“Shall We Go, You and I, While We Can...” | Bklyn Sounds 10/10/2024—10/15/2024
What I learned from speaking to God at a Grateful Dead concert + This Week's Shows include: Irreversible Entanglements 'Speakeasy, Vol.3' / Ge-ology / More Eaze / 'Soul Connection' / Nick Lowe / more
35 years ago, on the evening of Monday, October 9th 1989, the Grateful Dead played a kinda-unannounced show at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia, under an old band-name. I was there, with an open baggy of psilocybin mushrooms in the pocket of my cargo-shorts, absent-mindedly munching down an excessive dose. I’d been seeing the Dead for five years up to that point, and eating psychedelics for a slightly longer time, yet what occurred was more intense than anything prior, and (almost any) thereafter. By mid-concert, the trip had triggered an internal conversation with what I then-comprehended as a higher power, an exchange which would affect how I approached the rest of my life. How I still do. The seeds of ideas central to Dada Strain—being present, trusting the value of experience above forms of second-hand knowledge—were planted on that deeply stoned autumn evening. The Dead played its part too, putting on a performance that opened the band’s last great creative chapter before Jerry Garcia’s 1995 passing, revealing its continued collusion with improvised music’s higher powers.
Of course in 2024 parlance, this anecdote sounds like the opening of a Drew Carey or Seth Rogen viral stand-up bit about getting lathered up on too much acid at The Shed, and f*cking Lucifer or something. (Look it up—or don’t!) I recognize the timelessly cliched earnestness of the “get high and talk to God” premise—it was as corny-sounding in 1989, as it is now. Even if in the ensuing 35 years, stories of druggy epiphanies have migrated from one cultural extreme (once, the last, illegal vestiges of nonconformist rebellion and radicalization…) to another (...now, a den of consumer-friendly spirituality and productivity-yearning wellness).
That said, I continue believing that it's foolish to dismiss anyone’s epiphany involving higher consciousness—especially one triggered by indigenous medicine with a long history as a counterweight to Western reason—no matter how culturally banal its context may appear. After all, I come into your inbox week-after-week, arguing for qualities of re-enchantment that can be discovered by losing yourself on a dance-floor, or by staying focused on a group’s improvised musical conversation, events many consider basic AF. I’ve long stopped believing that a society’s popular opinion (or hip perspective) of an experience has anything to do with the personal value one might glean from it.
Academics do too. In his pointed (if a little wordy) book, Get Shown The Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead, Michael Kaller writes that conditions of a spiritual transformation (i.e. people doing “‘weird stuff’ [to] find that it [leads] to God”) don’t matter, “if only as far as [those people] are concerned….Are they subjectively right? Do many people genuinely believe that, after they did the weird stuff something unique and transcendent took place and perhaps changed their lives? In many cases, it seems clear that they are right…that they did perceive something happening.” Which to me sounds a lot like the best nights spent in thrall to rhythm and improvisation.
Monday, October 9th, 1989, wasn’t even the first such night of my life. But standing on the Hampton Coliseum’s GA floor, swaying to the Dead’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” while tripping my face off, marked the first time a different voice inside my head began responding to questions that 20-year-old me had been asking. Much later, I’d learn that legendary psychonaut Terrence McKenna labeled such conversations, "interiorized linguistic phenomenon," and called the voices inside the head, “Logos.” McKenna speculated that Logos was a sort-of intermediary between humans and what some might consider to be “God”; numerous studies on the effects of high doses of psilocybin have resulted in stories of such dialogues, with some open-minded researchers speculating that the fungi themselves are the source of the voices and the knowledge, or that their effects unlock our own inherent understanding.
