"When you hear that song
crying like the wind
it seems like all this life
was just a dream"

To sit in the upper deck of Dodger Stadium recently on a perfect June night and feel the overwhelming cosmic connection of 25,000 souls to the music of the Grateful Dead, no matter what the band is called now, is to find home. Whether you're a fan of their music or it remains outside the limits of your listening world doesn't really matter. Because what the group--now tagged Dead & Co.--is really creating is something so far beyond music that it's almost alchecmy. They are opening the valve on what it means to be a human being in 2022, and to offer a glimpse of what surely the world was supposed to be. For 57 years the Grateful Dead in various incarnations has played songs that serve up an ethos that doesn't really exist without them. It's a miracle of musicality that appears for those willing to believe. Like life itself, it's all about the faith it takes to stay open to hope and happiness. Less than that brings reality crashing around us all, and takes away the inner openness the Grateful Dead offers. Choose that high road and the journey sparks to life. Greatness is found when you are are ready to feel it. For so many years the music of the Dead has provided a key to entry into another level. It's like a big forest of feelings, ones that rarely come at any other time. It is such a precious gift there can never really be words to describe it. Instead, it is a vibrant vibration that takes away the doubts of what this life means, and supplies an answer that is beyond question. The lesson is to treasure the precious moments that come and then go, and to hold onto the spirit that flows through everything. It is the spirit of not only this life, but maybe the one that could live in the great beyond. If there is one. And if not then it is to really realize what we are given now, and know that the moments of goodness are our reward for being able to recognize them for the glorious gifts that sometime come our way. That is the treasure that descended over all those at Dodger Stadium the other evening. It ebbed in and out of all there with such an overwhelming sense of pure nowness in the air there was no need for anything else. We were all in the psychic pudding, and for a few hours walked into a dreamworld of endless fascination. The miracle appeared. One of the last songs that night, "Stella Blue," said it all: "It seems like all this life was just a dream."

I went searching for the miracle of another reality in 1966, when I first read about San Francisco's Grateful Dead from a story in Crawdaddy magazine. In Houston, it was next to impossible to even find a copy of Crawdaddy. The Record Rack store got sporadic issues, which sold out instantly. This was over a year before Rolling Stone magazine debuted, and information on the so-called psychedelic music being played on the West Coast was near-impossible to learn about. Hit Parader magazine would publish the rare feature story about Jefferson Airplane or the other new rock outfits that had songs on the radio, but there was no coverage of the more underground bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. That was all left to our yearning imaginations, which veered wildly about what was going on way out west. We were desperate for a new sound. The English rock bands were retreating from the road and their more public personas. In Houston, we had the 13th Floor Elevators as our local heroes, but surely there were more. That was when the countdown began for the Dead's debut album to be released. Hopefully there would be answers then for where rock was going, and a bright new sun for us to find and follow. There had to be. America was changing, even if Texas felt like we were being held in a headlock while wearing a straitjacket. The Grateful Dead--Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan--were carrying a new flag up the hill. Their efforts were starting to twang in the Texas counterculture, what there was of it. But when would we find out on record or in person just what that power might be?

The first Grateful Dead album, which was simply self-titled, was released on Warner Bros. Records in March 1967. It featured an adventurous cover unlike anything seen before, and songs that gave a hint at a fervent musical crew who were reaching for the sky. But in the end they didn't really get there on that first offering. Everything felt somewhat rushed, and for whatever reason the group's lyrics didn't really provide the new world order we were hoping for. We already had the mighty 13th Floor Elevators' originals like "Reverberation (Doubt)," "Fire Engine" and their friend Powell St. John's opus "The Kingdom of Heaven (Is Within You)" to open those doors of perception for where rock music could take us. And though the Dead got close there weren't any true amen moments on their two original songs, "Cream Puff War" and "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)." What there was on that album was a huge promise extended but not really fulfilled. That would have to wait. But there was the cheering sound of the band, like a subtle rolling thunder was locked inside it. Now it was on them to crack the code, harness the heavens and set their surging sonics free. All the Dead's fans were betting on the band. There was a feeling of extended community, one that had nowhere for them to go but up to the stratosphere. And take all of us with them. That's because the Grateful Dead were different. You could feel it even from thousands of miles away. They loved to play for hours, improvising their way to nirvana while twisting their songs into evolving creeds of a world just beyond this one.

