Weir and Loathing at the GRAMMYS

A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Staple Center via Englishtown, NJ
Memo from the Rock Desk with apologies to HST
by Lou Brutus

It was recently relayed to me that the Grateful Dead would be honored with The Recording Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. Ye Gods! Pigs are flying by a moon over Marin. There is a fly in the ointment and a shadow on the land. There are also reliable reports of a peacock in the woodpile and the inmates taking over the asylum. However long and strange the band’s trip to Grammy immortality I cannot help but ask myself whether it is mere chance or the planning of dark, freakish forces of nature that the honor comes during the 30th anniversary year of the band’s historic concert in my tiny hometown of Englishtown, NJ.

It was Labor Day Weekend of 1977 and I was but a broth of a lad immersed in the usual summer doings of our backwater community. My friends and I had spent the previous months throwing eggs at cars, cow tipping and lolling in the fields trying to ignore the stench of manure. We were simple people in a simple land with little of the outside world to invade the blissful ignorance of our single digit IQs. However, our serene stupidity was brashly invaded on the morning of Saturday September 3rd by the unexpected reek of patchouli oil wafting on the morning’s soft summer breeze. This odd affront to our nostrils was only the olfactory outrider of the full array of over powering; hippy smell that rose to choke us by late morning as over 150,000 Dead Heads from around the world arrived to besiege our one horse town and its two man police force.

From the air, the tie-dyed Technicolor spectacle must have looked like some giant being had just vomited several tons of Skittles on the usually quiet fields of Central New Jersey. Rasta curled fans, their heads come alive like trippy Medusa, danced like marionettes on acid (a half truth) in clouds of gigantic Jersey mosquitoes which then flew crazily thru the sky after ingesting the hyper-resinated hippy blood. The entire spew of half naked humanity was enough to cause the two Barney Fifes of the local constabulary to weep like scolded schoolgirls. Their judicial impotence in the face of this crush of long haired law breakers broke the spirits of these two legal giants who had spent their entire law enforcement careers writing up little old ladies for doing 26 in the 25 mile per hour zone on their way home Sunday mornings from Our Lady of Peace Church on Main Street.

In the middle of it all were the Grateful Dead doing what the Grateful Dead did best. Orchestrating not only the wonderful and bizarre musical cacophony that some people swore by and other people swore at but also the magical ability to bring together a medium sized city’s worth of people in a hitherto unknown place to jump around like loons with like minded strangers for a day of unbridled weirdness.

I stood around with my mouth wide open wondering what planet I had been transported to.

Judas goats on both sides of the musical spectrum may bleat out that the Grammy honor for the Grateful Dead is some kind of lunatic travesty. The cold hearted music biz types will dismiss them as a freak show with no hit records to speak of who do not deserve to stand in the hallowed presence of the musical giants who have gone before. Other elements will say that the band were always outsiders from the rest of the musical scene who will besmirch their legacy by accepting. I say a pox on both those arguments! The Grateful Dead has been one of the most unique and interesting chapters in the annals of music bar none. I hope you got to see the whole shebang at least once as there was nothing like it before or since in this portion of the galaxy. It was as exhilarating as the extravaganzas of ancient Rome without all the fuss and muss of someone being messily devoured by ravenous lions. They deserve the honor as much as anyone has and perhaps more than most.

I, for one, look forward to chatting with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead on the Red Carpet outside of the Staple Center. Will it be weird talking to them in that setting? Hell yeah, but no weirder then them showing up against all hope and reason in the previously music starved hamlet of Englishtown so long ago. I am sure I will have a grin a mile wide as they hit the stage but I might not be looking at them. I may not even be scanning the faces of the crowd to who’s delighted, who’s not and who’s just plain wigged out. I just might be seeing a flashback in my mind’s eye of a New Jersey kid standing around a usually quiet field just a couple of miles from his house thirty years ago wondering how he got so lucky as to have the strangest circus in history come to his town.