Thought for the day

I’m going through hundreds of interviews, searching for stories to put into this book I’m working on with Blair Jackson. There’s a lot of great stuff that doesn’t really fit into an oral history but really ought to be shared. This is from a December 2013 interview with producer/director Allan Arkush, a longtime friend of Jerry Garcia:

For most of my adult life, I’ve worked almost every Friday night. That’s the nature of television: you start 7:00 Monday morning, but you do your night stuff at the end of the week. And especially when you’re doing shows like Crossing Jordan, where you always find bodies at night. That’s the genre.

Whatever the show is or wherever you are, you’re working on Friday night ’til about three or four in the morning. You wake up Saturday morning – and you never get enough sleep, because the work is still bouncing in my head – I’m not rested, but I’m too tired to do anything else.

I’ve developed this habit of lying in bed, putting on earbuds or headphones, and playing the Dead, and not doing anything for two or three hours. It always has to be the Dead, because you don’t know which way the music is gonna go. I don’t want to hear just song, song, song: I want to be taken somewhere else. It’s a way to restore myself, both mentally and physically. It’s meditative, to me.

Leave a Comment