Blue Garcia

I can see moments of it clearly. Other memories come dredged up only after concentrated re-constructing, re-remembering, or looking it up to make sure. Memories can turn into mini investigations of sorts. In this case it's down the passageways and wormholes, streets and parking lots, and arena sized concrete expanses filled with a smoky blue haze. The smoke lingers and I can still make out its prickly sweet color from where I'm sitting now. Sitting thinking back to August 23, 1983 when I am 14 and the world is changing. I'm walking into a sports arena. In through the double glass doors. The drab color of the concrete. Concession stands. Ramps and stairs. And then in through an opening that leads to the main floor area. My first glimpse of the stage and the crowd as I walk out into the expanse. There is a blue haze hanging above the heads of the people who arrived early. Seattle Center Coliseum. My second time to a Grateful Dead show.


I had gone the year before. The previous August. I have memories from that show but their more illusive. More fleeting. The music was still rather new to me then, and the sound of the songs coming off the stage was much different sounding than the songs I had heard on the records up to that point. Those Grateful Dead albums that I had heard were all from the early to mid seventies, and making sense of how the band sounded in 1982 compared to their records from earlier time periods was a useless task. Useless, if it was the first or second time that you had ever seen the Grateful Dead operation in action.


Part operation, part contraption, the Grateful Dead were to become a part of the road. The whenever-you-could-make-it-happen-throughout-the-year type of adventure. Over time the band members became to feel like friends, and ten years of adventure stories abound.
But I digress. I must hold the thought. The vision of it all. The Seattle Center Coliseum. August 1983. In through the doors. Across the concrete hallway. Into the tunnel under the bleacher seats. Out from under the bleacher seats. Out into the smoky open.

I find my friends sitting in a circle on the floor some 25 feet, and just to the left from center stage. Up on the stage it's self; two drum sets sit on risers, amplifiers, cases, crates, microphones on stands. Flowers. An organ with it's slowly rotating Leslie speakers. Lights. Two Persian carpets. I recognize Phil Lesh the bass player poking his head out from behind a stack of gear cases as he tunes his guitar. He makes faces at the crowd and we hoot back. People in the crowd look drab under the oddly muted and smoky arena lights. The air smells like smoke and feels like ozone emanating from the ocean worth of electricity moving though the enormous hulking P.A.. The static, and huge black presence of the ground level P.A. speakers, the hanging speaker arrays, and the amps, flight cases, and gear boxes in the wings, was broken by the silent twirling movement of the Leslie speaker cones, and the twinkling of the V.U. meters and the LED lights of the amplifiers, stacks of racked power amps, and guitar effects cabinets on the stage. The effect was a true sense of waiting for something to happen. I remember thinking to myself "They're here". (The thought seems quaint now and makes me smile). The band had played Spokane the night before, and were off to Portland the night after. This, combined with the fact that the Grateful Dead never really went in for elaborate stage designs, meant that most of the cases and boxes that held the band's gear were sitting out in the open. The effect of this for me was always to underscore the transient, circus-like quality to the experience. Boxes full of guitars and drums and magic gadgets that ran on electricity.


I'm still a little unclear just who it was who had the joint, but I think that it was most likely one of two Mikes who were my friends. A little homegrown wrapped neatly in a dull white cigarette paper. We passed it round in the open. A little ember on the end. A little smoke in the lungs. A little spark in the head. We pass it 'round and then another. A little ember on the end. A little smoke in the lungs. A little spark in the head. A little ember on the end. A little smoke in the lungs. A little spark in the head. Then suddenly the lights go out pitch black, we stand, and several thousand people roar in the dark. In a few moments the band wander out from behind the boxes of gear. They look like shadows with human shapes, moving under the dimmed red and yellow stage lights. A little spark in the head. Someone tunes a guitar. Someone else hits a drum. A little spark. After a few moments Jerry Garcia turns to the band, eyebrows raised above his glasses. Bob Wier spins around, back to the audience. They pause for that one collective moment. In-breath. Everybody ready? OK. 1,2,3, jump.


