Bob Dylan Touring With The Grateful Dead

Wanting to keep the Grateful Dead theme going this week. Here's "Bob Dylan Touring with The Grateful Dead"  (from "Wait Until I'm Dead"). 

Warning - only minimum Grateful Dead content! (but plenty of content!) 

Bob Dylan Touring with the Grateful Dead 

Bob Dylan Touring with the Grateful Dead
acid crowd federal narcs in the capitol, alert alert,
Now's their chance
Boy George already forgotten in headline video
pleads new songs even in pain
indifferent yuppie high school tank topped athletes
               shudder blonde bodies vomiting in the back
               seat
car carshed into an Iowas lamp pole
better not get high in the Detroit stadium naked for the
              narcs, a busy, a bust
the agricultural poet drunk in his red bikini in the
              Buddhist garden
if I feel dread, what feels he alone with his family crazy
              in outer Long Island?
Where can he go with alcohol and the landlord's
             eviction notice comes to us all?
gentrification will oust us from our nest
where put books and file cabinets heavy with paper
             gold?
Wake, smoke another cigarette with aching back
the last in breath through cancered throat
too late to go back to college a smokeless virgin
lead a purist spotless life of commercial crime
unfair, an 80-year-old stepmother's bride broods in her
             garden apartment
who'll change the light bulb,
climb up on the ladder and fix the triumph of death on
             the wall?
Have I learned the Book Of The Dead in time?
breathing Manhattan's springtime
bomb Libya,
Ukranian wheat crop poisoned by radioactive burst
whispers in the UN corridors 10th floor
the Secretary General sees a black cloud approach 
over Queens and Brooklyn in a hundred years
down the street Gregory tokes a joint by Dag
             Hammarskjold's private bus stop
the driver smelt incense, out of the kiosk he whispered
             to the supervisor
What's that smell? Is that a police patrol by the fire
             hydrant?
Where will the drunken farmer go if they kick him out
            of the Buddhist retreat?
the sky turned black
dread heaven over Columbia Library dome
and later in the bookstore, animal clerks glared
             wounded behind the cash register  
skeletons standing in place behind the counters and     
             shelves
filled with Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas

ca. May 22, 1986

Jerry Garcia (1942-1995)

Jerry Garcia died on this date 21 years ago in 1995, "Deadheads" around the world mourn. Here's Allen's photo of Garcia backstage on the concluding night of the Grateful Dead's historic five-night sold-out series of concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden September 15-20 1987




The Grateful Dead and Poetry -  here's Nicholas Meriwether, official Grateful Dead archivist  on "The Poetry of the Archive":

"Dozens of themes knit together the various sections and collections in the Grateful Dead Archive, but one of the most interesting and evocative is poetry… Poetry was a major form of artistic expression in the Haight-Ashbury, where the dividing line between the Dead and their fans was blurred from the beginning. Even in their early days the band attracted well-known poets such as Richard Brautigan, who wrote "The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead' as a surrealistic homage to their travails, and their neighbor Michael McClure, who gave Garcia a lyric that he tried to work up ino a song. Though that failed to come to fruition, both McClure and Brautigan remained lifelong fans of the band's music and lyrics. Brautigan made it a point to share his admiration for the band with other poets; one of his biographers recounts a memorable occasion when he played American Beauty for an appreciative Robert Creeley. The Dead returned the favor. Most of the band members, to varying degrees, had an affinity and respect for the Beats as bohemian elders and avatars, most fanously in their friendships with Neal Cassady, but the connection between the two generations of artists are more extensive and nuanced. Pigpen's library included seminal works by San Francisco poets, and he even tried his own hand at poetry: one of his Beat-inflected efforts appears in The Grateful Dead Family Album. Phil Lesh found Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" so inspiring he began to set it to music [sic]. .."