A year later, the group's ANTHEM OF THE SUN was sprung on a not-so-delirious public in July 1968. It was one of the more avant-garde rock albums of that era, with songs like "That's It for the Other One" and "Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)" paving a way for an audacious odyssey into musical mind-tripping. Supreme lyricist Robert Hunter had started collaborating with the band, and it was obvious he was itching to take them on a magical mystery tour of their own. Listening to the bob-and-weave of the songs was deeply inspired by the fantasticalness of LSD, and new keyboardist Tom Constanten was clearly no stranger to wandering into that zone. All portals were open for lift-off, and when it was announced the Grateful Dead would be playing Houston's small but feisty Catacombs Club on December 28 at the end of '68, cerebral waves went through the roof for certified followers. Oddly, the Catacombs was an under-21 club, probably due to some arcane Texas alcohol laws, but for the 200 followers who packed the club that cold December night, the Grateful Dead came prepared to blow the place apart. In a simple sentence, that evening was the most flat-out amazing night of rock music I've ever seen. My brother and I were sitting in folding chairs right in front of the foot-high stage. We could almost reach out and touch Jerry Garcia's microphone stand. When the bearded man starting playing his small red Gibson SG electric guitar, it was like he was having an involved dance with himself, smiling and swinging and pushing the music into places rock & roll had never gone before. And just to insure all rhythmic possibilities were covered, the band had added second drummer Mickey Hart to the mix, someone who had never met a time signature he couldn't conquer. From the very first note of the show, there was a thrilling power that roared off the small bandstand, like the group's mission was to imprint a lifelong impression on everyone there. Their first set was an almost complete performance of ANTHEM OF THE SUN, with the intensity turned up to stun. After a short intermission, the Dead came back and started the set with "St. Stephen," and after a half-hour of massive improvisation, veered into "The Eleven" followed by "Dark Star" for the next two hours. It was like the group knew the new NASA headquarters were a half-hour away, and decided to take their audience on their own interstellar journey just to announce to the space scientists they had competition in town. It really did feel like the transfixed audience were going on an excursion into the outer cosmos. When we all finally touched back down about 2 in the morning, Jerry Garcia sang the Rev. Gary Davis blues staple "Death Don't Have No Mercy," just to remind us life is short and there is not a second to waste. I still shudder when I think of the mental and spiritual velocity of that night. But that was the Grateful Dead: one great show and you're never the same. The Catacombs was that night for me. The next 50-plus years of albums, shows, books and sometimes just flat-out silent thought transmissions have woven an ever-evolving certified circle of higher elevation. The road there never ends.

A few years after the Houston show the Grateful Dead came to Austin. The night before Thanksgiving in 1972 they played at the Austin Municipal Auditorium, a not overly-inspired hall filled with the growing freak army amping up through the South. The band was in fine form, but the venue wasn't really right. Everything felt normal, not the ideal setting for an evening of eventfulness. About three songs in, the walls started moving, the lights flashed from red to green to blue and the audience seemed like an untamed beast ready to explode. The Owsley Orange Sunshine had taken over my being and had some fairly serious intentions on where it wanted to go. Of course, there was no discussing it. LSD doesn't take directions. It gives them. And when the Dead roared into an enhanced rendition of Marty Robbins' "El Paso," I noticed the clear plastic tubes hanging down from the ceiling above the band had attached themselves to the brains of the players, and were delivering liquid thoughts to each member on what needed to be played. You could see the color liquid flow into their heads as the song shifted and took on a jacked-up cadence. By then, I was pretty sure the Owsley dose was in overdrive and I needed to remember this feeling would not last forever. Three hours and four songs later I wandered into a chilly Austin evening thinking I'd crossed a lunar landscape on all fours and was happy to be back walking on solid ground. Score one for inifinity. The next evening, Thanksgiving to be exact, on one of those jackpot occurences that happen every decade or so, Dead members Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh joined a crazy-quilt group of local musicians for an unannounced (and free) show at the Armadillo World Headquarters. The ad hoc band was being steered by Jerry Garcia's Texas buddy Doug Sahm, and included Oklahoma visitor Leon Russell on piano, Shiva's Head Band's Jerry Barnett on drums, Greezy Wheels' Mary Egan and Plum Nelly's Bennie Thurman (who just happened to be the original bassist in the 13th Floor Elevators) on fiddles and Freda & the Firedogs' David Cook on pedal steel. It was a celestial brew of country & western music crossed with a side serving of cosmic California sounds, and as expected it is still being talked about 50 years later, with half the population of Austin claiming they were in the 1,500-seat Armadillo that Thanksgiving. But it put a seal on the city as a Grateful Dead favorite, and each time they would visit, whether it was at Manor Downs Racetrack where their former road manager Sam Cutler now worked, or a mondo outdoor show it was special. The Grateful Dead and Austin had bonded.

