Bob Weir dropped some good advice in a GQ interview not long ago.
But before I get to that, let me acknowledge that my relationship with the Grateful Dead, slim as it is, has always been complicated.
I’m not alone in that. By the time the Dead rolled into the 90s, their hirsute revolution was long over. We were dorm-room dilettantes, our Dead came pre-boxed and branded, frat-friendly, grey-bearded and cuddly. Dancing teddy bears trumping acid tests.
Were we part of the struggle or just being sold? Maybe some hazy purity still remained in the misty eyes of our mentoring boomers, but for our generation’s Dead, the complicity — that alloyed compromise of art and commerce — came baked into the brownies. (“Turning rebellion into money.” as The Clash soon, and self-knowingly, would sing.)
Whatever the motivation, it worked. And that’s the real head-spinner, the surprise at the end of this long, strange trip: The bums won. With apologies to Mr. Lebowski, perhaps the bums will always win. For as it was foretold: “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” 50 years later, the counter-culture remains ascendant, has gone mainstream, has co-opted the masses. They even got John Mayer.
For a moment let us enjoy the irony of reading a glowing celebrity puff piece about Bob Weir — the last-standing hippie grandaddy — in Gentleman’s Quarterly, the establishment’s monthly missive to the upwardly mobile, the well-coiffed, the corporally fit, and corporately fashionable.
Perhaps it’s just the next step in some sort of divinely appointed dialectic. Discuss that at your leisure, but for now the aforementioned advice: Bob Weir’s “Three Pillars of Happiness”:
- Regular Exercise
- Daily Meditation
- The Constant Pursuit of Purpose.
That’s a short list, doable, hard to forget. I should give them a shot. His three things are really my three things anyway, the three things that are happening when I’m hitting on all cylinders. I often get around to one or two on any given day, at least when weather and children cooperate. Exercise was on point this summer when getting ready for some backpacking. Meditation comes and goes. Purpose? Now that’s the hard one, that which eludes me most. But my writing comes tantalizingly close, so I shall keep at it.
Simple stuff, yeah? My body needs the exercise, my mind needs the meditation, my soul needs purpose. I need to make a point of starting my day with those three things, or at the very least keeping them on the schedule and readily at-hand. If I don’t, I’ll find their sad and bloaty analogues before bedtime, stumble into lazy ways of dissipation, turn off without tuning in.
Might as well do it the right way. It seems to be working for Bob.
So let me leave you with a Bob-sung song, “Dark Hollow,” that goes back to the early days of the band. I do owe the Dead one very proper debt of gratitude: They introduced me to a slew of old-timey tunes, and made me believe I could play along too. They kept trad alive for a generation that never knew Bill Monroe, that came around a little too late, or were a little too weird, for the Peters, Pauls, and Marys.
I’ve been picking at this one off and on for years, since that time when we were the new kids, trying things on, doing our best to rattle the comfy collegiate cage so graciously provided. Third-tier, nor’eastern, ivy-clad institutions like mine are still populated by a certain frisbee-tossing, backpacking type, still strumming guitars and driving be-stickered rides (though now better logo’d in praise of Patagonia.) It all seems so sweetly familiar.
The revolution is Dead. Long live the revolution.
