2000
 Spacedancing at the Edge of Chaos:
 A Conversation with Steve Silberman
 by Peter Sawyer
 
 
 PS:   How does the Grateful Dead scene serve as a religion 
 in the lives of Deadheads?
 
 SS:   I don't think anyone worships the band members.  
 Dead shows function like a church or a temple for some 
 Deadheads, because they are places where people go to have 
 profound experiences of meaning with others, to participate 
 in the creation of a peak experience that blurs the boundaries 
 of the individual.   I think one of the reasons why Dead 
 concerts work as a mandala or place of spiritual experience is 
 that their music contains elements of terror and awe, as well 
 as beauty and consolation.
 	There is a mystery at the heart of the Grateful Dead 
 experience:   the miracle of telepathic improvisation, which is 
 not a new-age mystery - jazz musicians do it all the time.   
 But it is a mystery in that there's this kind of pulse or 
 entrainment that can happen among human beings playing 
 music, or insects drumming on a log, or birds in the air, 
 where each individual is caught in a web or pattern that has a 
 beauty in it which is a larger beauty than any one of the 
 individuals could have premeditated.  Everybody gets to 
 break through to a new moment of beauty simultaneously.  
 At Dead shows the audience is included in the moment of 
 discovery.   So a show can be experienced as collective 
 worship, but rather than worship of the band members, it's 
 of a fertile creative principle that comes through the band 
 members and the audience at the same time.
 	A Dead show can also be a site of individual 
 initiation.  The experience of initiation is something that's 
 hardly ever talked about by people when examining the 
 Grateful Dead culture, yet I think it's one of the most 
 significant things that happens at Dead shows.  I don't think 
 that it's an accident that a sizable portion of the Dead's 
 audience is young people, adolescents.  I also don't think 
 it's an accident that some of those kids are taking 
 psychedelics, like psilocybin and mescaline - agents which 
 have been used as initiatory catalysts for thousands of years.   
 Psychedelic initiation is not a new thing under the sun.  In 
 fact, people like Terrence McKenna believe that the very 
 roots of what we understand as religion has its beginnings in 
 experiences triggered by these botanical, naturally occurring 
 substances, which appear in so many different cultures.  
 Whether you're talking about Siberian shamans eating 
 amanita muscaria mushrooms, or people in South America 
 inhaling DMT-containing snuffs, or Mexican curanderos like 
 Maria Sabina eating psilocybin mushrooms and singing their 
 sacred visions, psychedelic experience is as old as human 
 civilization.  So kids taking acid at Grateful Dead concerts is 
 not a new fad, it's that good ol' time religion [laughing].
 
 PS:   Can you describe your first spiritual experience at a 
 Dead show?
 
 SS:   I can't remember my first, but one comes to mind.  It 
 was in 1979, in Madison Square Garden.  I had taken LSD, 
 and when the band came out for the second set, all of a 
 sudden there was a big rush of people toward the stage.  
 Unfortunately, the security people freaked out, and started 
 clubbing people, including a pregnant woman who was 
 clubbed to the floor right in front of my eyes.  When you're 
 getting off on acid, that's not what you would wish to see.
 	The music was so magnificent afterwards, however, 
 that I remember looking up at the ceiling and realizing - it 
 was during "Truckin'" - that this instant of being aware, 
 moment to moment, of music that was literally being created 
 right then, was the difference between being dead and being 
 alive.   I felt very alive, and very thankful for my existence, 
 and I was also appreciating the impermanent nature of it all.  
 It wasn't a moment that I wanted to hold on to, it was a 
 moment of delectation of transient beauty itself.  As Blake 
 put it, "eternity in love with the productions of time." A very 
 spiritual moment.
 	It's hard to trace it back to a first experience.  There 
 have been many moments like that at shows, so many that I 
 actually use Dead shows to check up on myself:  Is my life 
 going O.K.?  I visit what feels like an ancient place at Dead 
 shows.  I can visit that place by meditating, or by having a 
 really good talk with a friend, or sometimes in solitude, 
 reading.  But there is something about Grateful Dead music , 
 particularly certain tunes - the one we're hearing, "Dark 
 Star," is one of them, "Playing in the Band" is another - 
 where they seem to be playing the music of this ancient 
 place.   I can't really explain that.  When I first felt that, it 
 was an experience of recognition, "Oh yes, this is the 
 inevitable beautiful music that comes from that place." But 
 I'm a Deadhead [laughing], so what can I say?  For someone 
 else, it's Wagner, or Beethoven's late quartets.  I've been 
 told that in Beethoven's late quartets, the composer is 
 working out existential problems in the voices of the quartet, 
 and I feel the Grateful Dead are working out existential 
 problems, or investigating essential questions, in the best of 
 their music.
 	I knew a teenager -  16, he didn't even shave yet - 
 who accidentally took a tremendous amount of acid one 
 night at a show.  Instead of going to the hospital, he chose to 
 ride it out.  During the break between sets, he was dancing 
 in the drum circle, and he met a woman, and did the old 
 dance with her.  Two days later, his beard began to grow.  It 
 was a classical initiation experience.  Normally, when one 
 hears about psychedelic overdoses at shows, we assume it's 
 a bad thing.  There are experiences that are more intense than 
 mainstream America is able to understand.  And yet they can 
 be the marrow of life.
 	The Grateful Dead situation is uncannily conducive 
 to the formation of what John Barlow calls the "groupmind."  
 You have so many people in one place, who know the music 
 so well, that when the band makes a musical gesture, it is 
 understood instantaneously by thousands of people in the 
 room against a background or field of reference of hundreds 
 of other performances of that same moment in the song.   
 That sort of synchrony is very rare.  I guess it does happen 
 at intense sport events where everyone wants the batter to do 
 something, or half the people want the batter to do 
 something.
 
