Bye Bye Bobby

Some deaths hit you hard. Bob Wier, who was still in his teens when he hooked up with Jerry Garcia to start making music, passed on January 10 after a brief illness, and Deadheads everywhere mourned and celebrated his life. 

I first saw the Grateful Dead on their "Live at Last" tour in the late '80s, after Garcia came back from a coma to re-learn the guitar. I thought, "This is where the 60s went" when I saw the parking lot scene: hippie selling colorful crafts, grilled cheese sandwiches and other goodies in a makeshift community that followed the band from show to show. I saw them play with Bob Dylan and several other shows back in the day when you could send in for tickets as part of a lottery for big shows. 

Bill Clinton float with a phattie at the 1993 Grateful Dead Mardi Gras show.

My hemp activism started when a cute hempster guy invited me to the 1991/92 New Year's Eve show at the Oakland, CA colosseum he'd pulled tickets for. It was an unforgettable show, with Baba Olatunji starting it out drumming through the crowd, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones blowing us away with a drummer whose kit looked like a guitar. It was the year the band's manager Bill Graham died, and since he would traditionally come out as Father Time at midnight at their epic NYE shows, film of him playing Father Time year after year was shown instead. 

I also got to their Mardi Gras show in 1993, when one of the floats depicted the newly-elected Bill Clinton with a saxophone in one hand and a huge burning joint in the other (pictured). As a hemp activist, I wo-maned a table selling tie-dyed hemp shorts and shirts at a string of shows in Sacramento and at Shoreline amphitheater in the Bay Area. The band's keyboardist Vince Wellnick stopped by the booth and picked out our most colorful shirt, which he wore onstage. I ran into Wellnick later on his way to Wier's wedding in Mill Valley. 

A memorial for Wier was held Saturday in downtown San Francisco where thousands gathered. 

Joan Baez spoke, saying Wier was part of a group that created a loving, caring community. "I didn't get it. I was a Mom saying, 'You can go, but don't smoke any of that dope.'....It's been a long journey for me. My own kid, who I was not that present for, found a family with you, Bob, and your people."

John Mayer, who Weir recruited to step into Jerry Garcia's (by way of Trey Anastasio's) huge shoes to  form Dead & Co., shared at the memorial that he and Bobby were born in the same day, exactly 30 years apart. "I come from a world of structural thinking....Bob learned early on that spirit, heart, soul, curiosity and fearlessness was the path to glory. He taught me to trust in the moment, and I like to think I taught him a little bit to rely on a plan. Not as a substitute for the divine moments, but as a way to lure them in a little closer."  

"How many nights we all lived so fully in each second, following the music around twists and turns, through forests and over majestic vistas, taking in the magnificent inner views and wondering how we all got so lucky to have found this music invited into this dream together," Mayer recalled. 

Wier's wife Natascha (left) and daughter Monet (right) notice a hawk flying over the crowd
as daughter Chloe (center) speaks at the memorial. 

When Bob's youngest daughter Chloe ("the other daughter") spoke about azimuth, a nautical/navigational term Wier used to describe the connection between the band and their fans, a beautiful red-tailed hawk began to circle the crowd, joined in the end by a second hawk before flying away. Bob would say that Garcia never really left him, that he still found him up on his shoulder. He and Jerry died 11,111 days apart. 

Wier's wife Natascha lead the crowd in 108 seconds of silence, something Bob would call "Taking a Holy Instant" in the day. To end the gathering, Mayer played "Ripple" (a Garcia/Robert Hunter tune) on Bob's guitar, and the crowd sang along: 

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

....If I knew the way, I would take you home. 

A song Bobby wrote and sang, "One More Saturday Night," took the crowd out and Chloe, holding a red rose, boogied down with Baez. 

Now everybody's dancin' down the local armory
With a basement full of dynamite and live artillery
Temperature keeps risin', everybody gettin' high
Come the rockin' stroke of midnight, the place is gonna fly...

