Notes from Dawson 2011 re Nicky Hopkins

 

Book on Nightstand at Serenity Knolls

I thought I remember that one of the big Garcia/GD auctions of some years back offered a copy of the book that was found on Jerry's nightstand at Serenity Knolls. Does that ring a bell for anyone? Anyone remember what book it was?

Fare Thee Well

I just read Joel Selvin's latest, Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead's Long Strange Trip. I have seen many Deadheads bashing it, but I thought it was just fine.

For better or for worse, but probably not surprisingly to readers of this blog, I haven't paid much attention to the post-8/9/95 goings-on. I saw one Phil and Friends show in Sunrise, Florida, ca. 2002, for which I had great seats, like 5th row center, and found it utterly uninteresting. I saw half a RatDog show at some point at the Tower Theater in Philly, but we got sleepy and bailed. As a result, I don't have any particular emotional investment in any of this, and no real baggage - I think that's to the good, allowing me a dispassionate assessment of what Joel has written.

Phil and Jill Lesh of course are the real villains of the story. Weir seems like he just wants to play music, and I am frequently struck by how Garcialike he is in that regard, and in terms of having (possibly somewhat corresponding) substance demons. Mickey is a mad polymath, Kreutzmann likes to chill in Hawaii and play with good players, but he's kind of a slacker with a temper. None of it particularly moved me.

Joel sort of constructs a triumphant ending to the whole thing, which is fine. Again, I don't really care about any of this except insofar as it sheds light on Garcia, and it does some of that. We knew he was the center of the whole GD operation, but without reading this it's not clear how much his gravitational pull kept everybody else away from each others' throats, sublimated their own petty rivalries within the greater benefit of being able to keep being near Jerry. I suspect there were a lot of petty jealousies toward Bob's especially close relationship with Garcia, but we don't really get any particular insight into each man's relationship with him. That's fine, that's not what the book is about, and few who remain (even fewer willing to talk) probably have any particular insight into those relationships, in any case.

The GD scene was ugly and petty enough with Garcia around, and, while it may have gotten even uglier and more petty after his death, it's not obvious to me that that's true. These are a bunch of incredibly talented men with their own ambitions, a number of them probably bona fide geniuses in their own rights, with amazingly deep connections that are profoundly human, with all that implies. I wish them all well, and hope they get to keep doing what they love to do for a long time to come, independently, together, or anything in between.

Mother American Night

Barlow, John Perry, with Robert Greenfield. 2018. Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times. New York: Crown Archetype.

This was an awesome read. By "hanging around with intent" (p. 71), Barlow managed to play a role in many of the most seismic changes to shake the postwar West, Forrest Gump with brilliance, vision and agency. In unadorned prose, he drops like a dozen lines that just had me marveling at his (and presumably Robert Greenfield's) way with words, and even more impressively his way with ideas.

His relationship with Garcia was rather fraught, and he doesn't pull any punches with him or the Grateful Dead scene. There's plenty here for the cynic. But this is the farthest thing from a tell-all or an exercise in score settling. He touches everything deftly, lightly, frankly and, it feels to me, the way it was (as JPB lived it).

This is a nice read, another reminder that the social world of the Grateful Dead (and the hippies, and the Sixties) was disproportionately populated with brilliant, amazing people who lived full lives doing important things. Two snaps up.

Folk Songs of America, 2: map

Lomax, Alan. 1960. The Folk Songs of North America in the English Language. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company.

Folk Songs of America, 1: cover
Folk Songs of America, 2: map
Folk Songs of America, 3: all front matter

Reading Notes: Jackson and Gans 2015

Jackson, Blair and David Gans. 2015. This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead. Flatiron Books.

Blair Jackson and David Gans, like Dennis McNally and David Browne earlier in my reading year, exceed my very high expectations. I don't generally do book reviews, and won't here, either, but I did want to spotlight just how foundational these guys have been in helping us understand the Grateful Dead's world just a little bit more.

Jackson and Gans are to writing about the Grateful Dead as, say, TC is to the band's music. I mean that as a compliment of utmost seriousness. In thinking about Garcia's musical life, I consider the players, those musicians who shared a stage or room with Jerry, to stand at the closest, inner ring of the social Garciaverse. TC was around 14 months and made an essential contribution to the Dead's most essential music, Live/Dead (1969). You can't understand the Dead if you don't understand TC.

