Initially, I really wanted to appreciate the Grateful Dead. I had a few older, seemingly cooler cousins who were into them when I was a child. Pairing the Dead's penchant for putting skeletons on their album covers and my own nascent fascination with the macabre, I figured that there must be something cool here. But then I heard their music.
Despite all those skulls, the Grateful Dead weren't evil or menacing or even slightly spooky at all. Hell, they were just a good-timey, rootsy rock band keen on long, improvisational jam sessions. Even at that young age, I preferred bands that got your attention via high volume or taboo subject matter or shocking spectacle, but even at their most rollicking, the Dead wouldn't disturb a sleeping infant. I didn't hate them (well, not yet, at least), they just left me sorta bored.
By the time I got to high school, I'd become friends with a few bona fide Deadheads. Not unlike fans of Punk Rock, fans of the Grateful Dead came in varying shades of commitment. There were the types that just dug Jerry Garcia's noodley guitar solos and appreciated the retro whiff of 60's counterculture that came with it. Then there were the types like my friend .... well, let's call him Chico.
I'd known Chico since grade school. He and I had absolutely parallel tastes for a while, both getting into metal bands like Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult before discovering Punk and getting into Devo, The Ramones and Dead Kennedys et al. all in relatively short order. Sometime in my junior or senior year, however, Chico said goodbye to all that and dove headlong into a fervent appreciation for the Grateful Dead. The safety pins that previously adorned the lapels of his school blazer were removed in favor of peace sign buttons, "Steal Your Face" badges and marijuana leaf insignia. Puberty was ripping through the school like a tsunami, and Chico immediately started cultivating peach fuzz on his face. As seemed inevitable, Chico then dropped out of school. I remember running into him in Central Park at some point during my freshman year of college. I was home on Thanksgiving break or something, and encountered Chico hanging out with some similarly inclined pals around the Bandshell, singing a cappella renditions of popular cartoon theme songs for spare change. By this point, he was fully ensconced in the Deadhead mold. I barely recognized him. But, hey ... that's what he was into. Was that really all that different from shaving your head, putting on some combat boots and squatting around St. Marks? I'm back in touch with him today. He's doing well, ... but still a Deadhead.
When I got to college, I'd pretty much gotten sick of the whole Dead thing. While I had begrudging respect for the hardcore Deadheads like my friend Chico, the prevalent variety of Dead fan at Denison University was of the type that played lacrosse and "dipped" chewing tobacco while cranking "Franklin's Tower" for the umpteenth time out of the windows of his BMW in the frat house parking lot. It just seemed like such a pose. It was this cliched aspect of the conventional college experience that they felt obligated to dutifully adopt and espouse. That wasn't true of all of them, though. My friend -- let's call him Tombs -- was an avid Dead fan. No, he didn't dress like a tye-dyed vagabond, but he could sit you down and tell you the specific, esoteric sonic nuances between various bootleg recordings and seamlessly spout off rarified Dead minutia like it was arcane Biblical verse. We may have had positively polar tastes in music, but his love of the Dead's oeuvre mirrored my own adoration for the stuff I was into. In that sense, we were birds of a feather.
In time, I realized that my cartoonishly frothy, knee-jerk hatred for the Grateful Dead was just as much of a cliche as the frat guy's ersatz love of it. Hell, then-favorite bands of mine like Black Flag and the Minutemen talked about touring with the Dead (I believe Black Flag may have actually opened for them at one point). I kept hearing stories about the myriad joys of experiencing the Grateful Dead in a live context -- arguably the ONLY TRUE WAY to fully appreciate them. I figured that I was obviously missing something, so I vowed to do it! I made a pledge that I'd go see Jerry and the boys perform and finally clue into the whole thing.
Well, Jerry up and died, of course, and that was that.
Years later, while I still don't really enjoy the Dead's music -- nor have I ever owned a single bit of Dead vinyl -- they do effortlessly take me back to my college years.
So, why am I blathering on about them here? Well, our good friend Bob Egan of PopSpots just put up a new entry that CRAZILY tries to pinpoint the precise album cover location of Workingman's Dead, a record I'd rather eat a bag of wet sand than listen to.
Check it out here....
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