Jerry

By Paul Ford

Just a college anecdote.

10/12 — I will be on Soundcheck on WNYC today at 2:00PM to talk about Gary Benchley, Rock Star. I'll go on after Don McLean. They may take phone calls. I'll be talking with the host about the book and about indie rock in general. It should be fun. If it's not fun then I will have failed. 212-264-7483 is the number to call in live, if you're so inclined.

Back in 1995 Jerry Garcia died. I was just finishing up college at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. I never really cared about the Grateful Dead all that much. Some of the Dead's music is okay if you don't have anything better to listen to, like, say, silence, or the sound of flies buzzing. I don't really have a problem with it, but I do have a problem with pious hippies. They get on my nerves in the same way that, say, Objectivists do. And I like all the stuff that hippies hate, like wearing solid colors, and living in a house that's not made of corncobs, and Western medicine.

My roommate in college had the same problem with hippies that I did. So we decided to put together a one-hour radio program for the college radio station, WALF, about the assassination of Jerry Garcia, complete with commentary and analysis and a slowed-down, audio-processed, totally fake bootleg of the song Sugar Magnolias to which we added fake gunshots. We played it one night and our friends were amused.

This was the early days of the web, and I figured I might as well put up a few pages about our assassination theory with some audio clips and see what happened. What happened is that Jerry fans sent me long emails explaining how important Jerry was to the world and that my theory was insanity and should be removed from the Internet immediately. Sometimes people would ask to speak to my supervisor.

I'd always write back. I'd send a fake email from the Internet Management Council, an organization that does not exist, telling the complaining party that their Internet would be shut down from this day on. And then they'd write back even more full of burning rage, telling me that they were going to write the Internet Management Council as well and have my Internet revoked. Sometimes I'd let them in on the joke, reminding them that Jerry Garcia had been in close contact with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and wasn't afraid of a good prank himself. They didn't write back. I did it over and over, and I was happy.