I say the Music Never Stopped!!

Thank you Jerry for all you gave

Excerpted from "So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead"

Three songs into the show, the house lights still on, the time had come for “Dire Wolf,” but with a perverse twist no one had anticipated. Twenty-five years had passed since the Dead had recorded that song at Pacific High studio. They’d played it innumerable times since, occasionally slowing it down a half step. But tonight, in the middle of Indiana, they again injected it with the crisp, merry gait of the recorded version, and even the song’s refrain harked back to its original impending-death inspiration. “Please, don’t murder me,” Jerry Garcia sang again, now in a voice weathered by age and abuse, as cops pivoted their heads, hoping to catch sight of the man who’d vowed to kill Garcia before the night was over.

Along with the likes of Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin, the Deer Creek Music Center had become a destination spot, a revered haven, for the Dead and their fans alike. Springing up amid cornfields and cow pastures a half-hour north of Indianapolis, the amphitheater was, like the band, an enclave unto itself. Out there the straight world never felt so distant. Although the Dead had played Deer Creek six times before without major incident, tonight began on a sour note. On their way from their hotel (north of Indianapolis) to the venue word filtered down to band and its management: a death threat had been called in to Deer Creek. Similar calls and warnings had arrived before, but this one felt creepier. An anonymous person had called local police claiming to have overheard the distraught father of a young female Deadhead. The information was unclear, but the implication was that the girl couldn’t be found and had run off on the road with them, and that the father was planning to attend the show and shoot Garcia.

Huddling backstage with the head of security, the band grappled with what to do. Verifying the threat was difficult, but Phil Lesh, the most immediately concerned because his family was there, made the case for canceling the show and heading out. “I was not going to stand up there and be a target,” he recalls. But Garcia brushed it off, saying he’d dealt with crazies before and wouldn’t let this one stop him. “Would you sacrifice yourself for the music?” Mickey Hart recalls of that night. “All those things run around in your brain. But I remember joking, ‘Jerry, could you move over six inches onstage? At least I’ll make it!’ We were screaming laughing. The decision was made and everyone came around. We were worried, of course, but we didn’t want some lunatic to shut us down.” Indiana state police made their way into the crowd and the stage pit; there they were joined by other Dead employees, including publicist Dennis McNally and Steve Marcus of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, all nervously glancing around for . . . something. No one knew what the supposed shooter looked or dressed like, and no one even knew for sure whether the threat was real. But they weren’t about to take any chances.

Ironically, the show opened with “Here Comes Sunshine,” the twinkling kaleidoscope of a song that was dropped from the repertoire after 1974 but had returned starting in 1992. At one point in the show a piece of electronics gear began misbehaving, and keyboard technician Bob Bralove, who usually stood behind the keyboards or drum riser, was forced to walk to the front of the stage to fix it. He’d performed the task dozens if not hundreds of times before, but never before had he felt as if a bull’s eye was plastered on his chest. “You could feel it,” he says. “This was normally the place that was always safe and you felt the love from the audience. But all of a sudden I’m realizing I’m standing next to the guy they said they wanted to kill. It was very, very intense.” After tending to the repair Bralove quickly retreated back to the darkened part of the stage.

For years they’d defied the odds; so many times they’d been written off creatively, physically, or economically, only to return, sometimes as vital as before. But the last few months had made even those closest and most loyal to the Dead wonder whether they, Garcia especially, would be able to pull back from the darkness. During a set break Garcia called his loyal driver, Leon Day. “I had a threat on my life,” he told him. Day joked back: “I got your back—you got mine?”

See rest of story here:
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/04/i_wont_see_the_end_of_the_year_backstage_at_jerry_garcia_and_the_grateful_deads_final_shows/

A Man Truly of Good Deeds.....

In his writing and in public discourse, Campbell could be humorous and profound, inspiring and apocalyptic—sometimes in the same paragraph. He was not shy about mixing the profane with the sacred. He enjoyed moonshine-making, bourbon-sipping, tobacco-chewing, and ritual as public performance. As a three-note guitar-picker and singer of his own off-beat compositions, he was adept at making his sermons and speeches clever or funny without losing their social message or their theological roots.

