![]() In Providence, Garcia sang, with some gruff delicacy, in my apparent direction: “Take a look at poor Peter / He’s lying in pain / Now let’s go run and see.” After moaning the words “run and see” a few times, he turned away from the microphone with something like disgust. The song ends by shifting into the point of view of people thronging to watch him die. He was playing a song called “Black Peter,” a bluesy dirge from the band’s 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead.” It is a first-person account of a hard-luck pauper on his deathbed: “One more day I find myself alive / Tomorrow maybe go beneath the ground.” Garcia, though only forty-three, had deteriorated into the title role, so that a song that had once seemed evocative, almost actorly-an imagined character conveyed by a man of prodigious gifts-now seemed downright real. Three months later, ravaged by opiates and ill health, he would fall into a diabetic coma, an experience that he’d later recall as being “one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic, space-ship vehicle with insectoid presences.” But on this night, despite the power of his guitar, and of his growling tenor and still palpable charisma, it seemed that he might die any minute. I could see the pearl inlay in the frets of his guitar neck and the ghostly pallor of his skin. (“Trouble ahead, Jerry in red,” the Deadheads liked to say.) I’d never stood so close. I’d worked my way up to a spot about twenty feet from the lip of the stage and found myself within winking distance of Jerry Garcia, an immensity in a red T-shirt that hung halfway to his knees. ![]() ![]() I had just turned seventeen and was on the floor of the Providence Civic Center. Photograph by Ed Perlstein / Redferns / GettyĪpril Fools’ Day, 1986. ![]() Robert Hunter gave the Grateful Dead’s psychedelic sound quicksilver conceptual coherence and old-timey cred. ![]()
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