Just days after posting answers to this annual survey, it occurred to me that I do indeed have an answer for that first question. In terms of something I did in 2019 that I'd never done before, I can say that I bought an album by the Grateful Dead. But first, let's backtrack a little...
Late in 2019, I was tasked, at my office, with putting together a going-away/tribute video for Joe, a beloved colleague from my company’s legal department. While splicing together testimonials from various folks, I asked his manager what sort of music Joe liked, as I wanted to score the finished product with a song or two that might resonate with him. “He’s a big Deadhead,” came the response. “Maybe use ‘Truckin’?” Given the length of the finished video, I ended up using both that song and “Franklin’s Tower” from Blues For Allah. This experience sparked the following reappraisal.
To put it very mildly, I was absolutely never a fan of the Grateful Dead.
I addressed a bit of all this on this old post, but having been weaned on the music of the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel as a young kid, and a little later on, bands like Kiss, Boston, Queen and Pink Floyd, when I first started becoming fully cognizant of all the music that rock radio had to offer, I started taking an interest in the seemingly morbid iconography of this curious band called the Grateful Dead. My two older step-cousins, Bruce and Peter, had been huge fans. Given my youthful predilections with the macabre, I had certain preconceptions about what they were going to sound like. That said, when my young ears finally heard them, I was immediately disappointed. Sleepy, edgeless and utterly bereft of any semblance of urgency, energy or anger, the music of the Grateful Dead seemed entirely insipid to me. No thanks, I guess.
But, even then, I was surrounded by their zealous acolytes. A great friend of mine since pre-kindergarten days, Chico (not his real name) – whose tastes basically mirrored my own, for many years – one day up and renounced our until-then mutual affinity for noisy-guitar bands like Iron Maiden, The Clash, The Mob, Flipper and Dead Kennedys in favor of all things Grateful Dead. We’d gone through all of grade school together and both ended up at the same high school, but Chico split after sophomore year for another school – only to drop out of there and become a full-time “Deadhead,” … growing his hair out and busking in Central Park, festooned in tie-dyes and the accompanying scruffy beard. It was almost like he joined a cult.
The dismay I felt about Chico's trajectory notwithstanding, Deadheads always seemed like a perfectly pleasant bunch. Much like the punk-rocker kids who went whole-hog and sported big, fuckoff mohawks, I respected their fervent commitment to their chosen subculture, even if I didn’t share that particular affinity. I’ve also never been a particular fan of smoking weed, in any meaningful capacity, which also might factor into the equation. It struck me that nine out of every ten Grateful Dead fans were mellow stoners. That was just never my scene.
Personally speaking, my nervous, twitchy and pointedly argumentative personality didn’t really lend itself to the relaxed, rootsy songs of Messrs. Garcia, Weir, Lesh et al. My pulse quickened to the doomy, stentorian heft of Black Sabbath, the breakneck sprint of the Ramones, the funereal cynicism of the Sisters of Mercy, the coldly alien sheen of Gary Numan, the bug-eyed clang of Devo and the pugnaciously point-blank assertiveness of Black Flag*. “Casey Jones” was aboslutely never going to give me what I needed.
Mercifully, it wasn’t just me, though. Upon being gifted an LP of the band’s 1977 opus, Terrapin Station, for his birthday, my friend Brad – a crucial figure, like afore-cited Chico before him, in indoctrinating me from the vestiges of punk fandom into the more disciplined ranks of splenetic hardcore – took the record into the plush Suffolk County backyard of the house his mother was renting for the summer and proceeded to shoot new holes in it with an air rifle. Still not satisfied, Brad then inserted a couple of fire crackers into those fresh holes. A final flourish was to toss the record – still in its barely-intact sleeve – on the grill for a few moments of charring, before slipping the battered, burned and beleaguered LP back into his collection, … almost as a warning. While inarguably an over-the-top display, this gesture summed up how my friends and I felt about the band. The Grateful Dead? Not for us, thanks.
But as cartoony as Brad’s overstated desacration of that record was, my years at college only reinforced the sentiment.
At Denison University in the verdant wilds of Central Ohio, I encountered a wholly different variety of Deadhead – one that eschewed ratty Volkswagon Vans for shiny BMWs. Seemingly, for the average Denison student, unwaivering appreciation for the Grateful Dead was practically mandatory. It was deathly difficult (pardon the pun) to walk from one end of the picture-postcard campus to the other without hearing Jerry Garcia’s inimitable guitar come noodling out of any number of dorm windows, usually bereft of any discernible melody. Similarly, it was nigh on impossible to make it through a weekend without hearing tireless airings of goddamn “Uncle John's Band.”