Same goes for Jackson and Gans with respect to the written word (to say nothing of Gans's many contributions via the radio and otherwise). But it's more than just the authenticity and aesthetic – we would have been lost without them. From the second half of the 1970s forward, as the Dead grew more insular, Jackson and Gans became increasingly central informational nodes linking the goings on in Marin to the wider world, sometimes even all the way out to far-flung Contra Costa County. J Through inter alia Dennis Erokan's Bay Area Music (BAM), they brought us the little tidbits of gossip and the long form journalism. Jackson and Gans were the indispensable Deadhead journos in an era before the internet, when information was scarce. In 1981, they teamed up to interview the band and BAM covered Garcia across two issues,[i] as Adam Block had done a few years before.[ii] Blair and and Regan McMahon launched the fanzine the Golden Road (1984-1993) not long after, and with it helped define what such a publication can be, marrying art, erudition, great writing and lots of substance to the Deadhead experience. Gans's first book, 1985's Playing In The Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead was the first of several to decode and re-encode the whole trip.

I won't narrate the rest of their story, but it underscores the creative efflorescence that the Dead tapped into and nurtured. Many talented people engaged many acts of genuine human creation around the whole scene, and the many wonderful writers and journalists certainly took, and continue to take, pride of place in my own text-centric little world. The semicentennial of 2015 was such a bounty of books, for example, that I am only now finishing up some transcriptions, first of Dennis McNally's shimmering personal text-collage Jerry on Jerry, then of Browne's rather stunning chronological retiling, reshuffling the deck and turning up aces, abundant fresh thoughts and material to consider.

In This Is All a Dream We Dreamed (TIAADWD), Jackson and Gans amaze me once again. I once briefly praised their work (with Steve Silberman) in curating the Dead's 1999 retrospective boxset So Many Roads, including the controversial (among picky Deadheads) but, IMO, correct choice to edit the 7/9/95 version of the titular swansong. The 2009 Let It Rock release of November 17-18, 1975 exemplifies their contributions to the Garciaverse: stellar music that is well-chosen, skillfully curated, sounding fat and fine from Betty's tapes and including Gans's excellent liner notes, featuring the rare chance to read drummer Ron Tutt's take on the Nicky Hopkins-era Garcia Band. I could go on and on.

I think Corry praised TIAADWD as oral history, and, as always, I can only second Corry's emotion. Communing with Jackson and Gans found me dusting off Greenfield (1996) and realizing that, not only have I never annotated it, but most every page either tells me something that I didn't know or tells me where I learned something that I do. Listening notes TBD. Talk is beautifully rich, and when it is thoughtful, well-considered, skillfully engaged and curated, manuscripting it reveals facets that may not become visible in similar material, but sourced from the human brain via fingers to text. Jackson and Gans have done lots of interviews, they live and breathe the substance and have come to master the various media in which they work, and it all comes together in a book that will remain an essential resource in any self-respecting Deadhead's library. If you haven't, yet, you should go buy it.

Various annotations and reading notes below the fold.

Reading Notes: Browne 2015

Browne, David. 2015. So Many Roads: The Life And Times Of The Grateful Dead. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press [a member of the Perseus Books Group].

I stand by my initial assessment - this book is the real deal, chock full of great tidbits, fluently written. This is a great addition to the canon, standing alongside Jackson, McNally and the rest.

Browne's method involved lots of interviews and access to materials with and from just about all of the key survivors at the very center of the Grateful Dead world. As a scholar, I lament that the move to improve the transparency of work done using qualitative methods underway in various scientific fields, which is a very good thing, could never work for this kind of writing. I will treat specific facts given by Browne as correct, unless I can find something to raise doubts. I rarely do.

The usual reading notes methodology. I know the endnotes don't format properly on blogger - one gets that for which one has paid, and I need to do it this way for my own purposes. Notes below the fold.

Reading Notes: McNally 2015

McNally, Dennis, ed. 2015. Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers.

I didn't quite know what to expect. On a read, it felt like this was all material that I already knew. From a strictly informational perspective I didn't feel like I got anything I didn't know out of Jerry's mouth. But when I went back to transcribe some key things, so engaged the book a second time, I felt like it really painted an intimate picture of Jerry by Jerry. McNally did a great job in using his own creative talent to let Jerry --a Jerry, a version of Jerry-- paint a lovely little posthumous self-portrait.

