A Long, Strange Trip, Etc.

The Grateful Dead represents the end of the Sixties, basically.

--A 21-year-old college student, interviewed in the Haight after the death of Jerry Garcia.

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Yes, they were saying it again last week. Jerry Garcia had died and so, it was proclaimed by many, had the Sixties. Again. By my rough count, this latest passing represented about the 25th time that the decade has died. It was said previously to have died in a kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, and also in the stage pit at Altamont, and on a motel balcony in Memphis.

Or it died with Jim Morrison in Paris, or with Cesar Chavez in La Paz, or with Sharon Tate and the rest, in the house up on Cielo Drive. It died when the last chopper fluttered off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. It died when John Travolta danced disco in “Saturday Night Fever.” It died when Marine One took Nixon away. And it died, oh, most definitely, when Jane Fonda showed up at the World Series, performing the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chop with Ted Turner.

A curious thing, this capacity to die and die again. It raises questions. Maybe some people have been overly eager to bury the Sixties. Maybe some other people have been afraid to let them go. In any case, the fixation on this long-gone decade--long gone, anyway, by the conventional calendar test--provides powerful evidence that they haven’t made any like it since. Look at it this way: Has anyone out there ever wasted a single moment wondering just when, exactly, the Seventies died? Didn’t think so.

*

On the night Jerry Garcia died, a memorial was under way in Golden Gate Park. The crowd, a couple hundred strong, huddled together at the center of the polo grounds. A breeze was up, bending the trees that encircle the vast bowl of green. News vans were parked on the perimeter, waiting to go live at 11 with the death of the Sixties.

While plenty of old hippies were present, most of the mourners seemed young enough to need Cliff notes to decipher Forrest Gump. They looked the part, though, with their tie-dye shirts and their soulful stares into the flickering light of candles stuffed into empty wine bottles and beer cans. The night smelled of pot and incense. Many people played music at the same time, but none played together. A wild man wandered the edges, screaming, “Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”

In short, everyone performed to type, acting precisely as one would expect at a keening for the man who was the soul of Sixties music, San Francisco-style. And it was precisely this that left me feeling unsettled, again. I’d experienced the same flash covering a farm workers march last summer . . . and watching protesters take over a UC regents meeting last month . . . and, back in my cub reporter days here, writing continually, it seemed, about the low-rent court trials or religious conversions of Sixties icons.

It is a gnawing sense that much of what transpires on the public stage anymore is but an acting job, a reprise of famous performances from The Decade. The right slogans are shouted, the proper songs sung. Even some of the old characters shuffle through in cameo roles. Still, it’s all been said and sung before, by the original artists in real time: Ours is the age of the sequel.

*

All of which, no doubt, says as much about me as it does about the endless churning of decades. I was only 13 when the Sixties first died, back in 1968. I had read the operator’s manual: “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” My bell-bottoms were decorated with flowers. I was ready. And then, boom, Bobby Kennedy, Charles Manson, the draft ends, the Beatles break up, leaving us with . . . Rod Stewart? No wonder I feel out of sorts in encounters with echoes of the Sixties: I was cheated.

No wonder, too, why so many people contrive to cling to that time. What has come after? Disco, Yuppies, New Puritans, computer nerds. Those who created the social and political revolutions of the 1960s had no script. They didn’t know where it all was going. That was its beauty. Maybe if they did know--that Cleaver would turn to peddling codpiece trousers, that Hayden would wind up in the state Legislature, that Garcia would die trying to sober up in Serenity Knolls--maybe they would have canceled the whole deal.

They didn’t, happily, and so they stocked the wine cellar with an irreplaceable vintage. What Garcia’s death represents is the polishing off of one more bottle. There are others left, but not that many. So hang in, Dylan et al. When you go, a whole decade goes with you. Again.