The Long Set

As of today, the count comes to four hundred twenty-nine. That is how many nights I gave myself over to a stage and let other people’s hands and voices go to work on the soft machinery behind my ribs. A stadium one night, a sweatbox the next, the gilded opera-house hush of the Oxford Apollo, a speedway field in Maine with the dust still hanging gold in the stage light. Fifty-one years of it, opening with John Denver at the Capital Centre in the green spring of 1974 and coming to rest, for now, on Diana Krall at Wolf Trap in the warm dusk of 2025. Fourteen at the first bell, sixty-six at the last. What I want to set down here is what all that beautiful noise was actually for, because it was never only fun. It was a schoolhouse. It was a sanctuary. It was the long, patient gathering of the sounds, smells and smiles I now spend my mornings trying to share in verse on smilegiving.com.

I will walk it close to the order it happened, because the order is the lesson. The dates line up like beads against the towns I slept in and the man I was slowly turning into, and the music had a way of arriving exactly when I was ready to be taught. So let me lay the map down first, the way Jerry and the boys used to tune in plain sight where the whole hall could hear them feeling for the key. The tuning, it turned out, was already the prayer beginning.

I. The Calvert County Kid Walks Into the Capital Centre (1974–1977)

I was born on the twentieth of May, 1959, and from 1962 I grew up in Calvert County, Maryland — tobacco-barn country, the Chesapeake on one side and the wide quiet Patuxent River on the other. A peninsula cherished by locals as the “land of pleasant living.” Which means that when the brand-new Capital Centre opened its doors out in Landover in the winter of ’73-’74, a teenage boy with a driver’s-license dream and a paper route’s worth of saved money suddenly had a spaceship parked within reach. Ninety-nine of my shows happened in that one building over the years. Ninety-nine. If the Cap Centre had charged me rent I’d own a wing of it.

My first ticket was John Denver, April 28, 1974, age fourteen. Laugh if you like; I do. But there is something fitting about starting with John Denver, a man who believed out loud and without a flicker of irony that the mountains and the people up in the cheap seats were cut from the same holy cloth. “Far out,” he would say, and he meant it as doctrine. I had no words yet for what was moving through me, but the seed was already down in the dark soil, taking. By August it was The Beach Boys with a lean young Marshall Tucker Band warming the room, and I keep the stub to this day. That was the night a lifelong affliction set in, for I am to this hour helpless before a stack of human voices braided in close harmony; Brian Wilson’s vocal blend came down on me like grace with a key signature. You can still hear me chasing that chord in Family Home, the chime struck once and ringing, ringing on past where the ear can follow. That is no metaphor I went looking for; it is a sound I stood inside at fifteen and have been trying to find my way back to ever since. By October a fourteen-year-old version of me stood watching Eric Clapton with the gloriously undersung Love opening the evening. Slowhand himself, before I could legally drive after dark. Somewhere in that same stretch the J. Geils Band came through with a then-unknown Peter Frampton opening, two years before Frampton Comes Alive! made him a poster on every bedroom wall in the country, so that I had the cult before the canonization, the secret before the sermon. That was the strange grace of the age: the gods were simply out on the road, passing through your hometown arena month after month, in trade for a couple of mowed lawns and a folded ten-dollar bill.

Then came November 11, 1974, and David Bowie on the Diamond Dogs turn toward Philadelphia soul, and something in me swung open on a hinge I never managed to close again. Bowie taught a tobacco-county boy that a self is not a fate handed to you but a thing you fashion, deliberately, out of nerve and costume and the refusal to apologize. I would spend decades sifting that lesson, throwing out the cold half and keeping the brave half. Ten nights later, Elton John at the white-hot apex of his glory, Kiki Dee opening for him. Two of the great shape-shifters of the century inside a fortnight, and me not yet old enough to drive home alone in the dark. The 1975 ledger reads like a dare somebody made to a teenager: ZZ Top headlining over a face-painted, not-yet-famous KISS; Rod Stewart with the Faces; Jefferson Starship; and, the one that lodged deepest, May 22, The Eagles sharing the bill with Linda Ronstadt.

I have to stop the whole telling and stand still on Linda. Because if you want the headwaters of my lifelong helplessness before a truly great voice, they are right there, in that arena, the night her singing came down off the stage and walked through me. She did not decorate a song. She seized it by the collar and told the unvarnished truth of it at full cry, and dared the rafters to call her a liar. I caught her again that December, and once more in ’77. A voice with that much honesty in it rewires a young listener; it sets the gauge for what sincerity is supposed to cost. Years on, whenever I sit deciding whether a line of mine actually rings or only chimes, it is Linda I hear, leaning in close: never gild it. Mean it, or leave it on the floor.