 PS:  At Dead shows, everybody wants the batter to hit a 
 home run.
 
 SS:   Every Dead show is the World Series, except there are 
 no losers.
 
 PS:   Though occasionally the team makes a few errors [both 
 laughing]. 
 
 SS:  Right.  So there is the experience available at Dead 
 shows of transpersonal bonding, identification with a larger 
 self, a delighted self, with hundreds of arms and legs, 
 having a real good time.
 
 PS:   The Grateful Dead religion is not dualistic, it doesn't 
 separate the body from the spirit.
 
 SS:  Exactly.  I've become sexually excited at Grateful Dead 
 shows.  That's something that - if you were standing up on 
 the rail [near the stage] in the early to mid'80s - was not 
 uncommon.  People were standing too close to each other to 
 not enjoy the contact that was going on.  When I see people 
 gettin' hard-ons in church because they're gettin' the spirit, 
 maybe I'll start going to church [much laughter].  The 
 Grateful Dead experience contains very rarefied states of 
 consciousness, but you don't leave your body behind.  
 You're still in your body.  
 
 PS:   How else do the Dead affect the people who listen to 
 them? 
 
 SS:   One thing that happens at shows is that people find 
 their spiritual batteries recharged.   It's hard to put it in 
 words - an uncategorizable vitality -  but it does seem to 
 bring along with it compassion, peacefulness, and respect 
 for others.  Some of that might have to do with Robert 
 Hunter's patter
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ning of the experience with his lyrics.  Hunter 
 is a real poet, and a scholar of poetry - he knows what he's 
 doing.  He's naturally drawn to what I heard a critic who 
 was dissing Hunter refer to as "blank-check aphorisms."  
 That does Hunter a disservice, but what he's able to do is 
 come up with statements which contain life lessons that are 
 not exhausted in one reading or hearing.
 
 PS:  They grow with you.
 
 SS:  A line like "Stoke the fires of paradise with coals from 
 Hell to start," from "Foolish Heart," is something that you 
 can hear many times over, and the older you get, the more it 
 means.  Which is the measure of any great artist or writer.  
 So I don't know exactly how much of the particular forms of 
 compassion that are stressed among Deadheads comes from 
 Hunter's patterning of the Dead experience in the lyrics.  
 People literally seem to be somewhat kinder after shows.   I 
 know I am.  I am often recharged in a way such that major 
 life decisions that I've been putting off are made very clear 
 during the show, and I feel empowered to act on them.  I 
 literally make substantive physical changes in my life 
 situation after runs.  Especially if it was a good one.
 
 PS:  How do you think social historians will look at the 
 Grateful Dead phenomenon in the future?
 
 SS:  I have a secret thought - it'll be hard for me to say this 
 without being misinterpreted - I believe that the Grateful 
 Dead, and Deadheads, are an authentic revival of very 
 archaic forms of spirituality.  Our book is, on some levels, a 
 funny book - there are a lot of jokes, a lot of wit among the 
 facts and historical narrative.
 	But at the same time - it'll be hard to say this without 
 being misinterpreted - I felt we were writing a new testament 
 for an authentic religious revival.  There are only certain 
 places where that's obvious in the text, most notably in "the 
 Zone" entry at the end of the book.  I undertook this task 
 with the gravest kind of humility, to the point of not feeling 
 up to it much of the time.  But I did feel that what I was 
 writing was the sacred text of a religious community, and 
 that it had to pass that acid test to be worthy of its subject.   I 
 literally built little statements into the text so that the Zen 
 masters, the real spiritual heavies of the scene, would know 
 that I had been to the Zone.  That I was not just writing 
 about the Zone, but that I myself had spent time there.
 	Having gone to shows for 21 years, I am somewhat 
 of a tribal elder.  I felt that it was my duty, my labor of love 
 anyway, to transmit that info to younger Heads who might 
 not be able to find words for it.  It was a lonely task, often.
 	So I believe that the Grateful Dead and Deadheads 
 are part of a revival of very ancient and essential human 
 values.  There are several other groups, like the Rainbow 
 family, and the Radical Faeries, who are working along the 
 same lines.  Zen too - Gary Snyder points out that a hunter 
 waiting for the game in a still but absolutely attentive state of 
 mind is, in a sense, sitting zazen.  And there is something 
 about listening to the Grateful Dead that is somehow like 
 that.  You are attending to what is being created in the 
 moment, but you are not preconceiving or classifying.  
 
 PS:  You never know where the music is going to go. . .
 