Wier's Politics, and Pot

Deadheads also gathered last week at 710 Ashbury Street, the house bandmembers were living in when, on October 2, 1967 the place was raided by San Francisco narcotics officers, and Wier and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan were arrested for pot possession. The arrest made national news, and Garcia's picture was reportedly used to represent a lawless hippie in an ad for Nixon's presidental campaign the next year. When the band was busted in New Orleans in 1970, they made music out of it for one of their most famous songs: "Truckin" (above).   

Rock/pot journalist Steve Bloom recalled working at High Times when the Dead were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994: "During the media session I fired off a question about Deadheads getting busted by narcs at shows for marijuana and LSD. The band members (Garcia was not there) seemed surprised by the question, but then Bobby stepped forward, decrying the situation and calling for drugs like that to be legal." 

In 2015, NORML was invited to table at the "Fare Thee Well" shows in Santa Clara, the 50th anniversary celebration that many thought would be the last Dead shows. HeadCount, the better-funded group that organized the "Participation Row" there that I participated in, noticed the long lines at our booth and soon started a campaign to register pro-pot voters, which doubtlessly helped with coming ballot measures. 

According to the LA Times, Dead & Company said they would bring at least 300 supporters of legal pot to their May 10, 2016 performance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” when a legalization measure was heading for the California ballot. "Members of organizations including the California Cannabis Industry Assn. and the Los Angeles medical marijuana collective Buds & Roses were encouraged to wear T-shirts, carry signs and even dress up as giant joints to get their message seen on national TV," the Times reported. 

The band hoped marijuana-advocacy groups could sponsor their Kimmel appearance, but programmers wouldn't permit a cannabis ad to run (they still don't). “The folks it would be hitting on that broadcast would be outside our normal sphere of influence,” Wier said in an interview. “We’re about music, but we’re about other stuff as well, and we always have been. We need to make our feelings on the subject as apparent as we can.”

Nancy Pelosi spoke at the memorial about Wier being a lifelong Democrat who loved his country, and who tried to get her to flash a "Vote" sign in a Grateful Dead motif at an event, but she insisted he do it instead. He gave her the sign though, and she showed it this time. His daughter said he would always speak of finding ways to get along with "our friends the Repubs." 

Bob and the band at the Kennedy Center in 2024

Pelosi noted, "Isn't it great that Bob got the last Kennedy Center Honor (when they were truly Kennedy Center Honors)." Interviewed on the red carpet at the event, Wier said that the band was persona non grata for most of its history, but now "everything's changed. Except us....That roar that I'm hearing is the sound of doors opening." Indeed, Dead & Co.'s 30-night residency at the Las Vegas Sphere was followed by another 18 nights to celebrate their 10-year anniversary in 2025.  And their three days of shows at Golden Gate Park drew 60,000 fans each night and raised 2.2 million for charity (NORML, which could really use some $$s right now, wasn't among the recipients).  

With a name that practically spelled "Weird," Bobby was unique. Will anyone step into his huge sandals and keep the music going? One way or another, it's bound to happen. It was said that Bob imagined the band's influence lasting 300 years; symphonic, bluegrass, and other forms of interpretation of their extensive catalog of songs have been mentioned and imagined. 

Elaine Pagels, Gnosis, and LSD

Elaine Pagels, the classical and biblical scholar who was among the first to translate and interpret the Nag Hammadi manuscripts writes in her 2019 book Why Religion? A Personal Story that she tried LSD shortly before feeling impelled to write her bestseller The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Gnosis, the direct experience of God, is something often powerfully enhanced by entheogens like LSD. 

Pagels grew up in Palo Alto, the child of academic parents (who were horrified by her dabblings into religion as a child). In high school, she hung out with a group of artists, and writes that she knew the (years older) Jerry Garcia, and attended his first wedding (to a very pregnant young woman). In high school, he dated Garcia's friend Paul Speegle, who died in a car crash that Jerry, also in the car, survived, and she surmises that the name The Grateful Dead “must have resonated from the crash he’d survived five years earlier.” The car crash also caused her to leave her new-found religion when born again Christains told her her Jewish friend would burn in hell. 

