Sam Cutler

Having been in Makati for three weeks, and having spent most of that time cooped up like a Philippine cockerel in my hotel room with no room to strut or crow; I decided I’d spend a day being a tourist. The national Gallery of Art, along with the National Museum of the Philippine People appealed to me, otherwise it was the Museum of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and that seemed singularly unattractive. Having established the address via the internet (right by Manila City Hall, a building which looks like a bank and is similarly devoted to extorting money from people) I jumped in a cab for the ride to the twin temples of Philippine culture. It would almost have been quicker to walk. Makati Avenue and Taft Avenue are two major routes in Manila and constantly choked with traffic. Yesterday was no exception. Trucks, busses, jeepneys, cars and motorcycles competed in a toxic fog of sickening pollution which made my eyes sting as I sat in the back of the cab busy going nowhere. A journey, which in a normal city would have taken ten minutes, took almost an hour, and by the time I was delivered to the wrong place my lungs were wracked with protesting coughs and my spine had been battered by a hundred pot holes. The cab was a good one. It had long since worn out its shock absorbers and the starter motor didn’t have long to live as the engine stalled at every opportunity, but by Manila standards it was in great shape. The only solace from the whole grim experience of the journey was that the fare cost less than three dollars and the driver was pleasant enough to grin like a banshee through the whole trip as is the Philippine’s way. They’re a happy bunch here in Manila though the emaciated kids pawing at the windows of the cars can be a little disconcerting at times. I finally got dropped beside Manila City Hall which sits incongruously across a broad boulevard from an eighteen hole golf course. This is in the center of a chaotic Asian city of some thirty million souls. Needless to say, less than one percent of one percent of the population is rich enough to play golf on the course, let alone own a set of clubs. In fact most Philippinos couldn’t afford a pair of golf shoes, let alone the other accessories. Imagine Central Park in New York, or Hyde Park in London, being a private club surrounded by high fences and teeming with security and you get the picture. It amazed me to see three people playing a game of lackluster golf at a leisurely pace and being totally unconcerned about the desperate squalor by which they were surrounded. On all side the homeless begged with outstretched palms to little effect - I certainly felt acutely embarrassed. No-one, when I asked, had a clue where the National Museum of the Philippine People was, so I made the dubious choice of asking a policeman. He didn’t have a clue either, but he had a radio. After a long conversation he proudly pointed to a huge building on the other side of the street and then ostentatiously stopped a tidal wave of traffic so that I might proceed to cross. I received my fare share of hostile stares but at least I made it to the Museum in one piece. I felt like I should have tipped the cop but I didn’t as it might have been considered poor form. Or not. Hard to tell about such things in Manila but I was advised by an old hand at traveling in the archipelago that it was wisest to bribe first and not bother to ask questions after. It was no coincidence I felt that Manila City Hall was by far and away the best maintained building in the city – it even had a fresher paint job than the golf club. Probably cost more to play in City Hall than at the Golf Club – both places stank of money like Manila stinks of poverty. The National Art Gallery of the Philippines is in a magnificent building that used to house the Philippines parliament and the building certainly overawes the art installations inside, save in one respect, the magnificent painting Spolarium by Juan Luna which won the gold medal at the 1884 Madrid Exposition. The painting is massive, standing to the ceiling height of about five meters and being some twenty meters (if not more) in width. (18’ x 70’) In ancient Rome, the Spolarium was the place in the Roman Coliseum where dead or dying gladiators were stripped of their final belongings, their last shred of dignity, in other words; despoiled. It was a dark and gruesome place, the scene of the nightmare ending to short and brutal lives. The painting when it was presented in Madrid in 1884 was seen as a metaphor for the condition of the Philippines chafing under the brutalities and exploitation of colonial Spain with its people’s despoiled defeated and conquered. Standing in the huge room which was once the Senate I allowed the painting’s subliminal message to wash over me. The painting dominates the room more surely than any politician-speaker could have done, and it screamed of the continuing indignity of the Philippines position. From colonial masters in Spain and America and cruel occupation by the Japanese, the Philippines has struggled beneath loathsome handicaps, and today, whilst nominally a free country, the people of the islands still carry immense burdens. Standing at 117 in the world’s economies, the Philippines is a nest of vituperative political intrigue and rampant corruption at every level, from the street cop to the highest politicians in the land. But, hopefully things are changing. The new President seems to be honest, which will be the first time an honest man had been elected President of this benighted country. The last one ( a woman) stole as much as she could get away with, including a 130 million dollar grant for poor farmers to buy fertilizers gifted from the IMF. Not one pesos made it to the farmers with the whole amount being brazenly stolen by the former President and the Minister for Agriculture. Meanwhile the literally impoverished masses that the painting seems to refer to, live in unbelievable squalor in Manila. I stood before the painting and it made my heart feel heavy with that despair many Western people can feel in Asia. Honesty, integrity, compassion, social justice, and even common humanity seem distant dreams in the Philippines; and yet the people have about them a friendliness and openness, a basic cheerfulness, that is positively remarkable when placed against the background conditions they are forced to endure. Philippinos are a brave and noble people badly served by their elites. Three percent of the population controls over ninety percent of the wealth and from such gross inequalities revolutions are born. There are active insurgencies under way in the Philippines that have festered for several decades. And yet, for all that ,this is a wonderful country brimming with positivity and optimism. My eyes went back to the painting Spolarium, with its savage depiction of the degradations of Roman public life. Was this how things were in Manila today ? As I departed the building with its mock Grecian portico I looked at the verdant greens of the golf course glistening beneath their irrigation sprays. Traffic rumbled past belching the grossest of fogs. Three little children who could have been no older than five at the most stumbled past with their rickety legs and outstretched palms and beseeching eyes. I felt as if the ghost of the painter of Spolarium strolled beside me pointing out the sights. Here a statue, there a bank. Everywhere the excess of a major metropolis. And beneath it all, supporting the whole suppurating edifice, the teeming hungry masses of Asia from whose mouths sustenance had been callously stolen for centuries. These people the noble artist embraced.