I could not have named the lineage yet. I was only a boy who had found the loudest, brightest, most generous room in the state and talked his way in, night after night. But the Whitman engine, that ecstatic catalog, the holy naming, the flat refusal to leave a single soul off the list, was already wiring itself into me one ticket stub at a time. Decades later it would come out as Hippie Dreams: I sing the body of Walt Whitman, I breathe the mind of Allen Ginsberg, I revel in Joycean language landscapes, I feel the poetry of Bob Dylan. You cannot stand in a crowd that vast, that often, that young, and walk back out still believing in the small separate self. There is no only-me; there is no other. The arena had begun teaching me that line a good fifteen years before I found the words to write it down.

And before I go a step further I have to name my band. People hear about the eighty-seven Dead shows and they file me under Deadhead, and that is true and I wear it gladly. The Grateful Dead have been the heart music of my whole life, the warm and forgiving center of it. But the obsession, the first one, the one that arrived like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know I had, was Jefferson Airplane. I was thirteen years old when “White Rabbit” first came spiraling out of a speaker at me, and the song was already an old thing by then, already a relic of a San Francisco that the magazines had told me was over before I ever got to it. It did not matter. Grace Slick’s voice climbing that Boléro march, calm and pitiless and beckoning, telling a boy in tobacco country to feed his head, did something permanent. Here was a band that had been to the place I most wanted to go, the place behind the curtain, and had come back able to sing about it. The Airplane were my first proof that the counterculture I’d only read about had truly happened, that the doors really were there in the wall, and that music was the hand that knew how to open them.

For years I had to make do with the descendants. I caught Jefferson Starship thirteen times across the decades, and watching Grace Slick own a stage was its own education: that fierce, swooping, slightly dangerous contralto that could turn from a purr to a battle cry inside a single bar, paired with an utterly fearless stage wit, the between-song needling, the raised eyebrow, the sense that she might say or do anything at all and would plainly relish it. She was thrilling in the original meaning of the word; she sent an actual current down the spine of a crowd. Ask the girl twirling through the air; she laughs at lies, fears no crying, never judges, doesn’t dare — when that stanza arrived in Food For God, I had a few particular women’s voices in mind, and Grace’s was loud among them. But the prize, the one I had quietly waited half my life for, came August 26, 1989, at Merriweather Post Pavilion: Jefferson Airplane, the original five — Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen, and Jack Casady — back on one stage for the first time in seventeen years, the genuine article reassembled, not a tribute and not a Starship rebrand. To hear Somebody to Love and White Rabbit sung by the woman who wrote them, in the flesh, that contralto still able to peel the paint off the back wall, was to watch a piece of the sixties I had been too young to see the first time simply walk back into the room. For ever beginning. Born again without end — I would write that in Ever Beginning, and at Merriweather that night I watched it happen to a band. Some loves you get to consummate late; they are the sweeter for the waiting.

II. The Record-Shop Years, the Velvet Revelation, and the First Tug of the Dead (1977–1982)

In June of 1977 I moved to Alexandria, Virginia, and took a job in a record shop, which for a young music obsessive is rather like being handed the keys to the confectionery and told that tasting is the work. I was eighteen, drawing a paycheck made half of vinyl, with a whole city of rooms opening their doors to me: the sticky and glorious Bayou down in Georgetown, the Warner, the Lisner, and a small new punk room on F Street, the 9:30 Club, that was about to rearrange my sense of what a body could do.

But the record shop did more than feed me shows; it fed me revelations, and the deepest of them arrived in 1976 when I carried home a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the one with Warhol’s banana on the sleeve. I put the needle down and the floor of the world quietly moved. After the sunshine and the harmonies, here was something that did not flatter you, did not console you, did not pretend the dark wasn’t there. Lou Reed’s flat unblinking eye, John Cale’s viola sawing like a nerve, and over it all Nico, that strange Teutonic cathedral of a voice, intoning rather than singing, beautiful and bottomless and a little frightening. The record taught me that art does not owe you comfort, that it can tell the truth about the underside and still be holy, perhaps more holy for the honesty. I have carried that lesson into every honest-dark passage I have ever tried to write.

