fterword. Afterward. After. Words. This is an intimidating task. So much has been said and sung —and not said yet, and never sung—but now it seems we’ve reached the end of it, and I’ve been asked to say a few words afterward. There is so much to say that only silence seems eloquent enough to make a proper closing bookend. But silence would also seem like a cop-out. After so many acts of courage, great and small, this is no time to be fainthearted.
I think now that no more Grateful Dead songs will be written. It appears that after forty years, we can say, truly and finally, that the words are yours. That we are done with ours. (Not that they ever really belonged to anyone in the first place.)
Of course, Hunter and I and the others whose works are included here will still write songs, and even some for those voices that sang these who, being still alive, can sing. But they won’t be Grateful Dead songs. All the Grateful Dead songs that will ever be written are in your hands.
Of course—and more to the point—these songs here will continue to expand and grow as others come along and fill them with their own imaginings and annotations, explicit or tacit. We’ve always tried (and Hunter, being subtler, more than I) to give you plenty of room to flesh your own song around the bones of what we gave you.
Every time someone would ask me, over the years, what I meant by this line or that, I would say, “What does it mean to you?” I’m glad I did that. I have heard some marvelous things following that question. The answers were often utterly unrelated to anything that I, or Bobby or Brent might have meant, but yet they would fit somehow. Depending on whether I was drunk or not, I would say either, “No, that’s not what I was thinking, but that’s pretty good,” or, conspiratorially, “Yes. That’s it exactly. But please don’t tell anyone. Let’s leave them room for interpretation. Let’s give them a chance to make up their own songs.” With each interpretation, the song became new again.
The fact is, one doesn’t really know himself sometimes. Some stanza is suddenly there in your head and with it there sometimes is, as Dylan said, “a terrible roaring sound.” Someone once said to me that “art is what happens when God speaks through a human being.” I wouldn’t claim that I’ve been that sort of oracle very often, but Hunter has, and there is no question that there were many moments when God, or whatever you want to call the Holy Whoknows, would zap Its stunning meaningfulness at you through the Grateful Dead. And it was as much a gift to us as it was to you. The good stuff just appeared, like grace. No, not like grace. Grace.
Dylan is a pretty good case in point. I remember one night in 1987, when the Dead were touring with Dylan for the first time and I was herding an ancient Cadillac filled with Ken Kesey and other old Pranksters down the Left Coast, following the tour down to Anaheim, of all places. There, not far from Disneyland, Dylan was singing, and Kesey turned to me and said, “I’ve just figured out who this weird little fuck is.” “And?” my eyes inquired. “Same guy who wrote the Book of Revelations.” Dead right, I thought. There have been times when Hunter also was, for sure. Sometimes I came pretty close to being that.
And what is being that like? It’s like being a faucet or a crack in the rocks from which the water emerges. The spring doesn’t make the water. At best, it knows how to get out of the way and open itself wide to the flow. If it’s really blessed and happens to be connected to some sweet, clear water, then it will taste like a revelation to those who encounter it.
But in the end, it’s just the song. It’s not the guy who writes the words, or the guy who writes the melody, or even the guys who work up the chords and improvise the fresh miracles that occur in that space for years and years. It’s the song itself. Again, I think of Dylan.
One time during the early nineties when Bobby and I hadn’t written anything for a while, I was at a concert at Shoreline and a freshly minted young Deadhead came up to me in the audience. He was about sixteen, and I expect some older, more experienced Deadhead had pointed me out to him.
“Hey,” he said, “I really like that new song you wrote for Bobby.” I cocked an eyebrow, sorry that there was no such thing.
“And what song might that be?” I inquired.
“That one about the watchtowers and stuff.” I gritted my teeth in a moment of involuntary humility.
“I wish I could tell you I wrote that song, but I didn’t.”
“Oh, yeah. Who did?”
“Bob Dylan.”
“Who’s Bob Dylan?” he asked.
This was a great moment for me. I realized, as I should have known all along, that if the song is any good, it detaches from its apparent source and enters into the hearts and minds of those who hear it to make its own home there, leaving behind everyone except for, say, the person you were making love with the first time you heard it. Or the folks who were in the microbus with you that night you threw a rod outside of Winnemucca and still managed to make it to the Sacramento show in time to hear it at the beginning of the second set.
Authorship and pride has been a tricky matter for me in this context. It has been no picnic for the ego to spend these decades writing songs in the tall shadow of Robert Hunter. Talk about intimidating. You cannot imagine how humbling (and occasionally humiliating) this has been. T. S. Eliot dedicated The Wasteland to Ezra Pound and called him, as he did so, il miglior fabbro. The better maker.
(At least T. S. Eliot got to be T. S. Eliot, a better faucet than almost anyone who ever channeled poetry in English.) But I was just me, a trickle of almost brackish, certainly at times hackish, water next to a torrent of what has always felt to me—and continues to feel—like revealed truth. Hunter was the better maker, as any fool could hear. There is no false humility in that recognition. It is simply how things have been.
And yet I knew why I was there. I knew why it was important to continue to persevere with my own far less immortal output. Had it not been for me, and my other junior-varsity colleagues, this ecosystem you behold here would have been a monoculture, a brilliant garden in which all the flowers were roses but which lacked in the diversity that is essential to ecological health. Furthermore, on a good night, when God (or whatever you want to call It) had shown up, the Grateful Dead could make everything I’d ever written for them sound transforming and true.
Still, if someone asked me to name my favorite twenty Grateful Dead songs, they would all consist of words that entered the conscious world through Hunter’s head. He has written over a hundred of the greatest short novels that have ever been sung and taught me a huge amount about what it is to be merely what one is, equipped with ordinary tools, beavering on in relative mediocrity, adding my own meager but necessary weeds to his rose garden. Making it real.
