gdead.berkeley.edu/gdead.berkeley.edu.tar/gdead.berkeley.edu/pub/gdead/interviews/Steve.Silberman.95

Text File | 1996-07-30 | 45KB | 880 lines

 Spacedancing at the Edge of Chaos:
 A Conversation with Steve Silberman
 by Peter Sawyer


 PS:   How does the Grateful Dead scene serve as a religion
 in the lives of Deadheads?

 SS:   I don't think anyone worships the band members.
 Dead shows function like a church or a temple for some
 Deadheads, because they are places where people go to have
 profound experiences of meaning with others, to participate
 in the creation of a peak experience that blurs the boundaries
 of the individual.   I think one of the reasons why Dead
 concerts work as a mandala or place of spiritual experience is
 that their music contains elements of terror and awe, as well
 as beauty and consolation.
     There is a mystery at the heart of the Grateful Dead
 experience:   the miracle of telepathic improvisation, which is
 not a new-age mystery - jazz musicians do it all the time.
 But it is a mystery in that there's this kind of pulse or
 entrainment that can happen among human beings playing
 music, or insects drumming on a log, or birds in the air,
 where each individual is caught in a web or pattern that has a
 beauty in it which is a larger beauty than any one of the
 individuals could have premeditated.  Everybody gets to
 break through to a new moment of beauty simultaneously.
 At Dead shows the audience is included in the moment of
 discovery.   So a show can be experienced as collective
 worship, but rather than worship of the band members, it's
 of a fertile creative principle that comes through the band
 members and the audience at the same time.
     A Dead show can also be a site of individual
 initiation.  The experience of initiation is something that's
 hardly ever talked about by people when examining the
 Grateful Dead culture, yet I think it's one of the most
 significant things that happens at Dead shows.  I don't think
 that it's an accident that a sizable portion of the Dead's
 audience is young people, adolescents.  I also don't think
 it's an accident that some of those kids are taking
 psychedelics, like psilocybin and mescaline - agents which
 have been used as initiatory catalysts for thousands of years.
 Psychedelic initiation is not a new thing under the sun.  In
 fact, people like Terrence McKenna believe that the very
 roots of what we understand as religion has its beginnings in
 experiences triggered by these botanical, naturally occurring
 substances, which appear in so many different cultures.
 Whether you're talking about Siberian shamans eating
 amanita muscaria mushrooms, or people in South America
 inhaling DMT-containing snuffs, or Mexican curanderos like
 Maria Sabina eating psilocybin mushrooms and singing their
 sacred visions, psychedelic experience is as old as human
 civilization.  So kids taking acid at Grateful Dead concerts is
 not a new fad, it's that good ol' time religion [laughing].

 PS:   Can you describe your first spiritual experience at a
 Dead show?

 SS:   I can't remember my first, but one comes to mind.  It
 was in 1979, in Madison Square Garden.  I had taken LSD,
 and when the band came out for the second set, all of a
 sudden there was a big rush of people toward the stage.
 Unfortunately, the security people freaked out, and started
 clubbing people, including a pregnant woman who was
 clubbed to the floor right in front of my eyes.  When you're
 getting off on acid, that's not what you would wish to see.
     The music was so magnificent afterwards, however,
 that I remember looking up at the ceiling and realizing - it
 was during "Truckin'" - that this instant of being aware,
 moment to moment, of music that was literally being created
 right then, was the difference between being dead and being
 alive.   I felt very alive, and very thankful for my existence,
 and I was also appreciating the impermanent nature of it all.
 It wasn't a moment that I wanted to hold on to, it was a
 moment of delectation of transient beauty itself.  As Blake
 put it, "eternity in love with the productions of time." A very
 spiritual moment.
     It's hard to trace it back to a first experience.  There
 have been many moments like that at shows, so many that I
 actually use Dead shows to check up on myself:  Is my life
 going O.K.?  I visit what feels like an ancient place at Dead
 shows.  I can visit that place by meditating, or by having a
 really good talk with a friend, or sometimes in solitude,
 reading.  But there is something about Grateful Dead music ,
 particularly certain tunes - the one we're hearing, "Dark
 Star," is one of them, "Playing in the Band" is another -
 where they seem to be playing the music of this ancient
 place.   I can't really explain that.  When I first felt that, it
 was an experience of recognition, "Oh yes, this is the
 inevitable beautiful music that comes from that place." But
 I'm a Deadhead [laughing], so what can I say?  For someone
 else, it's Wagner, or Beethoven's late quartets.  I've been
 told that in Beethoven's late quartets, the composer is
 working out existential problems in the voices of the quartet,
 and I feel the Grateful Dead are working out existential
 problems, or investigating essential questions, in the best of
 their music.
     I knew a teenager -  16, he didn't even shave yet -
 who accidentally took a tremendous amount of acid one
 night at a show.  Instead of going to the hospital, he chose to
 ride it out.  During the break between sets, he was dancing
 in the drum circle, and he met a woman, and did the old
 dance with her.  Two days later, his beard began to grow.  It
 was a classical initiation experience.  Normally, when one
 hears about psychedelic overdoses at shows, we assume it's
 a bad thing.  There are experiences that are more intense than
 mainstream America is able to understand.  And yet they can
 be the marrow of life.
     The Grateful Dead situation is uncannily conducive
 to the formation of what John Barlow calls the "groupmind."
 You have so many people in one place, who know the music
 so well, that when the band makes a musical gesture, it is
 understood instantaneously by thousands of people in the
 room against a background or field of reference of hundreds
 of other performances of that same moment in the song.
 That sort of synchrony is very rare.  I guess it does happen
 at intense sport events where everyone wants the batter to do
 something, or half the people want the batter to do
 something.

