Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes Donn Harris, author of _This Darkness Has Got to
Give: Post-Kindergarten Lessons from the Grateful Dead_, about how
the Grateful Dead influenced more than just the music world. The
Dead were part of a time not unlike the Camelot we attribute to the
Kennedy era, or the  gospel and blues foundation of the Civil Rights
movement's powerful social and artistic forces and how they combined
to give us our own Renaissance, a rebirth that broke free from an
oppressive past. The Dead laid out a path for anyone, in any
profession or role. "When I moved to San Francisco," Donn says, "my
car mechanic had a Grateful Dead statement of philosophy in his
entry area. People lived a certain way when they were exposed to
others who lived that way - authentically, deeply, with imagination
and a lack of judgment. Over the years, it was still a battle
against the forces of control and fear. We still fight wars, and
there are corporate take-overs and economic disasters and world
leaders who wield power unconscionably. The school secretary still
thinks spare the rod, spoil the child." But progress is
unmistakable, and Donn's book tells the story of that progress from
his vantage point.
  

    
Donn is former Principal of the San Francisco School of the Arts and
Executive Director of the Oakland School for the Arts. He served on
the California Arts Council from 2013-2021, including three years as
Chairperson. An Air Force veteran and national arts education
thought leader, Donn is known for his innovative approach to
organizational growth. He has transitioned to writing novels and
essays that explore public education, the arts, and societal issues,
pioneering a genre he calls speculative sociology. He resides in
Nevada County, California, actively engaging in local and
international communities.
  

    
Leading the conversation with Donn is David Gans is a long-time WELL
host and a co-founder of the Grateful Dead conference <gd.>. He is a
musician, author, and radio producer. After ten years as a music
journalist, the publication of his first book led to an appearance
on the KFOG Deadhead Hour - which led to his becoming the producer
and host of the nationally-syndicated Grateful Dead Hour. He has
published five books about the Grateful Dead (and one about Talking
Heads). He is a cohost, with fellow WELL Deadhead Gary <almanac>
Lambert, of a talk show called Tales from the Golden Road on
SiriusXM's Grateful Dead Channel. "Having covered this beat for
nearly half a century, it's gratifying to read stories from others
who have built their lives around the things we have learned from
the music and culture of the Dead. I was delighted to receive Donn
Harris's book, and I'm delighted to be talking with him here."
  

    

WELLcome, Don!

I am grateful for your book! We are nearly sixty years into this Grateful
Dead experiment, and THIS DARKNESS HAS GOT TO GIVE is an fascinating account
of your life as a beneficiary of its lessons.

This music and this culture emerged from a moment in American history in
which the shackles of conformity were cast off and we set off in pursuit of
lives based in joy and creativity. You tell us how you put that philosophy to
work in your career as an educator.

My favorite sentence in the entire story is this:

"I could not reconcile having been a Deadhead with forcing a dress code on
children who wanted to express themselves."


How did you get to that point, and how has your Dead-ucation served you in
your career?
  

    
Hi David. Thanks for the space and the questions. I was always a
maverick, looking far over the horizon since I was about 9 years
old. I was looking for the grateful dead experience - transcendent,
experimental, spontaneous. I had my first grateful Dead experiences
in new your at the aGe of fifteen -- the Fillmore East, some tiny
place on long island near the south shore in Long beach -- that was
my tribe. Moved to California in summer 1971 armed with Live/Dead,
Working man's Dead, American beauty, anthem of the sun. Just kept
moving from there.

Fast forward to "growing Up" -at some point I earned a college
degree and wanted to be a teacher. When I got to that world, in san
francisco, i was surprised to find so many negative attitudes from
bygone eras. So I became a kind of voice for student freedom and a
little bit of trust, and found my values coinciding with counter
culture ethics as expressed by the dead. So I disdained dress codes
and draconian discipline measures -- I mean, I was "on the Bus" and
that was my worldview. So I had my share of battles and they were
worth it.
  

    

It is interesting, nearly 60 years into this wonderful subculture, to see
what we have made of our Deadhead lives. We've lived long enough to see one
of our tribe become Vice President of the United States (Al Gore!).

We just lost one of the biggest (literally!) Deadheads of 'em all: Bill
Walton. Bill wrote and spoke extensively about the GD influence in his life
and work, drawing parallels of "improvisation within a structure," selfless
team play, etc.

