William F. Buckley And The Grateful Dead
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
My guess is that there are a large number of admirers of the work of the late William F. Buckley among readers of The Wanderer. If you are in that group, you will find it rewarding to spend some time with James Rosen’s new book A Torch Kept Lit. Come to think of it, even if you are not familiar with Buckley’s writing, I recommend Rosen’s book. You will discover why Buckley was such a favorite — a cult figure of sorts, in fact — of so many younger conservatives in 1960s and 1970s. The book is a compilation of some of the obituaries that Buckley wrote over the course of the last half of the 20th century.
If all you know of Buckley’s work are the columns he wrote in the ten or so years before he died in 2006, you do not know Buckley at his best. Buckley wrote several times during those years of how he had switched from writing his columns with a word processor to dictating them into a recording device. I hate to say this — I was an avid reader of Buckley’s work and a regular viewer of his television program Firing Line, a fan — but most of those later columns read like dictation, without the grace and elegant phrasing of his earlier written work.
The obituaries in Rosen’s book will give you an idea of why Buckley was admired by so many. I recommend especially the pieces on Whittaker Chambers, Ayn Rand, Richard Nixon, John Lennon, Barry Goldwater, and Jacqueline Onassis. Also the Jerry Garcia obituary.
Yes, that Jerry Garcia, the lead singer of the rock group The Grateful Dead. You would not think that Garcia and the Dead would be on Buckley’s radar screen, which focused more on Bach, Wagner, and Giuseppe Verdi. Actually, that was the case. Buckley was oblivious to The Grateful Dead and their music until, he writes, a young Harvard graduate began a National Review “internship that stretched into two or three years” in the late 1960s.
The intern invited Buckley to join him in attending a Grateful Dead concert. The young man had recently attended one of the group’s concerts and found it a “wonderful experience.”
Buckley did not take up the young man’s invitation, but informs us that he wishes he had, in the hope that he could have gained deeper insight into why the young man sank into “progressive listlessness” after becoming an enthusiast of the group, adopting the “trappings” of what people call a “Deadhead,” sandals and earrings, and tie-dyed shirts.
Beyond that, the intern’s writing became “unprofessional, and impenetrable,” prompting an associate editor at the magazine to inform Buckley that he thought the young man “was going off the deep end.”
In short order, the intern announced he was going to marry “a flower child who dressed as he had dressed. One weekend they just faded away. A few years later we received formal invitations from him to a second marriage, to a woman from South America,” where he was teaching English. Five years later, the staff at National Review learned the man had married again and had “gone off to live in the hills” in South America.
Buckley proceeds to ask a question that seldom is asked these days, by commentators on both the left and right who have adopted a libertarian posture that holds musicians and actors blameless when fans get caught up in the lifestyle of drugs, sex, and rock and roll that they glamorize in their songs and movies.
Buckley asks: “Is Jerry Garcia in some way responsible for this?” It is well known that drug use is considered to be “part of the experience” — not by all, but by many — at Grateful Dead concerts, extolled and joked about in many of the group’s songs.
The conventional wisdom is that celebrities have no responsibility to be “role models”; that they “create art” that cannot be blamed for the actions of a “few impressionable fans” who may “act irresponsibly,” just as John Wayne should not be blamed if some muddle-headed young man begins attacking classmates after watching one of Wayne’s shoot-em-ups.
But is it that simple? Do not addictive drugs add something starkly different to the equation? Garcia died after leaving a drug rehabilitation center. He had been addicted for many years before he entered rehab.
“He knew what his habits were doing to him,” Buckley writes, yet “he never went public on it. One has to suppose, sadly, that in his case, going public on his problem, would have required the dramatic gesture of retiring from the stage.” That is, required him to surrender his persona, his hip pose to the drug-taking fans at his concerts.
“If he had done so, it would not have been wounding to those of us who were never exposed to the special intoxicant of his performances, but, if he had done so, how many would have had better prospects for health, love, and longer lives.”
It is said with a wink by many fans of the Grateful Dead that Garcia died “with a smile on his face,” implying that he was high at the time. “But,” writes Buckley, “he also killed, if that’s the right word for such as our intern, a lot of people.”
Too harsh a charge? It is true that there are millions of Deadheads who do not destroy their lives with drugs. But there are also perhaps hundreds of thousands of young people who pride themselves on being Deadheads who end up dead or with wasted lives like Buckley’s intern.
It is not the same. The addictive properties of narcotics adds a dimension greatly removed from when teenagers wore their hair like Elvis or smoked a cigarette and tossed their hair like Lauren Bacall. Promoting “drugs, sex, and rock and roll” is no laughing matter. The stakes are too high to portray drug-addled teenagers and rock musicians as cool and comical in our popular entertainment.
Jerry Garcia did that. Buckley was right to nail him on it.