 PS:  At Dead shows, everybody wants the batter to hit a
 home run.

 SS:   Every Dead show is the World Series, except there are
 no losers.

 PS:   Though occasionally the team makes a few errors [both
 laughing].

 SS:  Right.  So there is the experience available at Dead
 shows of transpersonal bonding, identification with a larger
 self, a delighted self, with hundreds of arms and legs,
 having a real good time.

 PS:   The Grateful Dead religion is not dualistic, it doesn't
 separate the body from the spirit.

 SS:  Exactly.  I've become sexually excited at Grateful Dead
 shows.  That's something that - if you were standing up on
 the rail [near the stage] in the early to mid'80s - was not
 uncommon.  People were standing too close to each other to
 not enjoy the contact that was going on.  When I see people
 gettin' hard-ons in church because they're gettin' the spirit,
 maybe I'll start going to church [much laughter].  The
 Grateful Dead experience contains very rarefied states of
 consciousness, but you don't leave your body behind.
 You're still in your body.

 PS:   How else do the Dead affect the people who listen to
 them?

 SS:   One thing that happens at shows is that people find
 their spiritual batteries recharged.   It's hard to put it in
 words - an uncategorizable vitality -  but it does seem to
 bring along with it compassion, peacefulness, and respect
 for others.  Some of that might have to do with Robert
 Hunter's patterning of the experience with his lyrics.  Hunter
 is a real poet, and a scholar of poetry - he knows what he's
 doing.  He's naturally drawn to what I heard a critic who
 was dissing Hunter refer to as "blank-check aphorisms."
 That does Hunter a disservice, but what he's able to do is
 come up with statements which contain life lessons that are
 not exhausted in one reading or hearing.

 PS:  They grow with you.

 SS:  A line like "Stoke the fires of paradise with coals from
 Hell to start," from "Foolish Heart," is something that you
 can hear many times over, and the older you get, the more it
 means.  Which is the measure of any great artist or writer.
 So I don't know exactly how much of the particular forms of
 compassion that are stressed among Deadheads comes from
 Hunter's patterning of the Dead experience in the lyrics.
 People literally seem to be somewhat kinder after shows.   I
 know I am.  I am often recharged in a way such that major
 life decisions that I've been putting off are made very clear
 during the show, and I feel empowered to act on them.  I
 literally make substantive physical changes in my life
 situation after runs.  Especially if it was a good one.

 PS:  How do you think social historians will look at the
 Grateful Dead phenomenon in the future?

 SS:  I have a secret thought - it'll be hard for me to say this
 without being misinterpreted - I believe that the Grateful
 Dead, and Deadheads, are an authentic revival of very
 archaic forms of spirituality.  Our book is, on some levels, a
 funny book - there are a lot of jokes, a lot of wit among the
 facts and historical narrative.
     But at the same time - it'll be hard to say this without
 being misinterpreted - I felt we were writing a new testament
 for an authentic religious revival.  There are only certain
 places where that's obvious in the text, most notably in "the
 Zone" entry at the end of the book.  I undertook this task
 with the gravest kind of humility, to the point of not feeling
 up to it much of the time.  But I did feel that what I was
 writing was the sacred text of a religious community, and
 that it had to pass that acid test to be worthy of its subject.   I
 literally built little statements into the text so that the Zen
 masters, the real spiritual heavies of the scene, would know
 that I had been to the Zone.  That I was not just writing
 about the Zone, but that I myself had spent time there.
     Having gone to shows for 21 years, I am somewhat
 of a tribal elder.  I felt that it was my duty, my labor of love
 anyway, to transmit that info to younger Heads who might
 not be able to find words for it.  It was a lonely task, often.
     So I believe that the Grateful Dead and Deadheads
 are part of a revival of very ancient and essential human
 values.  There are several other groups, like the Rainbow
 family, and the Radical Faeries, who are working along the
 same lines.  Zen too - Gary Snyder points out that a hunter
 waiting for the game in a still but absolutely attentive state of
 mind is, in a sense, sitting zazen.  And there is something
 about listening to the Grateful Dead that is somehow like
 that.  You are attending to what is being created in the
 moment, but you are not preconceiving or classifying.