© sam cutler 2012

IF I KNEW THE WAY ……

Much is now being made of the Grateful Dead’s business model as some kind of guide to contemporary industry, and I think this bears closer scrutiny (no pun intended). The very idea that the ‘corporate model’ of a rock and roll ‘collective’ has some relevance to a publicly listed company is on the face of it risible, BUT perhaps it possesses some merit. The question, what was it that made the Grateful Dead’s experiences relevant to today’s companies, (if anything) needs to be examined and answered.
A corporation is responsible (in the final analysis) to its shareholders and it is the responsibility of the board of directors to deliver ‘value’ to those shareholders. HOW that is achieved, on what BASIS decisions are made, is very largely no concern of the ultimate owners of a company (the shareholders) unless they seriously object to the methodologies employed when they can subsequently chose (theoretically) to dismiss the board of the company at an AGM. Whatever the Grateful Dead ‘model’ was it would have been inconceivable for Jerry Garcia to have been ‘dismissed’, so the analogy with current corporate structures simply doesn’t apply. The Grateful Dead over the years were MANY things but the members of the band were never (in a classical sense) the ‘directors’ of the board and Garcia was never a CEO in the accepted meaning of the word. What WAS IT the Grateful Dead DID that is of ‘relevance’ ?
My opinion is that Garcia practiced a form of ‘benevolent despotism’ which his employees (the family) were prepared to accept upon the basis that firstly he was irreplaceable and secondly that he was a worthy recipient of the collective’s ‘trust’. People loved Jerry, they loved him as a ‘wise old bird’ and they loved his music which was central to the whole endeavor. I can think of no CEO that bears comparison to Garcia in the contemporary economic scene – Warren Buffet and Steve Jobs are the only two that even come close in my mind, and neither of them played in a band – they (like Garcia) simply ran companies with unrivalled personal power and authority. Buffet and Jobs approach was ‘big picture stuff’ as was Jerry’s, and Berkshire Hathaway and Apple (AND the Grateful Dead) seemed to have worked on a principal where bye all was fair as long as the ‘main man’ didn’t DIS-agree. This allowed for flexibility and innovation and an environment where people’s ideas were valued and seen as real assets rather than annoyances.
The one thing the Grateful Dead’s ‘business model’ possessed which is sadly lacking in the contemporary business world was flexibility. The ability to remain ‘light on its feet’ to change it’s approach when its systems were failing, to alter its ‘strategic planning’ at a moments notice, and (built into the whole thing) most importantly; a commitment to the collective upon the part of the employees rather than the pursuit of naked individual self-interest. The Grateful Dead practiced an essential ‘cooperative’ model of benevolent capitalism rather than a ‘competitive’ model – other people making music (and their success or failure) had little or no interest to the Dead. In the final analysis the Dead were only interested in one thing, namely ‘how to survive’.
Their ‘answer’ to this ‘problem’ is where, to some extent today’s business community might well learn something. The priority for the Dead was to make sure that their fans (their customer base if you like) always felt involved and catered to by the band’s activities. The Dead made music with them and for them and every ‘deadhead’ felt an intimate connection with the band’s activities. The band never forgot from whence they came which was the ‘alternative culture’ which spawned in the Haight Ashbury in the 60’s. As this small group dispersed throughout the country the Dead kept the essentially ‘cooperative and harmonious philosophy’ of that period alive. The band embodied those values, never forgot them, and paid back their followers with music that was true to their origins.
The only CEO of a major company that I know of who gladly credited some of his success and insights to LSD was Steve Jobs. One can make of this what one will. It would be a brave man that suggested the ‘captains of American industry’ should all take acid! LOL. BUT one can say this in the current economic climate. Many of the old business models are outdated and due for a ‘major rethink’. They need to be re-examined fearlessly and those parts of the model which don’t ‘fit’ any more need to be discarded or at least substantially modified. A new approach to the whole business of how a company ‘relates to its customers’ needs to be formulated where customers no longer are ‘consumption units’ but rather seen as ‘flesh and blood’ people who will respond better to kindness and care than they will to exploitation. The same could be said of ‘employees’. Their relationship to a company needs to be re-examined and some of the more de-humanizing aspects of employment need to be addressed. In short – throw out the old and bring in the new – and in the unlikely event that it aint broke, then don’t fix it !
I have always thought that in life we are confronted with opposing choices, and that how we synthesis these opposites is a pressing concern. Essentially the question for people of my generation and those who follow on is this. HOW can we live harmoniously and essentially cooperatively in a competitive world without ultimately destroying the planet upon which we rely for our survival? Tired of the rat race, of dog-eat-dog? Then come up with a new model. This is the constant challenge. The Grateful Dead came up with some answers of their own – there’s no reason that I can think of why others cannot do the same, each in their own unique and special way. My contribution, as a writer, is simply to ‘point the finger’ at the problem and to confess that “if I knew the way I would take you home”.

