In May, I came across an ad in the subway promoting the months-long residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, of Dead & Company, the current permutation of the Grateful Dead, featuring two surviving members, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, and the pop star John Mayer. The ad read, in a brassy “Star Wars” font, “Dead Forever.” I remembered what David Letterman said years ago when he saw a billboard in Times Square for the musical “Cats”: “ ‘Cats: Now and Forever’—is that a threat?”
And yet, a month later, I found myself on the way to Las Vegas, where the band was a dozen shows into thirty at that glimmering new Sno Ball of a hall just off the Strip. Half the seats on the flight seemed to be occupied by fellow-Deadheads, identifiable, as ever, by the hieroglyphs. I had checked no luggage, but I carried some personal baggage. It had been forty years, almost to the day, since I’d caught my first Grateful Dead show. The week of my flight, an elderly evangelist in a sun hat had stopped me in Central Park and asked, “Young man, what makes you happy?” I paused, then exclaimed, “Jerry Garcia!”
So one thing in common between novels and certain musical genres of the period is a palimpsest of voices and styles, a seething mass of surface particulars. But they are just that – a surface. I want to turn to a more profound theory of realism to recognise isomorphisms between the arts on a more significant level.
“I am not a biographer, in the usual definition of that term,” Ann Powers writes in her introduction to Travelling, describing herself instead as “a critic, a kind of mapmaker”. Her book follows Joni Mitchell’s trail across eight decades, mapping out not just the artist’s singular musical journey, but her misjudgments, musical and otherwise, in a discursive narrative that is peppered with critical theory and personal self-questioning.
Cloudland Revisited is worth the trip, whether you’ve passed this way before, like me, or you’re a rookie Perelman reader. He has his successors, but the full package only came around once. As he said of himself: “Before they made SJ Perelman, they broke the mould.”