 PS:  You never know where the music is going to go. . .

 SS:  Exactly.  So you have to remain attentive.  I'm not
 saying that the Dead have any sort of patent on this, but I do
 think that it's a massive phenomenon.  The way that the
 mainstream currently latches onto it, they really don't
 understand it.  Deadheads do, but the media, and the culture
 at large, simply do not know what is under their noses.
     If you read about a town in Central America where,
 on a regular basis - say eighty nights a year - 10,000 people
 ate mushrooms, and had a ritual that involved dancing, and
 that this had been going on for thirty years, you would say
 it's a major religious phenomenon.  The place would be
 swarming with anthropologists.  But because this happens in
 Cleveland, Pittsburgh - all of these mundane places, with hot
 dogs being sold in the hallways - nobody notices that this is
 a major religious revival.  By religion, I don't mean the
 Pope, I mean what psychedelics are getting to.  The reason I
 believe in psychedelics is that they get to an apprehension of
 the deeper layers of reality...

 PS:  Sacred space...

 SS:  Right.  So you have these people creating sacred space
 together, with music and dancing and drugs.  That's
 religion.
     Think of how many PhD's have been written about
 the American transcendentalists.  How many people where
 involved in that:  Emerson, Thoreau -

 PS:   Did anybody follow them around?

 SS:  Well they did actually go on tour.  Emerson and
 Thoreau would go on speaking tours, and people were way
 into it, but it wasn't 10,000 people taking ancient sacraments
 to hear Thoreau lecture.

 PS:  And they weren't dancing...

 SS:  Right - for eighty nights a year, for thirty years.  Think
 about how many thousands of books have been written
 about those guys.  I'm not diminishing them.   I think that
 the Transcendentalists were getting at what the Dead get at,
 or what Deadheads get at, but we're talking about something
 that involves a lot more people.

 PS:  What are some of the life-changing lessons you have
 learned from the Deadhead experience ?

 SS:   I'll tell you an interesting one - interesting because it
 was somewhat at odds with certain aspects of the Deadhead
 community, and I'm sure would be quite a surprise to the
 band.
     I figured out that the love that I have for my buddies
 - which was not and is not understood by the culture at
 large, and is not even served by gay cultural forms - was an
 expression of my deepest nature.   I feel I literally was given
 permission to be myself at shows.  What's funny about that
 is that Deadhead space is pretty much heterosexual space,
 and the prevailing feeling at Dead shows was almost
 homophobic for many years.  Now not so much.
     Also, somewhere out there, I learned to regard
 people as souls rather than opponents or surfaces...

 PS: To look beyond the persona. . .

 SS: Right - to see the flicker of the transpersonal identity, the
 big mind, whatever you want to call it, in each person.
 That's something that's really reinforced at shows.  I
 remember seeing a big, buffed, sweaty, tripping-out-of-his-
 mind young guy walking down the halls at Oakland
 Coliseum, hugging everyone, including the hot dog lady and
 the security guards.  Whispering in each person's ear,
 "We're all the same vibration."

 PS:  Wow.  When you are deeply involved in the music
 what happens to you?  Is it visual, sensual, dream-like... ?

 SS:  When I'm deeply involved in the music, I'm
 spacedancing, which in my book a Theology student named
 Shan Sutton calls "a bodily conversation with the music."
 With me, it involves a rocking motion at the hips.  It's struck
 me in recent years that I get into some kind of oceanic space
 by doing that.  It resembles something that orthodox Jews
 call dovening, a motion they make while praying.   I'm
 rocking with my hips on the balls of my feet, making
 elaborations on that pulse with my arms and legs and feet.
 My mind is in a very relaxed, yet aware, place - aware of
 past, present, and future - remembering very old things.
 Quite at peace with myself, at what T.S. Eliot called "the still
 point of the turning world."

 PS:  What are some of the the ways that Hunter has deeply
 influenced your individuation process?

 SS:  Hunter is a very crafty poet.  He is able to get some
 very old lessons across without seeming clicheed.  He's
 attracted to extremely dense idiomatic phrasing that does not
 say, "this is the moon," but points toward it.  He is a
 wonderful philosopher of the psychedelic experience,
 because he builds ghost traps that the ghost can freely enter
 and leave.
     I would say that Hunter's shtick is the Golden Rule,
 be kind to your neighbor, and don't sell your soul for a
 fistful of silver.  Your decisions are your own - personal
 responsibility, with a sense of obligation to something larger
 than one's personal agenda.  A sense of the fragile, exquisite
 chance that life is.
     A song like "Stella Blue"is a fairly direct presentation
 of certain truths of existence.  And a line like "dust off those
 rusty strings just one more time" points toward the kind of
 resurrection that's possible in every living moment.

 PS:  "I'll get up and fly away."

 SS:  Yeah, exactly.  although that's kind of a tricky line
 because the character who says that might not be able to do
 it.  The ultimate denial or the ultimate hope . . .

