We leave for Chicago the day after Jerry Garcia dies of a heart attack. And so after decades of pot, LSD, heroin and everything in between, Jerry is finally laid low by an overdose of twinkies. And so now that everything makes absolute and insane sense, we gun the little Honda engine hard and steer our heads westward and over and out to the Tour Unknown. And right away we are reminded that touring is not about being on stage and being famous and beautiful. It's really about bleary-eyed rest stops and 3 am McDonald-land coffee with a shared donut. It's endless flat farmland and the great American corn field that touches the eastern border and reaches out into endless infinity western skies. It's the trick of driving with your eyes closed and waking the drummer up to take the wheel. It's the permanent stiff neck and the dirty Mexican blanket that everybody shares in the crumpled up back seat traveling road show insomnia. I lean back in the driver's seat and smell the ripe stank of cow shit for a thousand miles and listen to my radio which used to sing rock 'n' roll fantasies to me all night long but is now telling me that the wages of my sin is death - and the gift of God is eternal life. Will is next to me in the navigator's seat, talking to me endless about nothing because his job is to keep me awake so we won't crash. And so through most of America we are talking idiots, listening to Jesus and trying to find a cassette tape that all three of us can listen to without resenting the other two. Somewhere in Ohio I give up the wheel and slip into a paranoid hallucinatory dream while Dave drives wide-eyed and eager into the morning light. The radio seems to be playing the same song over and over and I think that sometimes I'm dreaming about being asleep in a car when I wake up sudden to the sound of Dave swearing and yanking the car over to the side of the road. "He wants us," Dave says. And I'm thinking, What? But then I see the flash of red lights and I see the state police storm trooper walking up to the window. It's become a terrible moment and I am sifting through my glove compartment for my paperwork and trying to block out my schizophrenic sexual dream from just a few minutes ago. The temperature is already over ninety degrees and I am covered in two days of dried car sweat.  "How fast were you going, man?" I ask. "I think it was about eighty," Dave replies. And I think, Eighty?? EIGHTY?! Eighty fucking miles an hour?? Eighty fucking fucking fucking miles an hour in MY fucking car??! Jesus goddamned fucking Christ! But I don't say anything because Dave clearly feels like shit already and I still like him. So instead, Will and I wait till the cop walks away and then say every ugly thing we can think of about the police.  "Dude," I say. "He's probably just doing this so he can feel like a stallion with his wife tonite. You know, he probably can't get it up unless he's pulled some good-looking kid over and tortured him at least once a day. I think he's just mad because he can't get laid. He's probably wacking off back there in the cruiser as we speak."  "Yeah," Will says. "The guy was probably potty trained by his drill seargant." And so it goes on until the cop comes back and tells Dave that he's taking away his license.  "Your driver's license is suspended in the state of Massachusetts so I am retaining it. You can obtain it from the Indiana State Police Department after you have fulfilled your outstanding obligations in Massachusetts. In the meantime, one of your friends will have to drive."  FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.  So we switch seats and I take the wheel and drive us to the nearest rest stop to get some bad coffee because I am half way to being dead in the driver seat. Dave goes to the back seat to sleep off the humiliation. And thank God it's only a hundred miles to Chicago because I don't think I can stay awake any longer.  When we get to Chicago, we get lost right away. We are following a map that the promoter ripped out of a phone book and mailed to us the week before. And it bears no resemblance to his written directions. Finally, after driving nearly all the way around Lake Michigan (it seems), we decide to stop and ask for directions. I am tired and ragged and driven entirely by hormones at this point, so I drive up to the most attractive woman I can find and say, "Excuse me. We're an out of state band on tour and we're lost. Can you tell us how to get to Melrose Park?" She gives us a big tooth smile and says, "Sure. Just take LSD. You'll be there before you know it."  And I'm thinking, Take LSD? Did I hear her right? Is she telling me to take LSD? So I say, "Take what?"  "Lake Shore Drive," she says. "It goes right past the park."  We all laugh and thank her as we drive away and Will says, "Man, I'll bet people in Chicago just love saying that to out-of-towners." 

No doubt. 

