Posts, that is, that have nothing to do with the World of WordPress.

Apologies, but, as someone once said, there’s somethin’ happenin’ here.  And I need to pay my respects — and attention — to it.

Yesterday, I posted about a fun, interesting book that puts forth the notion that the Grateful Dead, among all people, were rather savvy, innovative, ground-breaking business people.  Imagine that!

Then tonight: I get home from the movies — wonderful The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep (nothing short of a-ma-zing in the lead role of Margaret Thatcher) — and I pop open the laptop to check Yahoo for the SU – OSU score (the Orangemen lost!  sniff sniff!), but what immediately grabs my eyeballs is something I’ve never seen before on Yahoo: a featured item at the top of the front page highlighting an ongoing live concert by, get this, none other than Bob Weir, one of the founding members of the Dead!

The concert, as it turns out, is a fundraiser for “Headcount”, an organization focused on registering voters, particularly young people, who tend to be under-represented in elections.  (Yeah, I was one of those young, non-voters myself back in the day.)

So, I hook up my laptop to the TV via HDMI and start watching the show.  Weir is playing in a recording studio in San Francisco before an audience of maybe 50 people max., with a backing group called “The Nationals”, a bunch of young kids who are pretty darn good musicians.  And they’re spinning out a blend of never-heard-before songs intermixed with some good ol’ Dead classics.  As I write this they’re in the middle of the China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider medley — one of my all-time favorites.  It’s hard not to miss J. Garcia’s vocals and guitar, but they’re doing a damn good job on this tune, I have to say.

Anyway, between the sets they broadcast a rather free-ranging panel discussion among a group of people that I mostly don’t know.  They talk about all kinds of loosely related things, like voter registration, the energy crisis, the influence of money on politicians.  But what really grabs me again is: not only is Weir, himself, on the panel, but so is John Perry Barlow.  “Who’s he?”, you might be wondering.  Barlow is one of the lyricists who collaborated a lot with the Dead (with Weir, in particular), and he’s the guy who wrote the Foreward to the book I wrote about yesterday!

I’m sitting here wondering: what the odd are that this could happen?  What is the significance of this is, ah, incredible coincidence?!   Well, my dear eldest son likes to say, “There are no coincidences in life — everything happens for a reason.”  I think he may be right.  I just need to start paying closer attention.

Weir and Co. just closed the show with an blissful medley of some of the best tunes from the Dead’s early studio albums:  Ripple, Uncle John’s Band and Brokedown Palace.  What an unexpected joy.

Quoting Robert Hunter’s lyrics in Ripple,

Let it be known

there is a fountain

that was not made

by the hands of men.

How true.  How true.

By the way, Dr. Barnes confirmed for me that this is the Dead show where he had his epiphany…

The book provides a nice, concise summary of the author’s view of the great lessons to be learned from how the Dead, literally, went about their business — which, quite consistently, was to do nothing by the book.
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