 PS:  The beauty of Hunter is that it could be both--it is both .
 . .

 SS:  Right, exactly.  Some nights you experience it and you
 say, "Oh, that guy is fooling himself, he's not gonna make
 it."  And then the other nights you feel that he could make it.
 Good old hippie existentialism.

 PS:  How about Barlow?

 SS:  Barlow's message is not quite as consistent, though I
 have been very influenced by "Cassidy."   Barlow is willing
 to take on a persona in order to write a song, whereas
 Hunter is always himself.

 PS:  And Barlow is hamstrung by Weir - Weir wants
 images, rather than the telling phrase.

 SS:  Right, and Garcia wants evocative phrases . . .

 PS; And he gets them.
 Although it is impossible to fully separate the music from the
 lyrics in what ways has the music itself deeply influenced
 your life?

 SS:  The basic lesson of Grateful Dead music is the next five
 minutes could be the most beautiful five minutes of your life.
 All you have to do is show up in a big way.
     The funny thing about the Dead is that they have an
 almost perverse inability to produce beauty when it is
 demanded of them.  So New Year's Eve, or Saturday night
 at Madison Square Garden, they'll stink. But Tuesday night
 in Cleveland, they'll suddenly reveal the ear of wheat that
 Demeter brought back from Hades.  Any night can be the
 good night.  Looking at every single day of life as a
 possibility of a new breakthrough to undreamed of, awe-
 inspiring beauty, is the lesson of Grateful Dead music for
 me, because it means that at several moments in a day, I can
 be in the middle of a conversation, or some other situation,
 and I can drop the past, drop my agenda, and expose myself
 to the raw possibility of the next thing as a stairway to
 heaven.
     That includes looking at the person next to me, and
 thinking that we could get to know each other better than we
 have, and it includes taking the next line in something  I'm
 writing, and instead of riding the syntax out to its inevitable
 boring conclusion, radically juicing up my next idea.  The
 Grateful Dead approach each song as a potential opening to
 strange and exhilirating possibility, and one can carry that
 into daily life quite effectively.

 PS:What did the experience of writing Skeleton Key teach
 you about the Grateful Dead and Deadheads that you didn't
 already know?

 SS:   Well the big surprise of writing Skeleton Key was  -
 as a young Deadhead, one feels that there are nice people in
 every corner of Deadville.  Then, as one gets closer to the
 organization, one hears: "Well, those people over there are
 not so nice," or "the Spinners are running a trip," or "the
 crew isn't nice."  As one gets less naive, one begins to feel,
 "Maybe I was naive, maybe it's just my friends that are
 nice."  Then one finds out that the band is human, and one's
 dreams are fully punctured.
     I went through that stage, and talked to people at the
 Office, and talked to the Spinners, and talked to people in as
 many corners of the room at a Dead show as I could get to,
 which turned out to be hundreds of people.  What I
 discovered, much to my delight, was that every single
 person I talked to was  trying to make things a little better
 from their little corner of existence.  There are a lot of fuck-
 ups around the Grateful Dead scene - people who are not
 working, or who are dealing bad drugs, or whatever.  But
 there are a tremendous amount of good intentions in every
 corner of the scene.
     When I talked to Sue Swanson, who was the first
 Deadhead, and Steve Brown, who started seeing the band in
 '66, even though I was meeting them for the first time, they
 were strangely familiar to me.  That's because those guys
 helped invent a kind of social DNA that's been successfully
 replicated into millions of people.  So there has been - with
 no organized structure to do this -  very effective dharma
 transmission from the first Deadheads to the little guy who
 just called me on the phone after reading Skeleton Key, a 15-
 year-old kid from Virginia Beach.   He's a Deadhead
 through and through, very sweet, sending David Crosby e-
 mail to help him feel better, and really trying to do the good
 thing.  Certainly there are many non-Deadheads who are
 trying to do the good thing, but it is really extraordinary how
 many Deadheads are noticeably socially beneficial.  It was
 surprising to notice how consistent the transmission was,
 from the beginning.

 PS:  The Dead, when they are on, can achieve amazing
 musical peaks.  What in your life have you experienced that
 is as powerful?

 SS:  The normal human profundities.  Seeing my
 grandmother in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease,
 saying things that some of my relatives considered
 incoherent, but were very beautiful statements about her
 situation.  Moments in conversation when some kind of
 communion occurs, when I find that I am not talking to an
 other, but I am talking to my Self, in a larger sense.
     I was raised by radicals, and was from a very young
 age participating in mass demonstrations and political action.
 This was in the '60s, and there really was a messianic
 intention - people thought they were going to transform
 society by marching in the street and manifesting a better
 possibility of human community.  Those demonstrations felt
 very much like Dead shows.  Dead shows became a
 perpetuation of that vibe when the demonstrations
 themselves no longer occurred.  I suupose they did in the
 anti-nuclear movement and then I felt some of the same
 exhiliration in ACT UP - that feeling of community in
 opposition to the forces of death, greed and the non-
 compassionate view.
     Moments of personal creativity, when I'm writing,
 feel like a jam.  I wrote Skeleton Key to the music of the
 Dead and Bruce Hornsby mostly, and there were times that I
 felt that I was dancing.  I spent many hours in that state
 actually.

