Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: Grateful Dead

  • Listening To The Grateful Dead Will Teach You Everything You Need To Know — But You Must Also Dance

    Listening To The Grateful Dead Will Teach You Everything You Need To Know — But You Must Also Dance

    listening to the Grateful Dead
    Photo by Jay Blakesberg

    # 99 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: You can learn everything you need to know in life from listening to the Grateful Dead — but you must also dance.

    The Godfather is the i-Ching, I beg to differ

    My tip is a derivative of this Godfather scene in You’ve Got Mail, the 1998 rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In the classic scene, Hanks answers Ryans questions with references to the Godfather, assuring her it is the “answer to every question,” the “i-Ching,” and “the sum of all wisdom.” It is a brilliant scene Hanks pulls off with aplomb, throwing in some impromptu Brando imitations for emphasis.

    I love the scene, but beg to differ. My go-to source is the Grateful Dead. Within their musical catalogue is everything you need to know. Non DeadHeads don’t understand (and don’t want to know) how their music infiltrates, penetrates, and saturates a Dead fan’s mindset to the last brain cell. 

    “For the truly Deadicated, theMusic Never Stops” 

    My someday book

    I plan to write a book in which every chapter will be a life-topic with related song titles — like this sampler:

    • Love — They Love Each Other, Sugar Magnolia, Not Fade Away, Comes A Time
    • God — Hell in A Bucket, Lay Down My Brother, Wharf Rat
    • Family — Me & My Uncle, Brother Esau, Mama Tried
    • Relationships — Row Jimmy, He’s Gone, Cold Rain & Snow
    • Politics — Throwing Stones, Standing On The Moon
    • Philosophy — Terrapin Station, St. Stephen, Eyes of the World, Box of Rain
    • Justice — Dupree’s Diamond Blues, Stagger Lee, Viola Lee Blues
    • Economics — Deal, Loser, Easy Wind, Big Boss Man
    • Psychology— China Cat Sunflower, Brown-Eyed Women, The Other One
    • Death— Death Don’t Have No Mercy, To Lay Me Down, Brokedown Palace, Black Peter

    This partial, non-exhaustive listing is exemplary of how songs in their extensive repertoire have application to every aspect of life. Like I said above, you can learn everything you need to know from listening to the Grateful Dead.

    Discovering all these connections made the music the soundtrack of my life; and one of my favorite lyrics serves up advice for all life’s uncertainties:

    “If you get confused, listen to the music play”

    ~Grateful Dead: Franklin’s Tower

    One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

    As a young adult, I got lost for several years in the hippy lifestyle (including the drug use part). I travelled cross-country following the band from show to show. The community was like none I’ve experienced since. The traveling kaleidoscope of clowns was family — a home on the road. 

    On my journey in 1985, I met Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, himself instrumental in the hey-day of what is known as the 60’s movement, and equally pivotal in the Dead’s beginnings as the house band for the infamous San Francisco Acid Tests so marvelously chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s seminal volume, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

    I went to dozens and dozens of shows became more and more lost in the mysticism and mythology and mis-application of truths and nearly lost my physical and mental health in the melee. 

    A year later, I met someone even more famous than Kesey. At a show in March of 1986, I met Jesus. My life forever changed, though the music has remained the soundtrack of it. The accoutrements of drugs and touring, I left behind. They aren’t necessary. They really never were. The music itself is a healing gift. One I’m Grateful to God to still enjoy. 

    Dance as if your life depends on it

    So many Grateful Dead songs are about impending mortality. The idea is in their very name. A fellow writer on Medium wrote this beautiful essay Accepting Your Mortality is the Beginning of Living Well. I heartily concur. The Grateful Dead’s music helps remind me. And it reminds me that the only effective antidote against an encroaching death is to live, to sing, and by God, to dance.

    Is there anything more celebratory, more filled with life and joy, the kind of life-celebration powerful enough to mock death — than dancing in the face of it?

    I think often of the story in the Old Testamanet, when the Ark of The Covenant was restored to Israel and Jerusalem after spending months and years outside the city, a young King David danced in such ecstatic jubilation, he danced right out of his clothes. 

    I still dance that way — celebrating life — warding off death. Now, I spin and whirl and shake my bones in the privacy of my home. Almighty God is the recipient of my Gratitude as He watches the overflow of my pent-up life. Nothing expresses exultation for the joy of living the way dancing does. As I dance before my God, the band playing is “Jehovah’s favorite choir“, the Grateful Dead.

    Everything you need to know—Just remember to dance

    So yes, I’m quite convinced, you can learn everything you need to know in life from listening to the Grateful Dead… but you must also dance.

    “Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.”

    ~ Grateful Dead: Eyes Of The World
  • Never Ignore Your Conscience—Even If Tempted By Camisoles, Honeysuckle, and Dreams

    Never Ignore Your Conscience—Even If Tempted By Camisoles, Honeysuckle, and Dreams

    Never Ignore Your Conscience
    Photo by Jan Segatto on Unsplash

    # 82 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Never ignore your conscience. It is the only internal compass you have to accuse or excuse your behavior. Ignore it at your peril.