© sam cutler 2012

For the last thirty years (or so) I haven’t read novels, preferring instead to read works of non-fiction. 
In some respects my life has been lived as if it were a novel, with me as the author of inter-weaving plots and developments that have twisted and turned in arbitrary ways sometimes outside of my own control. I may well have thought myself the captain of the ship HMS Word, but it often plunged me headlong into strange seas of my own devising, to become sometimes becalmed and sometimes almost ship wrecked. My navigation of my own life has often been faulty, based in innocent foolishness upon an inner compass that has swung wildly and an outer horizon that has sometimes alarmingly advanced rather than receded. Sometimes (rather fortuitously) I have found myself at critical moments up the proverbial creek without a paddle and thereby saved from veritable typhoons that would have otherwise seen me mercilessly swamped by waves. It’s been a total lottery!
Put another way, it could be said that for the last thirty years or so I have had a tenuous grip upon what passes for formal or consensual reality. To provide the antidote to my own shocking self-absorbed narcism I decided about a month ago to begin to read novels again and to see what other writers made of the world in the somewhat forlorn hope that this might help me to, as the Americans say, ‘get real’.
I went back to one of my first true loves – Dickens and Great Expectations. What an opening to a book! My mind raced with a million possible developments of the plot and I began to think the first chapter would make the basis of a wonderful Opera. The convict (an Irish political prisoner) could sing of his being deported from his homeland to sail upon the British hulk to Australia, leaving his young family never to be seen again. He escapes from his imprisonment and encounters Pip who is so moved at the thought of the convict’s plight that he decides to help him. 
Whilst reading Dickens all kinds of thoughts like these entered my mind and I found myself having to do battle with my own imagination, and I had to literally force myself to surrender to the will of the writer of the novel. A certain receptive passivity was required of me. I had to abandon my own ‘wonderings’ and allow my inner self to be taken upon the journey that Dickens wished me to take. It was a surprisingly difficult requirement and I struggled to surrender to the plot that Dickens had created and to not superimpose my own fantasies upon the other man’s tale. It was only when I had finally graciously encompassed the towering imagination of Dickens, and got out of his and my own way; that at last I could participate in the glorious journey that the immortal author wished to share with me his reader. 
I have always read two or three books at once, it’s a habit I have had since I was a child. I love the challenge of moving from one book to the other and forcing myself to remember what had previously happened. It keeps me sharp! So in the middle of Dickens and Victorian London I began a short novel by the Australian Author Michael Wilding. The Prisoner of Mount Warning was wonderful and I couldn’t put it down – read the whole thing in a day. It is a tale of the security services and their interest in domestic politics in the sixties. Fascinating and thought provoking and deeply disturbing. Anyone who was alive in the glorious sixties, the years of my own young adulthood, should read this book. It makes one realize what a hopeless and ineffectual bunch were all were when it came to actually changing anything other than our own version of hedonistic pleasure. 
Dickens awaits me, and I shall return to him for a while. When I go to my next book as I plod happily through Dickens, it shall be a Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. Check him out – I am told he’s delicious and delicate as the Cherry Blossoms the Japanese adore. 
Novels have been no help whatsoever in assisting me to ‘come to terms’ with my own life. Not at all! They simple confirm in me the conviction that life is wildly unpredictable serendipitous contingent and more or less beyond one’s control – unless of course one is an author and then one can ‘construct’ a life upon a page. But real life is not written on pages, it’s written in our own days. It’s a marvelous monster slowly devouring us as we rust slowly with old age – assuming we’re lucky enough to get that far! Who the hell really knows what it is, this thing called life? Sometimes I think I understand, at others I’m absolutely convinced I haven’t got a clue! I laugh gaily at both realizations – they help me to chuckle at myself and to keep my own imagination within certain bounds.
The interior life is a gift. We live with it as we may. The disciplined mind apprehends the world knowing the gloriously decadent influence of illusion. It appreciates the absurdities and necessities of distinctions. It observes itself and its own processes dispassionately and with true compassion. It is, as it were, kind to itself. Books, my friends my life long companions, have been such wonderful antidotes to the poisonous delusion that I am in charge of how my life will ultimately devolve. They have enriched me immeasurably. My own work continues, and as I hover near my sixty ninth birth day I am so pleased that I chose to become a writer. But I chose to write non-fiction. I am not a novelist. I lack the certain kind of imagination that novels require. Sometimes I think that I put the measure of that imagination into my own life – it seems that way to me. But what the hell do I know? I’m sixtynine (almost) and still working on it!