Which is why March 11, 1979, at the Bayou is a night I will carry to the end of my days. John Cale and Nico, co-billed, the two surviving poles of that first Velvet record, in a little Georgetown club an arm’s length away. I met her in a side hallway between sets, this living legend, and she signed her name for me, and I felt the floor move again. Then, in her second set at the late show, she began the Doors’ “The End,” and somewhere down inside that long dark hymn she simply broke, the grief in it overtaking her, and she could not finish. I watched a myth come apart in real time, and it was unbearable and it was somehow blessed, both in the same breath. The night did not end gently. When the manager refused to pay her for the second show she raised a furious storm, and I watched her bodily put out the Bayou’s front door onto the Georgetown sidewalk, where she drifted from stranger to stranger asking, with terrible candor, where a person might find some heroin. A friend told me afterward that he and another fellow had gathered her up off the street and taken her back to his apartment, where they dropped acid together and Nico spent the whole long night weaving stories in and out of the trip, among them the tale of her first acid, taken years before with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. I have never forgotten it, the beauty and the wreckage of her in a single evening. It taught me something the sunny records never could: that the people who carry the sacred fire are often the ones it burns, that tenderness toward the broken is not optional but commanded, and that there is no light worth singing about that has not also kept long company with the dark. Every poem of mine that refuses to look away owes a debt to Nico on that sidewalk.

But first I have to confess the conversion that was already underway. September 25, 1976, Capital Centre: my first Grateful Dead show. I’d end up seeing them eighty-seven times — by a wide margin the most-seen band of my life — plus the Jerry Garcia Band ten times, The Dead, Phil Lesh and Friends, and on into Joe Russo’s Almost Dead right up to 2024. Here is the thing that cannot be told to anyone who has not stood inside it: a Dead show was never a concert. It was a congregation. The band felt for the key in front of you on purpose, courted the wrong note on purpose, chased a jam clean off the edge of the cliff and trusted the other four to throw a bridge across the gap in midair. And twenty thousand of us agreed, by a treaty no one had ever spoken aloud, to love them straight through the stumbles, because the stumbles were the very soil where the new thing grew. That is a theology, plain and entire. The bumper sticker said there was nothing like a Grateful Dead concert, and the quiet joke of it was that the bumper sticker was simply telling the truth.

On Halloween night in 1980 I watched the Dead at the Warner Theatre by way of the live feed beamed down from Radio City, and the Post called it “Return of the Dead”. I remember thinking that the technology was a small miracle and the crowd around me was the large one. The screen was only glass and light. The people were the sacrament.

Now, the years from 1978 through 1982. The psychedelic years, to give them their honest name. I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, living among records, dancing three and four nights a week, and the doors of perception were being kept conscientiously clean. I will not pretend otherwise; this is a sincere account and you are a grown soul reading it. There were nights, a Hot Tuna show where Jorma‘s guitar stopped being a string of notes and became one unbroken filament of light, a Dead “Morning Dew” where the whole arena wept at the same moment and not one of us was ashamed, when the seam between me and the band and the swaying stranger at my shoulder thinned to nothing and then was gone. What stood in the empty place it left was a knowledge with no words around it, plain as a stone in the hand: that we are all one substance briefly parceled out into separate bodies, and that the music is only the part of us still able to remember the fact. I did not reach for that sentence to sound devout. I felt the truth of it bodily, on an ordinary Tuesday, in a crowd, with my shoes off and my eyes shut. Half a lifetime later it is, word for word, the thesis under everything at Smilegiving.

And the dancing. Lord, the dancing. Here is where I must testify to Tiny Desk Unit and the first incarnation of the 9:30 Club. May 31, 1980, Tiny Desk Unit with the Lounge Lizards, in that low-ceilinged, sweat-weeping, gloriously grimy original room on F Street. The new-wave and post-punk crowd there was a tribe unto itself: Urban Verbs (four times for me, once opening for Devo at Merriweather), the dB’s, Klaus Nomi — Klaus Nomi! the alien countertenor! — Mission of Burma, the Lounge Lizards. I danced one of those Tiny Desk Unit nights until my shirt was soaked clean through, until the floor and the band and the strangers and I churned together into one organism with no edges, the self-imprisoned mind of Co-Creator Conspiracy simply coming undone in the noise. A small piece of trivia for the heads: that scrappy local band’s name would be borrowed decades later by a certain public-radio concert series you have surely heard of, the Tiny Desk Concerts, christened by the band’s own Bob Boilen. I was in the room when the phrase still belonged to four kids and a synthesizer. The Dead taught me to dance open, loose-limbed and oceanic; the 9:30 taught me to dance sharp, angular and electric and a little dangerous. A body needs both. I have always held that motion is its own kind of thinking, that the feet can arrive at a truth the seated mind would never reach, and I learned it on two very different floors inside the same two-year span.