I've looked it up, and on the night of my first smoke, and second show, the band played:



1st Set:

Jack Straw

Deep Elem Blues

My Brother Essau

Brown Eyed Women

Little Red Rooster

Ramble on Rose

Looks Like Rain

Deal



2nd Set:

Touch of Gray>

Playing in the Band>

Uncle John's Band>

Drums/Space>

Throwing Stones

Black Peter

Saturday Night

E:
It's All Over Now Baby Blue



A good setlist for sure, and one that I have on an old tape. On fresh listening it was perhaps not the strongest of Grateful Dead shows. They roared out the gate with stellar energy but then the first set evens out and begins to wander. The playing is strong though for sure, and there are a good few highlights to the show. Actually, I want to re-check my memory and have just now finished listening to the entire show again. (I found a recording of it at www.archive.org) It is in all actuality a lovely little show. It's the type of show that underscores the Grateful Dead's work ethic and their love of the music. They had traveled all this way to come play. During the course of the afternoon the crew had set up all of their gear, and then the band had delivered a solid and lovely little show. Maybe not one for the history books, but it didn't really matter. They gave it their all and we roared back from the dark.


In 1983 though the nuance of the music was, perhaps, somewhat lost on me. Smoke in the lungs. A spark in the head. Everything whirled in a Technicolor haze of sound, light and moving shape. I spent the night in an adolescent twirl in the crowded dark under the big top circus spotlight. I walked upon golden tightropes. I held my arms outward and palm up and spun in soft Sufi circles. I walked the outline of a figure eight loosing myself in repeating infinity symbols. I lost myself all together in the music and the dark. Some guy wearing a Nixon '74 tee shirt and a top hat zooming past. Mike Dhalquist dancing like a sweaty possessed madman in the tunnel under the bleacher seats. There is a giant circular backdrop behind the stage of the huge iconic Grateful Dead skull and skeletal shoulder bones surrounded by an enormous garland of roses. It stares down at the crowd from behind the band like God. I watched smoky Nag-Champa tracer lights bouncing off of guitars. I disappeared into forests of dreadlocks decorated with bits of ribbon, old keys, rings, thimbles, bird's nests, anthills and wind. Lights on the amplifiers twinkled like stars. I noticed that there were children, among the adults, in the wings of the stage. Everybody seems stoned, and colors have a Mobius hue about them. A girl is sitting in the tunnel under the bleachers, knees up and crying. Eyes smile and smile back. Dilated LSD pupils pass you by and can't focus, or, focus instead on something that is far off in some other dimension altogether. The band is playing and we dance. Dance hard. Work up a sweat. The air smells like bodies and sweat and smoke and carries an odd organic sweetness. Sweat spins off on dizzy pentatonic scales riffing off the fingerboards of two guitars. Drums are primal and huge, B3 organ is hot and restless, and the impossibly low notes of the bass guitar hit you in the ribcage and disassemble your pieces. In the tunnel under the seats, just to the left of the stage, there's room enough for dancing there. I make for it. Make my way into it. And then it happened. It happened and nothing was ever the same again.


As I sit listening to the recording of the show that the Grateful Dead played that night, I can almost re-construct events. At the set break I was feeling too squashed in the crush of the main floor crowd. My friends and I made it off to the side under the bleachers where there was a little for more room for dancing. House lights go dark. Band returns. For the second song of the second set, the band played Playing In the Band with it's long extended free-form jam at the end. There is every possibility that the world changed for me during that jam. I feel a little dizzy even now listening back to it. But it did. It happened. And nothing was the same after.


I saw her and smiled. She smiled back and tripped all the circuitry in my head. My body went all electric and shaky. She danced alone, just by herself, in a long green cotton skirt from India. Blond hair, left arm cradling her small baby. Topless, her child suckled at her breast while she moved to the music. Spinning a circle. Mother and child. In her right hand she held a green apple eaten a quarter of the way. A cool green apple. As I pass we catch eyes a second time. She holds the gaze, tilts her head back ever so, chin up still smiling, extends her arm and offers me a bite of her cool green apple. She doesn't say a word. Only smiles. I reach out and grasp the two core ends of the cool green apple and am suddenly dizzy. The apple passes from her hand to mine. I hold it to my mouth. I take the bite and the sweet juice fills my mouth. I bite down. I crunch it around in my molars. I savor the juice on my tongue. I swallow, and then the world collapses and evaporates and even the sound of the Grateful Dead and the crowd changes and becomes duller and farther off.