© sam cutler 2012

Michael Phelps the champion Olympic swimmer has reportedly been photographed smoking a bong! Tens of millions of people know what he was up to – he was getting high! He was exercising his perfectly legitimate right to the pursuit of happiness. He was smoking something (I presume) that grows in virtually every country on the planet – a weed. The human race has been smoking weed for centuries with no discernable long-term ill effects. What then is the problem?

The risible situation whereby huge numbers of otherwise law abiding citizens (and Champion Olympians) are criminalised by their activities, when they smoke and get high; is long overdue for reform. Even the police know that smoking pot is not a criminal justice problem per se. The vast majority of pot smokers lead productive and busy lives and are in all respects participant members of society. They’re the doctor. The man driving the bus. The government functionary. The politician. The judge and the jury. They are us.

Millions of people have smoked pot. Its way less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. It’s time to decriminalise the whole situation. Allow people to have a little bit and to get on with their lives without fear of unreasonable search and seizure. Then perhaps the focus of attention and concern could be directed towards those drugs which are decidedly antithetical to the interests of human beings and a blight upon the society in which we all live.

A guy who has won fourteen gold medals at the Olympics smokes pot. Says it all really. Is there anyone who can really claim with any justification that pot is ‘bad’ for you? That it enfeebles people, makes them listless and lacking in motivation? Michael Phelps should stand up and be counted but unfortunately commercial pressures are intervening. He has already apologised to his fans in China and is said to be full of regret for what he did. A pity really. How heartening it would have been if he had the courage of his convictions and told the world that he reserved the right to get high. Marihuana does not enhance an athlete’s performance. It’s a recreational drug. Phelps managed to get fourteen gold medals whilst being a stoner. What to say, but good on him?

Ó Sam Cutler 2012

“It is important to realize that ALL black markets are dangerous to the public health, damaging to the economy, corrupting to officials, and create a basis for crime”

                                Bear “Owsley” Stanley

         The Grateful Dead were a legendary California band that went from being totally broke and playing for free in San Francisco parks to becoming multi-millionaires and one of the most successful live acts in the history of the music industry. They famously were the ‘house band’ for the early acid tests and were (initially) financially supported by Owsley one of the most well known Underground Chemists of the day.

In many respects they were pioneers of the “San Francisco sound” and the band became synonymous with the whole “hippie ethos” which sprang from the sociological experiment that was the Haight Ashbury in the late sixties. People who were into the alternative culture of that period identified with the band and thought of it as “our” band, the band of that generation of ‘freaks’ who were proud to call themselves ‘Deadheads’. The Grateful Dead played whilst the Deadheads got high. Then acid was made illegal and things got tricky.

A large part of the blame for the hysterical over-reaction of the authorities to LSD and to illicit drugs in general can be laid at the feet of Timothy Leary. Leary was a renegade Harvard professor with a mouth that exceeded the measure of his intellect by a considerable factor. Leary delighted in shocking the mainstream press with sensationalist claims as to the benefits of LSD. His pathetic and simplistic catch cry of “turn on tune in drop out” became the alarm bell that alerted the authorities to the ‘problem’ of drugs and hastened LSD being driven underground. This was to have incalculably negative long-term effects.