And threaded all through these years was Patti Smith, whom I caught twice in 1978, at the Warner in July and at McDonough Arena that October. I cannot overstate what her first record, Horses, did to a young man trying to work out whether the thing he felt for poetry and the thing he felt for rock and roll were one hunger or two. Patti settled it. She walked out of Rimbaud and the Beats and the garage all at once, half-shaman and half-street-kid, and proved that a poem could be screamed over three chords and lose nothing of its soul, that words and ecstasy were not rivals but lovers. She was the patron saint of exactly the fusion I would spend my life chasing. I would learn, years on, that a skinny art student in Georgia named Michael Stipe had been knocked sideways by that same record at nearly the same moment, and that the two of us were less than a year apart in age. We were drinking from one well, half a country apart, and neither of us yet knew the other’s name. There was John Cale again in these years, solo at the Cellar Door and the Bayou, the Velvet ghost walking, and Talking Heads at the Bayou in 1977, which is to say I watched David Byrne twitch and incant in a sweat-slick Georgetown barroom before most of the country had so much as heard his name.

The clubs were teaching me nerve while the arenas kept teaching me scale, and a handful of these nights I will carry to the grave. Neil Young and Crazy Horse on the Rust Never Sleeps tour in the fall of ’78, with its preposterous giant amplifiers and roadies costumed as hooded Star Wars Jawas, and that phrase itself working its way into me like a koan: rust never sleeps, keep moving or corrode. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band that November on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, three hours of proof that a concert could be a grave moral act and the most fun a body is allowed to have in the same breath, that joy and gravity were never enemies. The long civic argument of The Long Table owes that night a debt it can never repay. And the fierce edges too: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band at the Bayou, whose music I prescribe as a spiritual discipline, since you either surrender the downbeat or you go home, and either way you leave rearranged; Iggy Pop at the Ontario, playing his own bare torso as the lead instrument; Richard Hell and the Voidoids sharing a bill with David Johansen at a club called the Atlantis. I have always danced, and I dance still. Dance righteously when your feet find that they can; being Light in motion is a blessing for everyman — I set that down in Jesus Smiled, and I meant every word of it as plain autobiography.

I should be honest about the air in those rooms, because it shaped the seeing. The years from 1978 through 1982 were, to put it gently, lysergically informed ones, the doors of perception not so much opened as lifted off their hinges and laid down for a dance floor. What that chemistry did, on its best nights, was not so much conjure a vision as strip the wallpaper off one I had already half-glimpsed sober: the bone-deep, laughing, weeping certainty that everything is joined, that the line between you and the crowd and the band and the very building is a courtesy we agree to most days and forget is a courtesy. Down the rabbit hole and over the rainbow, as I would later put it in Peaced Together; clouds float gently upon thoughts sky high. And in Different than Before, millions of light years to the nucleus from which we burst. I did not find those lines in a book. I found them on a handful of specific nights when the music went translucent and I could see clean through it to the source.

III. The Air Force, and a Boy from Calvert County Loose in England (1982–1985)

In May of 1982 I joined the United States Air Force. Basic and tech training took me to Aurora, Colorado, then Plattsburgh, New York, through that summer and fall. I squeezed in three Grateful Dead shows in September ’82 on the northeast swing — Portland, Boston Garden, the Carrier Dome — like a man stocking the pantry before a long winter, because I had a feeling about where I was headed. That was the run where I finally understood the Grateful Dead the way you are meant to: not a show you attend but a caravan you join, a moving town with its own economy and ethics and unwritten constitution of kindness. Abundance in trust with relations to last, as I would write in Paradise for Moriarty. I was about to put on a uniform and serve a country an ocean from home, and I wanted one last taste of the borderless tribe before I went. In November 1982 I shipped out to RAF Upper Heyford, England, and stayed until October 1984.

Picture it: a twenty-three-year-old Deadhead and record-store alumnus, suddenly stationed an hour from Oxford with a base pass and a thirst. England in 1983–84 was one of the great live-music ecosystems in human history and I drank from it with both hands. Van Morrison at the Oxford Apollo in March ’83 — Van the Man, in full Caledonian-soul trance, the kind of show where he stops singing words and just incants. The London Blues Festival that May at the Hammersmith Odeon: Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, John Lee Hooker, and Albert King — three living roots of the entire tree, on one stage, in one night, while I stood there in a foreign country realizing this was the source code for everything I’d loved back home. David Bowie‘s Serious Moonlight at the Milton Keynes Bowl that July, the homecoming-king-of-Mars version of the man I’d first seen at fourteen.

