Grateful Dead<\/a> are like the dire wolf, waiting outside your door, ready to pounce when you least expect it. I remember a time when I didn\u2019t give a wharf rat\u2019s ass about this band. What a joke: the jams, the hippie hordes, the drugs, the Bobby shorts, the drum solos, the whole aura of mystic pomposity. No band embodies so many sarcastic punch lines, and they\u2019re all true. You remember the old Deadhead joke: What has 59 fingers and can\u2019t sing?<\/p>\n\n\tI miss the days when I could snicker at this band from a safe distance. But I got chomped by that dire wolf, somewhere in my thirties, without planning or (Lord knows) wanting it to happen. I didn\u2019t choose to start loving them \u2014 dragging them was more fun. I\u2019d spent decades politely smiling at my Deadhead friends and shrugging, \u201cI guess you had to be there, and by \u2018there\u2019 I mean \u2018high.\u2019\u201d I had decided I was totally cool with ignoring the Dead for the rest of my life. Then I said my prayers, went to bed, and that\u2019s the last they saw of me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIt had nothing to do with drugs, either. Somehow, I caught myself falling in love with everything I used to mock about this band. No eureka moment \u2014 just one of those cases where you gradually get shown the light. My teenage punk self would be horrified that my adult version of that joke is \u201cWhat has 59 \u00adfingers, can\u2019t sing, and I\u2019m obsessed over \u00adarguing whether their 4\/20\/69 \u2018Dark Star\u2019 in Worcester beats their 11\/13\/72 version in Kansas City?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFor most of their existence, the Dead were mocked as dinosaurs, a thing of the past. Nothing going on in their music but nostalgia \u2014 the nine-mile skid on their 10-mile ride. The world got that all wrong. No music was better designed to time travel through the decades. The Dead are more popular than ever right now, in their ever-expanding cosmos. No band is so completely polarizing \u2014 primally painful for many folks \u2014 yet so universal.<\/p>\n\n\n
\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tBy now, they\u2019re one of the most indestructible rock & roll legends, even though they spent their careers refusing to do typical rock & roll things like \u201cmake hit singles\u201d or \u201cplay songs that end.\u201d The only one who seemed like an actual rock star was the late, great Bobby Weir \u2014 he was the heartthrob in the Grateful Dead, which is kind of like being the fiercest kickboxer on The Golden Girls<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tBut they keep getting bigger. Somehow, these old hippies ended up prophesizing everything about how people hear music in the 2020s. All fandom today aspires to the condition of Deadhead culture. Remember when it used to be weird how these fans knew the date of every show, and which town got which surprise song? Now, that\u2019s just what fandom is. If you\u2019re obsessive about music, you can\u2019t evade the Dead, because they intersect with every music story. They\u2019re a bottomless silver mine of lore, myths, rumors, secret histories. If you\u2019re a music geek, the Dead will hunt you down and claim you, because they defined geekdom as we know it.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs an Eighties kid, I first heard their music from the cool older kids in high school, who started bands so they could jam in the student center on \u201cTruckin\u2019\u201d and \u201cGoin\u2019 Down the Road Feeling Bad.\u201d I loved the lore, the outlaw mystique, the romance of the tape-trading culture. The catch was the ever-pesky question of the Actual Music, since I had trouble staying awake through the Dead\u2019s later albums. As it happened, so did the Dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut they were something of a party band, which was suspect to a straight-edge punk kid like me. I gravitated to music that was uglier, noisier, angstier, antisocial, obnoxious, emotionally hostile, technically incompetent. Something about the cartoonish smile-smile-smile part of the Dead\u2019s image was too spiritually wholesome for my teenage self to take. I was also ridiculously ignorant about drugs. I was a kid who worshipped the Clash and listened to all six vinyl sides of Sandinista!<\/em> without it ever once occurring to me these guys were spliffed out of their skulls. Even though it ended with \u201cShepherd\u2019s Delight,\u201d a dub-reggae track full of baaa\u2019ing sheep.<\/p>\n\n\n
