My friend Thumb, who also happens to be my attorney and long-time musical partner, sent me this pic of Bob Weir holding a poster, a repop and not an original I'm guessing, from the infamous "acid tests" that were put on by the Grateful Dead back in the 60s.
They held massive parties where everyone was given LSD and danced the night away while the Dead played music accompanied by early light shows, using overhead projectors, slides and Super-8 projectors and such.
It reminded me of my own "acid test" that I performed at Red Rocks back in the 80s. About 15 of us flew out to Colorado to see three shows. Originally they were going to be nighttime shows but for some reason they switched to daytime shows. I remember that bummed me out a little because I like nighttime shows, but in the end I doubt it mattered.
I love the Dead and I really love their studio albums but I'm definitely not a "Deadhead" like the rest of my friends who went were. I always thought they were a bit sloppy live, but it was the live shows that made the band, along with all the people who followed them and the sense of community and all the peripheral stuff that accompanied the shows...and the drugs.
There were drugs of all kinds freely available at Dead shows, but aside from tons of weed and enough nitrous balloons to fill a circus, the drugs of choice were of course psychedelics- LSD and mushrooms, all of which you could easily get hold of for cheap and sometimes for free.
I knew that psychedelics was a big part of the experience, and I wanted to find out just how much...to me anyway, so I decided to have my own acid test. I decided that with the exception of weed I'd stay straight for the middle show. That way, if it turned out that tripping made as much of a difference as I thought it would, I could still trip balls for the third show, which for the record I did. I'm glad I planned it like that because with all due respect seeing a Dead show without dosing wasn't the same thing at all. Don't get me wrong...I still enjoyed the show very much. I enjoy live music of any kind, from a grandma singing in church to Tibetan monks chanting to Joe Divot hamboning to my favorite band, but the show was flat compared to the other two shows where I was considerably altered.
How altered was I? I was seeing skeletons relaxing on the clouds and I experienced full-blown Synesthesia. I could "see" the music coming out of the speakers as colors. Different instruments and sounds had different colors and waveforms, like what we see as auras in Kirlian photography, and it seemed to make perfect sense. That was fun and extremely interesting. I believe it's like that all the time but ordinarily we can't see it.
A guy came up to me selling Rhythm Devils t-shirts. The Rhythm Devils was a percussion-based project with the Dead's drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. The guy had printed the shirts himself and they were awesome.
They had the name of the band and a bunch of skeletons dancing around and playing various percussion instruments. Right before my eyes the skeletons came to life and started dancing. It looked absolutely real.
I still remember like it was yesterday...the guy walked up to me and held up a shirt. I stared at it for several seconds with a huge grin on my face. The guy was grinning too as he watched me admiring his work. Finally he said, "They're dancing, aren't they?" "Yes they are" I replied. "I'll take one please." They were $5. Ah, the good old days. RIP the economy.
I reached for my wallet but he said, "Nah man. You need it. Enjoy the rest of the show." With that he tossed me the shirt and walked off. "Thanks man!" I managed to say. He nodded and flashed a peace sign. I didn't get to tell him that I played percussion too but maybe he got the vibe.
I knew better than to try and insist that he take my money, and I'd have gladly paid ten times that amount. That would've been an insult, and would've gone against the basic principles of the community ethic. I saw maybe a couple dozen shows and that was the coolest thing that happened at any of them.
I wore that t-shirt until it was long past due for the rag bag. It had more holes than a sieve. It actually met a heroic end. I was wearing it one day as I was loading equipment into a club on Southside where I was playing that night.
A girl came up to me in tears and obvious distress. She'd been trying to rescue a feral kitten for some time. That day she almost caught it but it got away and ran under a parked car. The traffic was heavy and it was a chaotic scene. I leaned under the car and tried to coax it out but it was no use.
I was determined not to let it get away, and my only option was to take off my beloved Rhythm Devils t-shirt and throw it onto the kitten like a net and drag it out. Bless its heart the kitten was going berserk but I managed to get it into her car, which I'm guessing she had to have detailed the next day.
The girl thought I was a hero, but the shirt played no small part. I hope she and her new kitten had a long, happy and healthy life together, after it settled down anyway. It certainly was a hard-won partnership.
I felt fantastic after being able to help an animal but not so much as I saw what was left of the shirt. The poor kitten had completely shredded it, and for good measure peed and shat on it too.
I sadly tossed it into a trash can. I've been a sentimental old fool since I was young, so I had a brief moment of silence and then said a few words over it and then saluted it. Well done, brave t-shirt! I wish I could've told the story to the guy I bought it from. He'd have loved it. That t-shirt was loved.
Anyway what was immensely cooler about Dead shows than the music was the community of hard-core Deadheads...the ones who traveled from show to show and set up camp in the parking lot. Sure there were a few chicks with hairy armpits, which never really bothered me, and at times the smell of Patchouli and clove cigarettes could make you feel like you might pass out, but the sense of community was legit.
I've always thought that it could be a model for how a society should be run, except that I know that's impossible because of all the evil and greedy people who call the shots in this world. For the most part the Deadheads were the exact opposite...kind, caring and generous. They understood the concept of "As you do unto others, so shall others do unto you." That of course can work either way, and they chose the correct way. God bless 'em.
They looked out for each other, and no one was allowed to go hungry or be in danger. They shared. One might give another a free ticket or whatever, and then that person would in turn give someone else a handful of buds or a sandwich or something. Karma doesn't always bounce back to the person who does something good for someone...it gets spread around, as it should be. It's not Woo-Woo. It's actually been studied, and of course it makes perfect sense.
It was a beautiful thing to see. I realize that most "utopian" things are bullshit, but they did it right. It wasn't planned...it came together organically. They were some of the nicest people I've ever met. That's what I miss most about the Dead years. I'm making it sound like everything was perfect which of course wasn't the case but overall there wasn't too much trouble.
Of course there were cases where someone took too much whatever and flipped out, but when that happened they'd have plenty of people taking care of them. There were usually medical tents and such. I only saw one guy flip out, if you could call it that, and I'd rather not talk about that.
People also got busted as you can imagine, but it was usually for really blatant things like selling whole sheets of acid right in front of a cop, or idiot frat boys who were just there to be cool and party, getting drunk and starting fights or whatever. Drugs were dealt openly for the most part. The cops knew they couldn't bust everybody, and they also knew that the people generally weren't troublemakers. I saw more than one cop joining the party.
Other than the middle show at Red Rocks there were maybe one or two other shows where I didn't trip. It was just part of the deal and a necessary thing I thought. I don't remember too many specific things about tripping at the shows, except that at one show in Atlanta I watched skeletons climbing around on the scaffolding above the stage. They'd climb around for a bit and then sit down and watch the show, tapping their feet. That was wild.
Mainly it was a thing where the music was enhanced. The Dead always had incredible sound systems and it was worth going for that alone. They had these gigantic custom built drums that when combined with the PA took the sound below the range of human hearing, so that you could feel them rather than hear them.
It was a sonic massage and it was amazing. It was majorly enhanced by psychedelics. It went through your whole body like you were a tuning fork and it felt like it was realigning your atoms. It was easily in the top-10 most intense sonic experiences in my life.
After Jerry died some of those people went on to follow Phish, Widespread and a couple other bands and the rest called it a day. Even though they've gone their separate ways, it truly warms my heart to know that they passed along at least some of that ethic to their children. It was an honor to be a small part of that and I'm glad I got to witness it.
Well, that's my acid test story. The moral is, should you ever find a working time machine and decide to go back in time to see a Dead show, which I highly recommend, make sure to dose heavily. Peace.
