Dedication to Jerry Garcia on 8/10/95

spoken by Mark Mercier

Before we start, we just wanted to say… just a couple of things if we may….
Yesterday all of our lives were changed irreparably…. Uhh.. It’s pretty
obvious, pretty damn obvious, that we have been affected by the Grateful
Dead over the last twenty-five years that we have existed as a band. But, we
just also wanted to add that Garcia’s presence has represented so much more
than just a musical influence on us. It has influenced the way we are, what we
believe, the way we live, and the way I wear my hair. We are all the way we
are because Jerry Garcia has existed. So we are gonna be doing a lot of tunes
we used to do, when we used to do a great deal of Grateful Dead. But we’re
also going to be doing a lot of our original tunes because our feeling is… is
that Garcia has passed on a creative torch. And even though we only posses a
spark, we want to carry it on. OK. Garcia’s passing does not mean that the
scene has to die. So…. We do this concert tonight in celebration of Jerry
Garcia’s life. We… And we are taking our performance tonight and we are
dedicating it to him and we are saying, “Thank you, Man, for everything you
have done!”


(note: I made every attempt to preserve the context and phrasing of this dedication
without regard for grammatical correctness. This concert was (at the time) the annual
free concert, which at this occasion, took place one day after the passing of Jerry Garcia.)