Music heals all pain: Marley knew it

It was Bob Marley who sang, “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.”… It was Bob Marley who sang, “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.” Thankfully, the man wasn’t lying.

This past Sunday, I had a rare opportunity before me – a chance to see the Grateful Dead. Now, of course, the actual band that would be playing wasn’t composed of the same guys who traditionally made up The Grateful Dead, but that wasn’t the idea.

Let me explain. Think about your favorite jam band. If your answer is “Dude, hippies stink” or “DAVE MATTHEWS BAND!” then please pay extra attention to the next two paragraphs.

But if you do have some appreciation for the music of so-called jam bands, then you know that the appeal of the music is not the song structure or whether the lead singer is, like, totally hot but rather in the feel of it all.

In other words, jam-band music, that hippie-trippy stuff where the songs are way longer than a radio hit and there’s bound to be dancing, isn’t about who’s playing but about the relationship between the jam of the musicians and the vibe of the crowd and how the music is interpreted by both.

So while a song by, say, Fall Out Boy, may illicit an emotional response of, say, boredom, the music of a jam band, as it is improvised live onstage, lacks that canned feeling – the song may make you sad when it’s played one night and really happy when it’s interpreted the next.

And there are jam bands to fit almost every music fan’s taste: The Allman Brothers and Gov’t Mule for the classic rockers, Phish and moe. for the modern rockers, Yonder Mountain String Band and The String Cheese Incident for the folksters, and The Disco Biscuits and Sound Tribe Sector Nine for the space cadets. Of course, for those who choose to stick with the originals, there are now Grateful Dead offshoots like Ratdog, Phil Lesh and Friends and the band I blissfully experienced Sunday night, Dark Star Orchestra.

So back to the story at hand. My friends Tom, Gavin and I had decided several weeks earlier to trek out to Homestead to see the performance by DSO, the premier Grateful Dead re-enactors, a band of hippies who recreate entire Dead shows onstage.

After hitting several thousand red lights, we at some point realized we were going to be late, and so upon arrival we promptly parked on a sidewalk.

Less than a block away and walking downhill toward the venue, we were stopped at a corner by a man in a tie-dye shirt driving a blue car with his wife sitting shotgun and his kids doing flips, somersaults and other kid-type things in the back seat.

“Hey, do you guys know where the Carnegie Music Hall is?” he asked loudly out the window. The Carnegie Music Hall was directly in front of us – this guy was quite the jokester.

When he said the word “Hey” I stopped in my tracks, save getting hit by his car, but by the word “guys” I took that one last step you always take when stopping suddenly. I took that last step off the curb and onto the storm drain below me.

Unfortunately, the storm drain had a large hole in it, about the size of, say, my shoe. I stepped directly into the hole and fell about a foot, my body stopped when my shin hit the metal edge of the hole. Noting that I was writhing in pain with my leg caught in a storm drain, the jokester in the car drove off, clearly aware that this was not a time for shenanigans.

I freed my leg and hobbled across the street, with Tom and Gavin saying things like “Wow,” “Holy sh–, man” and “That must really suck.” Indeed it did.

Still, we trekked on, down the block and into the venue and quickly to our seats. My leg was throbbing a good bit, and so I decided to stand with all the weight on my leg that hadn’t just been beat up by a storm drain. Wiggling my left toes, then my right toes, I concluded that my right toes felt about 100 percent more blood-covered than my left. Damn it, I thought, Tom and Gavin were right. This really does suck.

Finally, and thankfully, the band soon came on and completely blew me away. They twisted their way through Dead jams like “They Love Each Other” and “Tennessee Jed,” trading solos and taking the music up and down and sideways and inside out. The crowd was in a state of euphoria, cheering and dancing and clapping like it was the end of the world. Even Tom, whom I’ve rarely seen dance during our near-three-year tenure as friends, busted a move.

And, amazingly, my leg didn’t hurt so badly.

During the set break, I limped to the men’s bathroom, which was inconveniently down three sets of stairs. There I locked myself in a stall and proceeded to roll my now-bloody pant leg up and take a look at the cut. With one leg propped up on the toilet and a lot of “Arrghs” and “Errrs,” coming out of my mouth, I imagine most people in the bathroom thought I was shooting drugs rather than dabbing a deep cut with toilet paper.

Deciding logically that toilet water was a bad idea, I hobbled out of the stall and to the sink. A 40-something guy looked at me piteously and said, “Hey, uh, you want some help?”

The help he was referring to was his buddy, who was – or at least told me he was – a doctor. So a Grateful Dead-sweatshirt-wearing doctor cleaned up the wound and advised that I go the hospital “but not until after the second set, of course,” while my leg was stretched up onto the sink counter, causing a lot more pain, as I am both short and inflexible.

I took his advice and enjoyed the second face-melting set. Even with a leg dripping blood down into my shoe, DSO was fantastic, joyously wading through a sea of musical communication – bouncing rhythms, intricate guitar noodling and a near-15-minute drum solo.

The concert ended after four hours, and I went to the hospital. But for four hours, I could think of nothing but how vibrant and alive the music was, so much so that I almost forgot about the makeshift toilet-paper bandage wrapped around my shin. Music is a powerful, powerful thing.

And Bob Marley was a smart, smart man.