The Grateful Dead were always distrustful of the loud-mouthed proselytizing blandishments of anyone who was in favor of the consumption of drugs. The Dead’s own ‘way’ was infinitely more subtle and sophisticated than Leary’s blustering performances. In certain respects, within the Grateful Dead, it was considered in rather poor taste to make direct reference to LSD and it certainly was not the case that anyone in the group publicly propounded widespread consumption as any kind of panacea or solution to anything.

As a group of artists they remained discreet whilst preferring to allude to the substance elliptically and metaphorically through their music and lyrics rather than by direct exhortation. Everyone in their audience knew (for example) what the lyric “ladyfinger dipped in moonlight writing what for across the morning sky” was referring to, and if they didn’t then they darned soon found out and not by reading the newspapers.

With drugs being seen as a mounting problem the authorities dedicated more and more resources to their suppression with all of the law enforcement agencies only too happy to stress the accumulating scale of the problem as a simple means of producing ever accelerating budget levels for their departments. This spiraling self-reinforcing series of events eventually led to the President of the United States declaring an all-out “war on drugs” with thousands of consumers being imprisoned for ever-increasing periods of time. The battle lines were well and truly drawn.

The ‘failure’ of Grateful Dead (the whole gamut of band and supporters who at this stage numbered in the several millions) was to do anything effectively to arrest the development of the continuingly punitive approach to drugs. Very little if anything was said or done to support the notion of a more balanced approach and people generally were so intimidated by the ‘forces of order’ that no-one seemed able or willing to ‘put their head above the parapet’ and call for a more rational approach to the ‘problem’. Indeed, it would have been a brave person that could claim publicly that there simply was NO problem and America and the Western World in general seemed to have no small child willing to stand up and bravely point out that the emperor had no clothes!

What had started out as harmless fun and hedonistic involvement (if not spiritual ritual) became criminalized and a danger to one’s individual liberty. If one consumed drugs, cultivated them, or possessed them the chances were one was going to get busted. Over the years ten and thousands of people were imprisoned, some for savage periods of time, and yet no effectively organized form of resistance was to ever emerge.

The forces of repression remain pre-eminent to this day and towards the end of the Grateful Dead’s artistic life in the 90’s there was serous disquiet in band circles that the Dead were actually making their fans a target for police action by conveniently gathering them all together in the one place where drugs were consumed – their concerts! The activities of the police was certainly not restricted merely to the band’s fan base – Garcia their lead guitarist was busted numerous times.

The most pernicious effect of the whole war on drugs has been the criminalization of the means of production and distribution of illegal narcotics. When there was virtually no legal action taken against drugs (in the early sixties) there was little or no criminal involvement in the drug trade – indeed, a drug trade barely existed with the whole thing being based upon trust and exchange between friends. As the repression increased so the potential for profit increased and as a result criminals saw an opportunity to get involved. They have done this with startling and ruthless efficiency, so that all of the drug trade is now controlled by supra-national criminal gangs and narco-terrorists who are virtually too powerful for law-enforcement agencies to deal with.

Where is all of this to end? The war will not be on the streets of Pakistan and Afghanistan but much closer to home and it is already well under way with over twenty thousand deaths. This is the war for control of the supply of drugs to the major cities of the United States and Canada. This war is currently being waged in Mexico but slowly and surely it is expanding to the mainland of North America. In every major American city South American gangs are already entrenched and when the battle for supremacy has played out in Mexico it will move to the Detroit’s and Chicago’s and other cities.

Local police departments will be unable to match the ferocity and firepower of the criminal cartels (as has happened in Mexico) and the ‘war’ against them will become professionalized. This put simply, means that Federal military resources will inevitably be brought to bear, which (in turn) means full-scale urban warfare with mounting casualties. The extraordinary thing is that all of this can be directly traced back to the initial approach to drugs, their being made illegal, and the virtually supine acceptance by people of my generation of this turn of events. On every level the people of the sixties failed and we are now reaping the ‘benefits’ of that failure.

We now have a President of the United States who is honest enough to admit that he’s smoked pot and sniffed cocaine. This admission didn’t stop him getting elected. It is time for some super-realism to enter the debate about drugs. Come to think of it, it’s time there WAS a debate about drugs, one based upon a realistic assessment of what is happening on the street. It would be wise for this debate to be conducted before the streets of American cities are awash with the blood of decapitated bodies as they are in Mexico.