“Many of us, of course, have left religious institutions behind, and prefer to identify as ‘spiritual, not religious,’” she writes at the outset of Why Religion? “I’ve done both – had faith, lost it; joined groups, and left them....What matters to me more than whether we participate in institutions or leave them is how we engage the imagination – in dreams, art, poetry, music – since what each of us needs, and what we can engage, obviously differs and changes throughout our lifetime.”

After graduating Stanford, Pagels applied to a Harvard doctoral program in the study of religion, and was rejected by Prof. Krister Stendahl because, he wrote, “women students have always quit before receiving a degree.” However she was encouraged to apply again the following year if she was “still serious," and after completing a Masters in classics at Stanford and continuing to study advanced Greek and Latin, she re-applied and was accepted. There she studied the “secret” gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, written in Coptic around the 2nd - 4th century AD.

Her husband Heinz, a physicist and author of The Cosmic Code who was interested in consciousness, took part in an LSD experiment at Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital while in graduate school. What he took "wasn't a placebo," he told Elaine later, "saying how astonished he was to see stars and galaxies being born and dying, while others emerged, through what felt like innumerable ages." The summer they married (1969), he encouraged his new wife to try it, "promising to cope with any difficulty that might arise." 

Pagels writes she "anticipated that what would happen might involve what I was writing about, some kind of Christian vision. Instead, as I sat in the apartment, looking out at the sky, the trees in light wind, and the garden, I saw everything alive as fire, gloriously intertwined. Watching, ecstatic and speechless, for about five hours, I finally managed to say, 'I guess that solved the dying problem.' What horrified me before, when [her high school friend] Paul died—that a beloved person could simply disappear, and disintegrate—now seemed to resolve into a deeper unity of the whole." 

That fall, she returned to Cambridge to complete her dissertation and doctoral exams, graduating with distinction. She began to teach, writing two "scholarly books" and several articles, and working with a group of nearly 30 scholars to translate, edit and publish more than 50 texts from Nag Hammadi. Concern that their work wouldn't be understood by the public led her to write The Gnostic Gospels, a less academic and more approachable text.  

One of the first to read the long-lost Gospel of Thomas, Pagels noticed that rather than focusing on Jesus's divinity, the teachings there encourage his followers to find the divine in themselves. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” saying 70 says.

In 1970 she began teaching at Barnard College (a women's school). Asked to speak at a conference there about women in the early Christian movement, she realized she'd been taught nothing about that. "While thinking about the conference, I suddenly realized that although the sources in the New Testament often marginalize women and minimize their roles, the secret gospels and other texts found in Egypt—some, especially—abound in feminine images, even for God," she wrote. "None of my male colleagues had noticed this, and I hadn't either, until I had been asked to confront the question."

"The Secret Revelation of John, for example, opens as the disciple John, devastated by Jesus's death, goes out in to the desert alone to grieve, when suddenly 'the whole creation shone with light, and the world was shaken.' Terrified, John says be heard Jesus's voice speaking from that light, saying, 'John, John, why do you weep? Don't you know that I am with you always; I am the Father; I am the Mother; and I am the Son!" 

Pagels writes that anyone reading the Bible in Hebrew would see that the words "spirit" (Ruah) and "wisdom" (Hokmah) are feminine, but that when translated to Greek and Latin, Ruah became the genderless pneuma and spiritus, losing connection with the divine Mother. "I realized that Israel's god was an anomaly—a single-male god, who, unlike other male gods among his contemporaries, had no feminine partner, as in Egypt, where Isis and Hathor were worshipped along with Ra and Horus, or in Greece or Rome, where Zeus and Jupiter were paired with divine wives, sisters, and lovers, like Hera and Juno." 

“I feel like it sort of just opens some windows on a tradition that had seemed pretty much closed and sort of codified a long time ago, like, these are the correct ways to understand God, as a father, as a son,” Pagels says about the lost images. “And now people say, ‘Oh, well, there’s many different ways of thinking about this. And for me that is like a window opening up, bringing fresh air and more light.” 

