Dead and co next month!
Hopefully it's a laid back environment full of positive vibrations.
Cannabis is legal, and if the environment is correct other psychedelics will be easily accessible...I miss the days where you could walk through the crowd and have every other person repeating the name of a different substance to passers by, where everybody is always willing to deal and trade, and where if you played your cards right you could enjoy the show mildly psychedelicly buzzed, and walk home with a variety of novel and rare substances in good amount.
I'm not all about the drugs, but at the same time, you have to realize the connection the dead has to psychedelic history...
Most notably the deads close ties to owsley "bear" Stanley, Tim scully, Nick sand, Ken kesey and the merry pranksters, and others...
Quote:Scully knew the government would move quickly to suppress LSD distribution, and he wanted to obtain as much of the main precursor chemical, lysergic acid, as possible. Scully soon learned that Owsley Stanley possessed a large amount (440 grams) of lysergic acid monohydrate. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. The 30-year-old Owsley took the 21-year-old Scully as his apprentice[3] and they pursued their mutual interest in electronics and psychedelic synthesis.
Owsley took Scully to the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966, and they built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. In July 1966 Owsley rented a house in Point Richmond, California and Owsley and Melissa Cargill (Owsley's girlfriend who was a skilled chemist) set up a lab in the basement. Tim Scully worked there as Owsley's apprentice. Owsley had developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9% pure. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "White Lightning". LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.
Scully set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Owsley and Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab. Later Owsley started to tablet the product in Orinda, California but was arrested before he completed that work. Owsley and Scully also produced a new psychedelic in Denver which they called STP. STP was initially distributed at the summer solstice festival in 1967: 5,000 tablets (20 milligrams each) which quickly acquired a bad reputation. Owsley and Scully made trial batches of 10 mg tablets and then STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets but soon ceased production of STP. Owsley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the authorities; Scully moved the lab to a different house in Denver after Owsley was arrested on Christmas Eve 1967.
Tim Scully first met William "Billy" Mellon Hitchcock, grandson of William Larimer Mellon and great-great-grandson of Thomas Mellon, through Owsley in April 1967. They became friends and Billy loaned Scully $12,000 for the second Denver lab in 1968. The product from the lab was distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love; Scully was connected with the Brotherhood via Billy Hitchcock.
The second Denver lab was discovered by the police while Scully was out of town. His lab assistants were arrested there when they returned a few days later. Scully was not arrested at that time.
In December 1968 Nick Sand (through an intermediary) purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California where he and Tim Scully set up a large LSD lab. Tim Scully and Nick Sand (another psychedelic chemist) produced over 3.6 million tablets (300 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "Orange Sunshine" by the summer of 1969. In May 1969 Tim Scully was arrested in California for the 1968 Denver lab. The search was eventually ruled illegal, but Scully decided to retire from clandestine chemistry and pursue electronic design instead. In 1969 Scully formed his own corporation, Aquarius Electronics, and he was president and sole designer from 1971-1976. -Wikipedia
The famous "steal your face" logo was designed by owsley Stanley, in my mind as an obvious reference to his "white lightening" LSD, I could go deeper here, but I'll just leave it at that.
Quote:cover art featured a logo (a grinning skull with a lightning bolt on the frontal bone) designed by Owsley Stanley and rendered by Bob Thomas. -Wikipedia
Quote:Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011), also known as Bear, was an American audio engineer and chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Under the professional name, "Bear", he was the soundman for the rock band Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Acid Test party. As their sound engineer, Stanley frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board.
Stanley was the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD.[1][2][3] By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than ten million doses at the time. -Wikipedia
So, the grateful dead was the house band for Ken kesey and the merry pranksters acid test events, which connected them to Nick sand, Tim Scully, owsley Stanley, and Neal cassady (reading Kerouac as a young kid I can remember being fascinated with "Dean moriarty", the Denver "jail kid", a car their and a ladies man with an infectious personality and fast paced life style that impacted everyone he knew, so to have this beat icon connected to the dead means all that much more to me, they had "captain Neal at the wheel on a bus to never ever land" )
The grateful dead was at the center of LSD chemistry, music, art and literature, and had connections to individuals who were just as amazing as they were...they are just as much a part of psychedelic history, clandestine chemistry history, counter culture history, and so on, as they are of music history...
And the music was amazing! It's not just as if they had all these connections and then half-assed their music, they actually ended up doing revolutionary things in music....
At the time most bands would play really cut and dry 3 minute songs, very structured...
Then the dead comes out playing music with a freedom rarely seen, full of novel and creative combinations of styles and inputs and musical arrangements.
The improvisation in their songs could be related to taking a trip, you are never sure what to expect, there are always some surprises, ups and downs, fast times and slow times, twists and turns, sometimes you really dig it, other times it goes out of your comfort zone...the songs take on an elements that could fit as a metaphor for the organic progression of life, or better yet travel, life on the road, or even the psychedelic experiance...constantly changing unplanned structured chaos...it's beautiful, a form of musical art which has not really broken through into the mainstream in any genuine sense other than the dead...
...there's actually some jazz out there that comes close, or even goes beyond, but the dead took rock and roll, jug band, improvisation, free form jazz, and folk and blended it into a novel creation in modern music...
Bob had a connection with Jerry, you could tell that Bob could anticipate where Jerry was going with a ird,cans he would be able to compliment it the entire way, and maybe throw in a few surprises for him along the way, it's an almost psychic connection, and it made the music amazing...
...I don't think anybody could ever have that same connection with Bob that Jerry did, Bob himself compared it to McCoy tiner on piano backing John Coltrane on sax, and I can hear it, though I feel it was deeper than that, though it's a good stylistic comparison...
I hope John mayor can fit in well with the deads free-form jazz, Jug-band, rock and roll, improvisational magic, and I hope he has a good connection with Bob...
Phil lesh will be absent as well, which sucks, but hopefully Oteil Burbridge can hold it down.
I think I've rambled on enough...
Looking forward to the show!
-eg