Tom Baas’ Long, Strange Trip to the Rosemont

THE ONLY TIME I EVER SAW THE GRATEFUL DEAD LIVE, before Jerry Garcia passed away in the summer of 1995, was two days after my seventeenth birthday on March 16, 1994, at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago. My dad, who paid for my ticket as a birthday present, took me and my friend Nick down there, while he went to visit an old friend in the area.

It was imperative that we get there a couple hours before the show was scheduled to start, so we could check out the parking lot scene. Leaving behind the impersonal hustle and bustle of dog-eat-dog city life, we suddenly entered a rainbow-themed tribal reservation of sorts, where all one could see were bright colors and smiling faces. Around every corner, primitive drum rhythms manipulated the atmosphere: people were dancing, eyes closed, to their own internal interpretations of the music around them. It was all so new to me.

"We have to be the most normal people here," I commented to Nick.

Some chick selling tape covers that she had designed herself overheard me and said, "That's what you think."

Somewhere, wandering among the masses of long hair and tie-dyed travelers setting up barbeque grills out of the backs of their VW Microbuses, speakers everywhere pumping out bootlegs of Dead shows past, I began to realize a whole new definition of "normal."

Nick wanted to find some acid before the show began, and I figured I might as well try some myself. I was still relatively new to drugs, even though I had smoked my first bowl of weed a few years previously. All I knew then about LSD was what I saw in Oliver Stone's movie The Doors. But Nick was one of the more hardcore Deadheads in my high school class, and a little more up on the drug scene. He had brought along three joints, and he took it upon himself to buy the acid in the parking lot. Perhaps we shouldn't have bought it from some random crackhead who looked nothing like a Deadhead, but we didn't know better at the time.

I remember turning to Nick twice during the first set and saying, "Hey, this is fun, but I'm not feeling anything yet. Can I get another dose?" Famous last words.

The second set started off with the classic medley of "Scarlet Begonias" and "Fire on the Mountain," which opened up to some pretty heavy jamming. Before long, the music completely escaped the realms of time signatures and verse-chorus-verse structure. I myself was straying so far from my normal state of consciousness that it barely registered that the band was making its way into the great psychedelic journey that is "Dark Star." In fact, I didn't even remember them playing the song at all until I got a bootleg of the show years later.

After all musical form had dissolved into chaos, the return to the basic primal rhythms of the universe was all that was left, in an intense and jumbling percussive conversation between the Dead's two drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman. By this time, I was sitting down in my seat, bathed in a hot sweat, holding my head in my hands. I was trying to make sense out of the morphing patterns of the stage lights, the tie-dye tapestries that seemed to be everywhere, and the experimental film being projected behind the band. Everything was a myriad blur of bright colors. I felt like everything I heard or saw was coming from completely different dimensions.

I remember overhearing some guy behind me say, "There's a lot of people really fucked up here tonight," and Nick asking me if I was all right.

Following the drum solo, the music emerged into an intensely exploratory space jam, where all corners of consciousness were explored simply by playing specific notes in a certain order that were in no way planned. I started to forget that I had just recently been on the verge of being really sick. I was beginning to see everything—time, space, reason, sense—from a completely broadened perspective. Somehow the "answer" to "everything" could be found through a little improvisational jamming by experienced musicians and a little mental masturbation.

From this newfound, expanded perspective, the music submerged back into old familiar sing-along tunes like "I Need a Miracle" and "Sugar Magnolia," and one of Jerry's mesmerizing existential love ballads, "Standing on the Moon." As the music re-evolved out of the chaotic exploration the band and audience had just experienced together through drums and space jams, old structures and messages in the last four songs were given a new illumination. The acid was wearing off, but the adventure was just beginning. I had received my first communion of LSD, and been baptized by music into the great religion of the Grateful Dead. I was finally starting to "get it." VS

Tom Baas recently graduated from UWM with a BA in English. He works in a day care center in the suburbs and is currently contemplating teaching for MPS.