I am obviously someone who put his love of this music to work and made a
career of it - quite improvisationally, I must say! I didn't plan much; I
just followed my curiosity into this world and found a niche for myself.

Barry Barnes published a book, "Everything I Know About Business I Learned
from the Grateful Dead," in which he explains how the Dead improvised a
business model that served them brilliantly - and suggests ways in which
others can do the same.

THIS DARKNESS HAS GOT TO GIVE arrives as another account of a Deadhead
life well-lived!



Tell us more about how you get here, please. Who were you and where were you
when you want to that first Dead show?
  

    
About that "dress code" topic you mentioned. We've still got people
wanting to take out rulers and measure the distance from a young
girl's kneecap the bottom of her skirt! In public school after the
millennium! at the school where this was an issue (we had kids in
punk bands after school who couldn't dye their hair magenta or cyan)
i made it a civil rights issue and got a few restrictions lifted
that way, and in the end i put together a committee and after the
draft recommendations came out (we literally had a 1.5 inch skirt
length item in there) I let the kids on the committee address the
faculty and the kids gave them an earful -- it was a moment 'that
burned off both of their ears'' so to speak. the teachers were
stunned and someone finally said, 'we never heard anything like that
before,' and the dress code died its own death shortly thereafter. I
was never fully trusted by staff, they kind of watched me out of the
corner of their eye, but I learned to do things indirectly so I
didn't need to have fiery confrontations all the time, i would set
some things in motion and watch them take their course. And you
know, they often went the way of the four winds -- they took us
safely home more times than not.
  

    
To respond to david about how it began for me: At fifteen I left
catholic high school for public school on long island and made some
friends who were pushing the envelope and the dead were part of
that, and I went to the fillmore east for the closing show in April
1971 (caught on that wonderful Cd) and there were moments in that
show where the jams resolved into ballads and the beauty was so
immense, and intense, that I thought: This music has power! I have
Power! And I had to be true to that -- I couldn't Walk out of there
and put up with the same old shit. And years later, when I would
encounter a 15 year-old with issues, I didn't forget my moments with
morning dew or loser ......... those kids had power too, whether it
was Wu-Tang clan or run DMC...... 
  

    <scribbled by tnf Tue 18 Jun 24 10:46>
  

    

Re <6>: That sounds pretty damn heroic to me!!

My wife is a retired schoolteacher. She worked in the after-school
program in San Francisco, using the Project Approach that was deveoped
in Reggio Emilia, Italy. That idea made perfect sense to me: rather than
sitting them down and stuffing facts into their heads, these educators
found things that the kids were interested in and let them learn by
doing. That's how I have done most of my best learning over the years!
  

    
 <7> had you heard the Grateful Dead before? Did you know what you were
getting into when you went to the Fillmore East?
  

    
I want to say a word in tribute to bill Walton. He was fighting the
battle in the day against his coach, John Wooden, as old-school
conservative as you could get, and managed to be who he was and
avoid crazy incidents and slash-and-burn confrontations. After his
playing days, to listen to him announce games and have these
wonderful freeform associative passages that mainstream sports
didn't always understand-- hey, that was our tribe, he was doing
Dark star when everyone else was trying to figure out 'Rock around
the clock' - a true original and a Great man who pushed the envelope
for all of us.
  

    
about your wife's experience with the reggio emilia model - i
believe i was in the sf schools at precisely that time as the
principal of the school of the arts - we had a visionary
superintendent, the late arlene ackerman, it was like having
sojourner truth or maya angelou as our boss -- a courageous woman
who opened a lot of eyes and had her own daily battles to fight. And
yes, reggio emilia (I actually visited the town in northern italy in
the mid-2000s), that was a child-centered, constructivist
educational model that focused on inspiration and curiosity and
figured: the classics aren't going anywhere, we can get to them when
the kids are excited about learning and ready for that level of
commitment and complexity. there is a musical equivalent to that,
the El sistema program out of venezuela with Gustavo dudamel --this
might be an oversimplification, but those kids made a lot of noise
with instruments before learning their scales and by the time they
were on stage, they were joyous and wild as they should be. Gustavo
was in oakland in 2016 and I introduced him to the crowd in the
paramount theater and got to spend some time with him. I figure if
you put mickey hart in charge of a student drum corps it would feel
like what gustavo was doing.
  

