Issue 37

	Tired of the same old New Years eve party?  Does your heart strain
to experience the incredible peak experience Bill Graham and the dead used
to give us?  Well, Jerry may be gone, but every New Year's Eve, Portland
Oregon Deadheads rock the rafters with the next best thing.  If the
following scenario seems appealing, we invite you to take a road trip and
join us for the most deadicated boogie on the planet.

	Eleven minutes to midnight and the Grand Ballroom of the Masonic
Temple in the Portland Museum of Art has started to quiver with electric
anticipation.  More than a thousand Deadheads are awaiting that undeniably
magical moment when the old year is put behind us and the new, potentially
most amazing year ever is born.  Suddenly, every light in the hall goes
dark.

	Onstage, the Zen Tricksters, who play the Grateful Dead's music
astonishingly well, segue quickly from deep Space into a Mardi
Gras-style shuffle, urging the crowd to chant along, "Out with the old,
and in with the new." Spotlights slice through the darkness and eventually
land on a huge, ten-foot-tall, tie-dyed float at the back of the hall.
From up out of the float rises Father Time, accompanied by a perfectly
portly lad wearing a huge (and remarkably resemblant) papier- mache mask
of Jerry Garcia.  Next to Jerry, who's waving with one hand clutching an
exact replica of the Doug Irwin Tiger guitar in the other, is another
pleasantly plump fellow dressed as Pig Pen (also wearing a life-like
mask).  Both are sporting feathered angel's wings on their backs.  The
Dead angles and Father Time are surrounded by lovely velvet-clad women who
begin to throw hundreds of thornless red roses into the crowd from the
float.  As the music surges, a parade is launched.

	A small, stealthy theater parade crew parts the crowd and a conga
line of wildly costumed characters comes running from the back hall,
waving huge tie-dyed banners.  Larger-than-life skeleton marionettes and
ten-foot-tall Rasta-man puppets (created by the amazing Risk of Change
puppet ensemble from Seattle) start to lead the conglomeration toward the
stage.  The smell of burning white sage permeates the room as the energy
begins to build to an uncontainable level.

	The Ballroom is surging as the puppets sway to and fro.  The
magical mystery parade winds its way through these thousand laughing
partygoers, and somehow, like a David Copperfield trick, the whole mad
mass gets to the stage in time and, "Three, two, one - Haaaappy New
Year!"  Father Time thunderously exhorts, as the lights come on, a jillion
balloons fall from the ceiling and the whole crowd takes off on a magic
carpet ride while the Tricksters break into the finest rendition of
Lovelight this reviewer has ever heard any band play.  Baby New
Year, clad in a tie-dyed diaper swings out to center stage and the two
characters embrace and start to do a joyous jig.  Deadheads on the dance
floor swim in a sea of balloons.  Amidst all this mayhem the Tricksters
are playing as though their lives depend on it.

	Dan and Brenda Cohen Peltier, who own Think Good Thoughts and
organized and ran this event, are the epitome of Portland's spiritual
counterculture largesse.  Even though the Badillions, a modern East Coast
incarnation of the Merry Pranksters, did a lot of organizing, Dan and
Brenda and their staff had their hands plenty full trying to put the whole
production together.  As seven o'clock approached, everyone in the hall
who had helped to put this event in motion gathered together in a circle
for a big group hug and a few words of inspiration.  The bottom line, the
measure of success, is Phun (spelled with a P-H because Phun is way beyond
ordinary fun; it is the kind of Crazy Wisdom Experience that changes your
life), and the organizers came together in a huddle chanting their mantra:
"Toward the Phun."

	Almost 800 people were already in the hall as the evening's first
act, Seattle folk genius Jim Page took the stage.  His tight set of
original blues and folk tunes were respectfully received (including a very
hip tune entitled Goin' to Eugene to See The Dead), and while
people were not really dancing yet, they were up on their feet and ready
for a real good time.  At about 8:30, Portland's own Higher Ground seized
the stage.  These handsome lads play what they like to call
"acoustic-fired back roots rock."  The now defunct Higher Ground had the
crowd in the palms of their hands as they jammed original but seemingly
familiar tunes.

	At 9:45, as Higher Ground finished up and the sweaty people in the
sweet spot in front of he soundboard/Light Show platform gathered
themselves.  The New Year was drawing over a thousand people by the time
John Dwork got on the stage to do a little aural Deadication,
invoking the spirits to come and visit.  Everyone quieted down to hear
what he had to say, on this, the holiest night of the Deadhead calendar.
As John rapped about how the Dead and the Pranksters used to honor the tao
of chaos, he started to play a bizarre little machine that rearranged the
digital voice recordings from children's electronic toys, making it sound
as though psychedelic gnomes were swooshing through the hall.  The
Tricksters poured onstage and began to back him with a perfect
Space jam.  As images of sacred Holy Fools dissolved up onto the
giant screen behind the band, John urged us all to move "Toward the Phun,"
while the Zen Tricksters broke out of the cathartic Space climax
into a resplendent Eyes of the World.  The entire room exploded in
bliss - the invocation had worked.  Jeff Mattson does Jerry as well as
Jerry did Jerry in 1974, and this Eyes of the World was a mint
demonstration of the Tricksters' dominance of Dead tunes.
	Eyes of the World segued into on of the Tricksters' own
songs, Arise, a high-energy tune with heavy Afro-Carribean
flavoring.  I think the band is getting much better at playing their won
tunes in the midst of the heavily Dead-oriented sets, which is a difficult
task since their songs are less familiar to us.  The band then brought the
energy down a few notches by offering an exquisite reading of Here
Comes Sunshine, as soaring through a sea of clouds.  This swooped
directly into China Cat Sunflower, and by now, the thousand-plus
heads of Portland were having as much fun as they did at any Dead show in
recent memory.  China Cat Segued into another original, Lay Your
Love, with a real slinky, funk groove, and then the band jammed back
into I Know You Rider.  As the Tricksters took a break, the lights
snapped on to reveal a sea of sweaty Deadheads all starting to shine that
it's-11:30-on- December 31st-and-I'm-just-beginning-to-peak-perfectly
smile.

