> The Golden Road (1965-1973) (disc 2: Birth of the Dead > The Music Never Stopped (Music from the Motion Picture) > WCUW Worcester Massachusetts April 8th 1988 (Remastered) > Wake Up To Find Out: Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, NY > What A Long Strange Trip It's Been - The Best Of The Grateful Dead > Bear's Choice:History Of The Grateful Dead > History Of The Grateful Dead Vol 1 (Bear's Choice) > Family Dog at the Great Highway, 4-18-70 > The Grateful Dead (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) La da da da, la da da, da da, la da da da, la da, da da. La dee da da da, la da da da da, da da da, da da, da da da da da If you should stand then who's to guide you? Reach out your hand if your cup be empty, It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken, Would you hold it near as it were your own? Would you hear my voice come thru the music, We heard their voices come through the music, and they ripple yet in the still water in the valley of the shadow of our souls.If my words did glow with the gold of sunshineĪnd my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, They were slaves to tunes with words that glowed with the gold of sunshine, slaves to crowds of the faithful who basked in it with them. Over and over and over again,The Dead have emptied themselves, endlessly going down the road feeling bad on some days and good on others, predictable in some gigs and prone to jaw-dropping serendipities in others, taking the music of the people, by the people, and for the people to the people. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians 2: 5-11, NRSV Let the same mind be in you that was * in Christ Jesus, But “Ripple” sings their souls. They never saw the music as a mere commodity for them to own and control. They could have retired to the studio in Marin County 40 years ago and they’d still be remembered as an awesome band today. Who can lead us there, in any case? But the song draws us in and on. We hold it near as if it were our own, and that’s just how the Dead wanted it. We may not get home, if there is such a place. It warmly embraces the mystery with joy and hope. “Ripple”’s message of uncertainty is borne by a lulling tune that might well be hummed by a mother rocking her child in a hammock on a sweet summer’s day. The lost chord plucked on a stringless harp. Something subtle is at work in the realm of the Dead: a second or third or fourth derivative of ordinary reality. The music isn’t the band, the band isn’t the music. If you sense the ripple, you’ve transcended the pebble. If you look at the pebble, you can’t perceive the ripple. “Ripple” is the catechism of indeterminacy. “Ripple” is the band’s confession that its music transcends itself, that the pilgrimage of a Deadhead leads to a concert destination beyond his or her ken, that Deadheadliness is next to a mysterious kind of Godliness. “Ripple,” penned by the band’s chief lyricist and official fifth member, Robert Hunter, is the Grateful Dead’s Psalm 23-its spiritual manifesto, its Doctrine and Covenants, its Lotus Sutra, its Bhagavad Gita. then, convergence!Ī special series on religion and culture produced in collaboration with the Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern CaliforniaĪ microsecond before Jerry hit the riff, we the audience leapt into the air, thrown to the sky by a fountain not made by the hands of men. We spun around to look in the wides of each other’s eyes, mouths agape with awe, hair tossed wild, overwhelmed by the unmistakable, ineffable reality of Something Larger-an emergent property not reducible to the band, the crowd, or anything mortal. The Dead sang, plucked, and pounded inexorably onward toward a palpably approaching ecstasy with no knowable when, where, or how- e xploring the innumerable kabbalistic nuances of a tune played countless times, then freshly interpreting the midrashic connotations of the nuances.Įveryone stood: heads bent, hair on end. They squinted back at him and at each other, and in turn sought the crowd’s unspoken input as the music followed a tune played by a harp unstrung to a destination sensed intensely yet unknown…. His fingers leading by following, Jerry peered over his reflective sunglasses at bandmates Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh. We, too, became instruments of the music while Jerry Garcia’s nine fingers ouija-boarded across the frets of his guitar in search of a lost chord. From the veritable wall of sound thundered the roars, riffs, crescendos, and diminuendos of The Grateful Dead’s songs and their long exploratory interstices-sound propagating invisibly through the adobe soil, entering the bones of our feet, crawling up our legs, our spines, and into our chest cavities. Reach out your hand if your cup be empty,Ī stack of amplifiers three stories tall loomed over the 7,000 faithful arrayed on sun-baked dirt one hot autumn day in the early 1980s at Stanford University’s Frost Amphitheater.
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