To some, this was heresy (a word she traces back to the Greek for "choice"). “You know, people have sometimes called me ‘Elaine Pagan,’” she smilingly told the Christian Science Monitor. She told Stanford Magazine she identifies as Christian—“but I wouldn’t say I identify only with that.” She often speaks at events at her Episcopal parish, where, the Rev. Leslie Smith says,  “She clearly challenges a congregation that’s fairly progressive, on issues like the early church’s repression of women’s participation.”

The Gnostic Gospels won both the National Book Award in the category Religion/Inspiration and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Modern Library named it as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Pagels went on to write books like, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. She had an early fascination with the trippy Gospel of John, which was also Emily Dickinson's favorite Bible book.  

Discovered around the time that the Nag Hammadi texts were found are the Dead Sea Scrolls, containing the oldest Hebrew-language manuscripts of the Bible dating back to the 2nd century BCE. One of the scholars to translate and preserve the Dead Sea Scrolls was John M. Allegro, whose book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross scandalized the research and religious communities by putting forward the theory that stories of early Christianity originated in a clandestine Essene sect centered around the use of psychedelic mushrooms.

Bread and Roses, and Mayor Mamdani

AOC and Letitia James spoke, and Bernie Sanders swore the new mayor in, just after Lucy Dacus and Sarah Goldstone performed "Bread and Roses" today at NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Inauguration Ceremony. 

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, 

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray 

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, 

For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses." 

As we go marching, marching, we battle, too, for men— 

For they are women's children and we mother them again. 

Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes— 

Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses. 

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead 

Go crying through our singing their ancient call for Bread; 

Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew— 

Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too. 

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days— 

The rising of the women means the rising of the race. 

No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes— 

But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

Helen Todd and her colleagues campaign for women's suffrage. Todd, as a factory inspector, discussed how the right to vote would gain for working women and society "Bread and Roses"

The song is based on a poem written in 1911 by James Oppenheim, inspired by a speech given by suffragist and labor activist Helen Todd. "No words can better express the soul of the woman’s movement, lying back of the practical cry of 'Votes for Women,' better than this sentence....‘Bread for all, and Roses, too,'" Todd said. "Woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.”

Todd went to California to help lead the suffrage movement in the state and campaign in the state's fall election for Proposition 4, which secured the right for women to vote on October 10, 1911. During the California campaign, the suffragettes carried "Bread for all, and Roses, too!" banners, and the phrase spread throughout the country. In July 1913, for instance, during a suffrage parade in Maryland, a float with the theme "Bread for all, and roses, too" participated. The float "bore ... a boy with a basket of bread and two girls with a basket of roses."

Folksinger Mimi Fariña set the poem to music in 1974; hear her singing "Bread and Roses" with her sister Joan Baez.  Fariña founded the nonprofit organization Bread and Roses that brings free live music to sick and imprisoned people. Dacus and her supergroup boygenius performed at a benefit concert for the organization in 2021, and Mamdani made a surprise appearance at her All Things Go festival in Queens in September. 

St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Miracle of the roses by Karl von Blaas, 1839.

The background of the motif "Bread and Roses" is thought to be the miracle of the roses in the legend of Elisabeth of Hungary, a saint closely related to charity and care for the poor. The legend tells the story of Elisabeth smuggling bread to the poor, against the will of her husband. When she was caught in the act, she had to uncover her basket - but only roses were found in it. The Castilian rose has become entwined with the legends of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the "Little Flower."

The phrase can be traced back to Roman physician and philosopher Galen of Pergamon, who said something like, "If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers, for bread is food for the body, but flowers are food for the mind." Edward Lane, in the notes of his 1838 translation of One Thousand and One Nights, states that, according to 15th-century writer Shems-ed-Deen Moḥammad en-Nowwájee, Galen said, "He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul." [There is a long history of the use of narcissus (aka daffodil) to induce trance-like states and hallucinations. Sophocles referred to the narcissus as the "Chaplet of the infernal Gods."]

Dacus and Goldstone's beautiful performance today lead into a tape of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changing." Let's hope so, and work for that change.