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. 

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). She had an early fascination with the trippy Gospel of John, which was also Emily Dickinson's favorite Bible book. 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." 

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.