this is actually taken from a long series of facebook posts and comments i made on this day in 2018. april 15th is the birthday of my freind patrick who we lost in a drunk driving accident in 2005. This was way way before i was blogging but i wanted to paste it here and make little edits. i don’t know if i’ve told this story (on medium) before.
So, 18 years ago when I was 19 years old, a close friend of mine Was lost to a drunk driving accident. His name was pat and today would be his 38rd birthday. Every year around this time I get particularly nostalgic, which is what I really want to talk about.
When I look back at 2004–05 I really believe that my friends had only one album. It seemed like every time we were together we were loudly listening to it: house parties, the beach, on the pond, in whoever’s car we were in. I think it’s the album that made all of us really “get” the Grateful Dead. “Ladies and gentleman The Grateful Dead” is culled from the April 1971 run at Bill Graham’s Fillmore east. As I listen to it now I’m actually afraid it will light my headphones on fire.
I can think of at least 8 kids who at the end of high school listened to it over and over, every single day. It likely changed them forever (there may have been concurrent psychedelic experiments that helped) Every April I listen to it a few times and it’s one of those things that sounds better every time I listen. It’s magic, it’s lightening in a bottle.
When my friend died, many of us found our only comfort In the same record, and it’s closing track the cover of the folk song “we bid you goodnight”. When I hear it now, it’s impossible to avoid a little water in the corner of my eye.
So I bid you goodnight and share this album that transformed the lives of at least 8 kids I knew in a small town by cape cod.
I’ll share the memory of how I became friends with Pat Corbett.
The year I graduated high school, we packed about 10 of us in a van and made the 23 hour drive to the 2004 bonnaroo music and arts festival.
The big headlining band on Saturday night was The Dead (the core four GD members with Warren Haynes on lead guitar). The band was supposed to come on at 9 on the huge main stage. That didn’t happen.
That night around 8 there was a tornado warning broadcast on the festival site radio station. Imagine, there we were: 100,000 hippies out in a field of Tennessee farmland…
It wasn’t until around 2 or 3 AM until the band actually came on. And there I found myself stage right, halfway back with Pat. We didn’t know each other, we were more like acquaintances.
We were immeasurably high on whatever psychedelics we had gotten into that night , braving the downpours and chemically induced terror.
Pat looked at me and said “I’ve never seen this band”. It was just me and this vaguely familiar kid against the forces of weather and the cosmic weirdness that the band would unleash on us that night.
I’ve never listened to tapes of this show but I can tell you that the rendition of Dark Star was wayyy out there. Like “scare the shit out of you” out there.
To make things even more mentally taxing, as lightening was repeatedly striking , the band eased from dark star in to a cover of Pink Floyd’s “shine on your crazy diamond” suite, which stayed expectedly spacey and dark. Pat and I were in over our 18 year old heads….
I must have been wearing a look of sheer confusion during the space, because Pat leaned over me and said “they always come back from it”. Seconds later the band landed into “Morning Dew”
I remember calming down a bit during “dew”, the rain let up a bit.
The band dropped the “help on the way>slipknot> Franklin’s tower” to close the set and by “franklins” we were dancing and laughing and hugging. Riding the wave of youth, summer, music….of life.
We became close friends from then on out. We spent the rest of the summer floating on the pond, laughing and drinking. Thick as thieves.
Later that year (winter), I ran into pat at some house party. I hadn’t seen him in a bit, but he said something to me that rings true to me now at age 37.
He said “bob (that’s what he called me), I don’t even need to see you all the time to know that we’re friends, we just pick up where we left off”
He said “that’s the best kind of friend”
13 years later I still have friends like that and they are some of my most cherished.
I guess i was blogging on facebook, 3 years before i started blogging on medium.