This is sort of like my "in praise of editorial judgment" thing --no reader here could possibly disagree-- Dennis McNally obviously knew Garcia well, was blessed to have spent a lot of time talking about everything under the sun with him, and he creatively arranges a lot of the material that I know (of), but hadn't really understood. It's nicely paced, a nice easy afternoon conversation, plenty of room to breathe, unlike so many of the Garcia interviews we get to hear. It's a nice piece of work, and it'll be on my shelf (or wherever I put it) for the long haul. (It's so nice that I won't even lament that absence of spatiotemporal identifiers for the quotes.)

A note on "reading notes": this is just my selective culling of quotes of particular interest to me. There's nothing representative about this stuff, I don't imagine. I pick up different stuff from LIA (who can remember it all without the contrivance of "reading notes"). The method is to sort these quotes into their respective topic buckets  (with little tags like #why and such), then put the book aside and move on to the next thing.

Raw notes below the fold. I lost steam with bolding the names at some point ...

Banjo

Dubois, Laurent. 2016. The Banjo: America’s African Instrument. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. en route as of 20160417
Keïta, Cheick M. Chérif. 1995. Massa Makkan Diabaté: Un Griot mandingue à la rencontré de l'écriture. Paris: Éditions L'Harmattan. to read

Reading Notes: Arthur Koestler, Act of Creation

This book has had tremendous impact on me.

