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 albumn, 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. Hearing the first few chords of Bertha brings me back to those days of dancing, twirling and grooving to the Dead.

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.