The stage darkens at the end of Drums, and for a moment remains
empty as Mickey's last eruption echoes and fades, reverberating
from speaker to speaker across the auditorium.
At another show, some invisible force lifted me bodily five feet above my seat and I was blasted with repeated jolts of electricity from the stage. The power of the music took me over, controlling every motion, every surge of energy. I don't know if anyone saw me hovering above the crowd twitching and dancing, but it was the strangest thing I've ever experienced. And there were no drugs involved.
The stage darkens at the end of Drums, and for a moment remains
empty as Mickey's last eruption echoes and fades, reverberating
from speaker to speaker across the auditorium.
drums simply in memory
Alone, Jerry steps out on stage and for about fifteen seconds
ethereal arpeggios from his guitar are the only things to be
heard. After the violence of Mickey's assault, they are
comforting, healing. It's a special moment.
The single most articulate and comprehensible construction of "meaning" I've ever heard came during a second set late in the '80s, sometime after Jerry's coma. The whole set, I could have sworn, was a ritual enactment of the mysteries of death and rebirth, forged in the crucible of "Fire On The Mountain," supplied drama by the terror and chaos of the jam following "Playing In The Band," and given final explication in "Black Peter" and "Knocking On Heaven's Door," both of which dropped through the gates of death and reemerged victorious.
Even the percussion duet faltered, descending at last into silence and nothingness, a dead stop. The silence that night after Mickey and Billy left the stage seemed to last an eternity, carrying with it all the weight of dissolution and insurmountable decay. There seemed to be nowhere left to go, no way the music could possibly continue in the face of that silence, but somehow, miraculously, it did, and everybody in the auditorium shared in that deliverance from the brink.
By the time Jerry sang that he was "knocking on heaven's door --
JUST LIKE SO MANY TIMES BEFORE" in the encore that night,
carrying the whole ritual into a final enduring celebration, we
all, I think, knew what we had been through, and none of us would
willingly have done without a single impossible moment of the
process.
Those impossible moments of glory and bliss are just too thick in my mental picture of the Dead, now that Jerry is gone, and it's almost impossible not to slip into a nostalgic haze. But this is not--and can't be--just nostalgia, which perverts and distorts everything it touches. The sheer fact that it lasted so long, and was such a deep part of my life, is assurance enough.
And the truth is that, if it were just nostagia, other kinds of memories would have been obscured. But there they are--Jerry looking green, bloated, and frighteningly frail on stage at so many shows in the early 80s, the hundreds of badly played songs through the years, the increasing ugliness of the scene outside of the shows in the 90s.
It's also true that, like Jerry's, my attentiveness wained at times, sometimes for months or years at a stretch. At one show, I swore that, if I ever heard them play another turgid and lurching version of "Tennessee Jed," I'd never come back. But then, of course, it happened--the next time I caught the song, it was a gem, sparkling and pure.
The grab-bag quality of memory remains--Donna hugely pregnant onstage, Brent counting down "Hey Pocky Way" to begin a show; the muscles in Jerry's left forearm as he worked the fretboard; a jam between Jerry and 
Bruce Hornsby--the two of them staring, smiling, into each others' eyes--that sounded like a psychedelic reel; moments of 1974 peeking through the interstices in a few shows during the 1990s; the jam in "Eternity" moving into some richly textured and mysterious spaces; "That Would Be Something" suddenly being transformed from a goofy little throw-away into a jammed-out dance tune.
I was fortunate enough to have two final shows, one with Jerry and one with the memory of Jerry. The first, at RFK Stadium, was wonderful. The second, at the memorial service in the Polo Fields, was magic. At the first, Jerry played beatifully with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Hornsby. At the second, he played beautifully with the gods.
I'll never forget either one.