 SS:  Exactly.  So you have to remain attentive.  I'm not 
 saying that the Dead have any sort of patent on this, but I do 
 think that it's a massive phenomenon.  The way that the 
 mainstream currently latches onto it, they really don't 
 understand it.  Deadheads do, but the media, and the culture 
 at large, simply do not know what is under their noses.
 	If you read about a town in Central America where, 
 on a regular basis - say eighty nights a year - 10,000 people 
 ate mushrooms, and had a ritual that involved dancing, and 
 that this had been going on for thirty years, you would say 
 it's a major religious phenomenon.  The place would be 
 swarming with anthropologists.  But because this happens in 
 Cleveland, Pittsburgh - all of these mundane places, with hot 
 dogs being sold in the hallways - nobody notices that this is 
 a major religious revival.  By religion, I don't mean the 
 Pope, I mean what psychedelics are getting to.  The reason I 
 believe in psychedelics is that they get to an apprehension of 
 the deeper layers of reality...
 
 PS:  Sacred space...
 
 SS:  Right.  So you have these people creating sacred space 
 together, with music and dancing and drugs.  That's 
 religion.  
 	Think of how many PhD's have been written about 
 the American transcendentalists.  How many people where 
 involved in that:  Emerson, Thoreau - 
 
 PS:   Did anybody follow them around?
 
 SS:  Well they did actually go on tour.  Emerson and 
 Thoreau would go on speaking tours, and people were way 
 into it, but it wasn't 10,000 people taking ancient sacraments 
 to hear Thoreau lecture. 
 
 PS:  And they weren't dancing...
 
 SS:  Right - for eighty nights a year, for thirty years.  Think 
 about how many thousands of books have been written 
 about those guys.  I'm not diminishing them.   I think that 
 the Transcendentalists were getting at what the Dead get at, 
 or what Deadheads get at, but we're talking about something 
 that involves a lot more people.
 
 PS:  What are some of the life-changing lessons you have 
 learned from the Deadhead experience ?
 
 SS:   I'll tell you an interesting one - interesting because it 
 was somewhat at odds with certain aspects of the Deadhead 
 community, and I'm sure would be quite a surprise to the 
 band.
 	I figured out that the love that I have for my buddies 
 - which was not and is not understood by the culture at 
 large, and is not even served by gay cultural forms - was an 
 expression of my deepest nature.   I feel I literally was given 
 permission to be myself at shows.  What's funny about that 
 is that Deadhead space is pretty much heterosexual space, 
 and the prevailing feeling at Dead shows was almost 
 homophobic for many years.  Now not so much.
 	Also, somewhere out there, I learned to regard 
 people as souls rather than opponents or surfaces...
 
 PS: To look beyond the persona. . .
  
 SS: Right - to see the flicker of the transpersonal identity, the 
 big mind, whatever you want to call it, in each person.  
 That's something that's really reinforced at shows.  I 
 remember seeing a big, buffed, sweaty, tripping-out-of-his-
 mind young guy walking down the halls at Oakland 
 Coliseum, hugging everyone, including the hot dog lady and 
 the security guards.  Whispering in each person's ear, 
 "We're all the same vibration."
 
 PS:  Wow.  When you are deeply involved in the music 
 what happens to you?  Is it visual, sensual, dream-like... ?
 
 SS:  When I'm deeply involved in the music, I'm 
 spacedancing, which in my book a Theology student named 
 Shan Sutton calls "a bodily conversation with the music."  
 With me, it involves a rocking motion at the hips.  It's struck 
 me in recent years that I get into some kind of oceanic space 
 by doing that.  It resembles something that orthodox Jews 
 call dovening, a motion they make while praying.   I'm 
 rocking with my hips on the balls of my feet, making 
 elaborations on that pulse with my arms and legs and feet.  
 My mind is in a very relaxed, yet aware, place - aware of 
 past, present, and future - remembering very old things.  
 Quite at peace with myself, at what T.S. Eliot called "the still 
 point of the turning world."
 
 PS:  What are some of the the ways that Hunter has deeply 
 influenced your individuation process?  
 
 SS:  Hunter is a very crafty poet.  He is able to get some 
 very old lessons across without seeming clicheed.  He's 
 attracted to extremely dense idiomatic phrasing that does not 
 say, "this is the moon," but points toward it.  He is a 
 wonderful philosopher of the psychedelic experience, 
 because he build
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s ghost traps that the ghost can freely enter 
 and leave.
 	I would say that Hunter's shtick is the Golden Rule, 
 be kind to your neighbor, and don't sell your soul for a 
 fistful of silver.  Your decisions are your own - personal 
 responsibility, with a sense of obligation to something larger 
 than one's personal agenda.  A sense of the fragile, exquisite 
 chance that life is.
 	A song like "Stella Blue"is a fairly direct presentation 
 of certain truths of existence.  And a line like "dust off those 
 rusty strings just one more time" points toward the kind of 
 resurrection that's possible in every living moment.
 
 PS:  "I'll get up and fly away."
 
 SS:  Yeah, exactly.  although that's kind of a tricky line 
 because the character who says that might not be able to do 
 it.  The ultimate denial or the ultimate hope . . .
 
 PS:  The beauty of Hunter is that it could be both--it is both . 
 . .
 