    Your conscience is to your future moral life as the ability to feel heat from a burner is to your future sense of touch. Ignore it at your peril. You should never ignore your conscience. It’s a pre-loaded tool that either excuses or accuses your thoughts and behaviors. A moral compass if you will.

    A clear conscience, free from internal, self-directed accusations and recriminations, is essential to peace of mind. And peace of mind, one of the highest of all ends to be sought for its own sake, is essential to a good life. Therefore, if you hope to have the peace of mind that enables a good life, don’t ignore your conscience.

    Alternately, you can lie to yourself, cover up your faults, sins, and poor treatment of others telling yourself you’re not as bad as Osama Bin Laden or Hitler, so you’re probably still not on God’s naughty list, since you aren’t as bad as you could be.

    But face it, a good life is really a life in which you’re as good as you can be in every area of which you exercise any degree of agency and control. No one would define the good life as the one in which you fail to be as bad as you could have been.

    Fear and Longing in a Camisole

    I remember my initial wrestlings with my conscience and the FEAR OF GOD! 

    Boy, do I! It involved some strange things happening in my dreams because of a raven-haired “sitter” who read me sections of the Hobbit in a too-sheer camisole . (She was my grandfather’s second wife’s 19-year-old daughter.) I remember the feel of her silken smooth arm against my pre-teen shoulder, propped up on pillows, listening to Gollom’s riddles. I remember how she smelled of honeysuckle. And I remember the unbidden and uncontrollable, and horrible longings all that innocent sensuality provoked.

    Soon, the honeysuckle-scented camisole’d sitter was in my dreams too! How did she get there? And, well… let’s just say my conscience worked just fine.

    It was my first encounter with the lifelong truth so ably depicted in the Grateful Dead’s Dupree’s Diamond Blues:

    “That jellyroll will drive you so mad!”

    Look, there are things you can control and things you can’t. Don’t fool yourself. And don’t attempt to fool God either, remember:

    “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.”

    ~ Galatians 6:7, NKJV

    The Takeaway

    Look, after all that 19-year old in a camisole, and honeysuckle, and dreams, you’re not stupid. You get the takeaway. I’m trying to keep a clear conscience here.

  • “Iko Iko” with Dr. John, Bill, and Mickey

    This is the YouTube video Playing for Change, Song Around the World version of “Iko Iko”. It features Dr. John in one of his last recorded pieces before he passed. Also, Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart make appearances in the video.

    I love these. This one made me cry. You know it’s art when it moves you like that. “Hey Now!”

  • Thirty-Five…still ALIVE!

    Hampton Coliseum: This Hell in a Bucket became my Altar of Remembrance.

    Like the Old Testament figures who faced a crisis, had an encounter with God, and erected a pillar of stones to commemorate the place, this day on the calendar is my altar of remembrance.

    Today marks 35 years since I was lost enough to let myself be led, to borrow words from my favorite Rich Mullins song, Hard to Get.

    Two questions and one answer forever changed the trajectory of my life and have given me these thirty-five years, quite literally, on the house.

    Question one: Are you having that much fun?

    Question two: How much are you worth?

    Answer: God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son.

    Thirty-five years in, and I’m as amazed today at how and where Jesus found me as in the hour I first believed.

    I’m certain many people are looking for God. They just don’t know they’re looking for Him. 

    Many, like my 21-yr-old self, think they’ve already found Him. He’s the all-inclusive, Grand Cosmic Guru running everything, hidden in everything, maintaining everything, right? He’s the One conducting the Acid Tests. He’s the One encouraging you to Be Here, Now. He’s the one that’s totally cool with you as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, right? Not considering that a life spent groping around in a dark room when there’s a light switch on the wall, hurt’s everyone else…right?

    And believing they already know Him at least as well if not better than the slick, well-dressed TV professionals; carnival hawkers pitching a snake-oil version of God, they aren’t looking in the traditionally right places. Because, face it, most of those places are oh-so-stuffy-and-judgmental, and frankly,…dead.

    They know instinctively God must be bigger than that. And so, rejecting the organizational part of religion, they feel themselves adrift, looking for something in the next port, the next experience, the next drug.

    Bobby Weir, 3-19-86 singing the lyric that led to the Question one. You don’t have to be a televangelist to be used by God.

    They can’t say why they’re pushing every envelope, testing every limit, hopping the fence at every boundary. Like me, they don’t know why they think every door they open, will be THE DOOR of the universe. They just know there must be more to all of this than what the world is selling.

    Let me just say, I feel ya!

    But sometimes in all your manic searching you can get yourself so inextricably tangled up and lost, that you’re ready to hold out your hands and take a Day-Glo green pamphlet from a hippy chick you’ll never meet again, read it, and like a snake shedding it’s skin, walk away a different person. 

    The switch clicks, the Light comes on, and you get found by the One who has been holding you in His outstretched hands. And the only appropriate words, even thirty-five years later, are simply, Thank You. 

    The outside of the tract said, How Much Are You Worth? God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son, was written inside the tract…with an image like this one.

    A few years ago, I wrote out this version of my testimony . I re-read it this morning. It could benefit from some edits, and it’s kind of long, but if you have any interest in whether or not Jesus goes to Grateful Dead shows, it’s there for the reading.