'Don't Look Back:' Of Dylan, The Dead and One Long, Strange, One-Way Trip

With age, I am increasingly fascinated by what we leave behind and how it catches up to us. “Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you,” the great sage and pitcher of screwballs, Satchel Paige, once said. “She’s an artist,” Bob Dylan countered, “she don’t look back.” Satch is dead and Dylan just won the Nobel Prize. I like to think they were both right.

An unexpected web flag popped up on my home screen recently. “First Listen: Bob Weir, ‘Blue Mountain,’” the flag flogged, a message from National Public Radio touting new CD releases. I was actually home when this happened and supine, post-op from some fairly minor but age-underlining surgery. It must be 30 years since I last listened to anything or anyone connected to the Grateful Dead, I thought. And so, in my recuperative lethargy, I clicked on “This long-awaited solo album,” from “the Grateful Dead veteran,” former-Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir.

What I heard did not remotely raise me up from my sickbed, though Weir’s new album retained a familiar, roots-centered grit. Somewhere in the miasma of links fanning out from the album landing page, I next noticed an icon for the official website of The Grateful Dead.

I clicked again.

I was a Deadhead once. I barely remember why. I do, however, remember exactly where and how I let that part of me go. Now, on www.dead.net , amid tabs for “Jam of the Week,” and “Dead World Roundup,” it all came flooding back.

I am 21-years-old, in my last year at Columbia, and preparing for a pilgrimage. The music of the Sixties has consumed me, ever since I missed out on “The Summer of Love.” (I also missed Woodstock, but at least bought a ticket for that, though my parents wouldn’t let me go because I was 11, for god’s sake, and clearly out of my depth, if not out of my mind.)

Now it is verging on 1979 and I am going to San Francisco at last. Winterland, the final Haight-Ashbury-era ballroom left standing, is closing and I am going to be there with my friend Josh for the New Year’s Eve finale, headlined by the Grateful Dead. Since neither Josh or I have ever crossed America before, we’ve also decided to make the journey by train.

Get the picture? Kerouac and Cassidy on the rails for winter break.

Except that Kerouac couldn’t go. I arrived bright and early at Penn Station to find Josh practically in tears. I can’t even remember why he couldn’t go. He just couldn’t.

So off I went, an empty seat by my side. An overnight run to Chicago would connect me to Amtrak’s California Zephyr and its famously scenic route to San Francisco; a total of three nights and four days in a railroad car.

Somewhere around Cleveland, a woman dropped down next to me — a young mother with a worn look and a young child in her arms aged three or so. The kid proceeded to toddle up and down the aisle gurgling at passengers and making people smile. It was impossible not to enjoy this tousled little person, though the hour was late and folks wanted to sleep. She just had something. Her name was Bessie, her mama told me, as we both watched her go. Mama then proceeded to explain how, during her pregnancy, she’d been “turned on to Bessie Smith.” The wonder in mama’s voice cut nicely against the weariness of her demeanor. The strength and power of Bessie’s blues was something she had never known herself, mama told me, and so she decided to name her very white, very blonde, daughter after Bessie Smith. I didn’t ask about a father and she didn’t tell me. As we were passing through Gary, Indiana, with Bessie now sleeping deeply across mama’s chest, we both looked out the window into the black night at the fiery spectacle of steel mills passing in the dark. The sight of their fierce lights, to me, looked like the seventh circle of hell. “God, I wish I could get a job there,” Bessie’s mother murmured, her nose pressed to the window glass. “That would just change my life.”

We parted at Chicago’s Union Station. I’ve never forgotten Bessie and her mama, whose name I cannot recall. Bessie would be about 40 today.

I spent my morning wandering. It was cold; December in Chicago cold. Eventually I stumbled on a brickpile that proved to be Soldier Field. What did I know? Just enough to realize that, for sure it wasn’t Wrigley Field. I circled the place. One of the side gates was wide open. No lock! I waltzed right in.

There was snow plowed up around the field’s perimeter. I scaled a snow dune and spent the next half-hour running plays up and down the gridiron. It warmed me right up. I don’t believe I’d ever been on a football field before (or since). The surface was Astroturf. The acoustics were great. I kept calling, “Hut! Hut!” and it echoed right back.

Eventually, I found my way back to Union Station and the Zephyr. The ensuing overnight ride to Denver was endless. Naperville, Princeton, Galesburg, Illinois…Ottumwa, Iowa… McCook, Nebraska. The train was frigid and seemed to stop every other minute at another backwater town. My sleep was fitful and dream-struck. I could have sworn that farmers were climbing on and off in the dark with their livestock.

We hit Denver just after dawn for a quick layover. I creaked from my seat, crawled out of yet another Union Station, glanced around at what appeared to be the backside of Denver, Colorado, and crawled right back into the station to wait for my train outta there.

The Zephyr soon ascended across the Rocky Mountains. I did homework. In my backpack I‘d brought one change of clothing (a second pair of emaciated blue jeans, plus tee-shirt), an attaché case-sized portable cassette/radio that was also my main source of music at home, and all my notes for the senior thesis I was writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. My thesis professor, Quentin Anderson, son of the long-forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Maxwell Anderson, was a bit of a stiff but I loved F. Scott Fitzgerald. As we choo-chooed through Utah and Nevada, I completed a full, first draft.