Once we get to the festival site, we are amazed to see the drama of the week being acted out before our tired eyes. The festival itself consists of a large canopied stage and a row of tie-dye vendors selling hemp pipes and crystals. The PA is blaring the well-rehearsed nonsense of a desperate metal band while on the distant hill over-looking the scene stands a seven foot peace symbol surrounded by an encampment of sad and lonely hippies holding a vigil for Jerry. So in between the garble guitar mashing you can hear the faint thump hump dumping of bongo drums and the whimpering twang of acoustic guitars. It is a very strange scene indeed. Meanwhile, the sun is burning huge and staring us down as it flattens everything in sight. People are lying prone on the grass and everyone is moving in a sort of slow motion panic to escape the fire. I feel like I am wilting as I slump down low in front of the stage and, against all odds, fall asleep in the direct path of the speakers. But Will has talked to the promoter and gotten us a place to shower and change. So I pack myself up and head out. We are introduced to a baby-faced alterna-kid who says he'll let us shower at his pad if we give him a ride home because, "I'm really drunk and I need to take a piss." We stuff him into the Honda and start driving up to the north end of Chicago where the tenements are high rises and little old ladies seem to like playing chicken with the oncoming cars.  Our new friend says his name is Mike and that he lives in a really rough neighborhood which he didn't need to say because it is broad daylight and I am already rolling up my windows and locking the car door. He talks in run-on sentences about Chicago and the local scene and how every person in the city must have a story to tell and how dangerous it is in his neighborhood and how drunk he is. And the truth is that we are so dead tired that we can't even pay him polite attention. So I just keep saying, "Cool." And he keeps on talking. Finally, we park on a side street and head toward his apartment amid the jeers of local wino bums and the burning oppressive weight of the summer air. He takes us into an alley and then through a locked iron grating to a cement block stairway and up to his floor. We walk down the half lit hallway and past the broken plaster and the domestic squabbles in foreign languages until we get to Mike's door. Inside is a one room pad with a bed and a bunch of alterna-band posters on the wall. He offers us something to drink and I escape to the bathroom. The bathroom, however, has never been cleaned. So the tub fills up ankle deep in gray water and my feet slippery slide on the collected scum of everything. After I come out, the other two guys take their turns and I sit and talk to Mike. And I realize that if I wasn't so damned tired I'd probably really like this guy, so I do my best to listen to him for real. He pulls out an electric guitar and I start playing which gives me an excuse to be inattentive while he tells us about his favorite bands and hands me a demo tape he made. He wants to talk about the scene in Chicago and songs he can play on guitar and women and about everything else in the world. Then he gets up and walks over to the sink and says, "You guys won't mind if I piss in the sink, will you. I'm really drunk." I lean over to Dave and say, "We didn't drink anything out of that sink, did we?" And Dave says, "No. I don't think so." So I say, "Sure, piss away." Once we get back to the festival site, we thank Mike for his help as he goes off in search of a port-a-jon."I'm really drunk," he says.  "Man," Will says. "That cat is desperate to hang around with a bunch of real musicians, isn't he?"  "Yeah," I say. "It's no big deal. He just hasn't figured out that any idiot can be in a band."  "Right," Will agrees.  "But what I can't figure out is why he lives in such a fuckin' rat house," I add. "It's probably because his parents have a nice big home in the suburbs," Will replies.  "Good call," I say. 

So we walk out onto the festival field and lay out dead on the grass to sleep. On stage is a thundering heavy metal band called Molten Hammer or something like that. I don't know. I don't know anything. I just collapse and burn in the blistering sun. 

After night falls, the air cools down smooth and hits my face gentle and awake. So we head up the hill towards the hippies to dig them and see. The festival stage is still blaring out guitar noise but the hippies aren't in this decade anymore and so they can't hear any of it. And they don't care. They don't care about anything. They're sitting in small circles and standing in skinny groups and talking so quiet and low down sad about Jerry. In weird like the weird twisty strangeness and peace of them. So low down and sad. And Jerry is really gone, man. Gone way gone over and out. So what now? Where? Where do you go? Underneath the giant peace symbol is a little shrine with burning sad burning weirdness and low candles and pictures and dried flowers. And they made this stuff themselves and brought it up to this little hilltop and over there is a giant city and lights. And here it's so quiet and sad. Someone is playing the Grateful Dead on a portable tape player while someone else thumps the bongo drums all alone. They all stand around and look so lost and lonely. And I'm thinking, "Look at this, man. Look at it long and don't let yourself forget it. This is the end of the last American tribe - Rock'n'Roll Cannabis Americanus Psychosexual Psychedelia. Right here. Right in front of us. And man, I am missing these people all ready. I'm missing the barefoot girls in the cotton sun dresses and the purple painted buses with the skinny white guys and their little blond dreadlocks. I'm missing those big happy zonkered out of this fucking world smiles and that fact that a Deadhead will say nice things to you no matter who the fuck you think you are. And as lame as they seem to be most of the time, man, I'll gladly take a Deadhead over a stock broker any day of the fuckin' year." 