• Single logic of creation comedy, science and art
• Blurb: "bisociative thinking" – the creative leap which connects previously unconnected frames of reference and makes us experience reality on several planes at once.
• "there are no frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins, and the uomo universale of the Renaissance was a citizen of both".[1]
• "I shall call a matrix 'blocked' when its 'rules of the game' prove inapplicable to the existing situation or problem in hand; when none of the various ways of exercising a skill, however plastic and adaptable that skill is, leads to the desired goal."[2]
• AK's version of "luck favors the prepared mind": "the bisociative act … depends in varying degrees on assistance from fringe-conscious and unconscious processes".[3]
• "The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery … can be described in very similar terms – as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible".[4] AK is not consistent with this latter piece, which is important. He generally says the matrices had previously to be orthogonal, but here he says they need to have been incompatible, meaning they had already been crossed in some way. Saying they are believed incompatible is saying that their connection is already known. So I think this line is an error.
• Unifying formula of creation: "matrices with fixed codes and adaptable strategies".[5]
• "The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experiences, enables [one] to attain a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation – the defeat of habit by originality".[6]
• The bisociation becomes permanent: "when to matrices have become integrated they cannot again be torn asunder. That is why the discoveries of yesterday are the commonplaces of today".[7]
• "Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit".[8] Actually, that's kind of what it actually does mean.
• Why we should all be polymaths, like AK: "the statistical probability for a relevant discovery to be made is the greater the more firmly established and well exercised each of the still [109] separate skills, or through-matrices, are."[9]
• Discussion of certain ideas being ripe, ripeness, pp. 108-109.
• Multiple discoveries, p. 110.
• "fortune favors the prepared mind" AK attributes to Pasteur.[10]
• "The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing [Mingus to Leary: "You can't improvise on nothing, man"]; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills".[11]
• Hadamard: "The Latin verb cogito for 'to think' etymologically means 'to shake together'. St. Augustine had already noticed that and also observed that intelligo means 'to select among'."[12]
• "The greatness of the philosophers of the scientific revolution consisted not so much in finding the right answers but in asking the right questions; in seeing a problem where nobody saw one before; in substituting a 'why' for a 'how'."[13]
• "The evidence for large chunks of irrationality embedded in the creative process, not only in art … but in the exact sciences as well, cannot be disputed".[14]
• Paradox of science: "A branch of knowledge which operates predominantly with abstract symbols, whose entire rationale and credo are objectivity, verifiability, logicality, turns out to be dependent on mental processes which are subjective, irrational, and verifiable only after the event."[15] I think John Meyer would agree with this!
• On variation: "static vision does not exist; there is no seeing without exploring".[16]
• "visual exploration and mental exploration are actually indistinguishable".[17]
• "When a situation is blocked, straight thinking must be superseded by 'thinking aside' – the search for a new, auxiliary matrix which will unblock it, without having ever before been called upon to perform such a task. The essence of discovery is to hit upon such a matrix – as Gutenberg hit on the wine-press and Kepler on the sun-force".[18]
• Why unconscious mentation is so important: "the temporary relinquishing of conscious controls liberates the mind from certain constraints which are necessary to maintain the disciplined routines of thoughts but may become an impediment to the creative leap".[19]
• pp. 170-171 drugs madness art science
• pp. 172-173 move from verbal thinking – too limited – to visual or auditory thinking.
• Under heading "the snares of language", he notes that "words are a blessing that can turn into a curse".[20]
• "in some forms of intellectual activity language is not only an indispensable tool, but … the stream of language actually carries the thought, so that the processes of ideation and verbal formulation become indistinguishable."[21]  What is so useful about this to me is that I often think everything is linguistically constructed. The statement only applies to some forms of intellectual activity.
• Language can parameterize thought.[22]
• "The rules of the game, however absurd, cannot be altered by playing that game". "True creativity often starts where language ends."[23] Hmmm, this guy never played "King Beer" in Isla Vista. Or "Calvinball".
• Dreaming: "Without this daily dip into the ancient sources of mental life we would probably all become desiccated automata. And without the more spectacular exploratory dives of the creative individual, there would be no science and no art".[24]
• To me this is the clearest statement of AK's perspective on the Creative act: "new synthesis of previously unconnected matrices of thought".[25]
• In the waking state 'side-stepping', 'shift of emphasis' and related expressions signify a change-over from one frame of reference to another. [i.e., we are serial processors; one other possibility – such expressions can just seem "off", or orthogonal {which they are!}] But while we dream, the coherence of these frames is so much loosened that the change is not experienced as such, and side-stepping becomes almost the normal way of the dream's progress. It is by virtue of its freedom from restraint that the 'dreamy' way of thinking can benefit the creative person."[26]
• "To undo wrong connections, faulty integrations, is half the game. To acquire a new habit is easy, because one main function of the nervous system is to act as a habit-forming machine; to break out of a habit is an almost heroic feat of mind or character".[27]
• "The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. … Without the art of forgetting, the mind remains cluttered up with ready-made answers, and never finds occasion to ask the proper questions".[28]
• "The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings—of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse—whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem"[29]. And the unconscious is the "ultimate matchmaker".[30]
• pp. 224ff very Kuhnian view of scientific progress, normal science punctuated by creative discovery
• "All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines".[31]
• AK's version of "all observation is theory-laden": "the collecting of data is a discriminating activity".[32]
• We would call this a Lakatosian view of the relationship between evidence and insight: "What we call 'scientific evidence' can never confirm that a theory is true; it can only confirm that it is more true than another".[33]
• "Controversy is the yeast which keeps science in lively fermentation".[34]
• "It has been said that we know more and more about less and less".[35]
•  Artist-Jester-Sage is his key triptych
• An "oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common denominator and emotional bond".[36]
• #music "Contemplation of the 'divine dance of numbers', which held both the secrets of music and of the celestial motions, became the link in the mystic union between human thought and the anima mundi. Its perfect symbol was the Harmony of Spheres – the Pythagorean Scale, whose musical intervals correspond to the intervals between the planetary orbits".[37]
• "the serious research scholar in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being".[38] and "the equation of science with logic and reason, and art with intuition and emotion, is a blatant popular fallacy".[39]
• "To derive pleasure from the art of discovery, as from the other arts, the consumer –in this case the student—must be made to re-live, to some extent, the creative process".[40] All of 265-267 is on teaching.
• "Art is a form of communication which aims at eliciting a re-creative echo. Education should be regarded as an art, and use the appropriate techniques of art to call forth that echo".[41]
• "every member of a living organism or social body has the dual attributes of 'wholeness' and 'partness'."[42]
• "A living organism or social body is not an aggregation of elementary parts or elementary processes, it is an integrated hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, consisting of sub-sub-wholes, and so on."[43]
• "The single individual represents the top level of the organismic hierarchy and at the same time the lowest unit of the social hierarchy."[44]
• "incongruity—the confrontation of incompatible matrices—will be experienced as ridiculous, pathetic or intellectually challenging, according to whether aggression, identification, or the well-balanced blend of scientific curiosity prevails in the spectator's mind".[45]
• "our remarkable responsiveness to rhythmically patterned stimuli and our readiness 'to become patterned ourselves' arises from the depths of the nervous system, from those archaic strata of the unconscious which reverberate to the shaman's drum."[46]
• "The emergence of order from chaos is a leitmotif of all mythologies".[47]
• "The surest symptom of decadent art is that it leaves nothing to the imagination; the Muse has bared her flabby bosom like a too obliging harlot—there is no veiled promise, no mystery, nothing to divine".[48]
• "man is a symbol-making animal".[49]
• "The belly of the whale cannot be made into a permanent residence".[50]
• "eternity is a pretty meaningless notion—unless it is made to look through the window of time. 'Immensity' is a bore—unless it is 'cloystered in thy deare wombe'. The absolute becomes emotionally effective only if it is bisociated with something concrete – dovetailed, as it were, into the familiar."[51]
• "This interlacing of the two planes [Tragic and Trivial] is found in all great works of art, and at the origin of all great discoveries of science. The artist and scientist are condemned –or privileged—to walk on the line of intersection as on a tightrope. At his best moments, man is 'that great and true amphibian, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds'."[52]
• The liminal spaces get all the interesting traffic: "The great innovators all stand at draughty corners of world-history, where air currents from different culture-climates meet, mix and integrate".[53]
• Virtuosity is mastering a technical skill. "Genius consists not in the perfect exercise of a technique, but in its invention".[54]
• "the principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property".[55]
• "laughter is sparked off by the collision of matrices; discovery, by their integration; aesthetic experience by their juxtaposition".[56]