 PS:  I have a friend who spends every waking hour listening
 to the Dead, when he's at work he sneaks onto the Internet
 and checks out the Grateful Dead conference, and when he
 calls me we talk about the Dead for hours, and the minute he
 gets off work, he listens to the Dead all night long.  What is
 it about the Dead that engenders such devotion from
 Deadheads?

 SS:  This phenomenon has positive and negative aspects.
 The positive way to look at it is that the Grateful Dead are an
 ongoing conversation in music, and one doesn't want to
 miss significant passages of the conversation.  If one hears
 that there was a particularly great passage of the conversation
 that occurred in 1972 in Austin, Texas, one wants to hear it.
 The Dead have played over 3000 shows, and to hear all the
 good parts, you'd have to listen to the music all the time.
 The Dead can be used like air conditioning for reality
 [laughter] - there's something about hearing the music in the
 background that can give one a feeling of joy and
 contentment.  So it's not necessarily spiritual.  Some people
 just feel better kicking back with a brew with the Dead on.
 For other people it can be an obsession - they have to listen
 to the Dead or they don't feel right.  Which is unfortunate,
 because the Dead themselves listen to other stuff.  I think
 one of the best ways to experience the Dead is as a pointer to
 other things: "OK, we improvise, check out jazz, they do the
 same thing." Or  check out other ways of using drums to
 evoke the sacred.

 PS:  They point in millions of different directions, from
 Willie Dixon to Charles Ives, and everywhere in between.

 SS:  If you trace back along the Dead's roots, you end up
 with a very thorough musical education.  In Buddhism, they
 talk about the marks of the Buddha.  One of the marks of the
 Buddha in the Dead scene is that there are so many forms of
 music that flow into it,  you can't go wrong.  You may not
 like them, but it's not because they're shallow.  You may not
 think they're good players, but their music goes deep, from
 jazz, to Latin, to Taiko drumming - a 20th century
 symphony.
       There are other reasons why people want to live in
 Grateful Deadland all the time.  Social reasons.  America is a
 very bleak landscape in terms of community.  People are
 expected to be happy with their monogamous  marriage in
 their suburban tract house, with their relatives safely packed
 away in the nursing home, or at school, or watching TV,
 where they are being relentlessly sold products that are bad
 for them and bad for the planet.  And they're expected to be
 happy!  Lo and behold, the human animal is not happy, and
 suddenly seeks anesthesia in the form of alcohol, or other
 drugs, or more TV.  Marriages don't last,  because they have
 no living familial context in which to occur.  Basically,
 Americans have a big hole in their souls which they try to fill
 with Dunkin' Donuts, and it does not work. Anyone from a
 traditional culture would say, "these people are sick."   It's a
 very sad life.
     Grateful Dead land offers meaningful conversation,
 and a feeling of fraternal or sororital identication with people
 you don't know.  It offers a contemporary form of tribality
 which feel very authentic, and the traditional human band is
 not the nuclear family, it's the tribe.    For some people,
 listining to the Grateful Dead, talking about it, and being
 with Deadheads, feels so at home that they dont want to
 leave, so they surround themselves with things Dead.  I
 know how that feels.
     I myself have to come and go, because I get bored,
 and I like to listen to other music.  But some people,
 especially young people who don't know that jazz is also
 jamming, it's a place that they want to live in for a while.
 And I can tell you from my own experience  that life on tour
 is a really wonderful thing.  It feels great.  It's like finally
 having a job that you want.  You get your tickets together,
 you get your food together.  It's like being in the wilderness:
 suddenly the simplest foods taste great.  And you go to the
 show, and participate in the sacred event, night after night
 after night after night.  Personally I love it.
     There are certain things about it that are not good in
 the long term.  One is willing to trash a town simply because
 one will not be there tomorrow.   But there are other people
 who do tour walking lightly on the earth, and that is
 beautiful.  They are going through the American wilderness,
 building their campfires, telling their stories, and moving on.
     There is also a downside, you see people who are
 just wasted, and they think that Jerry is God - and poor Jerry
 is up there, having big self-esteem problems.  So there is a
 kind of passivity that can happen in the Dead scene, where
 you think the band is supposed to do the work in your life of
 revealing the sacred for you, and that aint cool in the long
 run.  You have to become your own Grateful Dead.

 PS:  Will you still be listening to the Dead when you're 80?

 SS:   I am absolutely certain that I will be singing those
 songs to myself, the way my grandfather sang Irving Berlin
 to himself.  I'll be psyched if I'm in the nursing home, and I
 make some arcane reference to some old geezer, and he
 comes back with "Hey now!" [laughing]

 PS:   Could you discuss some of the archetypes that you've
 encountered through the music and lyrics of the Grateful
 Dead?

