Bertha - STEVEN R. TABOR

Bertha

The song "Bertha", was written by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia. It was the first track on the Skull & Roses album, and when I first heard that album, as a college student at Cornell University in1976, I was hooked on the Grateful Dead.

My first Grateful Dead show was their 5/8/77 Cornell Show, which ranks as one of my favorite concerts of all time. Thereafter, I spent parts of the next two summers traveling with the Deadheads and catching shows wherever I could.

The simple interpretation of the song "Bertha" is that someone runs from a window, into a tree, and then into a bar, where he takes shelter from the rain. Robert Hunter has declared that the song is about the cycle of birth and death--in the song Garcia's saying that he's tired of running through the birth-death-reincarnation cycle over and over again.

For this series, I've included images from the first model photo shoot that I ever did. These were of the model, Mischa, and here she poses with a sacred, Dayak ancestor figure--literally a deadhead--while she dances and prances around him to her very own beat.

If you'd like to see the full series, download the PDF catalog here.