Jerry Converse
A couple of weeks ago, I got word that Jerry Converse had died. No word on where or how. I like to think it was with a bong by his side and a smile on his lips. Much like our Jerry of legend is said to have gone. With the smile, at any rate.
I knew Jerry from Dead Nights at the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle, where he would set up in a booth over by the pool tables with piles of tie dye shirts and himself as the model. Don’t think I talked to him much. His designs and dyes were not quite my style. Cartoons. Splashy lettering. Garish colors. But a great many Deadheads in the Moon loved them, and Dead Nights saw those shirts dancing around the bar as the night wore on.
Richard Lee and I ran into him at Dead shows all the time. I remember well one show when lots of the Seattle people were staying at the same Motel 6 (a friend of mine had a Motel 6 Road Warriors tee shirt that I coveted). Jerry was in the room next to ours with his running buddy, Bill Adams. I don’t remember why, but I found occasion to run next door after a show, only to find the room filled with smoke and bathed in garish light from a tie dye shirt taped over the smoke alarm. “Close the door,” one of them yelled. They had fired up a small barbecue set for an apre’ show steak.
Then there was the New Year’s Show when Richard and I had been shut out of actual New Year’s. We had tickets for the three preceding show, however, so of course we were in Oakland for the duration. Jerry didn’t have tickets, but he was vending in the parking lot at all the shows. This was strictly illegal, according to the Oakland police. At least they used it as a pretext for offering the hippies free accommodations for the night. We were with a bunch of people listening to the shows being broadcast on radio, when somehow we learned that Jerry had been picked up for vending and arrested for carrying “narcotics.” This, we knew to be bullshit. Jerry would have had pot and a pipe on him, but nothing else. Suspecting planted evidence, we waited for news. When it seemed nothing more was coming, Richard and I took Bill with us to our motel room for the night. In the morning, all was well, Jerry told stories about kidding around with the cops, and we all drove back up the I-5 to Seattle. Both Jerry and Bill are gone now. I hope somewhere in the great beyond, they are reminiscing up a storm and keeping an ear cocked for familiar guitars.
I don’t remember when or how Jerry suggested I ride with him and another woman cross-country to the Dead shows in Chicago and Deer Creek (Indiana) in 1992. Richard Lee and I had been together a couple of years by then, and it was the first time in a relationship that I decided on my own that I was going, by myself, to the shows. A ride across half the country in a touring bus with a couple of fellow Deadheads –Richard couldn’t leave his job – I just had to go. And I’ve never forgotten it. It was its own kind of epic trip.
That was when I met Sarah, who has remained a dear friend of many years. I was not too impressed at first – maybe because when he picked me up she was already in the shotgun seat. And then halfway out of town, she discovered that she had forgotten her weed, so we had to go back. I didn’t smoke – not pot, anyway – so I wasn’t in the loop. And then we had to stop for one last latte at a gas station in Spokane, because she was certain there would be no such thing as espresso at gas stations further east. She was right. And she didn’t like Bobby songs. But then she helped me persuade Jerry that we had to go out of our way to visit Devil’s Tower because “Close Encounters.” I still have my pewter jackalope around here somewhere. And I love Sarah.
We stopped in Madison to pick up my son, Christopher, for the Chicago shows. And we stayed at my brother Randy’s in Chicago for those shows. So much fun for everyone concerned. Christopher went back to Randy’s after the last show, but we three journeyed on to Indiana. In the pouring rain. It rained and it rained and it rained, all the way down the highway to Indiana, on the thousands of Deadheads heading for the next shows. By the time we were halfway there, and deciding that perhaps a motel room might be worth it, we discovered that a few thousand Deadheads ahead of us thought the same thing, and as the miles went by so did the “No Vacancy” signs on every motel in sight. Then the Beast began coughing or chugging or something, and Jerry stopped and got out of the van in the pouring rain to check the engine. Nothing he could do here, so we chugged on and finally pulled off the highway into a gas station where the manager called around and found one motel room available. Sarah and I took a cab to the motel. Jerry slept in the van.
It was a time when summer was always great and winter was always rainy, but the shows were always sweet and I rode shotgun with Jerry for the next few years. We had a routine. I saved the seats while he sold his shirts. Our last show together was back in Indiana, although I hadn’t gone east with him. He had gone much earlier for the east coast shows. I, however, flew into Indianapolis with the understanding that Jerry and the Beast would be traveling that way around the time my plane landed. There was no sign of him by the time I got outside. Lots of other Heads were there, getting picked up by friends. I was offered several rides. Don’t know why I didn’t take any of them. I had no way of knowing just where Jerry was. This was back in the days before cell phones, you know. But I stayed put and the minutes rolled by as all the cars pulled away, leaving me alone in front of the doors to the terminal. And then I saw it, far off down that straight Indiana road, just barely cresting the horizon. The heavy green forehead of that old Dodge van. I was going to the shows.
As it turned out, there was only one show instead of two – the second one got cancelled after people without tickets had stormed the venue. It had been that kind of tour, Jerry told me. The people he called the “trustfund kids” had been causing trouble all along the way. We didn’t know it, but it was the last tour. Christopher met me in Chicago, and we saw one show together before he had to leave for work. I saw the last show by myself. It was, although no one knew it that July 9th, the very last show of all.
I saw Jerry off and on over the next years. He was always vending at the big Seattle festivals and street fairs. He was a regular vendor at our annual Hemp Fest, where I was Information Booth Coordinator for a while. And there are a few more stories I could tell, I suppose, but they are more about me than Jerry. Jerry stayed the same. Same grin. Same hair and beard. Same laugh. Same attitude.
He gone now, and taken all those good times with him, leaving me so many memories. Maybe some day I’ll tell you about the time Puff and I decided to clean the Beast. Puff had a shop vac. Oh, nevermind. No room here now.
All I can say at this point is that if it wasn’t for Jerry Converse, I would never have seen so many shows in the last years of The Grateful Dead. I wasn’t there at the beginning, but I was there at the end. And Jerry made it all possible.