NOW
Every One Can See Now That Babbs Was Not The Gleef @ WOODSTOCK!
text & images courtesy of http://skypilotclub.com


40TH ANNIVERSARY OF WOODSTOCK

Everybody knows now that time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana, ana banana fee fie fo fama, obama, and the big Four Oh is building up all around us, I'm acknowleging it but saving my big guns for the fiftieth. Here is a little ditty I composed to assuage the demanders of a Woodstock story:

Me and the Gleef

by Ken Babbs

(My rap and the gleef's rap are both on the sound tapes from the scene, but the new DVD starts with the gleef talking, I've already quit, before the first camera got rolling, so he gets a great closeup, out in front of everthing, coverage, his moments in history.)

The release this year of the three disc set of the Woodstock movie has brought to the fore a misunderstanding that for forty years has been part of Grateful Dead lore.
I've been asked many times, why was I such a gleef up on the stage at Woodstock and I always reply, "That wasn't me, that was some other gleef."
Now, for the first time everyone can see who the gleef is that was talking over the microphone when the Grateful Dead started to play.
A tremendous thunderstorm had just roared through, tearing the canvas top off the stage, covering the floor with six inches of water and shorting out all the electrical power: the lights, the musicians' amplifiers and the PA system.
I was onstage at the time, leaning on the organ, talking to Pigpen while the techs attempted to make sense out of chaos. Finally one microphone, in the middle of the stage, close to the edge, was working.
Pigpen, as he always did when the Dead were messing around, not yet ready to play, said, "Tell them a story, Babbs," knowing once they heard my voice booming out of the loudspeakers, they would immediately come forward and take over.
I told the audience how all of us, forty people and four buses, stopped at Yellowstone on the way out and bathed in the hot waters, just like the people of old, for it was a sacred place, where everyone came in peace, all beefs and differences put aside, and now, I said, Woodstock has emerged with the same spirit, and you can take that spirit of unity with you out into your daily lives.
I backed off the mike, the band began to play Lovelight, then another voice came out over the loudspeakers.
This is where the Dead portion of the DVD begins, after I've quit talking, so I'm not in the DVD. I am on the audio tape, however. Cosmic editing. I didn't make the cut. One camera starts filming and the sequence begins with the gleef on the stage, no one knows who he is, he arrived from no one knows where.
Dark piercing eyes. Black Prince Valiant haircut. Closecut beard shaping his mouth. He's on the center mike, telling everyone there is a third coast, it is on a huge lake in the middle of the country, it has a magnificent beach, and while he's babbling, with a single spot lighting his face in a beautiful camera closeup, Michal Lang is saying off camera, "wWho is that guy, get him out of there," so I lit up a joint, walked up to the gleef and handed it to him.
He took a big hit, passed it to me, his back was to the edge of the stage, I gave him a little nudge and he disappeared into the unkown from which he came.
The Dead tore into a fantastic 38 minute Lovelight with all the stage lights gradually coming on and all three cameras working, a tremendous addition to the Woodstock DVD.
Well, forty years before the DVD came out, the audio tape of the dead playing was already circulating through Deaddom, and the listeners, unable to see what was going on, assumed that I was the gleef, and ever since, Deadheads have been asking me, why were you spouting that lame phoney baloney stuff over the mike at Woodstock?
I no longer have to defend myself. The DVD has vindicated me. Everyone can see for themselves that it was some other gleef. I no longer think of him as a gleef. He has a name and I remember him now with fond affection: Third Coast.