(San Francisco, 1968-69)
Whether she ever saw them perform we don’t know,
but she did go to a Janis Joplin show,
and Thom Gunn’s account of smoking a joint with her
backstage at a group reading makes it easier
to imagine her chatting with Jerry during a break
(about Billie Holliday, or Baudelaire, or Blake)
if not dancing in the aisles during one of the band’s
already notoriously labyrinthine jams
like the one between “Dark Star” and “Saint Stephen”
(a new song in their repertoire that season).
He would have been twenty-six, she fifty-seven.
She might have let it drop that Donovan
wanted to record “The Burglar of Babylon,”
he might have praised her trippy “Riverman,”
but she probably wouldn’t have uttered the phrase
she’d used in one of her unfinished essays
to describe the music of a rock band she’d seen
several times that year: a fucking machine—
though that might have led to a flurry of wit
or perhaps a killer rendition of “Love Light,”
with Pigpen lewdly rapping, in the second set.
Unlikely? Still, I’d like to think it happened—
my favorite poet meeting my favorite band.
Her partner then was in her twenties and
had connections to the music scene. Also,
in the year and a half she lived in San Francisco,
the Dead gave over sixty-five performances
so you’d think she’d have seen them once. Is
that too much of a stretch? Well, this just in:
five or so years later, on one of her trips up
to her beloved Nova Scotia, Bishop
brought as a present for her teenage cousin
a copy of Europe ’72—a triple album
gathered from live concerts—telling him
the Grateful Dead was a band to know about…
and also that it was okay to smoke pot.
—Jeffrey Harrison, Between Lakes, Four Way Books, 2020.
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