As the prohibitions on alcohol delivered America into the hands of the Mafia, so the prohibitions on drugs have delivered America into the hands of an even more ruthless enemy. The only possible public policy that will halt the inexorable advance of South American narco-cartels is a policy of decriminalization or outright legalization. This, it seems, is unlikely to happen and the future is bleak. How many deaths will it take before the United States grasps the nettle and realizes that it is in making drugs illegal in the first place that the roots of all the current problems lie?

As the Chinese saying has it: ‘we live in interesting times’.

© sam cutler 2011

“All the musicians in the Grateful Dead loved playing for people who hadn’t heard their music before – a fresh ‘new’ audience represented a golden opportunity to “strut their stuff” musically, to blow a few proverbial minds, and to have a whole lot of fun.

The Grateful Dead had long dreamed of playing in Europe but because of the logistical problems involved and the cost of moving people and equipment the dream had never quite materialised. As a European member of the family I was keen to introduce the music of Grateful Dead to a wider audience and I soon got Garcia’s support for the idea.

I was firmly of the opinion that a tour of Europe by the Grateful Dead would be possible on a financial level and that we would be able to bring most of the family along for the ride.  Jerry simply required two things: one was that we record the tour and the second was that we take as many family members as possible.

I decided the best way to get the tour together was to go to Europe up front and scope out the possibilities – people needed to be persuaded as many European promoters knew very little (if anything) about the band and we all wanted to be sure that we played in the finest venues available to us.

I went to London and hooked up with John Morris and Tom Salter who became the key London promoters, and Euro-hosts for the band. We stayed with Tom and Frances Salter at a Templar fortified manor house they happened to own. It was built in 1312. 

French, Dutch, German and Danish promoters soon came on board eager to be involved with the mysterious phenomena which was Grateful Dead and within ten days I was able to return to the USA with enough promises of money to get over fifty people and equipment to Europe - and (most importantly) to also get them back!

There was a mad scramble for places and through a system I still haven’t quite fathomed out, the necessary people were duly assembled for the journey. You were either on the bus or off the bus – in this case literally as we had decided to tour around Europe in two buses. Over fifty people made the trip and it turned into something of an epic journey replete with many musical highlights and lots of suitable craziness.

Some travelled in an “American bubble” and barely had anything to do with the Euro-natives whilst some were culturally adventurous and hired cars and shot off on mad jaunts through Euro-land in search of what they might find. There were a nominal total of 53 people on the journey and I can remember counting people at several critical points only to never achieve the exact mysterious number 53.

In Denmark where the police told me there was a problem at the border I had to count everyone and collect their passports – I think the total was 51, and I could never work out who was missing. In Switzerland we left someone stranded in no-man’s land between Switzerland and France and having counted all the passports arrived at a total of 50, which was highly improbable. There were three people missing but whom they were or what happened to them I was never able to conclusively establish.

We wandered around Europe with everything perfect except for the numbers and no one seemed to mind! For me, as the Tour Manager, it seemed almost churlish to wonder about such a meaningless requirements as everybody being “present and correct”. Far too military a concept for the Grateful Dead! We arrived in Europe with 53 and we left Europe two months later with 53 – what happened in the interim is the stuff of legends and dreams.

The band played magnificently and certainly blew some European minds. They had never heard a band like the Dead and the musicians rose to the challenge of a fresh audience with infectious enthusiasm and audacious joy.  The unique elixir of life, which accompanies the band, manifested throughout the tour and the audiences responded accordingly.

I suspect the band was slightly bemused at first to realise that people in Europe got just as high at their concerts as people in San Francisco. To play in a concert hall where Mozart himself gave a recital some three hundred years ago is quite an experience. When two thousand people accompany the opening chords of the music by lighting up joints (in a hall with a strict no smoking policy) then even Mozart has to take second place to Uncle John’s Band!

The Tour Manager has a slightly different view of being on tour than anyone else, if only because he’s naturally nervous about losing a member of his touring party. I was constantly ‘losing’ people only to have them magically reappear, and indeed on one memorable occasion (in Lille in Northern France) I got lost myself! It was somewhat humbling to realise that nobody seemed to notice! The tour continued on its merry way and I sheepishly rejoined it several hours later with no one being unkind enough to enquire where I had been! Fortunately I managed to hang on to the money and the passports and more by luck than judgement the tour party was still in the same country as myself so I was able to rejoin with a minimum of fuss. There are some who claim that Tour Managers should not take psychedelics!

 We experienced several narrow escapes at various border crossings as the tour rumbled its way across Europe and at every stage the band and travellers were assisted by divine providence. Most of the customs officers we met were simply stunned to see two bus loads of hippies with most of them wearing red clowns noses and rather than deal with the apparition simply waved us on our way!