The music and smoke and sweat have spun, like a galaxy turning on it's axis and I have wormholed down through the middle of it. Like some aerial jump down through the eye of a hurricane; down through time and space, back to the Garden. I'm find that I'm suddenly down the rabbit hole. I'm real gone. I learn immediately about dual realities. My mind floods with the recognition of simultaneous experiences. I am at the same time here in a concrete coliseum surrounded by thousands, and I am also and likewise here in the Garden savoring the sweet juice of the fruit and lost in the smile and offering of a woman who I will never speak to, or even see again after the moment has collapsed. The Garden. It's all in front of me in one split second and I see it all clearly. Everything has changed. I'm standing in the garden. The garden of fertility and sex and longing. The garden of delight. The garden after the flood. The garden of antique stars and cool evenings on the fields. The garden of candles, and molten lead, and wheat stalks, and poplar trees, and yew, and oak. Acorns here hold magic nuts. The garden, and the entire world is new to me. The garden, and the entire world is old, ancient, mythic. The universe turns at a speed so slow I can't comprehend it but I can feel the rhythmic grinding of it's engines inside me. In the garden, where we chew on bits of apple and smile. There are snakes here. There are technicolor masks that look like the heads of cartoon birds made from paper Mache and paint. Circus barkers wearing coats with long tails stand in front of tent flaps and call to passers by. Magic drugs. Potions. Cups of tea with floating tempests of twigs and mushrooms. There is the shadow, here, of a woman's breast in the dark. Floorboards are painted with haloed portraits of saints and ploughboys. Rich Byzantine colors that make the head swirl. Old maps painted on parchment. Sailing ships that float silently from their bottles and slither away, disappearing over the edge of the world.
The entire world is a dream and I am suddenly forever falling awake. Falling. Falling up. Falling through clear blue atmosphere and out into heavens of stars. Falling down, through. Down through unreal worlds and forgotten neighborhoods. Flocks of ghostly pale birds fly past disappearing through the broken glass of windows that don't exist. They hang there framed in utter darkness as I fall past.
Everything smells like earth, rich soil and roots. I uncover stained glass windows of amber. Dark windows of obsidian. Crystal agates, and bits of driftwood that look like spaceships. I drink wine with women at cafes. I wander through mountains. Every moment is fleeting and poetry. Every moment is full of longing and promise and despair and more longing. A longing so intense that it makes your guts hurt, and songs are squeezed out of the pores of the skin as you bend over and wretch.
When I am finally empty inside all I see is her. Blond hair, and eyes looking back at me. They are forever watching me. I am bashful and embarrassed and try to look away but she holds the gaze until I simply must hold it also. I realize that no one will understand that she is watching. No one will understand that I have been swallowed. There is sweet, sticky apple juice in my mouth. And she is like some goddess of a deeper world. Like some goddess of fertility, and returning. Like some goddess of understanding the world on a different level. Like the goddess of sex, and individuality, and motherhood. In one split turning moment as I bite into the apple the sweet juice of the world floods me. The electric turnings of my DNA shift slightly and make my head spin. The double helix of soul is strung out in 4/4 time along a fourteen-note pentatonic scale that comes twisting and snaking out from the speakers above and beside the stage.
Here I am. Moving through a concrete sports arena, and at the same moment I'm standing with a woman in the garden of earthly delights, and the garden of spiritual vision.
The world spun, cracked open, swallowed me, and was closed and healed again. I was gone. She doesn't say a word, only holds me exactly in the eye and smiles. I reach out returning her apple hoping that we might touch fingertips as it passes but we don't. She takes back the cool green apple and I mouth the words "thank you" over the music. She smiles. And then spins. She doesn't see anymore. Her eyes are closing. Her head is tilting back, half smile, she is loosing herself back into the music and the dark. She's gone. Mother and child. I close my eyes and follow her into the dark. I don't look back. I don't ever look back. I can't.