And so we leave the little hippies on the hill and head out to meet the crazy guy who the promoter has talked into putting us up for the night. His name is Dennis and he's one of the hippie tie-dye vendors as well as a wild-eyed maniac pothead kinda guy. And the promoter gives us shifty sideways looks when he gives us his name. "He lives in a mansion on the north side," he says. "I think you'll be okay there. But I'm not sure." And so when we meet Dennis he seems both over-excited about everything and completely forgetful as we help him load up his car with peasant dresses and he keeps asking us, "Who are you guys again?" 

But Dennis' mansion, it turns out, is the most glorious dump I have ever seen. It's an ancient city manor home that should have been condemned decades ago but for the insane wisdom of Dennis and his hippy crew that keep it barely alive and functional as a home for wayward everybodies. The inside is decorated in a late Demolition Era motif with exposed ruins of pipes and sinks and trash pad habitable spaces. The rugs haven't been cleaned since the sixties and the couches all smell like cat urine. But the crayon-painted walls and strangely beautiful thrift-shop-on-acid decor make this place seem more lifelike and comfortable than the well-dressed museum homes of any suburban death park. There are door frames painted in sloppy purple trim and psychedelic rock music posters colliding on the walls with ancient artifacts and childlike cartoon monster drawings. And it all gives you the impression that these people aren't so much living here as camping here. It's a pot smoker's Addams Family dream house and - truthfully - I would rather be sleeping here than anywhere else in the civilized world - even if I have to lie down curled up under a pool table in the den - even if the dog is over-friendly and slobbery in my face - even if we're not allowed to drink the water 'cause it's poisoned. I don't care. This place is too damned cool. And Dennis is probably the nicest crazy lunatic guy we've ever met on tour. He's chatty and generous and completely out of his fucking mind insane. And he is telling us about how he danced with the Dead in Chicago back in '67 and how he was in a punk band called "Pond Scum" back in '66. He says everything he can and has us half convinced that the world is really gonna change for the better. And praise Bob, I don't wanna live in a better world unless it's designed by Dennis. In fact, I find myself waking up the next morning to a stale donut and the sound of Dave telling Dennis that, "Yeah, I guess I'm an Earth Person, too." And this is DAVE. I mean DAVE. Dave, the totally dedicated punk rocker who wants to eat hippies for lunch and vomit them up for fun. Even fucking Dave has fallen under Dennis' spell. So, sadly, we leave Dennis and his mad funhouse to return to the festival where we need to be serious and actually play music. But I can't help wondering what would happen if we could get Dennis to join the band. Even Dave might become a hippy. 

When we get back to the festival we are late. So we have just about enough time to plug in and play. So there I am at 11:45 am and I'm not even fully awake but I'm on a stage in 95 degree heat trying to play rock music. And then I look out into the audience and I see that there is no audience except just one guy lying in the grass. One fucking guy. He is drunk and shirtless and I'm trying to figure out what makes a guy get drunk at 11:45 in the fucking morning on a Saturday. And the worst part is that he LOVES us. He thinks that we are the best thing he's ever heard. And he is soooo tragically wrong. Because we are, for whatever reason, playing so badly I can barely stand to listen to it. We sound like a moving train wreck in the key of D for dogshit. It is, at the particular moment, probably the worst audible thing happening on the planet Earth. But this guy is wooping and hollering and fucking singing along to songs he's never heard before. And sometimes I think he's getting the lyrics right more often than we are. I'm looking over at Will and he's just hiding his whole face in his hair. Then I catch Dave's eyes and he is looking at me with desperate terror because he can't hear me and things are going horribly horribly wrong. And I will do anything just to get off this stage. And when I finally do, I just want to hide my face and cry. And now things are truly horrible because not only have we just completely embarrassed ourselves (in front of our only fan) but I know that we are very, very way far from home and are going to be having a really big argument at any moment. It is a ritual that every band must perform after a bad gig. But the other guys must see it too, because we make an unspoken agreement to not fight until we get home. 

"Hey, I think that went better than expected," Will says.     

"Yeah," I say. But it's taking some considerable effort to maintain the farce. Because we haven't fooled anyone. In fact, I can see the promoter at the side of the stage with a huge red face and big, thick blue bursting veins screaming at the stage manager and pointing at us like her finger is the barrel of a loaded gun. The stage manager is keeping his hand on her chest to hold her back, but she wants nothing to do with him. Finally, he wraps his arms around her in a bear hug and is probably promising to buy her a case of beer if she refrains from eviscerating the guys coming off the stage. And I feel awful. We all do. She thinks her show is ruined. And I don't know. Maybe it is. I'm so sorry. So we leave the festival in shame and drive the car away. And to the east, the sky is turning black.