Fillmore

Sometimes my cell phone camera captures things my SLR won't. This was one: a view of the stage of the Fillmore. It dawned on me while Toots and the Maytals raged below that I recognized the acoustic signature of the room from the scads of tapes I've heard of acts playing in it during its initial reign, Grateful Dead or otherwise. It changed being there for me from another night in a sticky club into suddenly and unexpectedly having completed a musical pilgrimage I'd forgotten I was on.

Walking through winding stairwells and rooms lined with posters documenting what would be by today's standards utterly mindbending lineups, at one time just the usual, each bill executed with a level of care that makes mockery of today's slickest offset-print elevating the space to the order of a shrine in ways even the original ballroom chandeliers don't, I found myself asking the question again what did it all mean. Not a new exercise for me by any means, but one that's changed over time: I now view the question as the gift, not what answers it provokes.

To look at the sea of joy below it would have been hard to peg the decade if not for the occasional phantom-blue of cell phones. With music so effortlessly bordering on the sublime, and no doubt aided by an abundance of olfactory cues, if I closed my eyes to a squint, it was easy to imagine it was 40 years earlier to the day.

Oddly enough my shitty little LG sorta caught the momentary superposition of past and present with this shot.

This is one stage that holds a lot even when it's empty.