For a glimpse of a world you probably haven't seen (and one your mother wouldn't believe if she did see it) go to the Grateful Dead concert Sunday night at the Labor Temple in Minneapolis.

Don't let the word "concert" throw you--if you go in your straight clothes you'll feel supremely out of it.  Outfits range from from the fairly straight (there are a few) to Hell's Angels jackets, and lean toward the hip.

The Angels are there, in a nice little bit of irony, to help the cops maintain order.  They get into the concerts free, and make sure the aisles stay clear and no one gets out of hand.  No one, but no one, lips off to an Angel.

Last Sunday night's Labor Temple concert featured Muddy Waters, with Sweetwater as a second act--it was a total freakout.  Muddy Waters is a Mississippi-born blues singer who has been around a long time.  He's backed up by another guitar, a piano and a mouth organ.  He's beautiful.  And "Long Distance Call" was beautiful.  And "Hootchy Kootchy Man" was beautiful--twice.

But Sweetwater was the surprise that made the evening a twelve-story high.  Sweetwater is a hard rock group--an unlikely combination of an electric piano, a cello, a set of African drums, a flute and a siren.  The siren is a girl, who doesn't play anything.  She just wails; and moves.

It hasn't been fifteen years since Elvis dropped into the world from that gas station in Tennessee and even non-conservatives were sure that rock music was "of the devil."  It's only been five since the Beatles began to change hair styles (and practically everything else) and everyone knew it couldn't last.

Muddy Waters' blues made us realize where some of us have always been.  The crowd at the concert showed us how far the rest of us have come in finding out what they have always had--that blues-born ability to make music to merge with.  And Sweetwater, with one half-hour number, brought that crowd of over a thousand people to it's feet in a maxi-happening that showed us why we came.

The crowd loved Sweetwater then.  And Sweetwater loved the crowd.  And everybody in the place loved everybody in the world.  And we wished they'd leave the stage, because there was nowhere to go but down.  But they started playing again--and went up.  The majority who weren't stoned already were feeling as high as the minority who were.  Then they played still another number, and the people who weren't satisfied just being on their feet flooded the stage, and we all would have flown up to the ceiling if we had only known how.

But then it was over, and as we stood there catching our breaths, trying to drop back to the ground as slowly as possible, the emcee came out and rolled the universe into a ball:  "When it gets too bad, and the goin' gets tough, there's always music."