Only once were we ever ‘searched’ and that was on the magnificently efficient German border with Denmark where some twenty customs officers emptied the busses of people and began a systematic search of our belongings. For reasons that now escape me the customs officers told me the busses smelt of Hashish (who would believe it!) yet they never once looked in the curtains of the busses for the offending item and we were ‘mysteriously saved’.

And so it was that after two months, over twenty tons of equipment (including a sixteen track tape machine) and fifty-three people made it from America to Europe and back again. That we ended up without losing anyone and with hundreds of hours of wonderful music on tape is nothing short of a miracle.

The tour has entered the annals of the Grateful Dead as one of the more memorable adventures of that happy tribe of musical troubadours and there is little doubt that the gods were on our side.

As we wandered the planet beneath the European rainbow with our boots filled with dreams I can still remember Garcia’s only complaint: that he wasn’t getting to play enough music – he didn’t want one day off, he simply wanted to play every day of his life.

This music brings back the happiest of memories. It is said in the land of secrets that a life fondly remembered is a life lived twice.”

©Sam Cutler 2011

              In most countries on New Years Eve the fireworks are in one place and the audience are in another – rather like in an outdoor theatre. Sydney has a world class example of this with the fireworks on the Harbor Bridge and barges parked nearby, whilst an audience of a million plus watches from every available vantage point all over the city. Things in Manila could not be any more different. Here the show and the audience are as one, and where the fireworks end and the people begin is as clouded as  dawn  on an Irish bog. No such thing as ‘safety concerns’ here – everyone’s in the middle of the show and the people screaming and laughing are as much the show as the fireworks. It’s a miracle that hundreds are not maimed and killed, though several thousand are injured, some of them seriously.

              I thought I’d watch the fireworks from the vantage point of my fifth floor hotel room from where I could see a good slice of the city, but it didn’t take me long to realize that the real show was going on all round the hotel at ground level. It was a much better choice to hit the streets, so at 11.45pm on New Year’s Eve I headed out the door. The hotel corridors were already full of the smell of cordite and smoky with fumes. Fireworks had been exploding all day with the most impressive bangs which sounded like military munitions going off – several times my room had actually shook and I  had laughed as I found myself flinching as a particularly loud percussive wave rattled the windows with a terrifying crash.

             Everyone and their granny was on the streets. In the side alleys off the main roads family groups were huddled around make-shift barbeques cooking food for themselves, youngsters were screaming with delight and throwing fire crackers, the air was thick with smoke; and in all directions rockets were exploding manically in the city skies. The main drag was packed with people laughing and joking and setting off fireworks in the middle of the streets which had been more or less abandoned by traffic. A few hardy souls on motor cycles were braving the explosions but all the cars had been placed as far away as possible from the burning rain-storm of explosives which would ruined their paint jobs in a moment. I stood on Makita Avenue wondering at the chaos and confusion and got hit in the head by the stick of an expired rocket that had fallen out of the sky – all the people around me laughed good naturedly and screamed Happy New Year as if I had been particularly fortunate. I grinned and shrugged and felt it was a good omen for the next trip around the sun. The city literally looked as if it was on fire.

             Manila is experiencing a huge construction boom with high rise blocks sprouting all over the city, and from many of these blocks the construction workers were launching impressive fire works displays with anarchic abandon. Empty lots hosted street people who had bonfires and more fireworks and everywhere Chinese fire crackers in long strings exploded chaotically as young girls ran yelling and screaming with mock fear and delight. I walked alone for over an hour through the middle of it all, and for what must have been a thousand times happy and flushed friendly faces yelled out Happy New Year to me. As a white man in an Asian city I have never felt safer and I have traveled through most if not all of the hell holes Asia can spectacularly offer.

             The Filipino people are graciousness personified and their New Year’s Eve was without doubt the wildest and most exuberant and profligate that I have ever witnessed. I stumbled back to my hotel at just before two in the morning and headed for sleep. An explosion of monstrous proportions soon knocked that idea for six

as I lay in my bed listening to the sound track of world war three rattle the windows. It went on all night and was supplemented at four in the morning by a deafening karaoke system that someone had set up right outside the hotel. It was karaoke versus fireworks and impossible to tell who won the prize for volume. At last, around five thirty the damned karaoke ceased, just when I had thought to get dressed and go down and strangle some drunk who was singing for the third time “I did it my way”. Peace and quiet. Bliss.

