The Deadgummits; blazing a long distance run through timelessness
A multi-generational ode to existence through the tall wheatgrass of unity.
Fred Eaglesmith captured a recurring, but inconsistent phenom I experienced as a teenager driving tractors in the wide open fields and diesel rigs to the granary in his song, Trucker Speed. I didn’t hear the song until just a few years ago.
I didn’t know a damn thing about drugs or booze. Not back then. Naw I’m talkin’ bout a bizarre, yet euphoric air ride sensation from the motorized chariot of destruction beneath my feet in the hours just after dusk but just short of me driving all fifteen tons of it into the river, nearly asleep at the wheel on a school night.
All damn day, and I mean every damn minute of a sixteen-hour drive, something was rattling or shaking or loose or wiggling or knocking inside the cab. Lawda mercy you hear the knocking before you see the shaking, ya dig. If not from inside the cab, most certainly along the drivetrain, or out back with the forty-foot wide disc or forty-foot long trailer. It was always something coming undone and it was always maddening.
Still is.
Once farmer kid joe fueled up for the evening’s last run, and grabbed cold spaghetti from the house, I’d climb back inside the cab, head back to the field and watch the sunset from my very own turbo diesel throne. A cab built for one with not a single soul around for a thousand miles.
I never knew when or where the magic would happen.
On the best days driving heavy machinery, some time after dusk, the whole damn thing planes out; levitates over the land; ten to fifteen tons of metal and rubber and hydraulic oil and nothing’s really touching the earth, ya dig? The engine, drivetrain, cab, implement, and the boy grinning like an idiot at the wheel are all in unity. A fascinating and eerie harmony of silence. Engine goes quiet, and the whirl of the glowing red turbo behaves as a hypnotic as I lean back in the seat no longer attached to the floor and “sometimes I feel like my wheels ain’t touchin the ground.” For me, and apparently Fred Eaglesmith, it was pure mechanical and existential bliss in the throne of solitude.
And it’s something I never talked about. I’ve never uttered it to another soul. Never thought to.
It was my own private space travel through utopia in the hours of darkness in the middle of nowhere.
Those were my symphonies back then.
For absolutely no reason whatsoever, at least none that I can think of, I never got into The Grateful Dead over the years. At least not their music. Prolly heard a ton of it on the radio or wherevs but was never pulled in by the whole movement. Community. Bleh. Thought it was all kind of bullshit, growing up. Could not fathom a world where people actually loved one other. A state of existing and doing and being unopposed. Above all, being present and kind to one another. A born skeptic raised violence familiale plowing through the world desperately seeking a safe haven of tangible truth.
And I never understood tie dye.
Until one day I did. But nothing ever grabbed me or rattled the curiosity in me to run back and listen to The Grateful Dead. As an outsider to the notion, I never put the Dead in the category of global hippies. Sure, some hippies may be dead heads but not all dead heads are hippies, ya dig. Traveling the world over the span of nearly five decades, I saw them everywhere.
Shortly after dusk in the mid-April planting season in the rolling hills and concrete fields of neighborhood americana, The Deadgummits planed out over the stage floor at Thelmas Peach in Tulsa, Oklahoma and levitated the crowd into the boyhood wonder of my ongoing and continuous rebirth; a clean slate of discovery and acceptance in a man no longer seeking the palpable thing.
No longer seeking truth from others.
A nine-piece noah’s arc of instrumentation, and a whole lotta love, summoned Tulsa’s happy hour crowd from the bumps, rattles, and shakedowns of everyday life to the tune of spirited classics conjured by generational gaps and lived human experiences worthy of celebration. And celebrate they did. As community. Young and old alike, dancers and movers all of them, their presence carried on the embodiment of not only The Grateful Dead, but of the fathers, uncles, mothers, and aunts (and all those in between) who existed beautifully in their own skin to spark childhood wonder and curiosity of generations to follow. The epitome of timelessness.
Up close and in tune with the river of life, Heather and Rex’s passion project extends the planting season of kindness, acceptance, and wonderment of life set to the tune of “rootscoustic” improvisation in a world increasingly hell bent on neurological, physical, and sonic perfection; chaos without harmony, application without balance, projection absent conviction. Nah, not for me, thanks.
No man ever steps in the same river twice. (Heraclitus)
Some time after dusk, in a neighborhood favorite watering hole, not so far removed from the endless fields of the great and miserable mississippi delta, I experienced the same phenom I long forgot as a kid, all those lifetimes ago. Halfway through their otherworldly tribute of Fire On The Mountain, the wheels of the band, the feet of the vibrant crowd, and the anchored bricks and stones of Thelmas came off the ground and levitated through the realms of angelic glory and into the souls of existential resonance; harmony with presence. Unity without measure.
Stringer.
After their show, I raced back to find any and all recorded versions of Fire On The Mountain, and in my wild-eyed and treasured disbelief, The Deadgummits version that night at Thelmas was simply magical. Far superior to any recorded version I could find.
Special to no one but that kid on the tractor, grinning like a goon waiting on adult me to come back and share the experience he somehow knew would unearth one day again.
A very special thank you to Heather, Rex, & Andrea and the gang for the warmest welcome and sweetest invitation to experience something previously far beyond reach for me.
Joe.
