Practice Is Perfect

“Grateful Dead at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, October 9, 1980” – Chris Stone – CC BY-SA 2.0

I might as well come out and say it now because you’ll eventually figure it out anyway: I’m a Dead Head. I don’t simply mean that I enjoy the song “Touch of Grey”; I mean that I’m REALLY a Dead Head. I sit down to work each day listening to the “this day in history” shows on the Internet Archive. I listen to two shows a day at a minimum. If you play a song for me I can tell you, not just what year it’s from and which guitar Jerry Garcia is playing, but sometimes even…who recorded it. I’ve written about the dead in both religious and secular contexts in the past and I plan to do so again in the future…

Not bragging here, just warning you.

But I bring it up to illustrate a point about how to think of this blog. The Dead were often criticized for taking pride in a lack of perfection. The phrase often used was “practicing on stage”. I remember someone in high school (long before I was a Head myself) saying that they didn’t want to spend two hours listening to someone practice.

I couldn’t disagree more.

It might be helpful to understand where the Dead are coming from here. Acting as the house band for Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in the mid-60’s, the crew was obsessed with the notion of finding “the form that follows chaos”, breaking apart received notions of how a concert should be structured, or what music should sound like, and just sort of seeing what appears. At its best it sounded like the exploration of uncharted sonic currents. At its worst it was unfocused noodling in weird modalities. But to characterize a Dead show as “practice” is uncharitably inaccurate. It might be better to call the shows attempts at the unexpected, plunges into mystery, or wild celebrations of chance.

The form of this blog won’t be so entirely radical, but the Dead mentality will hopefully inform the rhythm and pace. I’ll certainly share with them the cultivation of agape as a guiding principle. So if the writing here ever seems like noodling, my hope is that it’s also bound in a perfect unity by love (Col. 3:14).

Like Pigpen said, turn on your Love Light. And keep it on.