The Grateful Dead were hanging out at Front Street one day when Bobby said,
“Fellas?”
“What, Weir?” Phil said.
“Blow me, Weir,” Billy said.
“Look at my new drum,” Mickey said if he was in the band when this scene take place.
Garcia said nothing, because he was in the bathroom. SUDDEN TWIST: Garcia is clean, and he is there for legitimate reasons related to the 7-11 hot dogs he ate on the way in. REVERSE TWIST: he lights a shitload of matches to cover up the stank, drops them in the waste bin, and sets the bathroom on fire despite his (relative) sobriety. COUNTER-CLOCKWISE TWIST: he feels so bad about it that he goes back to using Persian.
Are there keyboardists there? Yes, no, maybe, who gives a shit, possibly. If one shows up, he shows up.
“Why don’t we, uh, have a Jam Show?”
“Why are you capitalizing that?” Phil asked.
“Free country,” Bobby said.
All the Grateful Deads in the room were intrigued by this idea, and displayed their interest by ignoring Bobby and playing grabass.
Garcia emerged from the bathroom as Parish ran in with a fire extinguisher.
“I agree with Weir. Let’s do one show and just lose it, man. Just go out as far as we can on everything. Throw caution to wherever caution gets thrown nowadays.”
Garcia was not the Grateful Dead’s leader; it was a coincidence that everyone always did what he wanted.
“Good idea, Jer,” Phil said.
“Jazzbo Billy’s making a comeback!” Billy added.
No one else in the band said anything because I don’t feel like writing dialogue for them.
And so the Grateful Dead announced their very first Jam Show at Madison Square Garden. Since there was no internet, they informed Dick Latvala of the news and told him to keep it a secret; every Deadhead in the world knew within 48 hours. There was even a theme: Skeleton Jam. (They did not work hard on the theme at all.) Tickets sold out immediately.
The morning of the show, no one had seen whichever keyboardist was alive for two days. If the keyboardist who was alive had a wife who was also a Grateful Dead, then no one had seen her, either. The entire hotel was not on fire, but only because it was a very large hotel. Nearly most of the band piled into the van around one o’clock.
SEVERAL WRONG TURNS LATER
The van was in Yonkers and Billy had punched the driver’s dick to death.
Phil took the wheel.
SEVERAL WRONG TURNS LATER
“Monticello?” Garcia asked. “How’d we get to Virginia?”
“There’s one in New York,” Phil said.
“Didn’t know that.”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty up here.”
“God’s country.”
SEVERAL WRONG TURNS LATER
“Weir’s asleep,” Garcia said.
“Little angel,” Phil said.
“We should tell him we’re proud of him more.”
“Good idea.”
“Where are we?”
“The last few road signs I saw had Cyrillic writing on them.”
“Not optimal.”
With ten minutes until showtime, Phil got the van to MSG. The giant inflatable gorilla in the tie-dye leapt from the building and began making bulbous love to the vehicle. Billy was aroused, and joined in.
“Come get a piece of this!” Billy cried.
“A piece of what?”
“I got no idea, but I’m fucking it!”
Extricating themselves from the penetrations of King Kong’s dong, our heroes went directly to the stage, stopping only to smoke, chat, grab ass, enjoy cocaine, receive tuggers and/or beejers, tune, bicker with each other, bicker with the crew, smoke another cigarette, throw paella at the promoter, ignore the fact that there were naked fucking children everywhere, and re-tune.
Earlier, Bobby had proposed that they play The Other One for the first set, and Dark Star for the second set. This was a reasonable plan, so of course it was ignored in favor of “finding jams where we didn’t know there were jams.” Garcia and Phil were very big on this plan, but neither was fond of rehearsal, so the plan never got further than “we should jam shit out.”
The first song was Promised Land. The jam was not found, even though they looked for it for a quarter-hour. The evening deteriorated from there.
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