And then the one I tell at parties. November 22, 1983, R.E.M. at Dingwalls, a little canal-side club at Camden Lock, with Murmur barely out in the world. I caught them three times on English soil across ’83 and ’84, including two consecutive nights at the legendary Marquee. I had no notion I was watching the band that would all but define the coming American decade. To me they were simply this jangling, murmuring, kudzu-green young thing out of Georgia, and Michael Stipe sang the way a person talks in his sleep, half-confessing a secret he hadn’t decided to give you. Here is what gives the memory its private weight, though. Stipe and I are less than a year apart in age, both of us cracked wide open in our youth by Patti Smith’s Horses, both of us reaching after the same impossible braid of poetry and electricity. Standing in those tiny London rooms, I was not merely watching a future star. I was watching my own generation find its voice in real time, in a stranger who had drunk from the very well I had, and the kinship I felt was bone-deep and entirely unearned. I noticed it so hard that years later the line I R.E.M. in my sleep turned up, half pun and half prayer, in Hippie Dreams.

But the night that rearranged me most deeply on English soil cost nothing and carried no ticket at all. The Stonehenge Free Festival, the summer solstice of June 1984. Tens of thousands of us drawn out onto the Wiltshire plain across the road from the stones, a whole ramshackle floating city of hippies and punks and bikers and travelers, tipis and painted buses shimmering silver through the heat haze, woodsmoke and patchouli and frying onions on the air, no fence around the music and no gate to pay, a hundred sound systems bleeding gently into one another. Hawkwind churned out their cosmic space-rock until the ground itself seemed to throb, and somewhere a fiddle went on, and a drum circle that never once stopped the whole long day. As the light failed and the bonfires came up, the entire field turned luminous and lysergic at once, ten thousand people dancing barefoot in the dark with no stage to face, because the field itself was the stage and every one of us was on it. Howl at the moon, howl as you sway, lay down a rhythm, ride a wave — when I wrote that in Tao Jones, I was describing this exact field.

And then the slow miracle the whole gathering had been built around. The short June night thinning toward dawn, the crowd drifting across the road to the stones themselves, robed Druids among them, and the sun coming up cold and gold over the heel stone precisely as it had for four thousand years, the great megaliths going black to grey to honey, and every freak and pilgrim and lunatic on that plain gone silent and then roaring as one creature when the first light cleared the horizon. There is a sound the silent night keeps, low under the hush, where the deep listening sleeps — that line in Light the Way I heard first at Stonehenge, in the held breath of a crowd waiting on the sun.

What I could not have known, dancing in that field, was that I was standing inside the end of something. That solstice was the last Stonehenge Free Festival there would ever be. The next June, on the road to the twelfth one, the travelers’ convoy was set upon eight miles from the stones by some thirteen hundred police in what history would name the Battle of the Beanfield: vehicles smashed, families dragged through windows, the whole free-festival dream beaten bloody on English grass. New laws soon made a gathering like ours a crime; two people walking the same way down a lane could be called an unlawful procession. So I had been handed, without knowing it, the very last one, the final time in British history that anyone stood free and unticketed among those stones at dawn and called it a festival. A whole way of being together was about to be legislated out of existence, and I had been given a seat at its closing night. I understood none of us is truly free until all of us are free differently after watching the freedom of that field crushed by the state. The open hand, it turns out, has enemies. The long table can be overturned.

Then the keystone. July 7, 1984, Wembley Stadium: Bob Dylan, with Santana and UB40 opening. My first Dylan. At Wembley. In England. As an American airman who’d grown up on the man’s records in a Maryland tobacco county. I’d go on to see Bob Dylan twenty-five times — second only to the Dead — and chase his voice across four decades of its glorious, gravelly, ever-shifting reinventions. But the first one was on foreign soil, and there was something perfect in that: the great American voice, met abroad, by a homesick kid who understood all at once that home was a thing you carried in songs and not a line on a map. A hundred thousand Britons turned toward the same growling oracle from Minnesota, and the songbook I was raised on had plainly crossed every ocean ahead of me. The work I loved was never local; it was a current, and it ran everywhere, even Wembley, even through an airman from Calvert County. I also caught the Pretenders on the Learning to Crawl tour, Robert Plant, the Psychedelic Furs, Big Country, and Elvis Costello at the Oxford Apollo as my farewell show before shipping back.

From November 1984 to December 1985 I was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington — the Pacific Northwest, closer to the actual San Francisco mothership than I’d ever been, even if the duty schedule kept the leash short. By January 1986 the Air Force and I had concluded our business and I went home to Calvert County.

