Tag: Jerry Garcia

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Grief, by Pat Gourley

“By meditating on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life”.
Stephen Batchelor – from Buddhism Without Beliefs. 1997

This is one of those Story Telling Topics that really brings home to me what a lazy undisciplined writer I am. My life certainly dating from the death of my father in August of 1980 up until my most recent shift in Urgent Care, which was yesterday, has been chock-full of experience after experience of life’s impermanence and the personal grief that causes. I should be writing at least several chapters on grief if I were ever to get off my ass and write a memoir. The reality though is that the topic of Grief is going to get less than a thousand words as usual.

If I were in a really self-indulgent mood I suppose I could conjure up reams on grief around my own HIV infection and that of many, many friends and clients and their suffering and too often deaths over the past 35 years. An issue of self-exploration here for me would perhaps be how much of my own grief over the decades has really just been self-indulgent wallowing in the pool of “poor pitiful me”. How unfair that I am “forced” to face my own mortality every day when I swallow my HIV meds. And even worse how come I have witnessed so much suffering and death of others? I really need to watch this tendency in myself carefully and continually realize that no one gets out alive and many through the ages up until this minute have it so much worse than I do or ever will.

Nevertheless, that all said let me delve self-indulgently just a bit into my own grief issues, as they seem to come into focus for me especially this time of year. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death. The Grateful Dead were an integral part my life for decades. During the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic, from the late 1980’s until 1995 when I was not only looking down the barrel of my own infection I was also the nursing manger in the AIDS clinic at Denver Health and living with the love of my life who was dying in front of me. The music of the Grateful Dead was a great solace in those years and remains so today actually. I was at the last two shows Garcia and the Dead performed at Soldier’s Field in Chicago July. 1995.

Those shows were not particularly memorable at the time in large part because Garcia was not well but it never occurred to me that he would be gone himself in a few short weeks. The memory of hearing the news of his death on August 9th, 1995 is indelibly etched in my mind but not for the reason you may think.

Minutes after the news exploded across the world of Garcia’s death of a heart attack in a rehab center in Marin County my life partner David Woodyard, who was battling several major HIIV related issues of his own at the time, was on the phone deeply concerned about me and how I was taking the news.

This was and still is for me the real lesson on how to handle the feeling of grief in my own life. I need to always take a moment or several no matter what the circumstances and look around, outside my own little puddle and attempt to be “conscious of life’ and what an amazing trip it is to get to experience that at all, even when filled with grief.

David was teaching me that lesson right up until his own death five weeks later at 9 AM on September 17th, 1995. That was when my own real grieving began in earnest with no Grateful Dead song able to console me. Not even the beautiful lyrics of Brokedown Palace, which we played at his memorial.

Fare you well my honey
Fare you well my only true one
All the birds that were singing
Have flown except you alone

Going to leave this broke-down palace
On my hands and my knees I will roll roll roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time, in my time, I will roll roll roll
In a bed, in a bed


By the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul
River gonna take me

Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
All the way back home

It’s a far-gone lullaby
Sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come
Since I first left home


Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Going to plant a weeping willow
On the banks green edge it will grow grow grow
Sing a lullaby beside the water


Lovers come and go, the river roll roll roll
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs

To rock my soul

Songwriters: GARCIA, JERRY / HUNTER, ROBERT

Brokedown Palace lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group

© August 2015

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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So Many Roads: A Great Performance by Pat Gourley

It was July 9th 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago, a Grateful Dead concert. The second of two sold out shows with over 60,000 in attendance each night. It was the end of that summer’s concert run for the Dead and the whole tour had been plagued by troubles – too many kids wanting to see the band, too few tickets, tension between the oldsters and the youngsters and very often too much too fast for way too many. The whole scene was truly turning weird. The draw for these shows though for me was simply too strong and the chance to see family back in the Chicago-land area to good to pass up, so I snapped up tickets the minute the went on sale through Grateful Dead mail order, a service available to the truly faithful. They were reserved floor seats, now mind you the shows were in a football stadium so I guess “good seats” was rather relative.

I had come from Denver without my partner David for the shows but did take Brian my blind bother to the second show. David was not well and stayed back home. I would have been able a few years prior to get him to two shows of a run without much cajoling, getting him to see four in a row though never happened.

These were the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic with protease inhibitors still a year or so away from general availability and use. The deaths did seem to have slowed down mostly because the most affected generation had already been decimated; many of those infected in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s were already gone.

I remember little about the first show on the 8th except that the band was not at their best for sure. Garcia in particular looked bloated, tired and at times almost listless. But you know congestive heart failure, a rather significant heroin addiction and uncontrolled diabetes tends to take the wind out of your sails.

There are several memories though about the shows I recall. One was the hassle of finding parking which for both shows was available only it seemed in public lots south of the stadium in a quite dicey neighborhood. The long walk back to the car the second night in particular was quite a trip in its own, a mugging I am sure was averted thanks in part due to having a blind guy with a cane on my arm. I have always been thankful for Brian coming to that show with me. Also there was a great fireworks display after the second show and the several big screens set up for the folks in the back made the show a bit more accessible.

The music or rather the musicianship both nights was quite forgettable. My LSD days were many years behind me so if the band didn’t come though at any particular show it could be a bust but more often than not the crowd would provide me with endless entertainment. Most of the time though the band would come through for at least one good or even great set, if not both.