\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tMy true Dead mentors were my hippie housemates in college. These guys were true astral voyagers, with every weekend a lysergic adventure. One Saturday, I was in the kitchen boiling Jell-O when they all trooped in, crowded around the stove, and just stared into the bowl. Ah, yes, I thought. Drugs. I\u2019ve heard about those. When they weren\u2019t following the Dead tour, they played bongos and flutes and guitars in the living room. They recruited me to improvise poetry over their jams. (\u201cPuttin\u2019 on the coffee, puttin\u2019 on the Ritz, one man swallows what another man spits,\u201d that kind of thing.) I tried turning them on to the Replacements and Black Flag, not to mention my hero Bob Dylan \u2014 but they couldn\u2019t forgive his voice. I figured the summer Dylan\/Dead tour would enlighten them to Bobby D\u2019s genius. Ah, no. They came home traumatized. My friend Elizabeth said, \u201cI never thought I\u2019d see the day when Jerry Garcia would have to bail someone out vocally.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tI\u2019ll never forget the first bootleg tape I ever heard: 3\/9\/85, in Berkeley. So much drama: the first night of a hometown stand, just a few weeks after Jerry got busted in Golden Gate Park, smoking a small pharmacy in his BMW. Naturally, they opened with \u201cBertha.\u201d The crowd explodes when he sings, \u201cTest me, test me, why don\u2019t you arrest me?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSuch a joyful sound \u2014 the way his boyish bravado feeds on the crowd. Hearing it in my friend Charles\u2019 dorm room, I felt the rush, even though I\u2019d never tried a substance trippier than Jolt Cola. The Eighties might not be your peak Dead era \u2014 Jerry living on heroin and H\u00e4agen-Dazs, nodding off onstage, forgetting lyrics, and, oh, yeah, Bobby in those shorts. But I spent endless hours with those tapes, since that\u2019s all we had.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the famous Tomorrow Show<\/em> interview from 1981, Tom Snyder asks Weir and Garcia how they manage to evolve over the years and stay current. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve stayed current,\u201d Weir says cheerfully. \u201cI don\u2019t think we ever were current.\u201d He wasn\u2019t kidding. Music was exploding, but this band wasn\u2019t taking part. For many kids, they turned into a symbol of nostalgic complacency. R.E.M.\u2019s Peter Buck used to say he started the band as a reaction against his hippie housemates, whose idea of a good time was \u201clistening to 133 different versions of the Grateful Dead doing \u2018Turn On Your Lovelight.\u2019\u201d Imagine my horror when hardcore heroes Black Flag came out as Dead freaks. Greg Ginn declared that one of his dreams is for Black Flag to open for the Grateful Dead. Damn, you can\u2019t trust anybody. (As the Flag song goes, \u201cYou\u2019re one of themmmmm!<\/em>\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tI SPENT THE NINETIES in a sleepy Southern college town, where the Dead were one of those sounds floating in the summer air. (There was a local group gigging around town called the \u201cDave Matthews Band\u201d \u2014 what happened to them?) One August afternoon, in 1995, I headed into our community radio station WTJU for my weekly rock show. The studio phone was ringing off the hook, as the worldbeat DJ kept saying, \u201cCall back later \u2014 the rock guy starts at two.\u201d The bad news was just breaking about Garcia: He\u2019s gone, gone, nothing\u2019s gonna bring him back. I cued up a long-ass version of \u201cKnockin\u2019 on Heaven\u2019s Door\u201d with one hand and started taking calls with the other \u2014 consoling, confirming, but mostly just listening. People were in tears, wailing simple questions (\u201cIs it true?\u201d) or tough questions (\u201cWhat am I gonna do?\u201d) or weird questions (\u201cIs Phil OK?\u201d).<\/p>\n
\n\tI was pitifully unqualified to minister to this grieving flock, but love doesn\u2019t call the qualified, it qualifies the called. I kept asking callers, \u201cWhat are the funeral songs in this tribe?\u201d Someone pointed me to Without a Net\u2019<\/em>s \u201cEyes of the World,\u201d with Branford Marsalis on sax \u2014 a new one to me. It seemed to take only a few days for the \u201cThanks, Jerry\u201d bumper stickers to start appearing around town.<\/p>\n\n\tPsychedelic rock entered my life for personal reasons \u2014 in my thirties, I was suddenly living alone, something I\u2019d never done before, and hating it, so I spent as much time as possible out of my empty, sad apartment, wandering the Virginia woods with my Walkman full of shaggy hippie guitar solos. Conveniently, the Dead were just getting serious about reissues, and I was in the market for music that didn\u2019t remind me of my own life. The Hundred Year Hall<\/em> live CD was a revelation \u2014 one crazed night in Germany, 4\/26\/72, the lean, mean one-drummer unit, with Bill raging like a monster. It was the hardest I\u2019d ever heard them rock, opening my ears to all 36 minutes of \u201cCryptical Envelopment.