Chamblee54

PG is making a sticker picture of a Grateful Dead album cover. The album is “Steal your Face”, and the image is the familiar thunderbolt across a skull. The project has made PG think about “the dead”.
There was a concert in Atlanta on Armistice day, 1971. The show was at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium. PG has talked to dozens of people at that show, and heard hundreds of opinions. There was a controversy about police on the stage, with the band almost refusing to play. The Great Speckled Bird didn’t think it was that great, and said the only player that was up to par was Phil Lesh.
One person who did like it was someone we will call Hampton. He became “born again” as a Dead Head that night. When Hampton and PG were at UGA in 1973, they became friends. PG heard lots and lots about that night at the Auditorium. When a dead concert was announced for the newly opened Omni in 1973, PG got tickets the first day he could.
This was the first of six dead shows that PG would see, four at the Omni and two at the Fox Theater. Try as he might, a dead concert was never a life changing event for PG. By the time the band was playing at the Omni in the early nineties, PG had moved on to other things.
Hampton became less and less devoted to the band. The last time PG talked to him was a drunken get the phone book out night in 1986. Hampton had fallen asleep at the last dead show he went to.
In his book “The Doors of Perception” Aldous Huxley describes listening to a classical album under the influence of a psychoactive substance. He had the sense of hearing everything that was available to hear in the album, and pondered the concept of music made to be listened to while tripping, by musicians that were likewise tripping. This was written years before the acid tests in San Francisco. The house band for these evenings was the Grateful Dead.
PG always felt that the key to the band was Bob Weir. While Jerry Garcia is a brilliant picker, he was a bit of a wildman. Weir played counterpoint to Garcia’s leads, and lead him on and up. (Unbacked hearsay alert) Weir, according to Hampton, has been drug free since 1967. This is a contrast to the notoriously Fubar Garcia, and probably helped to ground Jerry.
There is a bulletin board in front of the lightbox where PG makes his pictures. On that bulletin board is a tarot card. The card is X, The Wheel of Fortune. This is a good image for this picture. It is based on circles, with red and yellow alternating and counterpointing like Garcia and Weir. According to the ancient Persians, Red is Fire and Yellow is Air. And what is fire but the combination of earth and air, to be controlled by water. The colors go round and round, like the Wheel of Fortune. There is no word on whether Vanna White…who lived in Atlanta in the mid seventies… is a Dead Head.