That night there was in fact only one song that stuck with me and that was the version of So Many Roads in the second set. It was a relatively new song having only been in the rotation since 1992 and I had heard it only once before that I could recall. It was one of a long line of soulful ballads that were almost always Garcia tunes and played usually middle to late in the second set. The thought that this would be the last time the Grateful Dead would perform with Garcia never of course entered my mind.

Despite people’s impressions, who are unfamiliar with the Dead, they were, Garcia especially, remarkably good at a soulful ballad that at times I suppose might described by some as a dirge. And the Dead were sensitive to play these longer and slower tunes later in the second set when the drugs had perhaps peaked even though they often ended their shows with a rousing couple of numbers. The encores were again often slow tunes to take the edge off before sending the masses into the night in a mellow frame of mind and almost always a single tune. They did a very rare second encore song that night, an old gem called A Box of Rain.

At the risk of loosing my Deadhead card I must say I don’t remember that either. Sorry folks it was the gut wrenching beauty of So Many Roads that has stuck with me for nearly twenty years now. I distinctly remember turning to Brian after that song and saying “well that was worth the fucking price of admission”. I am not sure he agreed. He had quite few beers that night and taking a blind guy to the port-a-potties at a Grateful Dead show is another whole story.

I do remember leaving the show singing to myself the chorus to So Many Roads. We made it back to the car safe and sound with only one stoned Deadhead tripping on my brother’s cane. The crowd was in general very sensitive to him and his needs as I swear only Deadheads could be.

A month later Jerry was dead from a cardiac arrest in the middle of the night at a rehab center in Marin County. That I had been to the last two shows was hard to comprehend. This was of course devastating to me and I will always remember David’s loving call to me at work about Garcia’s death to make sure I was doing OK. The much bigger blow though was to come with David’s death another month later.

So many roads indeed.

April, 2014

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Where Was I by Nicholas

          In the early 1960s,
I was in high school studying French, struggling with chemistry, hating algebra
and the jerk who taught it, but loving English Lit and the teacher who taught
that. High school was nothing until my senior year and then I learned to party
and enjoy myself. The promise of just getting out of high school was enough to
liberate my spirit. It was the great age of liberation with the civil rights
movement and its innumerable clashes on the nightly news every day.

          Liberation for me came in
drive down Interstate 71 from Cleveland to Columbus where I joined 45,000 other
students at Ohio State University. New people, new studies, new challenges and
suddenly I got to make my own decisions. OSU is where I took part in my first
political demonstrations, volunteered to work in a community development
project in Columbus, first doubted my Catholic faith, and first voiced
opposition to the Viet Nam War. It was also where I had my first disastrous
love affair that I didn’t even realize was a love affair until many years
later.  

          And then I
came out—to California, that is. Experiences in San Francisco and elsewhere in
California are what I associate with “what did you do in the 60s?” When the
‘60s began and ended is a matter of interpretation or maybe just mood. Like
many of the drug-induced experiences back then, the decade tends to wiggle and
undulate on and off the calendar. It is not contained in a simple ten year span
of time.
My political activism, however, was
short lived. I stayed on the fringe looking in. I was on the edge of the crowd
trying to escape the tear gas and bullets that summer day on Telegraph Avenue
in Berkeley, not in the thick of it getting beaten up by police. I was in the
back of the throng at the Altamont concert, kind of wishing I wasn’t there at
all, but thankfully not crushed in front of the stage and amidst some lethal
violence. I was stunned one day to see a friend appear in the bright California
sunshine when he ventured out of his heavily curtained, smoky sanctuary/den,
looking like a cadaver. But I wasn’t that drugged out cadaver and wasn’t headed
in that direction.
I would work for a few months and
then take off for a while, go hitchhiking, spend days climbing Mt. Tamalpais
and watching the ocean from a sunny meadow. I came to think that this is how
life ought to be. I would grow up, that is, settle down, commit to something,
have a career, later, I kept thinking. There was plenty of time for that.
My project then was to stay out of
the war and out of the army, a commitment based both on principle and downright
fear. The fear was as realistic as the principle was laudable. I was against
that war and couldn’t see myself joining in any war and when drafted to do so,
said, no.
The motivation for my and others’
actions did not stem entirely from a sense that we were acting out grand laws
of history as earlier revolutionaries might have but we came from a very
personal sense of what was at stake for us. Beyond mere egoism and
self-indulgence, it was an ethical standard based on me.
And there was music, always there was
the music. Rock music took on an artistry ranging from the Beatles’ tunes and
the poetry of Jim Morrison and the Doors to the blues of the Grateful Dead with
the exquisite guitar of Jerry Garcia and the hard rocking of the Rolling Stones.
From them I learned about Chicago blues, electric blues, hard and fast urban
blues.
So, where was I in the 60s. I was in
the city hearing black people tell their stories. I was on the all-night bus to
New York City for the first huge anti-war march. I was hiking through Point
Reyes on the Pacific Coast. I was filing appeal after appeal with my draft
board. I was discovering yoga and quiet and meditation. I was discovering brown
rice. I learned to bake bread. I was dodging cops to avoid getting arrested. I
was bouncing around Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park probably hearing the
Grateful Dead or Janis Joplin or Quicksilver Messenger Service. I was growing
up and life was good.

© 2 June
2014  

About the Author  

Nicholas grew up in
Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He
retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks,
does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.