And then there is always that question. “Who’s Bob Dylan?”
Personally, I have been incredibly blessed by the songs in this book, in more ways than I know so far. As Deadheads know, these songs are continuously growing and revealing themselves. Resonating with frequencies unheard at the time of their writing. Being imbued with all that received belief, collateral and yet vital as anything that happened in the silence of our own minds or in the hugeness of two hundred thousand people dancing.
The songs revealed themselves over time, even to us. I’ll tell you a story and make an essential admission. I thought I wouldn’t do this, but I will anyway. It’s as good a way as I know of conveying an essential point about all these lovely collections of phonemes, belief, and meaning.
When I wrote “Looks Like Rain,” I had never fallen in love. I had certainly heard a lot of love songs. I had been to an opera or six. I was not unfamiliar with the huge literature of amorous helplessness. But I remained skeptical. I secretly believed that “falling in love” was a conceit that people had made up in order to make themselves even more miserable for their perceived insufficiencies. People do stuff like that. Nevertheless, there this song was on a winter day in Wyoming, and I didn’t try to stop it from coming into existence merely because it trafficked in emotions I hadn’t quite experienced. I didn’t know who these people in the song were or, really, what they were experiencing, but as it arrived, it seemed as genuine as any other love song.
That was in 1972. Twenty-one years later, I fell in love for the first time in my life. I looked across a crowded room and saw somebody’s back and knew. Don’t ask me how I knew. Don’t even ask me what it was that I knew.
Now, mind you, this was after I’d had about two hundred people come up to me in various contexts and tell me that “Looks Like Rain” was the song they fell in love to, or was the song that was played at their wedding, or was the song that changed their lives and helped them feel like one person. I would nod and smile as if I knew what they were talking about.
In any event, I was instantaneously in love with some person whose face I hadn’t seen yet. She turned around and fell in love with me. We were both so convinced of this emotional reality that a week after we met, we were living together, even though she was freshly married at the time to a far likelier candidate for the positon.
She was also an improbable Deadhead, a sleek young psychiatrist who preferred black Armani suits to tie-dyes and had never smoked pot in her life. In fact, she’d grown up making particular fun of hippies, particularly old ones like me.
After we’d been together almost a year, enjoying a relationship so radiant that others would gather around it like cats to a fireplace, we were at a Dead concert in Nassau Coliseum (of all grim places). Bobby started to sing “Looks Like Rain,” and I started singing it to her myself so that she would get all the words. About halfway through, I realized that I was getting all the words for the first time. I finally knew what the song was about. I finally meant it. Or perhaps one could say more accurately that it finally meant me. Both of us were crying by the time it was over. And we didn’t even know why we were crying yet.
About three weeks later, I put her on a plane in Los Angeles, two days before her thirtieth birthday. She went to sleep almost immediately. When the flight steward tried to wake her up to tell her to put her seat belt on as they descended into JFK, he found that she was dead and had been for a while. The flu we’d both been suffering from when I sang that song in her ear had attacked her heart and given her viral cardiomyopathy. She fibrillated in her sleep. She flew away, as angels sometimes do. And I still sing her love songs. . . .
I tell you this story not as a mere self-indulgence (though it probably is that) but to make a point about these songs. I can’t really speak for any of the other songwriters whose babies nestle in these covers, but I suspect that all of us learned some startling things about our own words as time proceeded, and, evolving in the primordial soup of Deadhead consciousness, they became themselves.
I could tell you lots of stories about all these songs, and not just my own. I have had at least one memorable experience that I could associate with every song in this volume. And collectively, you could tell me enough stories about your own experiences with them to fill many books this size.
Also, David Dodd has done, with your help, a marvelous job over the years of identifying the references and resonances buried in them, whether intentionally or not, and making them richer for everyone. I hope this book will not be the end of that enterprise. You and he have barely scratched the surface of what we extracted from the Bible alone. . . . In other words, there is a lot of ore still unmined here. And yet, at the same time, it’s over. Gems may be discovered, but no new ones will be formed.
Afterword. And after everything else, I guess.
After the most remarkable tapestry of sagas—as all these frayed threads wove themselves in afterthought —after all these experiences that could never be trapped in words, whether for being ineffable or unspeakable, here I am gazing back on the words themselves. For me, for Hunter, for Robbie Peterson, Gerrit Graham, “McGannahan Skejellyfetti,” and all the rest, every one of these songs has a story that surrounded its creation, known only to us and a few others. (Elsewhere in this volume, you will find my own little creation myth for the writing of “Cassidy,” but generally we left that to your imagination as well.)
As improbable as it seems that this is actually the end of all that, the greater improbability is that it went on so long.
Hell, we thought it had been a long, strange trip in 1969! We didn’t know from long or strange, as things turned out. It was a hazardous environment, socially and physically. Many of us actually are dead now, having departed earlier than we would have if we’d taken up a safer undertaking. Many more of us would be, had we not developed such an astonishingly facility for spitting in the Devil’s eye and laughing. And, mostly, loving each other in our own weird, dysfunctional way and somehow hanging together. Hanging out. Hanging on.
A big part of what we leave lies between these covers. It’s a long epitaph. It is as beautiful as it deserves to be.
Thank you for summoning it forth, you Deadheads.
Thank you wordsmithies, particularly Hunter, for rising so magnificently and often to the call.
Thank you, Whatever You are, for issuing it so abundantly.
It was long, it was strange, but we really did enjoy the ride.
—John Barlow
New York
June 2005