Any Deadhead worth his psychedelic salt remembers the first GD album he bought and played until the grooves had nothing more to give. It was the summer of 1980 after my freshman year, and I was earning extra money at the Notre Dame golf course for an exchange year coming up in Austria. I was training a new hire, a senior making a little cash too. I was training him how to water the fairways at night by changing the sprinkler heads every thirty minutes, and as the only things to remember were not to drive the golf cart into a tree in the dark and to keep your crotch away from the spigot when the high pressure water made its first 40-yard shot, you can image that the training quickly gave way to beer and music.
“I have no idea what the Dead were thinking when they dreamed up this album,” he grumbled as we settled into a cart near the edge of street lights in the back of the old 16th green to crack open beers and watch traffic. Nonetheless, he slid Go to Heaven, which had just been released that Spring, into the tape player he’s brought along, and continued.
“They haven’t had a great album since Wake of the Flood.”
“Why didn’t you bring something else, then?” I suggested.
He looked at me like I’d just been blasted in the noggin by one of the high-powered sprinkler heads. “Are you crazy? This is still light years better than the crap you hear on the radio, man!” With that, he pushed the PLAY button on the tape player.
I liked it so much I bought the record a few days later. The raucous humor of “Alabama Getaway” hooked me immediately, and the bluesy shuffle of “Althea,” with Robert Hunter’s pithy lyrics, made me smile. Even now, I think that the searching weariness of “Lost Sailor and “Saint of Circumstance” are among John Barlow and Bobby Weir’s best writing efforts. The Brent Mydland contribution, “Far From Me,” fell out of the Dead’s live rotation way too early. But it’s “Feel Like a Stranger,” with it’s opening chords that still haunts me as a truly great Grateful Dead song, and the apex of the Barlow/Weir collaborative relationship. On the all-too-few occasions that “Stranger” opens a bootleg live set, I still get warm and welcome chills.
Well, as we moved sprinklers and made our way through the six-pack on that hot summer evening, returning to watch the traffic stop and go at the intersection of Angela Boulevard and U.S. 31, we heard the sound of a small gas engine through the “chuh, chuh” of the sprinklers. We turned and saw the course pro, Joe, making his way toward us in a golf cart. We were so surprised to be shaken from our reverie that we forgot to hide the beer or turn off the tape player.
“Hey, you knuckleheads,” he said as he pulled beside us, “Some lady across the street can see you under the street light and she called Security, thinking you’re vandalizing the golf course. I figured it was you geniuses just watering, so I told Security I’d check it out. Now, for making me drive all the way out here from home, I’ll take one of those beers. And move your asses into the middle of the course where you can’t be seen, and turn the hippie music down!”
Suddenly he was speeding away, and we were left with a single beer which we shared after we moved into the darkness of the 6th tee. I feel kind of bad for not remembering the name of my companion that night, but I never fail to think of him as being the catalyst for the foundation of my long, strange and continuing trip as a Deadhead.
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