IV. Home Again, and the Greatest Run of My Life (1986–1995)

This is the decade the numbers go vertical. 1989 alone: thirty-eight shows. 1990: twenty-four. 1991: twenty-five. From January 1986 in Calvert County through the early nineties I was, by any reasonable definition, a man organizing a life around live music — and these were the second great psychedelic years, the 1986-through-1995 stretch, the long warm middle of the journey.

It opened with a thunderclap: July 6 and 7, 1986, RFK Stadium, the Grateful Dead co-headlining with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. My two great long-term loves, the Dead and Dylan, on one stage, in my own backyard, the summer I got home. Dylan-and-Petty was a famously feral, electric pairing, and the Dead were entering their unexpected late-career renaissance. (That summer was the one right before Jerry’s near-fatal diabetic coma — we very nearly lost him, and the relief when he came back made every show after feel like a stay of execution we’d all been granted together.) I caught the Dead-and-Dylan bill again at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia in 1987, then three straight nights at the Cap Centre that September. Three nights. In a row. Because of course.

Let me try to set you down inside one of those nights. The lights drop, the first chords of Scarlet Begonias uncurl, and that is my own poem before it was ever my poem: appreciate these Scarlet Begonias for their percolating motion, spinning on the land, tiptoeing on the ocean, passing from hand to hand. Twenty thousand people find the pulse in the same instant and the floor becomes one organism. Then the drums come, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann working through the Drums and Space passage, and the rhythm reaches down past thought and unlatches something, drum beat open ear, heart tickle, the way I would transcribe it in No Time At All. And then, if the night is being merciful, Jerry leans into Stella Blue or He’s Gone, and a stadium of strangers is weeping and grinning at the same time, and I am dancing with my eyes shut, and the roof of the place might as well be gone: the floor beneath us drops, our feet they hang, we look up, the roof is gone, we are directly connected to the Divine. I wrote that in Family Home. I was describing a Dead show. They are the same description.

These were the years of the full tribe and its full mythology — the parking-lot shakedown street, the spinners, the miracle ticket, the unspoken etiquette, the sense of a traveling nation with its own economy, language, and saints. I’d grown up absorbing the secondhand mythology of the late-sixties San Francisco counterculture through the media of my childhood — the magazine spreads, the Sunday-supplement think-pieces, the documentaries that made Haight-Ashbury sound like Camelot — all of it filtered, romanticized, pre-internet, arriving as legend rather than fact. And here in the late eighties I was getting to live a late, real, unglamorous, deeply earnest chapter of that same story. I knew it was a continuation, not the original. I didn’t care. The values were the same: generosity over greed, ecstasy over cool, the group over the ego. I was home in more than one sense.

It was in these years too that the two halves of me fused for good, and I can name the very afternoon. October 7, 1989, the National Mall, the free Housing Now! rally, where I stood and watched Tracy Chapman, Jefferson Airplane, Mickey Hart, Richie Havens, Los Lobos, and Stevie Wonder turn a protest into a worship service in broad daylight. I had spent fifteen years learning to lose myself in a crowd for the sheer joy of it; that day I learned the crowd could also be a conscience. The neighbor who turns up all through my civic poems was born on the grass of the Mall with Stevie Wonder singing into the autumn light. For none of us is truly free until all of us are free. Bring open hands, open doors, open arms, not velvet ropes, not limited access — that is I’m Never Free By Myself, and it did not come from a seminar. It came from a lawn.

And the Dead handed me the high holy days of the whole thirty years right in this stretch. Labor Day weekend of 1988, a four-night run at the Capital Centre, the same beloved barn where I’d first seen Bowie as a teenager, now my home temple, and by the third or fourth night the whole room moves as one creature, you stop being an audience and become a congregation that already knows the liturgy. That run gave us a small miracle, an electric Ripple for an encore, that gentle American Beauty hymn almost never played plugged in, suddenly ringing out over a roaring arena, gone are the days we stopped to decide where we should go; we just ride. Grown men wept. I may have been one of them. I had half-written the feeling years before in Get Shown the Light: gifts of mystery and devotion, passing from hand to hand.