	Like the Acid Tests, the parade during the break and the orgiastic
boogie that followed was a performance by and for everyone.  It was as
special as any magic moment the Dead had ever reached with its audiences.
Everyone turned on their lovelights as we started the new year with love
in our hearts and wide, wide smiles on our faces.  

	When Lovelight climaxed some fifteen minutes later, the
lights went down, save a red glow onstage, and the Tricksters slipped into
one of my favorite songs, Scarlet Begonias.  On the light show
screen dancers began a slow-motion pas de deux amidst giant slides of deep
red roses.  From either side of the stage, belly dancers emerged and began
to do scarf dances!  Everyone (including the band) got wide-eyed again as
the very heavy scene ebbed and flowed onstage.

	Standing in the delighted crowd, I felt the universal love that
Scarlet Begonias speaks of.  The singer lets her pass by because he
is aware that no matter how much love he feels for this wonderful woman at
that precise moment, it is only a drop in the ocean of love that is all
around us.  Even though he learns the hard way, by the end, "strangers are
stopping strangers just to shake their hands, and everybody's playing in
the heart-of-gold band." And so we were.

	But the Phun was just beginning, really, as the band elicited
shrieks of delight by peeling off the trademark opening notes of St.
Stephen.  Instantly, a wave of electricity shot through the hall.
St. Stephen was the song I'd always wanted most to hear the Dead
play live, and though I've hear the Tricksters do it before, this version
was absolutely unfuckinbelievable.  When they got to the
"Ladyfinger" verse the lights all blacked out, save a lone white spotlight
on center stage.  A diva from the Portland Opera came out and, as everyone
quieted intensely, she sang the gentle lyrics.  The entire hall was
hypnotized!  As she got to the final line of the verse, both she and the
band rose in volume.  As she hit and held the last magnificent note, the
Tricksters exploded into a mind-bending jam, as the light show projected a
backdrop of images of saints from the stained-glass windows at Chartres
Cathedral in France.  I swear to you there wasn't one person who didn't
have goosebumps.  It was just incredible!

	St. Stephen flowed seamlessly into a full-blown
Cryptical, which in turn gave way to a ferocious Other One.
After Jeff Mattson's screaming guitar leads tore a hole in the fabric of
normal reality, he brought the band into a luscious rendition of
Terrapin Station.  This led, poetically, back into the Other
One, replete with a closing, apocalyptic Cryptical Reprise.
The band could've stopped there at one AM.  But no, these are New York
Deadhead musicians and only complete, over-the-top madness would suffice.
They leaped headfirst into a festive Iko-Iko, then brought the
energy down to a slow boil and steady simmer with their Stella
Blue-like original Shine Your Light.  Then they headed toward
the finish line with a mind-bending rendition of The Eleven, which
frenzied the crowd properly for the final funky bursts of the beloved and
oft-sought Cosmic Charlie.

	While some people may have heard their mama callin' them home,
most of the crowd was on hand for the rousing third set.  The
Tricksters stepped into the spotlight again and let everyone know they had
plenty of steam left by delivering a textbook performance of Hard to
Handle, complete with the classic Fillmore East '71-style volcanic
crescendo.  I've seen them do about a dozen of these and this was by far
the most amazing.  They burned it.  This led straight into their own
Cumberland Blues-style tune, Done is Done, a number that
perfectly set up the stellar Help> Slip> Franklin's to end the set.

	Without disappointments, the Zen Tricksters remounted the stage
and pulled a Golden Road To Unlimited Devotion encore from out of
their nostalgic hats, and we all found a second or third wind to dance.
This led directly into a sweet and syrupy Brokedown Palace.  I
found myself getting that same lumpy feeling in my throat, that anyone who
has ever been to a Dead show got when it was the last time you were going
to be seeing the Boys for a while.  The bittersweet caress of this was a
blessing; but it was over and we had to go home, find a place by this
precious waterside to lay our bones.  Words cannot adequately describe the
warm glow that infused that room when the lights finally went up.
Everyone just sort of floated out of the museum with ecstatic grins on
their faces.

	The Grateful Dead as a band may only be memories now, but the
Grateful Dead experience lives on.  Somehow, on New Year's Eve, we
created that same magical space, that sacred collective groove, as all in
attendance rode a magic carpet ride toward the phun.  The entire
experience was a phenomenal, and everyone I spoke to afterwards marked
their mental calendars for this coming New Year's Eve.  Same Dead time,
same Dead channel.

							David Marglin