For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: Installment 2
We kind of alternated between her scene, the urban late-night freakshow parties with hotties and guys with long greasy hair and my Deadhead milieu. I took her to an acoustic benefit for some music in the schools program at Marin Vets. We took ecstasy (of course) and sat in something like the fifth row. The show was mostly solo acts by members of the Dead. Bob Weir did a little solo set where I first started liking his eerie “Victim or the Crime” and came back at the end with the whole gang to debut an acoustic version of Blackbird that he would butcher at the Greek in Berkeley later that year.
Jerry played a set with stripped down string band. Even Brent, the angry alcoholic doomed keyboard sideman put on a credible set of his own mixing his usual depressing originals - a song called “Love Doesn’t Have to Be Pretty,” his original contribution to the Dead repertoire from one of the Dead’s disco era albums called “Far From Me” - with a few classic rock medleys, like the “Devil with a Blue Dress” into “Good Golly, Miss Molly” medley originated by Mitch Ryder but popularized by the Boss and a “Hey Jude” into “Dear Mr. Fantasy” with a “Hey Jude” reprise that was often hinted at in Dead shows but never otherwise played in full.
Finally, the whole creaky crew came back together for Weir’s “Blackbird” and a rollicking take on Sam Cooke’s “Good Times” (Come on and let the good times roll/We gonna stay here till we soothe our soul/If it takes all night long) that most people knew from the Rolling Stones cover. After a staid evening of laid-back acoustic guitar music this one song got the whole room up and dancing in that familiar ever-so-slightly out of synch noodle dance the Heads are known for to this day.
Sandwiched in the middle of this show was the real highlight for me, Hot Tuna doing an acoustic set. Jorma singing in his incomprehensible blues man by way of Finland voice. Timeless instrumentals like “Embryonic Journey” from their first album. But mainly that almost telepathic communication between simpatico players who know each other’s moves from decades of performing together, stopping on a dime, breaking into double time and then just as suddenly taking it back down a notch. Incredible dynamics. I looked at my hands and said to myself, I have to get serious about playing the guitar. It doesn’t matter if I’m ever any good. I just want to play.
Most of the time my guitar sat in the closet. I did get it out again after that show but there was no room for it in my room. I’d move it from the futon to the floor and then be afraid I’d step on it, so I’d lay it across the cinder blocks. Before long it was back in the closet again. I didn’t forget though. I’d remember every now and then the pure joy I’d felt hearing two guys playing acoustics, a regular one and Jack Casady’s oversized bass, and the sense that the point is just to do it, not to be a pro, not to accomplish a goal, not even to impress girls, but just to make some music in whatever way I could.
Other times it was just enough to dance, either with Cecilia or by myself, or with whomever else was in the crowd. I was getting to be a good dancer. People would make room for us. It would be ok if we touched people, stranger, grazing them as we whirled around. I picked up some slightly exaggerating hip hop moves, a little posing. Dancing was the only time I felt like I was fully inhabiting my body. I’d start to think someone was looking at me, wondering how my body seemed, thinking a little bit about my bum knee and wondering if there might be beer on the floor and then all of that would drop away and it would be the beats, the countermelodies, space, and time. And occasionally catching Cecilia’s eye and having that kind of laughter in the air between us from knowing that we were in the moment together.
There’d be even more room to dance at those illegal floating late night parties. They’d be crowded, sure, but usually they were in some cavernous warehouse or squat of many rooms. We’d pay the door fee, find the keg, head for where the music was loudest and then slide right into it. There was always this transition for me into dancing. It was not like in high school where I’d hold up a wall, like a kid afraid to jump into the pool even though he knows he would just love it if he could get over his fear. No, by now I didn’t need convincing, but I did need to find my internal rhythm. I found that I could do that by easing into it, maybe just sawing at first, maybe bending my knees in time to the backbeat.
I’d try to resist doing the white man’s overbite and throwing my elbows out like a chicken dancer. I’d make sure the right side of my body was engaged. I needed balance, symmetry, asymmetry. Anything I started repeating I’d try to change it up. If I was doing fake fingersnaps I’d splay my fingers out instead, if I was leaping up I’d crouch down. I would feel my waste uncrimping as I loosened up and gained fluidity. At some point there’d be no looking back, as if I couldn’t remember not dancing. I’d become graceful, weaving myself around people. Sometimes there’d be a lot of twirling, the way kids will spin for what seems like hours, getting high on the dizziness. I’d be fully in the music, especially if I knew the tune or at least understood it, where the syncopations were going, where to anticipate the double stops. Usually I’d be singing along to myself: not singing words, singing the melody, feeling the song resonant in my chest, in my skull.
Cecilia and I would reconnect, we’d sweep other people up into our flow. One guy came up to me and said, “You’re crackling with energy.” Another guy, totally wasted, drifted into my space, as if looking for the source of the vortex of energy he was sensing. He stood right next to me looking around in the air about head high, not getting it. When I was completely lost in dancing people, usually women would get sucking into the whirlwind, often with their clueless boyfriends in tow, some of them not even consciously trying to block the energy flow, standing or stomping between their girl and me, waving their arms across sightlines, like trying to rescue their date from a male siren without fully understanding the dynamic.
I didn’t want these women. I wanted the dance. It was my very indifference that sucked them in. Whenever I thought about how I looked or tried to make an overt connection the thing became heavy and clumsy, the electrons spun out of orbit, the probability cloud collapsed, the cat died. It was when I didn’t care, when there was only now and a blur spinning around me that I became the center of the action. Sometimes when the music stopped for a while people would come up to me and Cecilia and hug us, or thank us, or praise us. They could sense the joy and pleasure we had going and they had gotten off on watching us or from joining into the improvised movement. Suddenly I’d notice I was incredibly thirsty, my face running with sweat. I’d be out of breath too. The limitations of my body would come back crowding in and my mind would vacate it again, like an absentee landlord, until the next time all the moving pieces linked up together again.
As we caught our breath, Cecilia would usually find whoever was running the party, or she’d go over to chat up the dj, or she’d go down to the door and hang out with the guys at the door. Bouncers loved her. Like most guys, they found her sexy and they thought they had a chance with her. Maybe they did. She had one friend who worked the door at DV8, this huge black dude who obviously worked out. I remember she got him to drive us around town one night. As usual it was obvious to me that he was hitting on her but she was doing her no you don’t understand we’re just friends routine. There was an odd magnetic repulsion between me and this guy, Roger. Like, how was he going to get anything from her with me around, but she’d always insist that I stick around.
I know Cecilia had never promised anything in return for his favors, and these guys did enjoy the way she’d keep them company and bum their cigarettes outside the doors of all these clubs and parties. She got away with it because she was blonde and had a hot little body, and maybe they even got a little charge out of her cockteasing ways, if only as a change of pace from the skankier girls who would get down on their knees and do anything for a backstage pass or a little blow.
When he dropped us off at the other club he used an expression with her I’d never heard before but that I liked immediately. He said, “Am I gonna get any ‘leg room’ from you?” As he said it he kind of spread his massive thighs a bit as he sat behind the wheel of his convertible.
“I don’t think so,” said Cecilia in her most impish, teasing tone of voice, as she climbed over the passenger door and then opened it for me, turning her back on him and she walked into the club. She could be cold like that. I turned around and gave Roger a helpless, apologetic look.