At which point things began to turn psychedelic.

There was a bar car onboard. By evening, I needed a break and a pop. I walked back and found the car predictably crowded. The mood was festively communal and it quickly became clear why. Some guy was buying drinks for everybody in sight. Eventually he bought me one.

His name was Leif Erikson, he said, and – as if that wasn’t fantastical enough – he claimed to actually work for Amtrak, out of the main office in Philadelphia. Leif was bound for San Francisco to begin his vacation by catching a flight to Hawaii. He was impossibly amiable, about 30, on the slight side, with medium-long, dirty blonde hair.

Watching him work the room, it was hard not to think that Leif had been placed on this train by Amtrak for the purpose of insuring that everyone had a good time. I’d been sleeping in my clothes now for two nights and three days. At some point, Leif showed me his little private stateroom and offered me the use of his shower. I accepted; no offense taken.

The next morning I met Leif for breakfast. I brushed my teeth in his bathroom. He asked me where I was heading. San Francisco, I told him; I had a ticket for the closing night at Winterland with the Grateful Dead.

Leif grinned. “I’ve got mescaline dots. I like to trip on the ride through the Sierras. Want to join me?”

No-one had ever asked me that before.

Leif led me to the glass-ceilinged observation car that the Zephyr was famous for. He handed me a purple “grapenut” (like the cereal, Leif said). I swallowed it.

And we took flight. The day was bright. An unknowable amount of very excellent time passed. And then Leif suddenly said: “Let’s go outside.”

Huh?

The train had begun its chug up through the Sierra Nevadas. “Coming down is the best part,” Leif explained, “I mean, down the Sierras,” he said, pointing at the expanse beyond the glass. “I like to take it in out there. Between the cars. It’s all straightaway after that into San Francisco. The train makes up all the time it lost crossing the country. You won’t believe how fast!” Leif beamed. “You have to feel it. Unbelievable.”

I believed him. I just needed to get my jacket.

I ran back to my seat but couldn’t find the damn car at first, then realized on my second pass through that some guy had flopped down in the seat next to me and had fallen asleep (more like passed out) across my seat too. I yanked my knapsack out from under his snoring mass, pulled out my jacket, stuffed the knapsack into the overhead and ran back to Leif.

‘Outside’ was spectacularly oxygenated; like floating between subway cars to Nirvana with a head wind. The Sierras were piercingly rugged and meanderingly breathtaking; if you can picture that on mescaline. Most of the time, I forgot there was a train at all.

Then we hit bottom. And began to fly. I have no idea what speed the engineer finally attained on that long straightaway but my cheeks felt like they were being plastered past my ears in the wind. My face seemed to be streaming back with my hair. I looked at Leif and he looked exactly like I felt; one long strobe. I started to laugh but couldn’t; my features could not bend.

When it all finally ended, when the train at last slowed to less than supersonic speed, my body seemed to have been shipped somewhere distant and then returned in a lump. It throbbed. And I was way tired.

“Go get your stuff” said Leif, as we made our way back into the train. “Friends are picking me up. We’ll give you a lift.”

The Zephyr did not, in fact, terminate in San Francisco, but rather in Emeryville, just north of the Bay Bridge, where buses carried passengers the rest of the way. A ride would be great. My plan was to sleep in a youth hostel I’d located in the Tenderloin.

I reached my seat just as people were climbing into the aisles to detrain. My drunken seatmate was gone.

And so was all my stuff.

This took a few seconds to sink in. Maybe I’d hallucinated him. Maybe my seat was actually elsewhere. Maybe I was an idiot from New York who should have known better.

I didn’t care all that much about the clothes or even the cassette player (though I recall it fondly to this day). My senior thesis. And my return plane ticket. And my thesis!

Leif was beyond Leif. “You’ll stay with me tonight, at my hotel. Tomorrow I’ll call Amtrak; the home office in Philly. We’ll have all the station garbage cans checked from here back to wherever that guy could have gotten off. Maybe he tossed your thesis where we can find it.”

It almost sounded plausible.

I’ll always remember Leif Erikson. He did put me up in his hotel room, which fortunately had two double beds, and he did phone Amtrak and set them to searching station trash cans for my stuff. I heard him do it. Leif also saw to it that his friends, a married couple who’d picked us up in Emeryville, took me in for a night at their home after Leif departed. The guy turned out to be a fairly well known, elder San Francisco poet. I can’t remember his name either.

I called Leif once after I got home. My thesis never turned up but the trash cans were indeed searched. I thanked Leif for everything. We never saw each other again.

Thirty-six hours after landing in San Francisco, I was walking to Winterland, a veteran now (at last) of the highs and lows of the Sixties, in a sense from Woodstock Nation good vibes to Altamont bad trip, and back again – in the span of one train ride. I was dazed and confused and ready for more. And, somehow, I still had my ticket for admission in my pocket.