    
I'm answering in a kind of space jam manner, circling back to themes
that were expressed. You asked about my first concert, if i knew
what I was getting into. To a degree, but not the full experience.
But once those chords hit for "the Other one" and the extended
opening to "morning dew" left me in suspended animation, I figured
it out pretty quick. Hell, I expected life to be like that, I have
spent a lot of time looking for transcendent experiences and it took
some work, but they were there to be had. You just had to poke
around.
  

    

please tell us more about your initial encounters with Grateful Dead music,
and later we'll get into how you came to recognize it as something more than
a musical culture.
  

    
My initial encounter was with Live/Dead at a friend's house, he was
a few years older than me and had moved deeper out on long island,
where the counter culture scene had a different feel, sweeter and
more thoughtful. just the idea of Dark Star at 23 minutes blew me
away, and the st. Stephen/The eleven jam was literally beyond my
comprehension and we went back a little further to anthem of the sun
which for about a decade I thought was the best album ever recorded
......... workingman's Dead was a different kind of revelation, but
the power of tunes like "EasY Wind" still reminded us of what could
happen when these guys let loose - it realLy was like new
consciousness, but it was also like a seCret we had, An
understanding that was profound. So I took those beginnings with me
to the west coast where I pretty quickly hooked up with a group of
friends who were like-minded and along with the music came the
adventures - up and Down the coast following the music and the scene
and whatever was connected to that. this is about 1972 now - I spent
the summers of '72 ad '73 hitchhiking cross-country which i detail
in the book, especially the adventures of '73 when we ended up in
upstate new york with 600,000 others on the watkins glen race track
to see The Dead, The Band and The Allman Brothers. The night before
the official show  about 100,000 of us who arrived early were
treated to the dead jamming at 2am for a few hours. I had been
asleep and I am hearing guitars tuning and a spacey-sounding jam
slowly lifted me out of sleep and I look up and the Dead are just
exploring some really deep space and a few feet away was a guy in a
poncho smoking a joint and I asked him, What is this? and he said,
Space, man, it's just space - and of course that's the jam on the
6-CD set "so many Roads." just Jerry, Bob, Phil anD Bill in deep
space at 2AM.
  

    
High-five from another Watkins Glen attendee!
  

    

In the book, you use lines from Grateful Dead songs to illuminate your
stories. Was that happening in real time, or did you put the lessons
together with the phrases later?
  

    
That's a great question and gets to the core of how this experience
resonates for me in life. It's been primarily spontaneous as I go
through various circumstances and situations. 

I recall when "I don'T know who's back's that strong" first hit me
-- I had some tense times with a group of friends, a lot of us were
going through early adult blues, bad relationships, minimal
finances, families in crisis, and one especially difficult night
going into morning we were saying goodbye to someone who was moving
away and the conversation turned epic and at some point we all
froze, it was almost too much, and the New Speedway boogie line just
flowed into my mind, and later it became about how strong my back
was to go through what I was experiencing ...... it ultimately
became a rallying cry for me and influenced how I helped others in
tough times.

With students, I would watch them try out all sorts of questionable
directions and while we needed to keep them safe and keep the school
operating, the idea "That their lives were proceeding by their own
design" gave me immense insight into the best way to handle things,
and how to direct other adults, and took things out of a punitive or
judgmental realm and gave the whole thing a much larger context. So
ideas liKe that came up spontaneously but when I started writing,
those specific phrases were already forming a foundation, but as I
wrote and got deeper into other events and relationships, lines like
"Broken heart don't feel so bad, ain't' Got half of what you thought
you had" just fell into place as I wrote, and when i was analyzing
my conflicted relationship with the Mainstream world, The Metaphor
of "having crafted a cuestick that was straight in line and calling
the shots with some confidence, so that when i reached the thin line
beyond which I really couldn't fake, I found that I didn't need to"
-- I mean, those lines practically wrote themselves, and that was a
moment of self-discovery, I had found a deep personal truth in
telling the story, an integration of external and  internal factors
that brought me to a new plateau of knowledge. And creatively, I
felt that was a clean writing sequence, combining two phrases
without having to account for a muddled double metaphor, as the
"thin line" is such a common baseline phrase, it didn't clash with
the cuestick ....... songwriting often repurposes familiar phrases,
as there is minimal space to telL the story and the songwriter needs
shorthand. genres have phrases that are immediate identifiers, and
as a rock 'n roll fan I Have a natural affinity for a certain type
of phrase, and it often flows as part of my general writing process.
After describing "This darkness has got to give" to close the first
section of the book, the phrase from Row Jimmy "Did we get there? I
don't know" came spontaneously, the rhythm of closure exactly what
the passage needed. And that's shorthand for a deadhead, but
universal enough to hold meaning for others. The Dead crafted A
whole language for us, a way of interpreting the world. just
yesterday a friend from L.A. read about my book and my appearance
herE and wrote to me on Facebook quoting "Fire on the Mountain." So
in answer to your Question: it's a spontaneous poetic process, but
its spark comes from the development of a spirit that was inspired
by the music and the worldview.
  

