The Grateful Pilgrimage

THE GRATEFUL PILGRIMAGE:

Time travel with the dead

By

HOWARD F. WEINER

© 2023 Howard F. Weiner

All rights reserved.

All lyrics quoted are for review, study, or critical purpose.

Pencil Hill Publishing New York, New York

Table of Contents

ONE: BARTON HALL

TWO: MUSIC MOUNAIN

THREE: RICHMOND AND GREENSBORO

FOUR: NEW YORK

FIVE: HARTFORD

SIX: LAKE PLACID

SEVEN: PORTLAND

EIGHT: WORCESTER

NINE: GRATEFUL BASEBALL

TEN: SYRACUSE

ELEVEN: LAST LICKS

ENCORE: BARTON HALL 2017

ONE:

BARTON HALL

An extraordinary trip to the dentist…The world is yours… The waterfalls of Ithaca… Birth of a pilgrimage… Deadhead migration patterns… A wayward man with restless fever… Attaching myself to the past through technology…

Inspiration for this book came to me on Sunday, May 8, 2022, during a road trip to Ithaca. That afternoon, I had an interview on the Sirius/XM’s Grateful Dead Channel to discuss my new book, Europe ’72 Revisited.

Being that this was a national radio appearance and the most important date of my book promotion tour, I took the day off from work. Instead of pacing around my apartment during the interview, I decided to make a three-hour pilgrimage to Ithaca, the site of an immortal performance by the Grateful Dead forty-five years earlier. On May 8, 1977, the Dead played what would become one of their most legendary shows, on Mother’s Day, in Barton Hall, on the campus of Cornell University.

It was also Mother’s Day as I drove out of my hometown of New Paltz and ascended into the heavens, up and over the Shawangunk Mountains. Dancin’ in the Street, the last song of the first set of the Cornell show, was thundering through the speakers. The Grateful Dead efficiently fused genres, erasing the borders between pop, rock, funk, and Motown as they accented the long jam between verses with jazzy flourishes. The dynamic instrumental consumed my mind as I guided my silver-colored Honda CRV over the mountain and onto New York Route 17 West.

Adrenaline, anticipation, and an odd sensation of déjà vu surged through me as I cruised toward my destination listening to Scarlet Begonias > Fire on the Mountain, the opening combo of Cornell’s second set. This performance proudly exudes the mystical powers of live improvisation. The music is at times feathery, dreamy, and tranquil, and at other times it’s smoldering and volcanic in nature. This road trip clicked on a cosmic level—going down the road heading toward a shrine and savoring the tunes that made the place immortal on the anniversary of the show. It made me flash back to the first time I heard the Cornell Scarlet > Fire. I was in the passenger’s seat. My father was behind the wheel. Our destination was a dentist appointment in Yonkers.

My fateful dentist trip was in April of 1981. I was seventeen, and I had just become a Deadhead. It all occurred in rapid-fire procession. I heard Europe ’72, fell in love with the album, and understood why people followed the Grateful Dead.

I saw my first Dead show in Madison Square Garden on 3-9-81, and then scored my first bootleg tape: 9-3-77 Englishtown. That Englishtown Mississippi Half-Step and Eyes of the World unlocked the secret: Jerry Garcia was the most gifted musician on the planet.

A few weeks later my friend Doug, who became a Deadhead at sleepaway camp over the summer, gave me a copy of the second set of the 5-8-77 Cornell show on a Maxell XLII 90 cassette tape. It was a Friday night, and we were smoking and drinking at a soiree with other high school outcasts. I’d first hear the tape on the way to the dentist.

On the morning of my Cornell indoctrination, I enjoyed a wake and bake session (coffee, cigarettes, and bong hits). I was comfortably numb for the drive from Nanuet to Yonkers. Lingering effects from the previous evening’s Quaalude added to my wonderful Saturday morning buzz.

I liberated the Maxell cassette tape from its case and eased it into the tape deck of my dad’s brown Cimmaron Cadillac. After announcements encouraging the fans to move back, Phil Lesh’s bass launched Scarlet Begonias as my dad merged onto the Palisades Parkway South. The optimistic music flowed to an infectious beat as the Dead stormed into one of their most beloved originals. The volume was loud, hard to converse over. Dad and I didn’t have much to talk about anyway back in those days.

My father wasn’t for or against the Grateful Dead. He had a sparse appreciation for music, but he understood music was my sacred domain. Somehow, when I was younger, I managed to dominate the radio dial on family road trips. On occasion, I’d coax my mother into sitting in the back seat so I could spin the radio dial east and west in search of my favorite tunes. As my tastes evolved, I made the move from the AM pop hits to FM classic rock. And then, it was simply Grateful Dead cassettes into the deck. Luckily for my family, I was a month away from a driver’s license and a car of my own.

It was a gorgeous spring day with a steady breeze. As Scarlet Begonias played, the trees aligning the Palisades Parkway seemed to sway in time. The sublime sound was in harmony with nature. As we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, the band’s improvisational foray blossomed into Fire on the Mountain.

The last leg of this dental adventure brought us onto the Sprain Brook Parkway as Garcia’s jamming became more intense in measured increments. I was drooling more than I would be in the dentist’s chair after the Novocain injection. The communion between the stunning music and the scenery was surreal, and experiencing this at a 65-mph clip made it come alive even more.

My head was reeling from the final Fire power jam as we pulled into a parking spot in front of Dr. Lasner’s office in Yonkers. The Grateful Dead were in the zone, and I was with them every step of the way—transcendence. I didn’t utter a word to my father the whole trip. I now wonder what he thought of the music. Did it move him at all? I wish I had asked.