Then, the very next night after the Housing Now! rally, the keystone of them all. October 8 and 9, 1989, the Hampton Coliseum, where the band did the one thing they almost never did: they hid. They booked two nights billed as Formerly the Warlocks, their own original 1965 name, tickets sold so quietly and so locally that almost no one beyond Virginia knew the Grateful Dead were playing at all. Those of us who did know drove through the night like pilgrims chasing a rumor of a relic. And the band, set loose for two evenings from the burden of being The Grateful Dead, played as though they had slipped their own chains. On the second night they struck the opening notes of Dark Star, a song they had not played in more than five years, the great lost psychedelic grail of the entire catalog, and the sound the building made was not applause. It was something older than applause, twelve thousand people recognizing a miracle as it happened. They went on to pull songs up from the deepest well, Help on the Way for the first time since 1985, Attics of My Life for the first time since 1972, Death Don’t Have No Mercy, Morning Dew. I stood in that ecstatic dark and knew, the way I would later put it in Jesus Smiled, that here and now is eternity to harvest honey. Some nights the veil only thins. At Hampton in ’89 it tore clean through.

And I got to watch my contemporaries climb. R.E.M., the murmuring club band I had stumbled on in London, came back through my life transformed at every stop, and following them across the venues was like watching a friend grow into his powers. The Patriot Center in October 1987, the year of Document, when Stipe had begun to lift his face and let the words land clear and the secret-in-his-sleep had become a thing he meant you to hear. The Capital Centre in April 1989, Green filling an arena, the kudzu band now standing in the very building where I had first met the Dead and Bowie and Linda, a full citizen of the rooms that raised me. And much later, the autumn shows of 2003 and 2004, the Patriot Center again and then DAR Constitution Hall, by which time Stipe sang fully out, a bald and unembarrassed elder of the form, every guard down. Seven shows, twenty-one years, one band, and across that arc I could read the whole story of my generation learning, slowly, to drop its mask and simply tell the truth out loud. It is the very thing I have tried to teach my own poems to do.

I ranged wide in those years; this was never a single appetite. The Neville Brothers four times over, because no one alive braided the spirit and the groove the way those New Orleans saints did. Santana, whose guitar always sounded as though it were praying in Spanish. Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat, The Band; and, keeping the new-wave flame trimmed and burning, Bob Mould, Sting, and our own Mary Chapin Carpenter rising up out of the local rooms. And always, woven under all of it, Hot Tuna and Jorma Kaukonen, sixteen Tuna nights and eight solo Jorma evenings across the length of my life. That deep, blue, fingerpicked Hot Tuna church, where Jorma and Jack Casady have spent half a century quietly demonstrating that two old friends and a fistful of old songs are the whole of the sacrament a soul actually requires.

In July 1995 I moved up to Washington, D.C. proper. And then, August 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died. I won’t dress it up. A whole nation of us — the traveling tribe — went home from the funeral that wasn’t a funeral and had to figure out who we were now that the campfire had gone out. I’d seen the Dead eighty-seven times. The thing I’d organized a decade around was simply over. The mythology I’d lived inside had a last page after all.

V. Alexandria, the Long Seeking, and the Music That Kept Faith (1996–Present)

In April 1996 I came back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I’ve lived ever since — through a whole career, into retirement, and right up to this June of 2026 as I tell you all this. The pace of shows naturally eased from the every-other-night fever of my thirties to the chosen, savored nights of a man who’s learned that you don’t have to catch everything to be faithful. But the faith never lapsed. Joni Mitchell at last, that voice and that open-tuned harmonic weather all its own. Brian Wilson — the actual, surviving, fragile genius behind those first Beach Boys harmonies I’d heard at fifteen — performing the resurrected SMiLE, then Pet Sounds entire, those stacked harmonies that had ambushed me at fourteen finally handed their cathedral, and me in the seats with my eyes wet, looped all the way home. Bob Dylan, still out there on the Never Ending Tour, his voice now a beautiful ruin he plays like a found instrument.

And the Dead’s long afterlife, which turned out to be its own resurrection: Phil Lesh and Friends, The Dead, and gloriously, in the modern era, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead — five JRAD nights running all the way to 2024, a generation of younger virtuosos keeping the eternal jam alight so that a man past sixty can still walk in, still lose the seam between himself and the crowd, still find that wordless old knowing exactly where he set it down in 1979. Hot Tuna at the Warner in 2023, Jorma well into his eighties and still telling the truth on six strings. The tribe scattered but it never died; it just learned new names.

This is also the long stretch when the seeking got conscious and got named. The thing I’d been feeling in crowds since 1979 — that universal, underlying love, that everyone-is-the-same-light intuition — I went looking for its lineage on purpose: Whitman first and always, then the Beats, then the New Thought and Hermetic teachers, the Trowards and Nevilles, the whole syncretic library of people who’d tried to put into prose what a great show puts into your spine for free. I wasn’t replacing the music with the books. I was finally building the frame to hold what the music had already taught me.