---

[1] Koestler 1975 [1964], 28.

[2] Koestler 1975 [1964], 92.

[3] Koestler 1975 [1964], 93.

[4] Koestler 1975 [1964], 94.

[5] Koestler 1975 [1964], 96.

[6] Koestler 1975 [1964], 96.

[7] Koestler 1975 [1964], 105.

[8] Koestler 1975 [1964], 108.

[9] Koestler 1975 [1964], 108-109.

[10] Koestler 1975 [1964], 113.

[11] Koestler 1975 [1964], 120.

[12] Koestler 1975 [1964], 120.

[13] Koestler 1975 [1964], 126.

[14] Koestler 1975 [1964], 146.

[15] Koestler 1975 [1964], 147.

[16] Koestler 1975 [1964], 158.

[17] Koestler 1975 [1964], 161.

[18] Koestler 1975 [1964], 163.

[19] Koestler 1975 [1964], 169.

[20] Koestler 1975 [1964], 173.

[21] Koestler 1975 [1964], 174.

[22] Koestler 1975 [1964], 176.

[23] Koestler 1975 [1964], 177.

[24] Koestler 1975 [1964], 181.

[25] Koestler 1975 [1964], 182.

[26] Koestler 1975 [1964], 189.

[27] Koestler 1975 [1964], 190.

[28] Koestler 1975 [1964], 190.

[29] Koestler 1975 [1964], 201.

[30] Koestler 1975 [1964], 201.

[31] Koestler 1975 [1964], 230.

[32] Koestler 1975 [1964], 233.

[33] Koestler 1975 [1964], 242. The connection is especially to Lakatos 1970.

[34] Koestler 1975 [1964], 246.

[35] Koestler 1975 [1964], 252. "Althea" would agree.

[36] Koestler 1975 [1964], 258.

[37] Koestler 1975 [1964], 260.

[38] Koestler 1975 [1964], 262.

[39] Koestler 1975 [1964], 264.

[40] Koestler 1975 [1964], 265.

[41] Koestler 1975 [1964], 266.

[42] Koestler 1975 [1964], 286.

[43] Koestler 1975 [1964], 287.

[44] Koestler 1975 [1964], 289.

[45] Koestler 1975 [1964], 305.

[46] Koestler 1975 [1964], 311.

[47] Koestler 1975 [1964], 327.

[48] Koestler 1975 [1964], 342.

[49] Koestler 1975 [1964], 342.

[50] Koestler 1975 [1964], 364.

[51] Koestler 1975 [1964], 364.

[52] Koestler 1975 [1964], 365.

[53] Koestler 1975 [1964], 395.

[54] Koestler 1975 [1964], 402.

[55] Koestler 1975 [1964], 402.

[56] Koestler 1975 [1964], 408.