How I Learned to Love the Dead

S
ad but true: You either die a hipster, or live long enough to see yourself become a Deadhead. We’ve all seen it happen. Hell, many of us have seen it in the mirror — the Grateful Dead are like the dire wolf, waiting outside your door, ready to pounce when you least expect it. I remember a time when I didn’t give a wharf rat’s 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’re all true. You remember the old Deadhead joke: What has 59 fingers and can’t sing?

I 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’t choose to start loving them — dragging them was more fun. I’d spent decades politely smiling at my Deadhead friends and shrugging, “I guess you had to be there, and by ‘there’ I mean ‘high.’” 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’s the last they saw of me. 

It 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 — 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 “What has 59 ­fingers, can’t sing, and I’m obsessed over ­arguing whether their 4/20/69 ‘Dark Star’ in Worcester beats their 11/13/72 version in Kansas City?”

For most of their existence, the Dead were mocked as dinosaurs, a thing of the past. Nothing going on in their music but nostalgia — 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 — primally painful for many folks — yet so universal.

By now, they’re one of the most indestructible rock & roll legends, even though they spent their careers refusing to do typical rock & roll things like “make hit singles” or “play songs that end.” The only one who seemed like an actual rock star was the late, great Bobby Weir — he was the heartthrob in the Grateful Dead, which is kind of like being the fiercest kickboxer on The Golden Girls. 

But 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’s just what fandom is. If you’re obsessive about music, you can’t evade the Dead, because they intersect with every music story. They’re a bottomless silver mine of lore, myths, rumors, secret histories. If you’re a music geek, the Dead will hunt you down and claim you, because they defined geekdom as we know it.

As 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 “Truckin’” and “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad.” 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’s later albums. As it happened, so did the Dead. 

But 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’s 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! without it ever once occurring to me these guys were spliffed out of their skulls. Even though it ended with “Shepherd’s Delight,” a dub-reggae track full of baaa’ing sheep.

My 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’ve heard about those. When they weren’t following the Dead tour, they played bongos and flutes and guitars in the living room. They recruited me to improvise poetry over their jams. (“Puttin’ on the coffee, puttin’ on the Ritz, one man swallows what another man spits,” that kind of thing.) I tried turning them on to the Replacements and Black Flag, not to mention my hero Bob Dylan — but they couldn’t forgive his voice. I figured the summer Dylan/Dead tour would enlighten them to Bobby D’s genius. Ah, no. They came home traumatized. My friend Elizabeth said, “I never thought I’d see the day when Jerry Garcia would have to bail someone out vocally.”

I’ll 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 “Bertha.” The crowd explodes when he sings, “Test me, test me, why don’t you arrest me?” 

Such a joyful sound — the way his boyish bravado feeds on the crowd. Hearing it in my friend Charles’ dorm room, I felt the rush, even though I’d never tried a substance trippier than Jolt Cola. The Eighties might not be your peak Dead era — Jerry living on heroin and Häagen-Dazs, nodding off onstage, forgetting lyrics, and, oh, yeah, Bobby in those shorts. But I spent endless hours with those tapes, since that’s all we had. 

In the famous Tomorrow Show interview from 1981, Tom Snyder asks Weir and Garcia how they manage to evolve over the years and stay current. “I don’t think we’ve stayed current,” Weir says cheerfully. “I don’t think we ever were current.” He wasn’t kidding. Music was exploding, but this band wasn’t taking part. For many kids, they turned into a symbol of nostalgic complacency. R.E.M.’s Peter Buck used to say he started the band as a reaction against his hippie housemates, whose idea of a good time was “listening to 133 different versions of the Grateful Dead doing ‘Turn On Your Lovelight.’” 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’t trust anybody. (As the Flag song goes, “You’re one of themmmmm!”) 

I 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 “Dave Matthews Band” — 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, “Call back later — the rock guy starts at two.” The bad news was just breaking about Garcia: He’s gone, gone, nothing’s gonna bring him back. I cued up a long-ass version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with one hand and started taking calls with the other — consoling, confirming, but mostly just listening. People were in tears, wailing simple questions (“Is it true?”) or tough questions (“What am I gonna do?”) or weird questions (“Is Phil OK?”).

I was pitifully unqualified to minister to this grieving flock, but love doesn’t call the qualified, it qualifies the called. I kept asking callers, “What are the funeral songs in this tribe?” Someone pointed me to Without a Net’s “Eyes of the World,” with Branford Marsalis on sax — a new one to me. It seemed to take only a few days for the “Thanks, Jerry” bumper stickers to start appearing around town.

Psychedelic rock entered my life for personal reasons — in my thirties, I was suddenly living alone, something I’d 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’t remind me of my own life. The Hundred Year Hall live CD was a revelation — 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’d ever heard them rock, opening my ears to all 36 minutes of “Cryptical Envelopment.”  (You can hear them argue onstage whether to play “Goin’ Down the Road” or “One More Saturday Night”— 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: “I have turned into somebody who listens to Jefferson Airplane as much as the Jesus and Mary Chain. What have I become, my sweetest friend?” 

There was so much lore out there, it was easy to catch up. I pored through each edition of the DeadBase books, soaking up the stats like a kid with baseball cards. One time, my editor at Rolling Stone caught me in the office with a Dick’s Picks in my Discman and said, “Welcome to the dark side. I always knew you’d end up harvesting wind.” 

It 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’s tragic how much time we all spent listening to product like Steal Your Face or Shakedown Street, just because there wasn’t much else. By the 2000s, everything was different: The complete live archive was online, the Dick’s Picks series was booming, and Jay-Z was declaring himself “rap’s Grateful Dead” on The Black Album.

For years, the band’s encouragement that fans tape shows was considered insane — especially in the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” industry propaganda of the Eighties. But it’s the core of the Dead legend. It’s all out there — around 3,000 nights’ worth of improvised mayhem, with massive highs and unlistenable lows. Anyone can jump in as a total newbie — a digital TouchHead — and by the end of the weekend, you’re an insufferable Answer Man. No gender implied — 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’t dream of suggesting she maybe tone it down a notch. Another way these bozos predicted the future. 

Somehow J-Hova Garcia and crew just keep getting bigger across the years because they were playing a bigger game than anyone else. Bob Weir called it right: They were never ­current, which is why they sound more timely than ever.

I always loved going to see Dead & Company — 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 “Not Fade Away” clap into the parking lot. My last Dead & Company gig was the summer of 2023 — 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’s silhouette as he took the stage, I did a double take at how Jerry-like he seemed — the boyish grin, the otherworldly hair — a thought that once would have horrified me.

I listen to that 1985 “Bertha” now, from that first tape I heard — no longer a banged-up Maxell cassette in a crate, now just a click away. It’s 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 — just another night when somebody showed up to hit the record button. But I listen to this “Bertha,” 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.