 SS:   One archetype came by the name of Dionysus in
 ancient Greece, normally depicted as an beardless adolescent
 who was so great to make love to, that his minions were
 driven insane.   Dionysus was worshipped with the tearing
 apart of small animals, and the ingestion of alcohol and
 psychedelics.  You could say Dionysus was an embodiment
 of chaotic beauty - the majesty of terror and destruction.  I
 have seen that at Dead shows.  There were times when I
 couldn't believe that the stage wasn't collapsing from the
 energy that was being barely controlled on the stage.
 There's a really tremendous performance of "Playing in the
 Band" from Laguna Seca in 1988.   Bob Weir said in an
 interview that he became frightened on stage during that jam,
 and I know why!  The first time I heard the tape I was in a
 car, and we had to pull over -  I thought we were going to
 crash.  Anybody who says the Dead are wimpy hippies can
 pop that Laguna Seca tape on, and tell me that Sonic Youth
 or Ministry is more terrifying.  I'm sorry!  This is heavy
 stuff.  So I've seen Dionysus at shows, reflected in the
 terror and ecstasy in the beardless faces of young
 Deadheads, spacedancing at the edge of chaos.
     I've also seen Demeter, who brings an ear of wheat
 up from the underground Plutonian stronghold.  A green
 beauty that is always new, young, eternally redemptive, and
 feels almost feminine.  Even though the bandmembers
 themselves are guys, there's something about the endless
 fecundity of the Dead's improvisations that feels archetypally
 female to me, the fertility of yin.  So I've seen that young
 woman who offers the ear of wheat that banishes winter
 from the earth for another cycle, and puts Pluto back where
 he belongs.
     I've also seen who you might call Parcifal:  young
 dudes or women who are heartbreakingly pure or hopeful,
 who talk about the new society that might be born on the
 Earth now.  They're often vegetarian, very loving and
 sweet, and slightly irresponsible.  Physically very beautiful,
 almost glowing.  It's extraordinary how many beautiful
 people there are at shows.
     Greg, my buddy who had his initiation experience in
 the drum circle, was extremely beautiful in a way that
 combined the traditional virtues of both male and female,
 you could say.  I've seen many young men and young
 women who manifested that archetype at shows.  I don't
 know what happens to them, exactly.  Maybe I was beautiful
 once, I don't know.  I probably was a nice little guy at the
 shows.  I started going when I was fifteen.
     I find it fascinating that a lot of Deadheads refer to
 Garcia as "the old man."  There are initiated tribal elders out
 there, who have a different sort of beauty than the beauty of
 an unshaven boy.  Often, interestingly enough, these
 initiated beautiful people can be almost ugly because they are
 worn, tattooed, or pierced.  They have a sort of biker glory.
 Women who have given birth to children.  Calico is a
 conspicuous example of that.  She was one of the first Hog
 Farmers, and she's been on the Dead scene since '67, often
 walking around the parking lot, keeping things sane.  She's
 a tribal elder, and a heavy woman:  she's been in the Zone
 and back so many times, you can't throw her by whatever
 psychedelic thing you're going through - she's seen it
 before.  Some of the volunteers at Rock Med are that way
 too.  There are some very old souls out there in the parking
 lot.  Young people are looking for elders who have not
 forsaken the sacred.  Donald Trump is not going to last as a
 tribal elder, because he's not tapping into stuff that's deep
 enough.
     People like that try to clothe themselves in real
 greatness.  But if they are seeking it in materials, they are not
 going to do it.  But someone like Allen Ginsberg, or Jerry
 Garcia, stay good tribal elders for a long time, because they
 are tapping into something that is deep and lasting.  Young
 people flock around it - they can smell it.  Young people
 want blessings conferred on them from empowered older
 people.  That's something I myself have noticed as I get
 older, and do stuff like writing a book.   Teenage people
 who I would have thought of as intimidatingly cool when I
 was their age, are actively seeking my blessing.  They want
 me to notice them, talk to them, and say "wow, you're a
 good writer," if they are, or offer them criticism.  To be
 honest with them.

 PS:  You're becoming an elder.

 SS:  I'm becoming - um - a middle-aged person.  But I'm
 trying to do it authentically, and I'm trying to not surrender
 my essential intentions.  I think young people can sense that,
 and they think that I have something to teach.  And rather
 than saying, "I have nothing to teach," maybe I do.  I don't
 think I have any existential truths to teach, but I have craft,
 and some habits of attention.

 PS:  Here's a quote from Jung:   Christianity "was accepted
 as a means of escape from the brutality and unconsciousness
 of the ancient world.  As soon as we discard it, the old
 brutality returns in force, as has been made overwhelmingly
 clear by contemporary events."  This statement is as true
 today as it was eighty years ago.   Do you think - as
 Terrence McKenna and many others like him do - that our
 culture is about to undergo a huge shift in consciousness, an
 omega moment? And if so, how do you feel that Deadheads
 could help in such a drastic paradigm shift?

