Touch of Grey is a California notebook on entheogens, midlife, and the Grateful Dead: all the people ever played by the music from the beginning until forever and ever amen. Because it’s written by a writer/teacher and actor/arts administrator, this space is also likely to include some poetry, theater, and higher education. Also fires, flooding, and heatwaves.
can you say more
“Touch of Grey” is famously the Dead’s big radio hit, a kind of horror show and deeply catchy anthem for the 1980s. The lyrics turn on cultural and historical hangovers, ignorance, scarcity, and political impasses. There will be no coming together, no understanding: I’m sorry that you feel that way / The only thing there is to say. Still there is a we who gets by, singing and moving together ecstatically. There’s still a rainbow full of sound, still fireworks, calliopes, and clowns.
The video features the band as dancing skeletons, evoking a soft version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” (It strikes us that there is probably an essay to be written about these two videos and the vexed relationship between 1960s psychedelic culture and the War on Drugs.) A dog comes running across the stage with a shin bone and foot ripped from Mickey Hart’s leg. Near the end the camera pans up to reveal skeletal hands pulling strings attached to Jerry, Phil, Bobby and the rest of the band, puppets played by something larger than themselves, the dead who came before.
When the video debuted on MTV in 1987 that something larger became monstrous. The Dead had always been a phenomenon outside anyone’s control, invented by the crowd as Jerry put it, this time around in the hands of the market. What happened next offers a useful perspective for anyone following the progress of psychedelic decriminalization efforts, clinical trials, therapeutic training programs, and biotech startups fifty years after the War on Drugs began.
“Touch of Grey” both imperiled and enlarged the we of the Dead. As the song climbed the charts it spelled disaster for a group who endeavored to keep the line between performer and audience thin, an ethos that emerged from the acid tests two decades earlier. Fame drew sharp distinctions between those onstage and everyone else. The audience churned and surged, bros fresh from tie dye frat parties in the distance. Hordes of new fans gathered outside sold out stadium shows, leaving piles of trash behind. Their reputation took on a kind of patina: dirty hippy. Zombies. Jerry looked more and more ghostly. It’s not that everyone wasn’t already exhausted, or that the scene wasn’t already misogynist. But “Touch of Grey” tipped the collective phenomenon into an entirely different location. It marked the beginning of the end. Without it, however, the music might not have gone on the way it has.
Robert Hunter wrote that when the Dead is playing at their best, blood drips from the ceiling in great, rich drops. In those moments a ceremony or interrogation unfolds, one that revolves around the question of how living might occur in the shadow of certain death. Hunter meant the original band but we know now that the music never stopped. That life is a gift that death gives us. Every silver lining has one: a touch of grey.
ok but what is this newsletter about
“Touch of Grey”—the disaster that ushered in the future, a song about aging and getting by when everything is terrible, even worse than it appears—contains much of what we hope to write about here: the transversal of time by culture; the transformation of culture over time; collective practices that bring us into contact with the calamity and possibility of the past; and the condition of being with what is already dead or only now dying in order to be with whatever is coming next. The usual stuff! Shows we went to, then and now. Very long sentences. Tending the garden. Two bisexuals in a LTR, one who started going to shows before “Touch of Grey” and one who found her way there after.
tldr
Deep thoughts, basically.
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