 SS:  Right, exactly.  Some nights you experience it and you 
 say, "Oh, that guy is fooling himself, he's not gonna make 
 it."  And then the other nights you feel that he could make it.  
 Good old hippie existentialism.
 
 PS:  How about Barlow?
 
 SS:  Barlow's message is not quite as consistent, though I 
 have been very influenced by "Cassidy."   Barlow is willing 
 to take on a persona in order to write a song, whereas 
 Hunter is always himself.
 
 PS:  And Barlow is hamstrung by Weir - Weir wants 
 images, rather than the telling phrase.
 
 SS:  Right, and Garcia wants evocative phrases . . .
 
 PS; And he gets them.
 Although it is impossible to fully separate the music from the 
 lyrics in what ways has the music itself deeply influenced 
 your life?
 
 SS:  The basic lesson of Grateful Dead music is the next five 
 minutes could be the most beautiful five minutes of your life.   
 All you have to do is show up in a big way.
 	The funny thing about the Dead is that they have an 
 almost perverse inability to produce beauty when it is 
 demanded of them.  So New Year's Eve, or Saturday night 
 at Madison Square Garden, they'll stink. But Tuesday night 
 in Cleveland, they'll suddenly reveal the ear of wheat that 
 Demeter brought back from Hades.  Any night can be the 
 good night.  Looking at every single day of life as a 
 possibility of a new breakthrough to undreamed of, awe-
 inspiring beauty, is the lesson of Grateful Dead music for 
 me, because it means that at several moments in a day, I can 
 be in the middle of a conversation, or some other situation, 
 and I can drop the past, drop my agenda, and expose myself 
 to the raw possibility of the next thing as a stairway to 
 heaven.
 	That includes looking at the person next to me, and 
 thinking that we could get to know each other better than we 
 have, and it includes taking the next line in something  I'm 
 writing, and instead of riding the syntax out to its inevitable 
 boring conclusion, radically juicing up my next idea.  The 
 Grateful Dead approach each song as a potential opening to 
 strange and exhilirating possibility, and one can carry that 
 into daily life quite effectively.
 
 PS:What did the experience of writing Skeleton Key teach 
 you about the Grateful Dead and Deadheads that you didn't 
 already know?
 
 SS:   Well the big surprise of writing Skeleton Key was  -  
 as a young Deadhead, one feels that there are nice people in 
 every corner of Deadville.  Then, as one gets closer to the 
 organization, one hears: "Well, those people over there are 
 not so nice," or "the Spinners are running a trip," or "the 
 crew isn't nice."  As one gets less naive, one begins to feel, 
 "Maybe I was naive, maybe it's just my friends that are 
 nice."  Then one finds out that the band is human, and one's 
 dreams are fully punctured.
 	I went through that stage, and talked to people at the 
 Office, and talked to the Spinners, and talked to people in as 
 many corners of the room at a Dead show as I could get to, 
 which turned out to be hundreds of people.  What I 
 discovered, much to my delight, was that every single 
 person I talked to was  trying to make things a little better 
 from their little corner of existence.  There are a lot of fuck-
 ups around the Grateful Dead scene - people who are not 
 working, or who are dealing bad drugs, or whatever.  But 
 there are a tremendous amount of good intentions in every 
 corner of the scene.  
 	When I talked to Sue Swanson, who was the first 
 Deadhead, and Steve Brown, who started seeing the band in 
 '66, even though I was meeting them for the first time, they 
 were strangely familiar to me.  That's because those guys 
 helped invent a kind of social DNA that's been successfully 
 replicated into millions of people.  So there has been - with 
 no organized structure to do this -  very effective dharma 
 transmission from the first Deadheads to the little guy who 
 just called me on the phone after reading Skeleton Key, a 15-
 year-old kid from Virginia Beach.   He's a Deadhead 
 through and through, very sweet, sending David Crosby e-
 mail to help him feel better, and really trying to do the good 
 thing.  Certainly there are many non-Deadheads who are 
 trying to do the good thing, but it is really extraordinary how 
 many Deadheads are noticeably socially beneficial.  It was 
 surprising to notice how consistent the transmission was, 
 from the beginning.  
 
 PS:  The Dead, when they are on, can achieve amazing 
 musical peaks.  What in your life have you experienced that 
 is as powerful?
 
 SS:  The normal human profundities.  Seeing my 
 grandmother in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease, 
 saying things that some of my relatives considered 
 incoherent, but were very beautiful statements about her 
 situation.  Moments in conversation when some kind of 
 communion occurs, when I find that I am not talking to an 
 other, but I am talking to my Self, in a larger sense.
 	I was raised by radicals, and was from a very young 
 age participating in mass demonstrations and political action.  
 This was in the '60s, and there really was a messianic 
 intention - people thought they were going to transform 
 society by marching in the street and manifesting a better 
 possibility of human community.  Those demonstrations felt 
 very much like Dead shows.  Dead shows became a 
 perpetuation of that vibe when the demonstrations 
 themselves no longer occurred.  I suupose they did in the 
 anti-nuclear movement and then I felt some of the same 
 exhiliration in ACT UP - that feeling of community in 
 opposition to the forces of death, greed and the non-
 compassionate view.
 	Moments of personal creativity, when I'm writing, 
 feel like a jam.  I wrote Skeleton Key to the music of the 
 Dead and Bruce Hornsby mostly, and there were times that I 
 felt that I was dancing.  I spent many hours in that state 
 actually.
 
