The open mike night began with a student named Goia sitting in lotus position on the dim stage and sending forth the most eerie, powerful chanting I have ever heard. This was throat-singing practiced by the people of Tyva (formerly Tuva), a nation near the Russian-Mongolian border. The link is to a detailed article from Scientific American.
Every open mike should begin with this kind of sacred cleansing of space. Will and I set up and played the songs we had planned and the flow was a blast to ride. Will immediately said “let’s play another” and with the mc’s nod we launched into New Speedway Boogie, which has been called the only topical song the Dead ever wrote – responding to a newspaper column questioning the “counterculture” after a man was murdered at the Altamont Speedway concert, four months after Woodstock.
Singing the chorus “one way or another, this darkness got to give” I felt the archetypal beneath the topical – the wheel keeps going around – and later remembered Rick Tarnas’ analysis that both Bill Clinton and W. Bush missed the central spiritual point of that period of awakening. Leadership arises most effectively from the bottom and the edges, and yet we also long for a national leader who “gets it” in a profound way.
So again to the lyrics of Robert Hunter:
I don’t know but I’ve been told
that if the horse don’t pull you gotta carry the load
I don’t know whose back’s that strong
Maybe find out before too long