My most recent show as I write: Diana Krall, Wolf Trap, July 3, 2025. From John Denver at fourteen to Diana Krall at sixty-six — bookended by two artists who, in completely different idioms, simply mean the song. The voice still matters most. After fifty-one years, the voice still matters most.

VI. The Long Set Comes Home: Concerts into Smilegiving

So here is the turn, the place where all four hundred twenty-nine nights resolve into one chord. Everything I do now at smilegiving.com — the poems, the essays, the postings down the right-hand sidebar — is me trying to hand you, in words, the thing those rooms handed me in sound. I have a tagline I live by: we are all born of the same Infinite Love, and we’re at our best when we give it away. I did not come to that sentence in a library. I came to it on a dance floor, poured out among twenty thousand strangers, somewhere around 1980, and I have spent the decades since trying to earn the right to write it down.

Look at what the music actually taught, and watch how cleanly it became the craft. Linda Ronstadt and Grace Slick and Dylan and Brian Wilson taught me that a voice — a real, particular, truth-telling voice — is everything; so the first principle of every poem I write is that it has to be said in a true voice, not a poetic costume. The Dead taught me that you build the sacred communally, through trust and shared risk and a willingness to fail in public; so I write “friend” in the devotional poems and “neighbor” in the civic ones, always reaching for the second person, always turning the poem at the end toward you, the way the whole arena turned toward the band and the band turned back. The dancing — the 9:30 Club sharpness and the Deadlot oceanic sway — taught me that meaning lives in motion and in the body; so I’ve trained myself to replace abstract doctrine with sensory images you can feel in your hands and feet, because a truth you can’t dance to isn’t finished yet.

And the years taught me to treat the popular song as a sacred text, which is why I can braid Dylan’s thin wild mercury and his jingle-jangle morning straight into Looping Home, or close Quantum Understanding by asking someone to play He’s Gone one more time. I did not decide that at a desk; I earned it across twenty years of treating a Garcia ballad as a psalm and meaning every second of it. Even the architecture of the work — wonder, then the honest dark, then the widening, then the quiet center, then the turn toward you — is only the shape of a great show. Every band I loved knew you open in wonder, walk the whole room down into the hard place at the middle, and bring everyone home together at the end. I merely wrote it down.

The poems themselves grew up across exactly these years. The early ones, drafted in the psychedelic stretches and the record-shop nights, were closer to ecstatic transcription — a young man trying to catch the dissolve before it faded, often overwriting, reaching for the cosmic when the kitchen-table image would have hit harder. The maturing happened the way a band matures: by learning what to leave out. By saving the em-dash for the genuine pivot. By trusting one open hand to say what a whole sermon couldn’t. The work grew from look what I felt toward here, this is yours, take it — which is, when you think about it, the exact difference between a kid showing off and a band playing for the room. The newer poems — the ones about co-creation, about lighting the way, about the one open hand — and the big civic work like the long table I set for America at two hundred fifty, all of it runs on the same current I first felt as a teenager: that art and music and humor and dancing and communal tenderness are not the opposite of prayer. They are prayer. They’re the portals — to spiritual clarity, to political conscience, to the plain daily decision to treat the stranger beside you as the same light wearing a different coat.

I think about the sheer accident of my birthday. Born in 1959, I was old enough to walk into the Capital Centre in 1974 and young enough to catch Clapton and Bowie and Elton and the Dead and Dylan while they were touring through my town. I caught R.E.M. in a London club before America met them. I caught three blues founding-fathers on one Hammersmith stage. I lived a real chapter of the counterculture mythology I’d absorbed as childhood legend. None of that was merit. It was timing — the dumb luck of being the right age in the right window — and the only honest response to that kind of luck is gratitude, and the only honest expression of that gratitude is to give it away. Which is the whole project. Which is the website. Which is why it’s called what it’s called.

The set ran fifty-one years and four hundred twenty-nine songs of the self, and it is not over yet; there is always another night, always another poem, always one more stranger to turn the verse toward. But if you have wondered all along what the beautiful noise was for, here it is. It was so that an old Deadhead from a Maryland tobacco county could one day stand at the rear of his own long life, watch the whole set draw down to its final chord, feel the seam between himself and the world give way one last gentle time into the single shared light it had always quietly been, and then walk out into the ordinary morning and write it down for you, friend, offering it with an open hand.

We are all born of the same Infinite Love. And we’re at our best — on the dance floor, in the cheap seats, in the poem, in the parking lot, in the whole roaring congregation of it — when we give it away, sharing our energy and our talents freely.