And one of the oldest ways of expressing that is in the folk motif called the grateful dead. When that connection happens, it leaves us changed-and grateful. The promise of those fragments is connection: mystical, mysterious, alchemical. From our own past, they challenge us to remember from other pasts, they challenge us to learn. No wonder the Dead earned the phrase “mammoth epiphanies.” And no more palpable proof of that is music. It is magic made real, for those fragments do convey insights, sometimes so powerfully we call them epiphanies. That's where the magic lies: in the way that some mystical part of the past remains in the relics we covet. Fragments can be evocative objects, as scholar Sherry Turkle has explained, but the mystique and majesty of those artifacts-that is their real power. Add a dash of imagination and bones suggest bodies launch a flight of fancy and a ticket stub evokes a concert. They bring us closer to the past they make us believe that with them, somehow what has vanished can live again, at least in our minds. Legate is only one of many of those who were there at the outset, whose lives only occasionally broke the surface of the cultural waters, leaving fragments scattered through the thousands of pages about the Dead that tantalize and beckon all telling fragments, like these two epigrams, without which the entire Grateful Dead phenomenon would be somehow less. That community remained a quiet wellspring that fueled and informed the life and times of the most significant rock band in American history it is part of the broader, amorphous bohemia that is an indelible part of the shadowy milieu that makes the larger story of the Grateful Dead such a near-mythic journey through the byways of American culture and into history. It stuck, just like Willy Legate's Dead Head catchphrase, “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.” Both phrases go to the heart of the achievement of the Grateful Dead, from the remarkable breadth of work they created and inspired to the many fascinating characters-artists, thinkers, bohemians-who clustered around the band from their earliest days. “Mammoth epiphanies”: that was how one early critic described the impact of a Grateful Dead concert. Introduction: Epiphanies and the Fragments of the Dead
0 kommentar(er)
