Brings Me The Jailhouse Key

The guards let Mickey leave at the end of the day; it wasn’t like that time Billy went to jail. This is 1993, and everything started as most Grateful Dead stories do: with a vanful of monks.

Rifkin was driving the Gyuto Monks–the throat-singing Tibetans in the yellow robes–around California when they passed San Quentin. The monks asked him,

“What is that building?”

“San Quentin,” Rifkin answered. “A prison.”

“We sensed great pain and suffering there.”

And Rifkin was very impressed by this because the monks’ robes were so very yellow, and the monks were so very foreign, that he did not say,

“Oh, you sensed great pain in the concrete building with no windows and razor wire everywhere? You got a bad vibe from the place with your monk magic, didja?”

No, he instead pulled the van over so that the monks could pray at towards the jail for a while. The story got back to Mickey, and he responded in the only way he could: by organizing a gospel concert and releasing a live album.

Here’s a little bit of it:

Mickey had good intentions.