Nostalgia

For my birthday, a good friend gave me a 3-CD set of the Grateful Dead performing at the Big Rock Pow Wow in May 1969. They were at their psychedelic peak. Songs like Dark Star, St. Stephen and The Eleven mixed with bluesy jams behind Pig Pen's vocals.

Three months earlier, I had my first Dead experience at the original Electric Factory in Philly. At 14, it not only changed my idea of music, but my outlook on life. I realized a different lifestyle than the one I had grown up with existed. Years later Garcia put it into words. He explained the concept he had learned from Neal Cassady, "Living your life as your art."

Listening to those songs again transported me back. Nostalgia has no hold on me, but I found myself awash in waves of it. My mind contemplated the yin/yang of  the sixties' final year- man walked on the moon, Woodstock, the Manson Family murders, Altamont...war, children, it's just a shot away.

It wasn't the momentous events that fueled the reminisces. My wistfulness sprang from lost innocence. Remembering the simple things - mastering changes between the G, C and that damned F chord. Riding my bike in the crisp morning air. Lying under a tree watching the light dapple through the leaves with absolutely nothing on my mind. The naive belief that the new generation, of which I was becoming a part, could build a bridge of positive change for the future.

The river of time has ravaged the trestles of that bridge leaving the detritus of cynicism and Weltschmerz in its wake.  Hearing the live muisc of what one critic of the time called "that band of hirsute simians" stirred embers of optimism in the bonfire of my soul. As ever - BB

"...how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet." - Robert Browning