As I listened to Cornell on May 8, 2022, it triggered memories and ignited a familiar desire to get on the road again. Due to a plethora of infractions and violations, New York State revoked my privilege to operate a motor vehicle in 1997. I moved to New York City and spent the next twenty-three years relying on taxi drivers, bus drivers, locomotive engineers, pilots, and eventually, Uber drivers. After COVID-19 forever altered life in New York City, I had to move.

I reacquired my driver’s license after making ransom payments to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. There’s no statute of limitations on driving offenses. Going twenty-three years without a driver’s license and having to take the road test again wasn’t punishment enough. They demanded thousands of dollars. Dealing with New York DMV is like dealing with the mob.

I had my license back and a restless fever burned in my brain. As crazy as it seemed, I had an urge to retrace an entire Grateful Dead tour on the anniversary dates of the concerts. This would be a massive road trip that would give me a chance to create new experiences as I examined the past. I don’t know of anyone who has engaged in this kind of thing before; therefore, this idea was instantly irresistible.

When I arrived in Ithaca, I drove straight to Barton Hall. I pulled into a spot by the back doors and admired the identifying white lettering against the Cayuga Bluestone façade of the building: BARTON HALL MILITARY SCIENCE AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION. I thought about what it must have been like to follow the Grateful Dead on that 1977 tour. The band was finishing their latest studio album, Terrapin Station, as they were in the thick of one of their hottest East Coast tours. The shows before Barton Hall, in the New Haven Coliseum and Boston Garden, were epic affairs, as was the night after Cornell in Buffalo’s War Memorial Auditorium.

As anxious Deadheads lined up to get into Barton Hall on May 8, unseasonably cold rain fell from the skies. The rain segued into snow as the Grateful Dead played. After the transcendent concert, Deadheads floated out the doors and into a winter wonderland. Steady snow was piling up in Ithaca—in May! Those headed to Buffalo for the next show would do so through treacherous traveling conditions.

On the 45th anniversary of the immortal Cornell performance, I was astonished as I opened the doors of Barton Hall. I didn’t see the ghost of Garcia, but the unlocked doors on a college facility in the year 2022 seemed unreal. Although, this didn’t come as a total surprise. I made this pilgrimage to Barton Hall seven years earlier, and the doors were also unlocked on May 8, 2015. On that occasion, I was conducting research for my book Grateful Dead 1977: The Rise of Terrapin Nation.

On both Cornell pilgrimages, I would have been satisfied just to see the shrine, take pictures, and listen to the show on headphones as I paced around the perimeter of the venue. In this age of high-tech surveillance and security, how many indoor venues, on or off a college campus, can you roll into and do as you please? Maybe this place has a natural aura of security because ROTC recruitment and training goes on inside. Barton Hall is also the headquarters for the Cornell Police. But apparently, there’s no line of defense against zealous Deadheads who want to relive the past.

The first thing that will grab you when you walk into Barton Hall are the massive windows that stretch across the back end of the venue in the shape of an acorn cap. A flat map of the world is imprinted over the windows with the words CORNELL UNIVERSITY at the bottom in red. It all makes sense when you imagine the band was looking at this on May 8, 1977. The massive window display seems to scream: The world is yours! This grand window map could inspire any performer, as well as Flat Earthers (those who don’t believe the Earth is round).

At one time, Barton Hall was the largest unpillared room in existence, making it an ideal indoor place for marching bands, military training, and school registration lines. These days, it’s primarily used as a track facility. In the middle of the 200-meter track there are six basketball stands with ten-foot hoops. I wasn’t planning on playing ball, but I couldn’t resist the temptation. I went out to my car, grabbed a basketball, and drained jumpers for a half hour as I listened to the 5-8-77 Scarlet > Fire on headphones.

There’s no commemoration of the Grateful Dead’s iconic performance anywhere to be found in Barton Hall—not a plaque, banner, or sticker. If you google the words Barton Hall, the 5-8-77 Grateful Dead show will appear in several links on the first search page. Other famous acts, from Bob Dylan to Santana, have played in Barton Hall, and the Dead also played there in 1980 and 1981. But that 5-8-77 show is immortal. It’s as if this venue’s sole reason for existence was that performance. Without the musical wizardry of Garcia and mates on that day, Barton Hall becomes just another obscure college venue on the entertainment circuit.

Carrying on with the business portion of my trip, I checked into the Best Western University Inn, on the outskirts of Collegetown. I had a fine stay there seven years ago in a spacious room with a fireplace. I requested a similar setup and received a pocket-sized crash pad with a fireplace and a queen-size bed. The exterior doors on my wing of the hotel were busted and unlocked. Security in public buildings doesn’t seem to be a major concern in Ithaca. This hotel wasn’t as sexy as I recalled. Undaunted, I took a brief nap prior to prepping for my appearance on Tales From the Golden Road.

I woke up an hour before the interview and carefully highlighted the topics I wanted to explore on a dry erase board, knowing full well that we wouldn’t discuss most of them. I wish I had the courage to just do the interview without overthinking everything, but this was for a national audience of Deadheads.

The fifteen-minute conversation passed by like a puff of wind. David Gans and Gary Lambert, the always gracious hosts of Tales, were supportive of my latest effort, Europe ’72 Revisited, and my writing through the years. This was my third time promoting a book on their long-running talk show. I was satisfied with the interview, even though I barely touched on any of my talking points. I didn’t even have a chance to let them know that I was pacing around a hotel room in Ithaca on the 45th anniversary of the legendary show.

I felt like a conquering hero as I went off to explore Collegetown before the sun went down. On my last Ithaca pilgrimage, I didn’t see any of the city’s famous waterfalls. Within a ten-mile radius of