Spokane’s Day Of The Dead Memorial Draws Hundreds To Remember Jerry Garcia
And some people say Spokane’s got no spunk.
Nearly 1,000 people turned the softball field outside the Peaceful Valley Community Center into a festival of funk Saturday.
They came from all over the Inland Northwest to pay their respects to the late Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, who died Wednesday.
It seemed a fitting tribute to Garcia, a 53-year-old man known as a musical genius, counterculture icon, promoter of world peace and drug user.
Men wore skirts, and women went without bras.
People walked dogs, ferrets and kids on leashes.
Tie-dyed shirts, skirts, pants, even hair were in style at the event, which was organized by Michael Moon Bear, a local Dead fan and business owner.
Impromptu jam sessions erupted all over the outfield as would-be musicians picked guitars and sang songs.
Aging hippies and under-aged grungers traded cigarettes and stories about their favorite Grateful Dead concerts or songs.
Well-groomed, middle-aged men in designer jeans, their children in tow, laughed with unkempt teenagers in hand-me-downs.
Announcements of anything free - like “fabrics and pouches” - sent swarms scrambling to a line of beat-up Volkswagen vans parked along the right-field line.
On a makeshift stage covered by a blue utility tarp - a place where shoes and last names were optional - people offered testimonials and played music in honor of the fallen performer.
“I’ve never heard music that could make me cry, make me dance so hard, make me laugh so hard,” said an 18-year-old Deadhead named Tom. “The music’s not dead but the source is. It’s a real sad thing.”
Another guy with stringy blond hair strummed an acoustic guitar and admonished the crowd to “focus on the note and send Jerry some energy.”
A Deadhead named Cecil, who has seen 10 Grateful Dead concerts in the past two years, said for him, hearing Garcia play was “hearing the harmony of the universe played in a guitar note.”
A man named Chris sang a Led Zeppelin song off-key.
Someone read a Langston Hughes poem.
Above it all wafted a haze of incense, cigarette and marijuana smoke, punctuated now and then by exclamations of “Right on!”
They were, in a word, “Truckin’.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo