SUNSET: August 9, 1995
Opening Song...
Somewhere in the Middle...
Closing Song...
"Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there"...
Grateful Dead Final Concert 7-9-1995 (2:31:15)
REMEMBRANCES
-- During the interview, Garcia was asked how he wanted to be remembered.
"I don't know. I never thought about it in those terms," he said with a laugh. "I guess I would want to be known as the guy who had a pretty good time while he was here...you can go at any moment so you might as well crowd as much possible into your life."
Here are some highlights:
• 'I hate to play anything twice ever. In fact, I'm almost constitutionally unable to do it. It isn't fun for me, and luckily everybody else in the band, the Grateful Dead, is like me in that regard. Our problem is to keep ourselves interested, and that means to keep changing. So that means every night we play the material differently. We don't do a "show" as such. We have a large repertoire of pushing 200 songs when we really are working a lot, and we just go on stage and play. It's the only way we can do it and keep it interesting… No two shows are alike. If you really want to see the Grateful Dead you have to go to all of these shows… To go on the road and play mechanically would cheapen this whole experience. We're interested in providing something that isn't just a live version of a record. We want it to be more dynamic, we want it to be more exciting, we want it to be unexpected, we want there to be surprises there, we want the people to feel they're participating in it… The audience becomes a part of the music and it becomes a very rich experience. If you decide what you're going to be is a jukebox, then pretty soon you get bored. Being on the road gets to be a real drag… Doing something that stays interesting, that really is the key.'
• 'We've always really avoided expressing any particular message with our music. We've made an effort to make it as ambiguous as possible so people could create their own sense. If we're standing for something, we hope that the whole gesture says it rather than the individual songs. So our songs have purposefully not been focused in a topical sense.'
• 'PCP is not good. Crack is not good. A lot of drugs will definitely kill you… You just have to be careful nowadays.'
• About his diabetic coma: 'I lost about four or five days there, they're gone... It was like a complete meltdown, I really had to start everything over again.'
• 'I'd like to be known as a guy who had a pretty good time while he was here.'
--The slightly off-kilter performance on the night was concluded with a saddening moment as The Grateful Dead perform the all-too-apt ‘Box of Rain’. After the first encore of ‘Black Muddy Water’ subsided, the song Phil Lesh wrote with Robert Hunter for his dying father would be the final song The Grateful Dead would ever play with Garcia. Jerry Garcia would die on August 9th, 1995.
Leaving Phil Lesh to sing “Such a long, long time to be gone,” as the audience left the arena, “and a short time to be there.” Its sentiment that rung out over the crowd that evening and every other fan of The Grateful Dead ever since.
--spend time with these wonder-filled memories…
In addition to family and members of the band, Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Bruce Hornsby and basketball great Bill Walton were among the mourners.
--a must read…short and deep…about Kesey’s reflections on Jerry’s wake…
-- Robert Hunter's elegy for Jerry Garcia read by Wavy Gravy 4 days after his death at a memorial for Garcia in Golden Gate Park
I’ll close with this song about the passage of time…
"The Wheel" - Jerry Garcia (04:02)
"The Wheel" from Jerry Garcia's debut solo album 'Garcia'. Written by Robert Hunter & Jerry Garcia. Video directed & created by Justin Kreutzmann (Bill’s son)
Naw…changed my mind…I want to leave us with a different energy…
