Hey,
I just came across this passage in the booklet for the Dead's Europe '72 album:
"Guitarist Jerry Garcia, his beloved Mountain Girl, bassist Phil Lesh, and Alan Trist (an old friend and head of the band's publishing company, Ice Nine) rented a car in London and toured the sacred sites of mysterious old England, including Stonehenge, Wells Cathedral, and Solsbury Hill. They hung out with author John Michell, whose book ‘The View Over Atlantis’ impressed them with its meditations on "ley lines," vectors of power running through particular locations on the Earth—a phenomenon they'd noticed themselves, musing on why they seemed to play better in certain places. It must have been a coincidence that an earlier John Michell, an 18th-century geologist, had been the first person to speculate about the existence of black holes in space, or "dark stars," as he called them.
"The kind of coincidence any Dead Head is familiar with, that is. Like the moment when the tour buses pulled over to the side of a road to witness a luminous double rainbow, and Steve Parish of the crew noticed that the bridge they'd just crossed was embellished with skeletons - one of several flashes during that tour that told him, he says, "that we were in the right place, and we were there for a reason." (The front cover of Europe '72, designed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, features a hoboesque American foot striding across the ocean, under a rainbow with pots of gold at both ends.)"
Written by Steve Silberman
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