Winterland was an old ice skating rink at the corner of Post and Steiner Streets that the legendary promoter Bill Graham had turned into a legendary rock concert venue — at first in tandem with and, ultimately, outlasting his seminal Fillmore and Fillmore West auditoriums nearby. Evening was just settling in as I joined the crowd snaking around Winterland; a snapshot frozen in another time. Everyone seemed to be draped in woven Mexicali ponchos. Near the front door, I could see Bill Graham himself in a no-frills down vest, eyeballing his patrons proprietarily.

It is crazy what you remember and choose to forget. For years, I have warmly recollected my New Year’s Eve of December 31, 1978 as a gauzy mystery of heightened, evanescent reality. It happened and it was gone and I was there. Then I discovered not so long ago that the entire concert was, in fact, simulcast on San Francisco radio station KSAN-FM and telecast live on KQUED-T.V.; that a CD and DVD of the show were later issued; that YouTube is rife with clips. We live in an age where looking back is digitally facilitated. Less and less is left to memory. I can’t say what degree of accuracy this mitigates or enhances. I can only say that, beyond the digital record, this is what I remember:

~The gift twists of three marijuana joints tied with little hemp bows that were handed out by Bill Graham’s ticket takers at Winterland. This would be the last marijuana I ever smoked; the stuff made me feel stupid and I was soon done with that. Still. It was a very nice touch.

~The free face painting. I had an enormous green leaf and accompanying blossom emblazoned across my puss that night. I would never do that again. I wish I’d had a camera with me.

No, wait a minute. I did have a camera.

Oh, well.

~These two guys from New York I’d planned to rendezvous with — I remember somehow finding them. For the life of me, I don’t know how. The Winterland ballroom floor had no reserved seating — it was a free for all for thousands. Yet, we connected. They were not close friends, just two fellas I’d worked with in the Poconos the previous summer. One of them was the boyfriend of a girl I desperately lusted after. But that wasn’t his fault.

Leif had left me the rest of the mescaline. I shared my grapenuts all around.

The Blues Brothers opened the show — Belushi and Aykroyd — a weirdly crass choice, I thought then, that worked, as I remember it, because of how intensely serious the Blues Brothers actually were about their music, in service to the comedy. They burned.

The New Riders of the Purple Sage followed. Their country-western-kicked psychedelia had always been amusing to me, if not wildly compelling. By this point in the evening, I was tripping pretty well myself. They proved to be nice company.

At midnight, Bill Graham descended from the rafters dressed as Santa Claus, riding a giant, burning, marijuana roach. I used to think I might have hallucinated this but there is YouTube video to back me up.

The Grateful Dead then played for six hours, until past dawn. They really did. At one point, more than halfway through the second set (of three), I distinctly remember having an epiphany. The song was “Ramble On Rose.” Suddenly, Jerry Garcia was addressing me directly, sharing wisdom that transcended time and space. His eyes and mine met. I remember howling at this revelation. I remember my two guys howling too. So we all got it. Sheer telepathy. I have no reason, in retrospect, to believe otherwise.

The night ended in daylight with the Dead crooning an a cappella “And We Bid You Good Night.” Two young girls, as memory conjures them, now appeared, dancing quite near me; all swirling locks and a floaty vivacity best summed up as the quintessence of (forgive me) “hippie chick” enchantment. They were from Oregon, they said, a commune, no less, and simply followed the Dead around, up and down the West Coast. As we all cried out our goodbyes to Winterland, with the Dead at last leaving the stage, my New York buddies, tears pouring down their faces, announced that they were going to Oregon with the girls to join the commune. I thought this was a great idea, since it would leave the one guy’s girlfriend, whom I so longed for, abandoned and unattended. When the lights came up, though, the ladies were gone; vanished into thin air.

Breakfast was then served. God bless Bill Graham. Eggs. Bearclaw pastries. Coffee. The roadies were whisking the stage clear. The crowd was slowly drifting away. In the middle of the Winterland ballroom floor, circles had formed of really old, dancing hippies, many with very gray ponytails, holding hands and chanting: “Not Fade Away.” I realize now that these ancients couldn’t have been much older than 40. Forty would have made them 28 in 1967. Still, they looked awfully old to me.

And that’s when it hit me: Man, this is over. I’m glad I got to see it, to be here, to touch it. But this is done. I don’t want to wind up dancing a Dead hora, refusing to fade away. I am ready to move on.

I bid my two buds from New York goodbye. We would see each other in the city, we said. We did not, as it turned out. I walked myself out into the morning dew of San Francisco, my face painted with a flower. There weren’t many people on the street. It was New Year’s Day morning. The few folks I did pass, didn’t give me and my flower a second glance.

There were no cell phones. Eventually, I found a phone box and called my parents to wire money for a plane ticket home.

And they did.

Starchy Professor Anderson proved extraordinarily decent about the lost thesis, accepting my, “a derelict stole my homework,” excuse and giving me all the time I needed to rewrite the damn thing. I, meanwhile, turned my musical attention to this new place downtown called CBGB, where I spent a lot of loud nights over the next decade or so. Before moving on.

That is another story, of course. Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize. My surgical scars are slowly healing. The election approaches like a runaway train.

The time is now.