    
High five back to andrew Aldren who Wrote that he also attended
watkins glen. In the book i give a few pages to the scene there.
through the years i have met others who attended and we all have
very different memories or impressions. I knew I had transitioned
into being a californian after just two years, and I was already
mourning the loss of the 60s. But the 2AM space jam was worth all of
it.
  

    <scribbled by tnf Thu 20 Jun 24 09:10>
  

    

(reposting to correct a typo)

Please tell us some more about your own life path - how you became an
educator and then an adminstrator of arts schools.
  

    
I wandered a bit after high school and crazily enough, the idea of
being an actor came to me during my time in the air force. Before I
went to Iceland I was stationed in Phoenix and i began taking acting
and creative writing classes at a local community college. A female
airperson was also a thespian and she and I would spend time at the
college's theater rehearsing and doing tech and acting in one-act
play festivals and a few mainstage productions. We had our fellow
airpersons in attendance so we brought a good crowd. I played
criminals, outcasts, drifters --hell, I could have played Jackstraw
or August West or one of my favorite drifters, the dude with the
retread on his feet from Mississippi toodledoo crossing the rio
grande. 
So then it was off to iceland and when i returned i went back to
L.A. and enrolled in college as an acting major, was in a few local
indie films, stuck with it until I received my Masters in 1984.
Looking for a way to make a living while I pondered how to break
into that business, I became a substitute teacher for L.A. Unified
-- a nice gig, good money and no real long-term commitment. then a
teachers strike hit and they were offering substitutes $400 per day
(that's $1060 today!!) --but I couldn't cross a picket line, I got
nauseous just thinking about it. So with my new wife joining me we
took off for asia, bought one-way tickets to bali and 6 months later
we were in kathmandu and suspected something, so we had a pregnancy
test there and sure enough, we were going to have a baby! The Nepal
trek I recount in the book was me getting in  a little
mountaineering while she remained in town. after i came down from
13,000 feet we started making our way back to the states and in
october 1989 we were in the indian himalayan town of Srinagar when
BBC radio described the loma prieta earthquake and reported the bay
area was devastated. We thought that's where we wanted to live when
we returned to the States. In January 1990 we showed up there anyway
and I got a teaching gig in juvenile hall, and over the course of
the next three years I taught in Juvie, in other court schools, and
stayed in college at night to get an administrative credential. and
as the fortunes  kept an eye on me the principal of sf's School of
the arts was retiring, and I interviewed for the position and was
selected. eight years there and Jerry Brown, Attorney General at the
time, paid me a visit to shoot the breeze about art schools and
public education in general, and we built a relationship that
ultimately had me crossing the bay to lead his art school in
Oakland. I had honed my 'On The Road' educational philosophy by then
and Jerry really liked out-of-the-box ideas - he kept me on my toes
for nine years - and all the factors came together including some
national connections I had made, and that Oakland school grew in
size, talent, educational outcomes, reputation and
recognition........ the first post-script in the book recounts a
series of events in 2014 that gives a picture of the school
environment and also shows how the Grateful dead philosophy
influenced decisions. Talk about a long, strange trip -- but I would
haVe to throw wonderful in there. A Long, Strange, Wonderful Trip. 
The daughter born in san Francisco as I was closing out the 1990
school year in Juvenile Hall just turned 34 a few weeks ago and next
weekend is her delayed wedding celebration -- she's been married
about seven years but the wedding party was delayed as they pursued
other priorities. A second daughter works for the SF Courts as a
homeless advocate and Spanish interpreter -- and both of them
attended the san Francisco school of the arts, tHe younger one aftEr
my departure for Oakland. So that's the synopsis from 1975 until
today, a near half-century of A Baby Boomer story that is shared my
many of our generation. What a time to have been alive! I tried to
convey that inspiration in the book and to highlight the effort to
keep the youthful ideals on the front-burner.
  

