Forgotten Space
When I was younger I followed the Grateful Dead. One September there was an extended run at Madison Square Garden, and one of those nights the band opened up with the medley Help On the Way > Slipknot > Franklin’s Tower. As it started, we found our seats on the right side of the auditorium, perpendicular with the stage. We were looking down at the band, able to see the two drummers play their full kits, the eight-limb machine on display.
I looked around our section and saw a large woman with hair past her waist moving her arms and hands in sign language to a row of eight people sitting behind her. She was dancing and signing to them, signing the lyrics of the song as the band played and sang it.
Her audience watched her and the band, slowly moving their heads to the vibrations. The woman worked her whole body into evoking the lyrics. She’d clearly done this before, and was into it. This was her profession, I assumed, or at least a part-time job - and she was good at it, as the smiles on her group’s faces showed. I don’t know how often deaf people attend concerts, but at that moment it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And in that moment I suddenly realized how lucky I was, how lucky anyone is to hear.
The band broke into the lilt of Franklin’s Tower. As Jerry Garcia sang the lyric, “In Franklin’s Tower, there hangs a bell,” the drummer closer to us, Mickey Hart, reached over and hit his cowbell without breaking cadence, the single tonk of the cowbell immediately following the word “bell” in the mix of sound. It was a clever, simple act that I’d never heard done within this song, and I chuckled. I doubt it would’ve registered had I not been looking down at the drummers playing. Nobody else in the band seemed to notice either, except for the bassist Phil Lesh, who turned around to look at the drummers, a giant shit-eating grin spread across his face. He had heard and put it together, and when his eyes met Hart’s he quickly nodded his big smiling face in a goofy way, as if to say, good one, dude, I got it.
It was a silly little joke, but it was wrapped in the middle of a song they’d played thousands of times, and it was new. And watching that little exchange between the band, and seeing the woman signing the song to her group, and hearing the music bounce around the Garden, I had one of those atom bombs of happiness go off within me, a moment of absolute joy, that joy that only live music can bring.