 PS:  I have a friend who spends every waking hour listening 
 to the Dead, when he's at work he sneaks onto the Internet 
 and checks out the Grateful Dead conference, and when he 
 calls me we talk about the Dead for hours, and the minute he 
 gets off work, he listens to the Dead all night long.  What is 
 it about the Dead that engenders such devotion from 
 Deadheads?
 
 SS:  This phenomenon has positive and negative aspects.  
 The positive way to look at it is that the Grateful Dead are an 
 ongoing conversation in music, and one doesn't want to 
 miss significant passages of the conversation.  If one hears 
 that there was a particularly great passage of the conversation 
 that occurred in 1972 in Austin, Texas, one wants to hear it.  
 The Dead have played over 3000 shows, and to hear all the 
 good parts, you'd have to listen to the music all the time.  
 The Dead can be used like air conditioning for reality 
 [laughter] - there's something about hearing the music in the 
 background that can give one a feeling of joy and 
 contentment.  So it's not necessarily spiritual.  Some people 
 just feel better kicking back wi
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th a brew with the Dead on.  
 For other people it can be an obsession - they have to listen 
 to the Dead or they don't feel right.  Which is unfortunate, 
 because the Dead themselves listen to other stuff.  I think 
 one of the best ways to experience the Dead is as a pointer to 
 other things: "OK, we improvise, check out jazz, they do the 
 same thing." Or  check out other ways of using drums to 
 evoke the sacred.
 
 PS:  They point in millions of different directions, from 
 Willie Dixon to Charles Ives, and everywhere in between.
 
 SS:  If you trace back along the Dead's roots, you end up 
 with a very thorough musical education.  In Buddhism, they 
 talk about the marks of the Buddha.  One of the marks of the 
 Buddha in the Dead scene is that there are so many forms of 
 music that flow into it,  you can't go wrong.  You may not 
 like them, but it's not because they're shallow.  You may not 
 think they're good players, but their music goes deep, from 
 jazz, to Latin, to Taiko drumming - a 20th century 
 symphony.
 	  There are other reasons why people want to live in 
 Grateful Deadland all the time.  Social reasons.  America is a 
 very bleak landscape in terms of community.  People are 
 expected to be happy with their monogamous  marriage in 
 their suburban tract house, with their relatives safely packed 
 away in the nursing home, or at school, or watching TV, 
 where they are being relentlessly sold products that are bad 
 for them and bad for the planet.  And they're expected to be 
 happy!  Lo and behold, the human animal is not happy, and 
 suddenly seeks anesthesia in the form of alcohol, or other 
 drugs, or more TV.  Marriages don't last,  because they have 
 no living familial context in which to occur.  Basically, 
 Americans have a big hole in their souls which they try to fill 
 with Dunkin' Donuts, and it does not work. Anyone from a 
 traditional culture would say, "these people are sick."   It's a 
 very sad life.  
 	Grateful Dead land offers meaningful conversation, 
 and a feeling of fraternal or sororital identication with people 
 you don't know.  It offers a contemporary form of tribality 
 which feel very authentic, and the traditional human band is 
 not the nuclear family, it's the tribe.    For some people, 
 listining to the Grateful Dead, talking about it, and being 
 with Deadheads, feels so at home that they dont want to 
 leave, so they surround themselves with things Dead.  I 
 know how that feels.
 	I myself have to come and go, because I get bored, 
 and I like to listen to other music.  But some people, 
 especially young people who don't know that jazz is also 
 jamming, it's a place that they want to live in for a while.  
 And I can tell you from my own experience  that life on tour 
 is a really wonderful thing.  It feels great.  It's like finally 
 having a job that you want.  You get your tickets together, 
 you get your food together.  It's like being in the wilderness: 
 suddenly the simplest foods taste great.  And you go to the 
 show, and participate in the sacred event, night after night 
 after night after night.  Personally I love it.
 	There are certain things about it that are not good in 
 the long term.  One is willing to trash a town simply because 
 one will not be there tomorrow.   But there are other people 
 who do tour walking lightly on the earth, and that is 
 beautiful.  They are going through the American wilderness, 
 building their campfires, telling their stories, and moving on. 
 	There is also a downside, you see people who are 
 just wasted, and they think that Jerry is God - and poor Jerry 
 is up there, having big self-esteem problems.  So there is a 
 kind of passivity that can happen in the Dead scene, where 
 you think the band is supposed to do the work in your life of 
 revealing the sacred for you, and that aint cool in the long 
 run.  You have to become your own Grateful Dead. 
 
 PS:  Will you still be listening to the Dead when you're 80?
 
 SS:   I am absolutely certain that I will be singing those 
 songs to myself, the way my grandfather sang Irving Berlin 
 to himself.  I'll be psyched if I'm in the nursing home, and I 
 make some arcane reference to some old geezer, and he 
 comes back with "Hey now!" [laughing]
 
 PS:   Could you discuss some of the archetypes that you've 
 encountered through the music and lyrics of the Grateful 
 Dead?
 