In any case, with “Memphis Blues” consisting of nine endless verses (that night’s version clocks in at over 12 minutes), I couldn’t work out how long the conversation in my head lasted, only recognizing it as relaxed and comforting rather than scary. No bad-trip vibes here. As the exchange began to ebb, I specifically asked the voice about the purpose of human existence, and received a clear, easy-to-remember answer: “Experience.” Being the sort that needs verification (yes, even when high) and believing that I was interrogating the divine, I followed-up with something along the lines of, “How do I know that this is the truth?” At which point a gentle visual cue took place, reinforcing my hallucinatory state but hardly overwhelming me. I can only describe what I saw as stage-curtains parting or a light foggy patina lifting, something instantly recognizable as meaning, “Let me show you, rather than tell you.” And that’s when the Grateful Dead took over.
About 75 minutes later, a good Dead show turned historic. A massive crowd roar greeted the opening notes of “Dark Star,” its first performance in five years. The song was originally recorded as a single in 1967 but lost most of its song-ness as it became the band’s a stepping stone to deep psychedelic improvisation, an always-mutating, extended piece of music that more than any other, helped foster the band’s reputation as a freeform ensemble. For a particular kind of Deadhead, “Dark Star” became godhead. When during the second half of 1970s, the Dead’s members sank into a collective powdery haze , the band stopped playing the piece, performing it only three times between 1974 and that night. But when “Dark Star” unexpectedly, gloriously reappeared in Hampton, the performance was a mighty 20-minute version, led by Garcia’s MIDI’d up guitar and Phil Lesh’s contrapuntal bass runs, noisy and open and full of strange electronic textures, a sign of the band’s late-in-life reawakening. For me, it bore evidence that the earlier voice wasn’t my own lunacy but something considerably more universally powerful.
The band delivered two more musical Dead-world shocks on October 9th: a cover of Reverend Gary Davis’ magnificent existential blues, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” another song they’d barely touched since the late-‘60s; and for an encore, the first performance since 1972 of “Attics of My Life,” a harmony-rich American Beauty lament about aging and memory. (The 10/9/89 show and the great night before have been released as a box-set. You can find it on the streamers, and video super-cuts of the concert are on YouTube.) For those of us who gravitated to the Dead around “Touch of Grey” and fantasized about long-gone songs and performances but also recognized the then-current Dead as a venerable update, that night sealed a new kind of relationship. For me, the evening became Exhibit A that the world of reason and knowledge I was being indoctrinated to in the West, wasn’t the entire story. And additional proof was to come. Or more like, events I interpreted as proof.
In the Fall of ‘89, my Deadhead fervor was suffocating what passed for a middling college education. I was missing classes by going on tour with the band for a week at a time, an act that would result in losing my student financial aid, a fact I barely lamented, because of a dream that I’d soon decamp to the Bay Area (for God knows what, except more Dead shows). This was, I felt, an inevitable future. That inevitability took a body blow on October 17th, 1989 with the Loma Prieta earthquake. Instantly, this too seemed like more evidence of the validity of the voice in Hampton. And if my future was knocked off stride by California’s tectonic plates, a little over three weeks later, a sociopolitical explosion in Europe shook the symbolic core of my immigrant life-story. On November 9th, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Eastern Bloc, which had defined my American existence, began falling apart. This too I attributed as having been forecast by the lifting of the veil. Three being the magic number, for proof, for De La, for a story pitch.
In the span of a month, the power behind the voice which had imparted upon me a life’s wisdom, seemed to predict radical unforeseen acts that took place in the moment, and those pertaining my future and my past. I was convinced of it then; I remain relatively bullish about it now. Of course, even when I bring up that night to my old Deadhead friends , which many also attended, all know its myths by heart, and all celebrate its anniversary in our different ways, there is plenty skepticism of what went down inside my brain during “Memphis Blues.” One, to whom I recently recounted the story, asked “Did God tell you to get a sandwich? I remember being hungry after 10/9…” We all carry what’s important, I guess.
What I carry is the absolute assuredness that the world we live in is a highly subjective reality, full of powerful visions and insights that are only recognized by paying close attention. And that the best way to get closer to understanding this power is by going out and getting involved with people and experiences, seeing, listening, conversing, and then acting based on what’s been learned. This is, in many ways, one definition of community building. Welcome to Dada Strain!
This Week’s Shows:
Argentinian vocalist, composer, and producer Sofía Rei created the Folk & Futurism project to “explore the convergence of traditional Latin American folk culture with contemporary genres and digital technologies.” On it, Rei’s co-conspirators are a who’s who of great current Latinx singers, songsmiths and song-oriented experimentalists. They include Gaby Moreno, Xenia Rubinos, Daymé Arocena, Mireya Ramos, Charo Bogarín, and Juana Luna. (Thurs 10/10, 8p @ Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street - $25-$35)
It’s amazing to think that Riverside, CA garage soul-punks The Bell-Rays have been around for more than three decades but never broke out of the grimy clubs. There may be few frills in what singer Lisa Kekaula and guitarist Bob Vennum do with increasingly rotating rhythm sections, but the power and consistency of their molten rock is almighty. Haven't seen them live in a decade—do they come thru NYC regularly?—but with the amount of mojo they always carried, I can’t imagine their tank ever be less than full. With the French garage-pop perennials, Les Sans Culottes. Also: Canyons + Locusts. (Thurs 10/10, 8p @ Gold Sounds, Bushwick - $20-$25)
Nicknamed “Jesus of Cool” in his first, punk-era prime, Nick Lowe always had divine verses. Choruses too. Now aged 75, Lowe still does. Plus he carries around one of power-pop-rock’s great songbooks (not just the ones you know, but all the others too). The new album, Indoor Safari, recorded with long-time touring mates, Los Straitjackets, adds to this mighty collection. He’s kinda the closest artist to Alex Chilton that we have left. Go see him if you get a chance. Two nights at Bowery Ballroom sounds perfect! Highest Recommendation. (Thurs 10/10 & Fri 10/11, 8p @ Bowery Ballroom, Delancey Street - $45)
An interesting experimental two-fer at the anarchist bookstore: Part one is dancer/performance artist Sara Koller and keytarist Matt Mottel’s drone piece “FANDOM” initially made in 2021, inspired by Britney Spears. Part two is a curious sextet featuring artist Jean Carla Rodea on voice and electronics, saxophonists Raffi Garabedian and Devin Brahja Waldman, bassist Georgia Wartel Collins, sTo Len on “electronics & objects” and Motel on keytar. (Fri 10/11, 6p @ Property Is Theft, Williamsburg - $20suggested)
From FourOneOne: “Dhrupad, the oldest living form of Indian classical music, has been practiced for at least twenty generations by members of the Dagar family. In the 20th century, Zia Mohiuddin Dagar revolutionized dhrupad by introducing its central instrument, the rudra veena—used for most of its history for accompaniment and private study—as a solo instrument for public listening. Zia Mohiuddin modified and redesigned the veena to produce a deep, soft sound created by finger plucking. His son, Ustad Mohi Bahauddin Dagar, is the world's leading performer of the rudra veena today.” Last year, Bahauddin inaugurated annual New York residencies with FourOneOne. Tonight’s performance is part of that series. (Fri 10/11, 7:30p @ DiMenna Center, Midtown - $35/$40)
ASHEVILLE BENEFIT: Bklyn’s garage chooglers The Sloppy Heads were supposed to be on a short tour with Asheville’s The Hypos right now, but Hurricane Helene intervened, and the headlining band is attempting to dig itself and their town out of a catastrophe. So the Heads are doing what heads do: supporting their comrades. Friday they and Dump (a.k.a. Yo La Tengo’s James McNew), plus as-yet unannounced guests, are staging a benefit for BeLoved Asheville, a 15 year-old community non-profit that is gathering food, water and medical supplies for the neediest; and finding housing for those who have been displaced. Please consider giving what you can. (Fri 10/11, 7:30p @ Union Pool, Williamsburg - $20)
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