          I was woken at 6.00am by an atrocious rendition at deafening volume of “O come all ye faithful” as I groaned and looked at my wrist watch. Impossible ! But then New Year’s day was a Sunday, the day when the deeply religious Filipinos all go to church. The karaoke stage was now the setting for the first Mass of the new year. There was no getting away from it and the hymns and religious rock were to continue throughout the day with the odd massive explosion as accompaniment. Sleep was impossible and I tried to read. I couldn’t get into the subtle nuances of Narcissus  and Goldmund and finally found a suitable book in Hyperspace by the physicist Michio Kaku which I had brought from Australia – string theory and  ten dimensions and all kinds of ‘strangeness’. Fascinating stuff and enthralling enough to divert my attention from the annoying noise from outside that continued throughout the day.

              I had experienced my first and memorable Philippines New Year’s Eve. Where all night the Filipinos had done their best to replicate the “Big Bang’ (the original ‘singularity’) with the loudest and most explosive fireworks. Then with barely a pause for breathe, and no sleep, in their millions all the next day they sang about it (the creation of the Universe) and praised their God with unstinting devotion. The enthusiasm for both activities made me feel exhausted even though I was an observer rather than a participant. But then the new physics explicitly states there is no such thing as an object  and an observer ‘relationship at a distance’. They are (effectively) ‘as one’. Neither possesses an existence independent of the other. It certainly felt that way to me in Manila and anyway I simply no longer possessed to the strength to argue with the book the fireworks or the Church about it; and thus I finally fell asleep.

© sam cutler 2012

           Merry lunacy on the last day of the year with Makati City sounding like Beirut in 1976 – there are explosions going off everywhere (fireworks) and I thought poverty was ubiquitous here; man these people have got money to burn! I rose at three thirty a.m. to work on a chapter that has stubbornly been refusing to end and all was peace and quiet – perfect! The only sound was that of the air-conditioner that rumbled with a tone similar to that of most of the cars around here. It grumbled like an old car like it had a gear (or two) missing and had last seen oil several months ago. Nonetheless I persevered and with the chapter miraculously completed I went for breakfast at seven with the happy prospect of then going to sleep. Fat chance! No sooner had I place my head on the pillow than a sound like a land-mine explosion literally shook my room five floors about the street. It was a massive concussive blast and I was sure it was some form of commercial explosive. I wandered to look out the window and could see nothing, though I could hear merry explosions calling out in response to the original big bang from across the city and into the distance. Philippinos are a happy people who rejoice in essentially innocent vulgarity the brash and extrovert side of life. The louder and more garish the color the better, and when it comes to fireworks well the requirements are simple - they should make (at the very least) one hell of a noise. Which is what they are doing right now and delighting some twenty million residents of this city into the bargain. I must have been the only person dumb enough to have even thought about sleeping at twelve thirty midday on the last day of they year. Forget it. No one is going to be sleeping for at least another eighteen hours or more. Things around here are completely topsy-turvy and the locals love it. They are merrily getting drunk, burning what must be millions of dollars worth of fire-works, and everyone is happily confused and there are still almost twelve hours to go until midnight and none could give a toss . The cockerel that rules his roost in the wasteland behind the hotel is joyously crowing for day like it was only just dawn and he’s six hours late! This is one crazy country and you have got love it otherwise it would drive you mad. I’m so pleased I brought my work with me – sleep is impossible so I can remain focused on getting my book finished and console myself with the thought that I’ve slept enough for this year. There’ll be plenty of time next year to make up for being tired. The chapter is finished , I’m going to spoil myself and head for the street where it’s all happening. I wonder where I can buy some fireworks and join in the fun? I ask the pretty girl at the hotel desk where I can purchase fireworks, (it sounds like a full-scale battle is going on outside) and she smiles at me a beautiful smile and says in her cutest voice “Sir, fireworks are illegal, Sir”. Only in the Philippines.

© sam cutler 2011

            After the positive orgy of  “peace and love and goodwill to all men” that Christmas ostensibly brought to the fore, the thought occurred to me that perhaps we should reverse things and have the ‘normal grind of day to day life’ for the few days of Christmas and extend the ‘Christmas ‘spirit’ to the rest of the year. Perhaps it would improve things.  I for one am glad the whole business of Christmas is over for another year. I celebrate my own religious festivals and no man or woman has to share them. They are invisible and they are not imposed upon anyone. I open my eyes each morning as an act of prayer, I breathe in and I take from the Universe; I exhale and give back to the myriad Gods. No other person needs to be involved in my exercise of the Sacred, but that’s just the way I am. My religion is a private affair and I am just a simple Zen Pirate wondering what all the fuss has been about these last few days.

© sam cutler 2011