 SS:   One archetype came by the name of Dionysus in 
 ancient Greece, normally depicted as an beardless adolescent 
 who was so great to make love to, that his minions were 
 driven insane.   Dionysus was worshipped with the tearing 
 apart of small animals, and the ingestion of alcohol and 
 psychedelics.  You could say Dionysus was an embodiment 
 of chaotic beauty - the majesty of terror and destruction.  I 
 have seen that at Dead shows.  There were times when I 
 couldn't believe that the stage wasn't collapsing from the 
 energy that was being barely controlled on the stage.  
 There's a really tremendous performance of "Playing in the 
 Band" from Laguna Seca in 1988.   Bob Weir said in an 
 interview that he became frightened on stage during that jam, 
 and I know why!  The first time I heard the tape I was in a 
 car, and we had to pull over -  I thought we were going to 
 crash.  Anybody who says the Dead are wimpy hippies can 
 pop that Laguna Seca tape on, and tell me that Sonic Youth 
 or Ministry is more terrifying.  I'm sorry!  This is heavy 
 stuff.  So I've seen Dionysus at shows, reflected in the 
 terror and ecstasy in the beardless faces of young 
 Deadheads, spacedancing at the edge of chaos.
 	I've also seen Demeter, who brings an ear of wheat 
 up from the underground Plutonian stronghold.  A green 
 beauty that is always new, young, eternally redemptive, and 
 feels almost feminine.  Even though the bandmembers 
 themselves are guys, there's something about the endless 
 fecundity of the Dead's improvisations that feels archetypally 
 female to me, the fertility of yin.  So I've seen that young 
 woman who offers the ear of wheat that banishes winter 
 from the earth for another cycle, and puts Pluto back where 
 he belongs.
 	I've also seen who you might call Parcifal:  young 
 dudes or women who are heartbreakingly pure or hopeful, 
 who talk about the new society that might be born on the 
 Earth now.  They're often vegetarian, very loving and 
 sweet, and slightly irresponsible.  Physically very beautiful, 
 almost glowing.  It's extraordinary how many beautiful 
 people there are at shows.
 	Greg, my buddy who had his initiation experience in 
 the drum circle, was extremely beautiful in a way that 
 combined the traditional virtues of both male and female, 
 you could say.  I've seen many young men and young 
 women who manifested that archetype at shows.  I don't 
 know what happens to them, exactly.  Maybe I was beautiful 
 once, I don't know.  I probably was a nice little guy at the 
 shows.  I started going when I was fifteen.
 	I find it fascinating that a lot of Deadheads refer to 
 Garcia as "the old man."  There are initiated tribal elders out 
 there, who have a different sort of beauty than the beauty of 
 an unshaven boy.  Often, interestingly enough, these 
 initiated beautiful people can be almost ugly because they are 
 worn, tattooed, or pierced.  They have a sort of biker glory.  
 Women who have given birth to children.  Calico is a 
 conspicuous example of that.  She was one of the first Hog 
 Farmers, and she's been on the Dead scene since '67, often 
 walking around the parking lot, keeping things sane.  She's 
 a tribal elder, and a heavy woman:  she's been in the Zone 
 and back so many times, you can't throw her by whatever 
 psychedelic thing you're going through - she's seen it 
 before.  Some of the volunteers at Rock Med are that way 
 too.  There are some very old souls out there in the parking 
 lot.  Young people are looking for elders who have not 
 forsaken the sacred.  Donald Trump is not going
2000
 to last as a 
 tribal elder, because he's not tapping into stuff that's deep 
 enough.  
 	People like that try to clothe themselves in real 
 greatness.  But if they are seeking it in materials, they are not 
 going to do it.  But someone like Allen Ginsberg, or Jerry 
 Garcia, stay good tribal elders for a long time, because they 
 are tapping into something that is deep and lasting.  Young 
 people flock around it - they can smell it.  Young people 
 want blessings conferred on them from empowered older 
 people.  That's something I myself have noticed as I get 
 older, and do stuff like writing a book.   Teenage people 
 who I would have thought of as intimidatingly cool when I 
 was their age, are actively seeking my blessing.  They want 
 me to notice them, talk to them, and say "wow, you're a 
 good writer," if they are, or offer them criticism.  To be 
 honest with them.
 
 PS:  You're becoming an elder.
 
 SS:  I'm becoming - um - a middle-aged person.  But I'm 
 trying to do it authentically, and I'm trying to not surrender 
 my essential intentions.  I think young people can sense that, 
 and they think that I have something to teach.  And rather 
 than saying, "I have nothing to teach," maybe I do.  I don't 
 think I have any existential truths to teach, but I have craft, 
 and some habits of attention.
 
 PS:  Here's a quote from Jung:   Christianity "was accepted 
 as a means of escape from the brutality and unconsciousness 
 of the ancient world.  As soon as we discard it, the old 
 brutality returns in force, as has been made overwhelmingly 
 clear by contemporary events."  This statement is as true 
 today as it was eighty years ago.   Do you think - as 
 Terrence McKenna and many others like him do - that our 
 culture is about to undergo a huge shift in consciousness, an 
 omega moment? And if so, how do you feel that Deadheads 
 could help in such a drastic paradigm shift?
 
