, just beyond a couple parks, schools, running/bike trails, and natural/organic grocers, the historic wooden grandstand at 75-year-old Civic Stadium (minor league ballpark and host to other events) was fully engulfed in flames. A citizens’ alliance (fueled by mostly small donations, and some large) managed to purchase the site from the city and school board, to maintain the grandstand and renovate the site for “kid-sports” and family recreational activities, despite Goliath developers bidding for the site to build (ugh) a shopping center. The renovations to provide family/multi-use facilities will proceed, but without the ol’ famous grandstand. Brokedown Palace indeed. Sad. 

And so, we’re “... back in Terrapin ... for good or ill again.”

Just as well that others and I won’t be going to Chicago. The Oregon Country Fair is nearly upon us. The Fair site hosted the Dead’s decadennal “Field Trip” in 1972 and 1982. Garcia’s illness compelled canceling the ’92 Field Trip; however, a small throng of us celebrated southeast of Eugene on Kesey’s land, marking the occasion with live music and other performances in a meadow encircled by woods that shaded and long ago overgrew the original “Further” (Harvester bus) that had been retired to pasture and ruin. Dark Star Orchestra played in town following Kesey’s death in late-2001 (they’d already been scheduled to play at the Kesey-family-owned venue) and returned the following summer to play during the Fair in 2002—thus, to my mind, marking the fourth decadennal Field Trip.

Thus, given plenty of local Dead lore, experience, and memory, and memento mori, I feel grateful for Santa Clara, but also grateful to be back home to patch my bones before I get back truckin’ on to the Fair. Likewise, I’m grateful that the band and crew and many of you have a brief respite before truckin’ to Chicago.

Peaceful travels to one and all. Glorious adventures. May the four winds blow you safely home! Meanwhile, to the living and especially to the Dead, I extend my gratitude. Thank You for a Real Good Time! Much love.