 SS:   I think that's a load of hooey.  It's like thinking that
 Christ is going to come down and make world peace, or that
 aliens are going to save us all.  If I get to 2012, or whatever
 the Mayan calendar says, and all shit breaks loose and "Dark
 Star" pours out of the sky,  I'll be there for it.  But I'm
 going to live more like the Zen monk who is not wishing for
 enlightenment, but sitting in enlightenment every moment.
 The omega moment is this moment, or nowhere.

 PS:  I think that might be one of the lessons the Grateful
 Dead has to teach.

 SS:  Yes, I think so too.  I am somewhat surprised by
 McKenna's fixation on this idea.  I don't know where it
 comes from.  I've heard Garcia is into it too -

 PS:  Yeah.  A lot of people who are into the Dead are into it.
 That's why I wanted to get your take on it.

 SS:  It's a pitfall of spiritual pursuit.  When I was a Zen
 student, I was the guy wishing for enlightenment.  I wanted
 to bear down on my zazen, and produce satori in the next
 second, or the next meditation period.  What do you do
 when it doesn't happen?  What do you do when the practice
 is just the practice, and your teeth are falling out because
 you're getting old?  What do you do when the Messiah does
 not come, and all of a sudden your wife is eighty years old?
 We still have to, somehow, live.  I'm not too big on the
 omega moment, because I think we're going to be stuck in
 our meat until the day we die.  So how to live.
     And I think in the Grateful Dead's relatively tireless
 quest for the brilliant possibility in every next moment, they
 are showing a way to live that is true, even if Santa Christ
 never climbs down the chimney with his bag of eternal
 goodies.

 PS:   Do you think one of the reasons Dead music is so
 powerful on psychedelics is that, during the formative years
 of the band, the bandmembers gained an intimate knowledge
 of the states of consciousness that psychedelics induce?  Are
 they psychedelic shamans or just damn good musicians?

 SS:  They are damn good musicians who are, by default,
 psychedelic shamans.  We don't have any psychedelic
 shamans, because the pursuit of truth through psychedelics
 was made illegal and fugitive.  Kids are not able to talk with
 psychedelic tribal elders, because the elders are in the closet -
 except for very few outspoken people like Ram Dass, Allen
 Ginsberg, and John Barlow.    I am going to be out of the
 closet about my use of psychedelics until they bust me, and
 I'll do it then.  I'm not going to turn my back on the church
 of LSD because it's not legally fashionable to be taking it
 now.  I've had some of the most profound experiences of
 my life on psychedelics.  The more people who would
 commit to telling the truth about their own experiences, the
 easier it would be to articulate this stuff, and you'd end up
 with less kids freaking out and having to be taken to the
 hospital, because there would be information that could teach
 how to go down that road safely.
      I once visited a camp for teenagers called Creating
 Our Future, which no longer exists unfortunately, which
 was partially funded by the Rex Foundation.  Teachers like
 Ram Dass would come in, and deliver lectures on how to
 become effective social and environmental activists, or how
 to meditate.  One night after the lecture, all these kids started
 asking Ram Dass about his psychedelic experiences.  I
 realized it was one of the few times, if not the only time, that
 I saw someone with a lot of experience - an elder - give kids
 the real deal on psychedelic experience.  Those practical
 lessons should be taught in high school, if kids are taking
 psychedelics in high school, which they are.

 PS:  Give the kids information, instead of just telling them
 that taking drugs is wrong.

 SS:  Now they just try to scare the kids with invented
 dangers, and told not to take psychedelics.  The kids take
 them anyway, and find out that the invented dangers are
 bullshit, and then they're not aware of the real dangers.
     You know many psychedelic rituals have been
 accompanied by music whether it's Huichol Indians going
 out on the peyote hunt, singing songs containing directions
 to the site where the Peyote grows.  Or Maria Sabina,
 singing during her mushroom rituals.   Drumming, in
 particular, goes with psychedelic experience somehow.  You
 don't really have to explain why.  And most Deadhead know
 that psychedelics - LSD in particular - and the Grateful Dead
 were somehow made for each other.  And they were partly
 made by each other.  Garcia himself talks about how the
 wave form of a Dead show echoes the wave form of
 psychedelic experience.
     The second set, in its journey from structure - the
 songs;  to chaos - the "drums and space";  and back to
 structure;  mirrors psychedelic experience.  You start out
 with your everyday identity, and then you begin to lose a
 sense of the boundaries of that identity, and then you venture
 to a place where new things can be presented to you.  If you
 take enough of the drug, you come to a place where there is
 very little patterning of experience, where all sensory inputs
 become scrambled, like static.  That is a very heavy place to
 go to.  The Dead themselves go from songs, to jams, to
 drums and space.   The "drums and space" is like the
 revelatory turning moment of a psychedelic experience, and
 then you come back to good ol' America, in the form of
 "Johnny B. Goode" or "Around and Around."  Also, you
 come back through a Garcia ballad, like "Stella Blue," that
 contains in it some crystallization of the existential
 ponderings that you've just been through.
     So there's something about the structure of a
 Grateful Dead second set that is uncannily related to the
 natural, organic sequence of psychedelic experience.  So the
 Dead function as shamans, but if you had Phil Lesh sitting
 over in that chair, and you started saying that the Dead
 function as psychedelic shamans, he'd be like, "hrrummph,"
 you know.