Overview

John Egerton remembers civil rights activist Reverend Will D. Campbell (1924–2013).

https://southernspaces.org/2013/reverend-will-d-campbell-southern-racial-reconciler

Essay

Al Clayton, Will Campbell, 1975.

The Reverend Will D. Campbell, a "renegade" Baptist preacher whose unorthodox ministry to a far-flung parish of unchurched souls was the signifying hallmark of his long pilgrimage out of the depression-wracked Deep South, died Monday, June 3, 2013, in Nashville from complications following a stroke. He was eighty-eight.

His career-long commitment to the biblically-remembered "least of these" earned for Campbell the praise of a broad range of individuals, from former President Jimmy Carter and country music icon Tom T. Hall to neighbors on his country road in middle Tennessee and inmates at the Riverbend Prison near Nashville.

"Brother Will, as he was called by so many of us who knew him, made his own indelible mark as a minister and social activist in service to marginalized people of every race, creed, and calling," Carter said. "He used the force of his words and the witness of his deeds to convey a healing message of reconciliation to any and all who heard him."

Hall, who on occasion turned his tour bus to the service of a motley brotherhood of Campbellites on good-deed missions in the southern outback, remembered those occasions and other forays with Campbell as "some of my best days on the road."

"Will was many things to us," he recalled. "Preacher, prophet, picker, poet. He had an uncanny way of making whoever gathered around him feel like they were part of the mix, no matter how much we differed among ourselves."

Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, Campbell often made common cause with activist leaders of religious and social efforts to fulfill the nation's unmet promises of liberty, equality, and justice for all. Finding his voice as a plain-spoken advocate of racial integration in the mid-1950s, he soon allied himself with the Nashville-based nonviolence initiative of the Reverends James M. Lawson and Kelly Miller Smith, whose leadership inspired the lunch-counter sit-ins and commercial-bus freedom rides of 1960–1961.

In later years, Campbell spoke eloquently against the Vietnam War, capital punishment, unregulated guns, overbearing government power, abortion on demand, and the invasion of Iraq. He also joined the fight to secure equal rights for women, gays and lesbians, the poor, the homeless, and all who suffered discrimination in a society dominated by affluent white males.

Describing himself as "a Baptist preacher of the South, not a Southern Baptist preacher," Campbell chose to identify more closely with the radical Anabaptist tradition of colonial times than with the contemporary Southern Baptist Convention, which he frequently criticized as too self-serving. He seemed to revel in the adjectives that some of his more rebellious "parishioners" attached to his Baptist identity: "renegade," "guerrilla," "outlaw," and one he used himself in a book title: "bootleg."

In appearance, thought, and behavior, Campbell was an unconventional and sometimes eccentric figure. He commonly wore cowboy boots, Western-style pearl-button shirts, and outlandish hats (in part to cover his premature baldness), and sported a walking cane long before he needed one for support. He once crawled through an airport security checkpoint on his hands and knees after the attendant insisted on x-raying his cane.

Campbell's favorite headpiece was the traditional broad-brimmed black wool hat of the Amish religious sect, which some of his friends thought lent him the aura of an anti-hero. The late cartoonist Doug Marlette appropriated the image for a comic-strip character called "the Rev. Will B. Done," but the humor eventually wore thin, as did the friendship that had developed between the two men. Both Campbell and Marlette denied any connection between the real and imaginary characters under the black hat.

Still, it was his ties to high-profile individuals long since divested of formal religious affiliation that brought notoriety to Campbell.

Among them were Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and some lesser-known denizens of the "outlaw" wing of country music. Ku Klux Klansman Raymond Cranford, Black Panther Bobby Seale, journalist Molly Ivins, social satirist Dick Gregory, artist-writer Jules Feiffer, actor-chronicler Studs Terkel and the French philosopher and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul likewise were drawn to his message of reconciliation.

Not all of his admirers were disconnected from the church. James McBride Dabbs, a South Carolina scholar-writer and a high-ranking Presbyterian, once described Campbell as "a man of many disguises" whose theology could be summed up in his assertion that "all men are bastards, but God loves them anyway."

To read the article in full click here:
https://southernspaces.org/2013/reverend-will-d-campbell-southern-racial-reconciler