 SS:   I think that's a load of hooey.  It's like thinking that 
 Christ is going to come down and make world peace, or that 
 aliens are going to save us all.  If I get to 2012, or whatever 
 the Mayan calendar says, and all shit breaks loose and "Dark 
 Star" pours out of the sky,  I'll be there for it.  But I'm 
 going to live more like the Zen monk who is not wishing for 
 enlightenment, but sitting in enlightenment every moment.  
 The omega moment is this moment, or nowhere.
 
 PS:  I think that might be one of the lessons the Grateful 
 Dead has to teach.
 
 SS:  Yes, I think so too.  I am somewhat surprised by 
 McKenna's fixation on this idea.  I don't know where it 
 comes from.  I've heard Garcia is into it too - 
 
 PS:  Yeah.  A lot of people who are into the Dead are into it.  
 That's why I wanted to get your take on it.  
 
 SS:  It's a pitfall of spiritual pursuit.  When I was a Zen 
 student, I was the guy wishing for enlightenment.  I wanted 
 to bear down on my zazen, and produce satori in the next 
 second, or the next meditation period.  What do you do 
 when it doesn't happen?  What do you do when the practice 
 is just the practice, and your teeth are falling out because 
 you're getting old?  What do you do when the Messiah does 
 not come, and all of a sudden your wife is eighty years old?  
 We still have to, somehow, live.  I'm not too big on the 
 omega moment, because I think we're going to be stuck in 
 our meat until the day we die.  So how to live.
 	And I think in the Grateful Dead's relatively tireless 
 quest for the brilliant possibility in every next moment, they 
 are showing a way to live that is true, even if Santa Christ 
 never climbs down the chimney with his bag of eternal 
 goodies.  
 
 PS:   Do you think one of the reasons Dead music is so 
 powerful on psychedelics is that, during the formative years 
 of the band, the bandmembers gained an intimate knowledge 
 of the states of consciousness that psychedelics induce?  Are 
 they psychedelic shamans or just damn good musicians?
 
 SS:  They are damn good musicians who are, by default, 
 psychedelic shamans.  We don't have any psychedelic 
 shamans, because the pursuit of truth through psychedelics 
 was made illegal and fugitive.  Kids are not able to talk with 
 psychedelic tribal elders, because the elders are in the closet - 
 except for very few outspoken people like Ram Dass, Allen 
 Ginsberg, and John Barlow.    I am going to be out of the 
 closet about my use of psychedelics until they bust me, and 
 I'll do it then.  I'm not going to turn my back on the church 
 of LSD because it's not legally fashionable to be taking it 
 now.  I've had some of the most profound experiences of 
 my life on psychedelics.  The more people who would 
 commit to telling the truth about their own experiences, the 
 easier it would be to articulate this stuff, and you'd end up 
 with less kids freaking out and having to be taken to the 
 hospital, because there would be information that could teach 
 how to go down that road safely.
 	 I once visited a camp for teenagers called Creating 
 Our Future, which no longer exists unfortunately, which 
 was partially funded by the Rex Foundation.  Teachers like 
 Ram Dass would come in, and deliver lectures on how to 
 become effective social and environmental activists, or how 
 to meditate.  One night after the lecture, all these kids started 
 asking Ram Dass about his psychedelic experiences.  I 
 realized it was one of the few times, if not the only time, that 
 I saw someone with a lot of experience - an elder - give kids 
 the real deal on psychedelic experience.  Those practical 
 lessons should be taught in high school, if kids are taking 
 psychedelics in high school, which they are.
 
 PS:  Give the kids information, instead of just telling them 
 that taking drugs is wrong.
 
 SS:  Now they just try to scare the kids with invented 
 dangers, and told not to take psychedelics.  The kids take 
 them anyway, and find out that the invented dangers are 
 bullshit, and then they're not aware of the real dangers.
 	You know many psychedelic rituals have been 
 accompanied by music whether it's Huichol Indians going 
 out on the peyote hunt, singing songs containing directions 
 to the site where the Peyote grows.  Or Maria Sabina, 
 singing during her mushroom rituals.   Drumming, in 
 particular, goes with psychedelic experience somehow.  You 
 don't really have to explain why.  And most Deadhead know 
 that psychedelics - LSD in particular - and the Grateful Dead 
 were somehow made for each other.  And they were partly 
 made by each other.  Garcia himself talks about how the 
 wave form of a Dead show echoes the wave form of 
 psychedelic experience.
 	The second set, in its journey from structure - the 
 songs;  to chaos - the "drums and space";  and back to 
 structure;  mirrors psychedelic experience.  You start out 
 with your everyday identity, and then you begin to lose a 
 sense of the boundaries of that identity, and then you venture 
 to a place where new things can be presented to you.  If you 
 take enough of the drug, you come to a place where there is 
 very little patterning of experience, where all sensory inputs 
 become scrambled, like static.  That is a very heavy place to 
 go to.  The Dead themselves go from songs, to jams, to 
 drums and space.   The "drums and space" is like the 
 revelatory turning moment of a psychedelic experience, and 
 then you come back to good ol' America, in the form of 
 "Johnny B. Goode" or "Around and Around."  Also, you 
 come back through a Garcia ballad, like "Stella Blue," that 
 contains in it some crystallization of the existential 
 ponderings that you've just been through.
 	So there's something about the structure of a 
 Grateful Dead second set that is uncannily related to the 
 natural, organic sequence of psychedelic experience.  So the 
 Dead function as shamans, but if you had Phil Lesh sitting 
 over in that chair, and you started saying that the Dead 
 function as psychedelic shamans, he'd be lik
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e, "hrrummph,"  
 you know.
 
