![]() I guess the reader can decide how true this sounds, though I like to believe it.Beep. Process note: This story is legendary and, like most legends, I don’t know how true: How Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, found some peace when the Grateful Dead played “Brokedown Palace” for him after the death of his son who had been a collegiate wrestler. He might begin some merry madness all over again. In fact, maybe he’d been wrong about everything,Īnd maybe, just maybe, and against his better judgment, Then–finally–he knew: Art needn’t be a fist to the face. Hunter’s playfulness with words comes through strongly in To Lay Me Down. We tend to demean the word as a cheap emotion, but it can, I believe, be just as profound an emotion as love itself. The Deadheads were stone-silent as if there were ghosts in the bleachersĪnd the silence enveloped Kesey like an embrace. The origins of the word nostalgia are from the Greek for homecoming (nostos) and pain or ache (algos). The Dead turned to him–for all their shambling harmony,Ĭlose as they ever got to as-one–and sang: With the smoke wafting off the rafters in waves Till one night in Eugene, Kesey sitting in a box over the stage Still, Kesey, he’s gotta live with the death of his wrestler-son,Īnother twenty-one years, a sentence he could never do sober or sane– Worn down and laid waste by the high-talking hucksters,īut along with it came this hard-won but unspeakable wisdom:Īin’t nothing we can do to make things right. The other hitched to a tree to keep the wrestling team insideįrom sliding off the cliff in the worst snowstormīut by then the Big Injun was getting small again, One hand was latched to the bumper of that chicken van The Dead Sing Brokedown Palace for Ken Kesey (May 8, 1984)
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