 PS:   But even they'll admit that they used to call the shows
 "church."

 SS;  Right.  But they were not Jesus, they were the altar
 boys.

 PS:  Deadheads are phenomenal builders of community, able
 to transform a random slab of concrete in the middle of, say,
 Cleveland, in a few short hours, into a genuine community
 that feels more homey than the neighborhood I grew up in.
 What makes this possible?

 SS:  People like to experience the highest moments of their
 lives in the company of people who they feel fully
 understand the significance of those experiences.   The
 Dead, for many people, are a reliable source of peak
 experiences.  One of the nicest things about a great moment
 at a Dead show, say when the band goes into "Dark Star," or
 "Cosmic Charlie," is that you feel that many other of the
 people in the room understand, as deeply as you do, the
 significance of what is occurring.  That desire to bond with
 others who understand the significance of a beautiful
 moment repeats itself fractally throughout Grateful Dead
 culture, even unto the WELL, where ideas that are remote
 from the tunes or the shows are collectively examined, and
 enjoyed in the company of an understanding group of fellow
 investigators.  The form reiterated throughout Deadland is
 people coming together to look at a set of experiences that
 contain in them the seed of mystery.  Whether that's setting
 up tents together in Laguna Seca for a run of shows, or
 colonizing the Internet.

 PS:  One of the things that is constant about the Grateful
 Dead is that it doesn't happen without the audience.  Their
 studio albums are generally mediocre, compared to their live
 performances.

 SS:  When the great thing happens at a Dead show, it's not
 because the band is out there, pumping it like toothpaste
 from a tube out of the speakers.  It is because everyone is in
 their exactly right place.  The Spinners are spinning in the
 hallway, the crazy guy is babbling is over there, your own
 foot is striking the floor at just the right moment, and Jerry is
 hitting that note that is a little bit better than the Platonic ideal
 of the solo that you were wishing he would play.

 PS:  Synchronicity.

 SS:  Yeah.  I think it was Nietzsche who used the phrase
 amor fati, the love of fate, or, you could say, the love of the
 particular circumstances which fate has dealt you.  Not the
 love of some ideal.  Not the love of some state you wish you
 could attain some day.  The love of the particular experiences
 in which you find yourself.  Particularly beautiful Dead
 shows involve this amor fati experience, where even if your
 tooth aches, or your clothes are wet because it rained on you
 while you were waiting outside the venue, you feel right.
 The medicine happens, and that moment involves everyone
 in the room.
     In Iron John, Robert Bly talks about how the
 protected, beautiful and weak child has to be stolen away
 from the castle of the parents by a "hairy man," and put
 through certain ordeals in order to come into his own power.
 For some kids, the Grateful Dead, and the community of
 Deadheads, are that hairy wild man, who steals the child out
 of his parents' castle.   Some of the difficult ordeals that kids
 go through in Deadville are not unfortunate impurities in the
 ecology of a goody-goody subculture.  The ordeals are what
 is doing the necessary transformation.
     Part of finding oneself in this society has to do with
 getting lost, and a lot of people get pretty damn lost in
 Deadville.   A lot of young people go through things that
 they would not wish on their own kids, when they become
 parents.  But I think that a lot of the things that are regarded
 as difficulties, or even shameful things happening in the
 Dead scene, can be looked at as ordeals, comparable to
 going into the wilderness and having your flesh torn, or
 getting a painful piercing or tattoo.
     Most of human religious experience, initiatory
 experience, has not involved getting cooled by feather fans
 while eating caviar.  It has to do with knowledge of pain,
 terror, knowledge of death, fragmentation of social forms,
 and being stolen away from your parents by force.  I think
 that a lot of what gives the Grateful Dead scene its mojo,
 includes even some of the things that some Deadheads
 consider dark, or unfortunate.  That's why I like dissonant
 songs like"Victim or the Crime."  The songs I don't like are
 songs that offer facile models of reality, like "Long Way To
 Go Home."  The music itself is too predictable.  A really
 good "Playin'" jam, or a good "Cassidy," snarls with primal
 terror.  Being exposed to primal terror is not something that
 Mall America offers much of, and I think kids need a dose of
 that as much as they need mother's milk when they're
 younger, to become fully human, live to the utmost, and
 exercise their faculties at large.
     By offering an organic whole to their audience that
 includes both shadow and light, I think that the Grateful
 Dead are worthy inheritors of the great tradition of human
 spiritual pursuit and investigation.