NED LAGIN
MIT MAY 1970
In June 2023 I received a request for stories, comments, photos, etc. about the first week of May 1970 at MIT after the Kent State deaths, the student strike, and as well the Grateful Dead appearing at MIT. All for an article that appeared late October 2023 online in Technology Review News, the MIT magazine with world wide distribution.
This is the full text of what was sent by me in response to the request in June.
------------------------------------------------------------
I had some involvement with both the strike activities and the Grateful Dead coming to MIT and playing for free, as well as my music concert in the MIT Chapel during the week of “Kent State” (and not to be forgotten, all happening just 12 days after the new idealism of the first Earth Day).
During that time (as well as earlier) I had had talks with Prof. Noam Chomsky and Prof. Louis Kampf, having earlier taken their course “Intellectuals and Social Change” which was the background for some of us participating in all the MIT events of May 1970. And also talks with Prof. Jerry Lettvin, Prof. Salvatore Luria, Provost Jerome Wiesner, and others about the times in which we were living and MIT’s social responsibility (especially about the Cold War nuclear MAD concerns, emerging environmentalism, and the Vietnam War). Although in May 1970 at MIT there were both “hawks” and “doves” (with some overlap) concerning the Vietnam War, no one wanted the war to last the five more years that it did, and the killing of four college students at Kent State was a shock for everyone. Shock and anger all over Boston and Cambridge. First about the incursion into Cambodia, then about Kent State.
That week - the strike, the events, and the concerts - changed my long-term life path in several ways (see below). I did stop going to classes for a few days. I did not finish one course (got an incomplete) which I finished in the Fall term 1970. The one incomplete course did not allow me to graduate with the rest of my 1970 classmates. Although officially completed in 1970, I was not granted my diploma until 1971, at which point I was drafted for Army service but classified 1Y (no service then but maybe later?). As the war continued I subsequently did an incomplete year in music graduate school, and then moved to California to work on my own music and with the GD until I stopped doing music (1976). I then worked throughout the next 50+ years in art and photography as my main core creative life.
I entered MIT in Fall 1966 as a science (biology) major, with the intention of maybe becoming an astronaut biologist, and also to study music in Boston. By the summer of 1968, because of the Vietnam War and political assassinations, while continuing with biology my desire to study music and humanities at MIT grew, and the chance to become an astronaut disappeared. By 1969, I was playing a lot of jazz. Especially piano in the MIT Concert Jazz Band and Jazz Quintet, improvising on an old piano in my East Campus dorm room, and working on a variety of new music compositions. A friend of mine, living in our East Campus dorm told me, "You ought to listen to the Grateful Dead." He played me some of their records and then convinced me go to a music club in Boston to hear the Grateful Dead, on December 29th or 30th of 1969. The club held 200 or 300 people, and the club that night was maybe only half full. I was wearing a turtleneck sweater and a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows – very jazz beatnik and science academic.
The Grateful Dead didn't start playing for an hour or two after they were scheduled to play. They all were sitting on their amplifiers or hanging-out around the club. Then they started playing, and my friend was right: we all were doing the similar kinds of music improvising from very different places.
And so I wrote Jerry Garcia a letter, describing my jazz, popular, and classical music training, and about my composing new electronic music. And ideas I had about sound and music and the magical mystical experience of acoustic spaces (derived partially from my studies of Renaissance music structure and symbolism). And as a biologist and musician, I made deep primary natural archaic connections between biology, hearing, music making, touch, feeling, body and mind.
After sending the letter, I heard nothing back.
My friends and I got the idea to try to get the Grateful Dead to do a concert at MIT. Well before “Kent State”, MIT’s LSC (Lecture Series Committee) took my Grateful Dead contact info and proceeded to arrange a formal MIT Grateful Dead concert for May 7th (though some committee members on LSC had doubts about the Grateful Dead’s reputation).
They arrived May 4th. Kent State had just occurred. Jerry (Garcia) was driving a rented station wagon with the guitar amplifiers and everything in the back. I met him at the motel, in the parking lot. I introduced myself, and he got out of the station wagon and ran away down the parking lot yelling, "Phil! I found the guy! I found the guy!" It turned out that my letter had had a tremendous effect on him. I found out later that they had scheduled an opening in their touring to spend a few days at MIT when they had booked the formal indoor MIT concert (before Kent State happened), so they could see and fully experience MIT (for them a huge cultural icon!), and to find me.
That afternoon we got in Jerry's station wagon and rode around Cambridge and into Boston, listening to tapes of the Altamont rock concert where someone had been murdered and musicians beaten. We listened to that segment several times, and then talked about the events at Kent State.
