From:terrapin@cats.ucsc.edu (Beth Dyer) Organization: University of California; Santa CruzReprinted without permission from Playboy, March 1972...
It is, I suppose, my unhappy destiny to be eternally numbered among the Last of the First; 'twas ever thus, even in 1966. For by the time I arrived, stoned to the eyeballs, at the Longshoremen's Hall in San Francisco for the final night of the Trips Festival, it had somehow got to be one or two or three o'clock in the morning, and the Dead were packing up their gear and nearly everybody had gone home. Some late-lingering hanger-on was fiddling with a slide projector, running through old slides that one of Kesey's Pranksters had shot in the La Honda woods, and even as I walked into the vast, almost empty hall there flashed, purely by cosmic coincidence-the synch, Tom Wolfe named it-on a giant screen above the bandstand, a gargantuan medium-close-up image of ... right ... of me, slapped up there on the wall behind the stage like some kind of weird wallpaper, head and shoulders in monumental proportions, my eyes masked behind a 12-foot span of impenetrably black wrap-around shades and my nostrils as big as manholes and my tightly pursed mouth, a furrow the length of the grave of a good-sized dog, fixed in what I must have intended to resemble a pensive attitude but that now seemed fraught with nameless apprehensions (to tell the truth, for all the time I put in hanging around the edges of the La Honda scene, I never did quite manage to shake off that vague, stranger-in-a-strange-land uneasiness that is the special affliction of us day-trippers); and, dwarfed by my looming monolithic visage, the Grateful Dead and their equipment crews slouched about at their assorted chores, a shadowy platoon of climbers grouping to scale a one-man, two-dimensional Mount Rushmore. All in all, it seemed as appropriate an image as any to remember the Trips Festival by, so I turned on my heels and split as quickly as I'd come.
And that was the very last time I sought out the company of any Rock'n'Roll Stars whatsoever, the very last time until...
"Looks like you fell in with a bad crowd, man."
Huh? Hoodat said dat?
Jerry Garcia, that's who; Jerry Garcia wading through the jack-strewn corpses carpeting the floor wall to wall, Jerry Garcia grinning down at me, his face swimming slowly into focus, his hairy aspect droll, almost elfin, Jerry Garcia reaching for the guitar case he stashed behind my chair about seven centuries ago when this night was young and so was I. All of which means, lemme see now, all of which means ...
Sonofabitch, it's over! Three sets, three whole sets of the Sweetest Sound this Side of Pandemonium, five solid hours I've been cuddled up back here in icy congress with a cold tank while out front the Dead were raising a rumpus loud enough to wake the living and set a multitude to boogalooing, and I've scarcely heard a sound all evening long, save the nitrous oxide whistling through the empty chambers of my mind ... I mean great Scott, Front Page, you've got a story to write, fella, you can't be loafin' around back here on your dead ass when ...
Prodded at last by my long-dormant conscience, goosed by good intentions, eyeballs, bulging maniacally with the effort to Pull Myself Together, I am halfway to my feet when Jerry, who by now has retrieved his guitar case and made his way back to the doors, turns and halts me with an upraised hand.
"What's your hurry?" he says, still grinning. "The tank's not empty yet, is it?"
I blink as this highly relevant bit of intelligence illuminates my socked-in consciousness, and when I look again Jerry is gone, vanished like the Cheshire cat, leaving just the memory of his grin hanging in mid-air to mark his passing. And the next thing I know I'm back in my chair once more, and somehow the hose is rising magically, like a fakir's cobra, from the writing turmoil on the floor to meet my outstretched hand, and I am thinking Yeah, right, just another l'il toke or two for the road, and then I'll get a good night's sleep so I can come back tomorrow night all primed and cocked to ....