A decade later I had moved to Los Angeles and had gotten embedded in the music scene, writing for the L.A. Weekly and then becoming a publicist for Slash Records before moving over to Warner Bros. When it was announced the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan were playing the massive Anaheim Stadium I knew this was not a show to miss. It felt historic. I had saved a single tab of LSD a stranger nicknamed "Rut" had given me a year earlier at The Saloon dive bar in San Francisco's North Beach area. I wasn't sure if it was a wise move to finally take it, but then figured I was being called to higher conciousness for this show. So off I went. The Dead played a 100% mystical set that afternoon in the beautiful California sunshine. The 50,000-plus audience was happily levitating in perfect time throughout the day, and when the sun started to set the band ended with a half hour-long tour de force of "Eyes of the World." Lift-off occurred. Then it got dark. Really dark. Bob Dylan took the stage, backed by the Dead, and it seemed like Dr. Doom had come with him. He played and sang brilliantly, but each song got to be more morbid than the one before it until all mental clues started pointing toward the exit signs. Something was off, and when that bell rings it's best to move on. Color me crazy, but that was it for me in Anaheim. I crossed the parking lot and got the train back to Los Angeles. When I arrived Union Station there felt like the promised land it was so shiny. I think I had learned a lesson. I just wasn't sure just what it was. A year or so later I learned another hard lesson. A Warner Bros. pal who had worked with the Grateful Dead when they were on the label said he could get me good tickets for their upcoming show at the Long Beach Arena. Yes, please. And he wasn't kidding. When I got there I found out the seats were in the front row. I hadn't been that close since the Catacombs night in Houston in 1968. But walking into the Arena I detected a violent edge in the crowd. Things were not lining up right. Noticing an abudance of hard-core bikers flying their colors, not to mention already spotting a few fights in the parking lot on the way in, I got to my seat when a altercation broke out right next to me. Again, the red light started flashing in my mind and that inner voice said it was time to move on. I'd been attacked once out of the blue at the huge outdoor Los Angeles Street Scene concert in 1984, and knew I didn't want to go through another jaw broken in three places. Being wired shut for seven weeks and getting down to 110 pounds because I couldn't eat is no way to celebrate Christmas. Color me paranoid, but the Grateful Dead would ride again for me, just not tonight. I wanted to be there alive and well when they did. So adios Long Beach.

Flash forward a few years and the Grateful Dead were playing their backyard playpen Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, south of San Francisco, as they often did. In 1990 they rolled out their finest fare and made all there feel like it was a raucous backyard party from the 1960s at their old spread in Novato. Like it is often said, "There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert," especially one where everyone in the audience seems like a close personal friend with at least one of the band members. My tour guide that day, the one and only guru of groove Michael Vosse (R.I.P) knew how to do the Dead right. The day before the show we traveled to their management house in San Rafael, which had a large room stuffed to the gills with tickets for upcoming shows which the band sold by mail order, and got a handful of different backstage passes for Shoreline, each one a clearance for another area of the venue's inner maze. Vosse had it down and showed me how things really work in the band's innards. For a lifetime fan like me it was a study in giddiness, at least for one evening, and something I've never forgotten. Eating a vegan lunch at a table with Phil Lesh that afternoon still makes me smile. That night the Grateful Dead started on the 99th floor and kept going higher. Jerry Garcia was back full-tilt from his 1986 illness, and this evening felt like a huge house party for the man who had helped change the culture with the Grateful Dead. No one suspected Garcia would be gone in a matter of only a few years. The last time I saw him play live was at a Jerry Garcia Band show at the UCLA gymnasium. My Texas buddy Big Boy Medlin and I went for old-time's sake. We had been through many great adventures seeing the Grateful Dead during the 1970s around the Lone Star state, and had both keyed in on Garcia's inquiring mind. In 1975 Medlin was a roadie for Doug Sahm on a tour where the Texan opened for Garcia's acoustic outfit Old & In the Way. He told me about his backstage conversations with the Californian about their mutual admiration for writer Roald Dahl, and other semi-eccentrics. This night in the big gymnasium was also special. When Garcia started the show with a Chuck Berry classic, Medlin and I predicted that Jerry Garcia might be playing the rock & roll songbook tonight. So we'd try and guess whose song Garcia might cover next: Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and others. What was amazing is that either me or Medlin were right almost every time. It was a night I'll never forget, like ESP filled our brains and we could do no wrong. When we left the UCLA campus that night, there was a full moon and Big Boy and I each started howling. The Grateful Dead magic continued. A year later, while I was swimming in a hotel pool in Galveston with my young children I heard on a radio that Jerry Garcia had died. It felt like all the air in my lungs had been forced out, and I couldn't breathe. But I quickly realized it was also a time to be thankful instead of sad. Jerry Garcia had given us so much music, but even more, maybe, had taught us that this life is for enjoyment. Not always, but enough to balance the books and remind us to always look ahead for new adventures. That is the big lesson: further.

There would be many more nights of Grateful Dead music, with surviving band members shuffling the deck with who was in the present lineup of whatever they were calling the collection that show. Sometimes they would add guest singers and juggle lead guitarists. There were semi-reunion shows, semi-farewell shows and now, as Dead & Co., just show shows. Through all the changes the one constant is the songs. They live on, flying on majestic wings into the ozone above the audience like a special delivery of goodness. In so many ways, they have kept a wishful life force alive that will always remain in the music of the Grateful Dead. Happiness is instantaneous when the music begins. It delivers a never-ending beauty, providing a warmth that lasts forever. Listening to "Stella Blue" at Dodger Stadium when the opening lyric begins--"All the years combine / they melt into a dream / a broken angel sings / from a guitar"--it all hit home. We are here for a certain amount of time, and should try and find ways to feel life as deeply as we are able. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes the world finds us, and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes we can hear the broken angels and their guitars, and sometimes we can't. But this does not end. It will always be a beginning. May the circle remain unbroken.

Bill Bentley