    
> I tried to
 convey that inspiration in the book and to highlight the effort to
 keep the youthful ideals on the front-burner.

That's why we're here! You have succeeded in that mission!

Before we go on, please say more about Jerry Brown. He was caricatured as
"Governor Moonbeam," but I thought he was a pretty good governor and mayor.
  

    
When I first met Jerry brown, in 2007, he was the Attorney General
and his oakland art school was in need of a boost. He showed up at
my sF school one afternoon and I heard his voice out in the general
reception area -- it was unmistakably him. We spent that afternoon
and evening together with his wife joining us at chevy's on van Ness
(no longer there) where we closed the place at about 10pm, sitting
in a back booth eating chips and salsa. The topics ranged from
anthropology to lawsuits against cheating corporations to public
education ........ within a month I was working for him and we had
an excellent relationship for the decade I worked for him. He was
intense, took nothing at face value. if you had the intellectual
chops to keep up with him, he gave you room to operate. He didn't
mind a good debate and was never stuck in a position; just a really
sharp guy, and ethical at all times. 
Two years in and he got elected governor with a brilliant campaign
strategy against meg Whitman, who had a Ton of money. Jerry Laid low
until LaBor Day and then he charged hard until Election Day. rarely
went negative. 

The governor Moonbeam label was coined by Mike Royko, A well-known
columnist from Chicago, way back in 1979, and was an indication that
Jerry was far more advanced than the mainstream on issues like the
environment, transportation, geopolitical alliances ...... i saw it
as a compliment, and it was funny how people seemed to have caught
up with jerry thirty years later -- his ideas didn't seem so
far-fetched in 2010. He had a highly successful 8 year run, had the
last of the good bipartisan relationships, and he bled for the
school although I think we finally gave him some confidence that we
could run it and it didn't have to be a daily burden for him. He had
that quality I've seen in the best high-powered leaders: if they
took ON an issue they mastered its necessary fine points, understood
how even minute things fit into a larger context ..... Jerry knew
potholes, for example, were an important indication of either
neglect or care, and made sure things at that level were handled,
which his successor as mayor, Ron Dellums, was unable to do. 
he was tough at times, you had to be ready for it, but he made me up
my game -- I am obviously a supporter, and I've seen him behinD
closed doors. He was too hard-driving to be described as always
showing kindness, but we never got any of the awful "private"
atrocities we hear from trump and further back, nixon, with their
vendettas and crude character destruction of their opponents. I
think Jerry Brown was what most of us want in a politician in terms
of behavior and demeanor and ethics, and there was no one smarter. 
Plus he'D sit in public places and converse with people for extended
periods of time; he never seemed overwhelmed with crazy political
details. And I had less politics in my life when I worked for him!
The oakland school was a charter school and without a school
district hanging over my head, the freedom gave me the best stretch
of my career. I learned the ropes in a large district, sO i can't
discount that a charter school runs off the framework of the
traditional districts, much like my solar panels would be
ineffective if i didn't have the PG&E infrastructure to deliver the
electricity  -- but large distrIcts need to make some bold moves to
stop The growth of bureaucracy. They're strangling. Here's the last
Jerry tale, for now anyway. When he got into office in 2010, one of
the first things he did was transfer the state redevelopment program
back to the cities.Saved money, cut bureaucracy, had more local
solutions emerge. I didn't even know that was possible. He was like
the gambler in "Loser," going for the inside straight, "I got no
chance of losing this time." 

Once he wanted to use the eagles' "Desperado" as a campaign song, so
while he's careful, he has a gunslinger's dead-eye confidence at
times. anyway: A great decade for me, and I was in Sacramento a lot
as the chair of the State arts Council, termed out in 2021.
  

    
Oof, you had me until that last example. 

He *ended* redevelopment and in doing so, defunded affordable
housing construction for like a decade. It would be derailing to get
into the details, but the industry is still recovering.