 PS:   But even they'll admit that they used to call the shows 
 "church."
 
 SS;  Right.  But they were not Jesus, they were the altar 
 boys.
 
 PS:  Deadheads are phenomenal builders of community, able 
 to transform a random slab of concrete in the middle of, say, 
 Cleveland, in a few short hours, into a genuine community 
 that feels more homey than the neighborhood I grew up in.  
 What makes this possible?
 
 SS:  People like to experience the highest moments of their 
 lives in the company of people who they feel fully 
 understand the significance of those experiences.   The 
 Dead, for many people, are a reliable source of peak 
 experiences.  One of the nicest things about a great moment 
 at a Dead show, say when the band goes into "Dark Star," or 
 "Cosmic Charlie," is that you feel that many other of the 
 people in the room understand, as deeply as you do, the 
 significance of what is occurring.  That desire to bond with 
 others who understand the significance of a beautiful 
 moment repeats itself fractally throughout Grateful Dead 
 culture, even unto the WELL, where ideas that are remote 
 from the tunes or the shows are collectively examined, and 
 enjoyed in the company of an understanding group of fellow 
 investigators.  The form reiterated throughout Deadland is 
 people coming together to look at a set of experiences that 
 contain in them the seed of mystery.  Whether that's setting 
 up tents together in Laguna Seca for a run of shows, or 
 colonizing the Internet.
 
 PS:  One of the things that is constant about the Grateful 
 Dead is that it doesn't happen without the audience.  Their 
 studio albums are generally mediocre, compared to their live 
 performances.
 
 SS:  When the great thing happens at a Dead show, it's not 
 because the band is out there, pumping it like toothpaste 
 from a tube out of the speakers.  It is because everyone is in 
 their exactly right place.  The Spinners are spinning in the 
 hallway, the crazy guy is babbling is over there, your own 
 foot is striking the floor at just the right moment, and Jerry is 
 hitting that note that is a little bit better than the Platonic ideal 
 of the solo that you were wishing he would play.
 
 PS:  Synchronicity.
 
 SS:  Yeah.  I think it was Nietzsche who used the phrase 
 amor fati, the love of fate, or, you could say, the love of the 
 particular circumstances which fate has dealt you.  Not the 
 love of some ideal.  Not the love of some state you wish you 
 could attain some day.  The love of the particular experiences 
 in which you find yourself.  Particularly beautiful Dead 
 shows involve this amor fati experience, where even if your 
 tooth aches, or your clothes are wet because it rained on you 
 while you were waiting outside the venue, you feel right.   
 The medicine happens, and that moment involves everyone 
 in the room.
 	In Iron John, Robert Bly talks about how the 
 protected, beautiful and weak child has to be stolen away 
 from the castle of the parents by a "hairy man," and put 
 through certain ordeals in order to come into his own power.  
 For some kids, the Grateful Dead, and the community of 
 Deadheads, are that hairy wild man, who steals the child out 
 of his parents' castle.   Some of the difficult ordeals that kids 
 go through in Deadville are not unfortunate impurities in the 
 ecology of a goody-goody subculture.  The ordeals are what 
 is doing the necessary transformation.
 	Part of finding oneself in this society has to do with 
 getting lost, and a lot of people get pretty damn lost in 
 Deadville.   A lot of young people go through things that 
 they would not wish on their own kids, when they become 
 parents.  But I think that a lot of the things that are regarded 
 as difficulties, or even shameful things happening in the 
 Dead scene, can be looked at as ordeals, comparable to 
 going into the wilderness and having your flesh torn, or 
 getting a painful piercing or tattoo.
 	Most of human religious experience, initiatory 
 experience, has not involved getting cooled by feather fans 
 while eating caviar.  It has to do with knowledge of pain, 
 terror, knowledge of death, fragmentation of social forms, 
 and being stolen away from your parents by force.  I think 
 that a lot of what gives the Grateful Dead scene its mojo, 
 includes even some of the things that some Deadheads 
 consider dark, or unfortunate.  That's why I like dissonant 
 songs like"Victim or the Crime."  The songs I don't like are 
 songs that offer facile models of reality, like "Long Way To 
 Go Home."  The music itself is too predictable.  A really 
 good "Playin'" jam, or a good "Cassidy," snarls with primal 
 terror.  Being exposed to primal terror is not something that 
 Mall America offers much of, and I think kids need a dose of 
 that as much as they need mother's milk when they're 
 younger, to become fully human, live to the utmost, and 
 exercise their faculties at large.
 	By offering an organic whole to their audience that 
 includes both shadow and light, I think that the Grateful 
 Dead are worthy inheritors of the great tradition of human 
 spiritual pursuit and investigation.
 
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