When I was 10 years, about nine months after my mother had died, we moved into a house on the corner of Dunvegan and 11th street, Sydenham (Johannesburg) , which uncle Max had purchased to house his doubly extended family.

I had a dream: I walked out of the backyard gate, crossed the driveway, and stood on the sidewalk looking up 11th street. My mother’s black Hillman Imp drove up slowly and came to a stop across from me, alongside the opposite driveway. I was surprised to see her at the wheel. I had believed I was never ever to see her again. She rolled her window down and smiled as I walked up to the car. It's hard to describe the flood of emotions that engulfed me: most of all relief, happiness. We exchanged pleasantries and I asked her,... “are you coming back?”. She smiled sadly and replied simply, ...“no, I have to go”, slightly inclining her head towards the two dark presences in the car with her. (One in front, the other at the back). She lifted her hand and poured a fistful of silver coins into my palm - substantial and reassuring. I leaned into the window and looked at the interior. The ceiling was the starry night sky, the space within infinite, the presences unfathomable. I stepped back awestruck. My mother slowly wound up her window, smiled again sweetly/sadly, and drove off slowly down 11th street, away. When I awoke I was atingle. Things were better, and I felt at peace with her departure.

At age 16 I wrote this song, “Land of the Dead’, pretty much complete apart from the bridge which I worked in more recently. Living in San Francisco in1989 and jamming with my Deadhead friend Marty, he suggested I change,...” its all my craze”, to ...“beyond the grave”.
Until that moment I had never understood the song was the fruit of the dream I had dreamt as a child. I had always seen that place across the road, a place rich with overhanging sweet grapes, as the site where ... ‘you might see me”, in the song. The lyric twist somehow brought the locus of dream and song into focus as one place, one piece.

Marty said I had visited San Francisco in that missing time between when I electrocuted myself (and had spun off into the white fog with the Grateful Dead logo happening in my skull), and coming back (into black claustrophobia with the paramedics pumping oxygen into my lungs), after Nadine had beaten my chest and sparked my heart and lungs back to life with her inspired rescue knowledge. Where I was, is impossible to know with any certainty. That part of Noe Valley, on the edge of Diamond Hill, where we jammed and played Wake and Dead songs, was pretty magical, no doubt.