\u201d\u00a0 (You can hear them argue onstage whether to play \u201cGoin\u2019 Down the Road\u201d or \u201cOne More Saturday Night\u201d\u2014 so they blow off the roof with both.) I was finally a full-on Dead Freak, Untied, just in time to miss it all. A journal entry from the late Nineties: \u201cI have turned into somebody who listens to Jefferson Airplane as much as the Jesus and Mary Chain. What have I become, my sweetest friend?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tThere was so much lore out there, it was easy to catch up. I pored through each edition of the DeadBase<\/em> books, soaking up the stats like a kid with baseball cards. One time, my editor at Rolling Stone<\/em> caught me in the office with a Dick\u2019s Picks <\/em>in my Discman and said, \u201cWelcome to the dark side. I always knew you\u2019d end up harvesting wind.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tIt was tougher being a Dead dabbler in those bygone pre-internet days. Back then, we were so limited by the official canon, before the deluge of deluxe reissues, box sets, books, docs, and the endless raging argument that is the Dead. It\u2019s tragic how much time we all spent listening to product like Steal Your Face<\/em> or Shakedown Street<\/em>, just because there wasn\u2019t much else. By the 2000s, everything was different: The complete live archive was online, the Dick\u2019s Picks<\/em> series was booming, and Jay-Z was declaring himself \u201crap\u2019s Grateful Dead\u201d on The Black Album.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\tFor years, the band\u2019s encouragement that fans tape shows was considered insane \u2014 especially in the \u201cHome Taping Is Killing Music\u201d industry propaganda of the Eighties. But it\u2019s the core of the Dead legend. It\u2019s all out there \u2014 around 3,000 nights\u2019 worth of improvised mayhem, with massive highs and unlistenable lows. Anyone can jump in as a total newbie \u2014 a digital TouchHead \u2014 and by the end of the weekend, you\u2019re an insufferable Answer Man. No gender implied \u2014 despite their sexism, the Dead were one of very, very few Seventies bands with a woman as an equal member. Say what you like about Donna Jean, but she made her noise on a stage full of men who wouldn\u2019t dream of suggesting she maybe tone it down a notch. Another way these bozos predicted the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSomehow J-Hova Garcia and crew just keep getting bigger across the years because they were playing a bigger game than anyone else. Bob Weir<\/a> called it right: They were never \u00adcurrent, which is why they sound more timely than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n
\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tI always loved going to see Dead & Company \u2014 not just to hear the band, but to hear strangers tell stories. I may or may not have wept buckets in the sterile concrete stairwell of Citi Field after the show, hearing the fans keep up the \u201cNot Fade Away\u201d clap into the parking lot. My last Dead & Company gig was the summer of 2023 \u2014 in a weirdly perfect coincidence, I saw them and the Cure on back-to-back nights. Another tribal gathering of true believers, another three-hour-plus marathon through the decades, mixing up hits and deep cuts. Seeing Robert Smith\u2019s silhouette as he took the stage, I did a double take at how Jerry-like he seemed \u2014 the boyish grin, the otherworldly hair \u2014 a thought that once would have horrified me.<\/p>\n
\n\tI listen to that 1985 \u201cBertha\u201d now, from that first tape I heard \u2014 no longer a banged-up Maxell cassette in a crate, now just a click away. It\u2019s a mess, for sure, a band on the verge of collapse with a crowd determined to carry them through it. Nothing classic or legendary going on here \u2014 just another night when somebody showed up to hit the record button. But I listen to this \u201cBertha,\u201d decades later, and I hear so many voices in it, from all different eras of my life, all those remembered voices calling, a-calling, coming back to me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"S ad but true: You either die a hipster, or live long enough to see yourself become a Deadhead. We\u2019ve all seen it happen….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":58236,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop","article","has-excerpt","has-avatar","has-author","has-date","has-comment-count","has-category-meta","has-read-more","thumbnail-"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}