(Host) Vermont summers are short, but memories of the warm season are long. This month, VPR commentators reflect on the importance of the past in our series “Summer Times.” Here’s commentator Philip Baruth, remembering guitarist Jerry Garcia. Garcia died in 1995, and with him died an entire culture built around the very sound of summer itself. Baruth remembers the Pied Piper sound of the Grateful Dead, and regrets that he never completely answered its call.
(Baruth) I’ve been a lot of things in my life, but, even though I saw the Grateful Dead a fair number of times before Jerry Garcia died, I was never, in the technical sense, a Deadhead. The music of the Grateful Dead had a Pied Piper quality to it, and my friends and I could hear it loud and clear, every June or July, when the band did a long swing through upstate New York to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. We’d get tickets and just be knocked over by the spectacle.
But when the show was over, suddenly my friends and I couldn’t hear the Pied Piper sound anymore. We’d stumble back to our car and get on the Thruway, and we’d go back to our summer jobs cooking and selling fire alarms door-to-door. The Deadheads, though, the music never stopped for them. They just packed up their buses and their stoves and their homemade
racelets and did it all again the very next night, in Ohio or Connecticut or Missouri.
And I always loved them for that, for never letting any of it ever really end. Summer was never *over* for them, the way it was always already in the process of being over for me. They just moved West or rather, danced West. You got the sense that it was never really a philosophy they’d formulated – more like a basic migratory instinct, kept sharp by the long-term effects of sun and music on the human body. So that’s the difference, I guess: my friends and I would sneak away every summer to see the circus, and we loved that circus to death, but we were never carnies, never really the ones manufacturing the magic.
Except for one night, deep in the summer of 1982. As we drove into the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, my friend Glen and I were directed to an overflow parking area somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. There were signs directing you from this new lot through the dense woods to the amphitheater. But when the show was over at ten oclock or so that night, the woods were impenetrably dark. The signs to the parking lot were invisible, and the concert staff seemed to have disappeared.
And that began one of the weirdest and best nights of my life, Glen and I and about a hundred other people impossibly lost, wandering over these dark meadows and through these dark pine woods, stumbling on little groups of Deadheads sitting around cassette players and makeshift fires. Everybody was sharing out their food, their blankets. Finally we just gave up looking for the car, gave up on trying to make it home, gave up on the concept of “home” itself, and we just sort of… “stopped” with this one group for the last four hours until dawn. And all of the sudden I could really imagine how you might just stop that way semi-permanently.
You can still see the remnants of the band today – Bob Weir and some other remaining musicians are now traveling and performing under the stripped-down name, The Dead. But the Grateful part is gone, gone forever, and when you get right down to it, gratitude was nine-tenths of what that scene had going for it in the first place. It was unadulterated gratitude that made their music the very sound of summer itself.
Philip Baruth is a novelist living in Burlington. He teaches at the University of Vermont.