Jeez, here we go again…some event reminding me of something from my deep, dark past. This one also allows me to add another chapter to a new category I’m thinking of starting, My Life Has Been Touched By The Famous.
The event is the passing of rock drummer Spencer Dryden this past Tuesday at age 66. Dryden’s life had been rocked by a number of pretty terrible situations in recent years, not the least of which was his illness. For those of you under age 40, Dryden spent time on the skins for both the Jefferson Airplane and later with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. I had the opportunity to meet and interview Dryden during his stint with the Riders.
In 1974, I attended a small state college in central New York where I studied journalism. The unfortunate part of this two-year period of my life was that I spend most of it partying and very little of it actually doing any school work, but that’s for another post. Along with many of my school chums, I was a huge Grateful Dead fan, which led me to be a fan of anything closely related to the Dead. The Riders had one of those relationship, a band of guys from California who sang country-tinged psychedelic songs, some of which combined an Old West flavor and dope. The fact that one had nothing to do with the other in reality didn’t matter to us; Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart played on the first Riders album, and Phil Lesh produced it, so that relationship alone was enough to get us burnouts interested. The Riders often opened for the Dead on that group’s seemingly endless tours.
The Riders came to our school in the fall of 1974 to play a show at the campus “concert hall,” an old converted gym that allowed the audience to get pretty close to the performers. Prior to the show, a few of my fellow journalism students and I went backstage and begged the band’s manager for an interview. She was a bit resistant, but agreed to let us chat with one or two of the guys in the band if we would come to their hotel after the show. This meant we had to drive about 30 miles to Syracuse, but we didn’t care…we were gonna interview the Riders.
The chat was originally supposed to be just with Spencer Dryden, who was very patient will all our stupid questions and discussed all kinds of things about his career, going back to his days with the Airplane. We were joined after a while by John “Marmaduke” Dawson, the guitarist and leader of the group. I remember going with three other people and that the evening was spent chatting and…er…relaxing, in a way you’d expect a ’70s band from Malibu with ties to the Grateful Dead to relax.
Somewhere in the world, there was a cassette with a recording of that interview, but it’s long since been lost in the shuffling of my life. SUNY Morrisville might also still have a copy of the college paper, the Chimes, where the interview was published after I wrote it up.
Hard to believe that was 31 years ago. Crap, I’m not enjoying getting old.
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