Bob Cooperman – Cajun Mutt Press

Catching the Grateful Dead at the University of California-Berkeley, 1972

It wasn’t the Fillmore West
of hippie legend. Still,
UC-Berkeley was close enough,
tickets still affordable, though
I had to count out coins,
the cashier scowling
as if I were foisting foreign,
thus worthless, currency on him.

Once inside, I was a racehorse
champing for the starting gate
to fly open.

Finally, the band began to play,
and though I’d love to gush
it was the music of the spheres
lifting me out of my seat—
a Sufi mystic in the throes
of an ecstasy of music—
the Dead sounded like
they’d rather be anywhere else
in the world.

“They’re too stoned to play,”
the kid in front of me confided
to his girlfriend, who stroked him,
and he likewise her, to make
their own celestial melodies

while all I could do was groan
silently off-key, in envy.