There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.  Except for maybe a Phish concert.  Or even maybe a parking lot that’s filled with hippies selling things to you because they’re trying to get money for gas to get home.  But there’s nothing like the shows on the east coast, and there’s nothing like the shows on the west coast, and actually the east coast shows were always so very different from the ones in California.  Today, you can’t exactly head to New York and stay with friends, and see the Dead play, but you can certainly find a great hotel, and hear one of the splinter bands playing out.  Fortunately, a few of the members are still hungry enough to play in many different projects, and we get to see the results of their endless creativity.

But it was very different back in the days when there was wine and roses, and bones and roses.  There was a day when roommates would put Steal Your Face stickers on the front of your guitar, and you’d just laugh, because the world was a safe place.  Even in New York, there was a sense that all of this was somehow all working out exactly the way it supposed to.  There may have been a palpably different vibe to it for the west coast Deads, and it may have been darker and more aggressive, but we didn’t notice.

There’s also that strange thing that works amongst the ones in the know, where we could notice that there’s an outward aura that showed up the differences.  They were easier to be with, and easier to convince to do things we didn’t want to do.  We dressed a little differently.  We were colder and they were warmer.  But get us all talking together, and after awhile all of this would dissolve, and all we were was a bond, a bond by a common love, and some common experiences that are too difficult to put into words.

The Dead in NYC is a post from: Kiss Java

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