The Grateful Dead spent most of that week at MIT hanging out. Over the next few days I took Jerry and Phil (Lesh), Mickey (Hart), Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and others on tours, some daytime and some very late at night through long empty halls, to various science labs, the student center study library, the MIT Coop, the “Great Court” with the names of historic scientists inscribed on the surrounding building, eating at Walker Memorial (!), the music library, and down into some basement computer labs where Jerry and Phil on separate visits got to play Space Wars, maybe the first primitive computer game. We also went out together day and night site-seeing and looking for live music driving around Boston and Cambridge. When they got up in the morning they would come over to my East Campus dorm. What shocked looks we all got from dorm residents when some Grateful Dead walked with me up to the 3rd floor and down the hall into my dorm room and closed the door, and us hanging out for an hour or more! And then going out.
The piano I had in my room was an old upright. Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and I both sat at the piano, first him on the left and me on the right, me playing the right hand of blues and jazzy kinds of things, and him playing the left hand. Then we switched around. Meanwhile, Jerry and Phil and others were just sitting on my bed or in chairs, hanging out and listening and talking about music and art.
(The very last picture of Grateful Dead (founding member) Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, a few days before he died in March 1973, was of him wearing his MIT sweatshirt which he got shopping with me and the others at the MIT Coop in the Student Center. The picture is available online).
I invited them to a free concert of an eight-track, four-tape-recorders electronic music composition of mine in the MIT Chapel, a beautiful acoustic space. The Chapel being a circular, cylindrical building surrounded by a moat that actually goes under the edge of the building where there's glass, and the cylinder has rippling water reflections up the inside walls. For the performance I set up eight speakers around in a circle against the walls, and the audience, MIT people and friends, sat within that circle. The composition was inspired by Ravel’s La Valse and Penderecki’s Threnody for Hiroshima - compositions I had studied in a 20th Century Music course with MIT’s Prof. Gregory Tucker; compositions which had as their themes war and destruction of life and culture’. The Chapel being a most timely and appropriate place for the music given the events that year and that week (and believing in the cultural responsibility of art and music). Jerry, Phil, and Mickey listened intently. When my composition ended, Mickey was sitting with his eyes closed – the music had just put him out there, “in the zone”. Jerry complimented me and said turned to Phil, "I'll bet he'd love to play with a 16-track tape recorder," and Phil smiling said "I'm sure he would." Then Jerry turned back to me and said, "You should come to California!" My Chapel composition was later “sedimented” (to use a geology metaphor) into my composition “Seastones”. (I was just recently surprised, and pleased, to find a brief mention of my concert in the Wikipedia entry about the MIT Chapel).
The free Grateful Dead concert was facilitated some by me and by others. Because of death of students at Kent State, on the day (May 5th) after their arrival, Jerry and some of the other band members (and crew) when visiting with me in my dorm room asked about the possibility of doing a free outdoor concert - where at MIT, and when, and who to talk to for permission and set-up. In those discussions in my dorm room the MIT “Great Court” facing the Charles River was considered (they had seen it first from their drive on Memorial Drive from their motel to me at MIT, and we went there for them to see it ), as well as the space next to East Campus (could be seen outside my window) between the Earth Science building, the main building, and the “Calder Sail” near Walker Memorial. Kresge Plaza (near the Student Center and the Chapel) was chosen for easy access (Mass. Ave.) from all of Cambridge and Boston, and because of concerns about people accessing further into MIT, and traffic.
Set-up at Kresge Plaza happened quickly. During and after the free concert the energy and spirit was intense for everyone, especially with the band played the song "Dancin’ in the Streets”. The free concert brought together many people from all around who were affected by the events at Kent State, the strike, and times within which we were all living. Because of the free concert I felt a new meaningfulness for live music touching people and bringing them together.
And because of the free concert, I better understood what my friend meant when he said the Grateful Dead and me were doing the same kinds of musical improvisations, referring to riffs which he had heard me play in my piano improvisations in my dorm room many times over the last year, and which I had played for the guys in the days before the free gig. Near the end of Jerry's guitar solo on "Dancin’ in the Streets" during the free concert he played those very same rhythms and riffs I had done on the piano in my dorm room. I got a tape of that concert and learned to play Jerry's guitar solo on "Dancing in the Streets". Later that year (Nov. 8, 1970) I got to play "Dancin’ in the Streets” on-stage with the band.
Afterwards, band members and crew spent some time talking with people from the (very grateful) audience (MIT and others), mostly about the times within which we all were living, and then they continued their visit with me around MIT and Boston into the next day. During the afternoon gym concert setup and sound check I got to meet more of the Grateful Dead crew and the New Riders of the Purple Sage - the opening music group with whom Jerry also played (on pedal steel guitar). I spent the gym concert mostly with the crew behind or next to the amps, and afterwards for awhile with Jerry and Phil. Then it was time for them to go.