I, of course, was having none of it. My initial indifference to the music of the Grateful Dead gradually flowered into the blossom of hatred from the music of the Grateful Dead. I started to find it profoundly depressing that so much of what I considered to be such a fertile era of music – this being the mid-80’s – was being blithely ignored by folks simply content to listen to so much yawnsome crapola from the 60’s and 70’s. As if on cue, the Dead released a studio LP smack in the middle of my Denison tenure – that being 1987’s In the Dark – which resulted in newly inescapable airings of the single, “Touch of Grey.” One evening as I manned my late-night shift at the college radio station, WDUB 91.1 FM in Granville, our station manager called in to request it. I neglected to play the single, sounding off over a hot microphone about its abject dearth of any conceivable merits and opting instead to play Big Black’s blunt-force cover of Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore.” Stunts like this did not do me any favors.
Undeterred, I even co-wrote an editorial with my friend Jay in the school newspaper (we were both on staff as the “fine arts editors” – it was an easy feat). While Jay wrote an emphatic entreaty for Denison’s student body to investigate and embrace newer bands – specifically his favorites in The Replacements – I drew an accompanying illustration of a stamp-out sign over the Dead’s Steal Your Face logo, augmented with the legend, BURY THE DEAD!. Again, shit like this did not curry me any favors in certain circles.
In hindsight, my vitriolic disdain was probably more a reaction to the fair-weather, tobacco-chewing, lacrosse-playing Deadheads who’d crank seemingly only the same four or five songs by the band out of their frat houses at all hours. These were not the deeper-dive Deadheads that feverishly collected and traded tapes and could cite the pithy nuances between the band’s performance of “Box of Rain” at a 1987 San Francisco show and a performance of the very same song at a 1986 Denver stop. For the majority of the alleged Deadheads at Denison, it was really just more like fandom via uniform.
Speaking of frat houses, Denison had what could only be described as a robust Greek scene, at the time. Never my sort of thing to begin with, I only tenuously participated in “rush” at the beginning of my freshman year, and not with any great amount of enthusiasm. Oddly, the only house that seemed to express any interest in having me as a member was a place called Fiji. I soon learned, however, that this was ostensibly only because I was evidently a “legacy.” Beyond that, Fiji was largely renowned as the “Grateful Dead frat" – largely comprised of genuine fans of same (again, the tape-trading variety). I couldn’t really wrap my head around the notion of adhering myself to a house solely because a family member I’d never met had done the same, much less immersing myself in a hive of Deadheads, where “Friend of the Devil” played in maddeningly endless rotations. As it happens, however, I was unceremoniously put on academic probation after my first semester, so any and all dalliances with any fraternities went immediately out the window while I belatedly acclimated myself to the rigors of collegiate academia I’d been blithely ignoring for the first couple of months. I got my grades back up, preserved my status as a Denison student and by that time, didn’t give one single damn about divesting from the whole Greek thing. I never looked back.
Arguably as a further result, I continued to associate and intertwine the music of the Dead with that which I pointedly renounced.
Towards the end of my four years at college, though, my circle of friends had refreshingly broadened to include several figures who were as deeply enamored of the music of the Dead as I was of, say, Killing Joke. During my senior year, I lived in an off-campus house with five other such folks. Since they all gamely tolerated my endless, high-octane spins of Jane's Addiction, Ministry, New Model Army, the Screaming Blue Messiahs and the like, I tried to demonstrate similar restraint when they insisted on playing "Fire on the Mountain" and "Sugar Magnolia" for the bajillionth time. Somehow, we made it work.
Once I graduated in 1989, though, my dealings with the Dead dropped practically right off the map. Back home in New York City, I could easily go for months and months at a time without a single invocation of their name, let alone their music.
Then, of course, in 1995, poor ol' Jerry Garcia died. Countless friends of mine from college and beyond were profoundly bummed out. Conversely, I remember seeing a show that same week at the Continental, just off St. Marks Place, and the bass player of a high-volume, punky band I liked was sporting a homemade "I KILLED JERRY GARCIA" shirt. I mean, I got it ... but it felt a little needlessly tasteless. We're better than that, I thought.
Time passed. My red-hot aversion to the Dead may have faded just a bit, but much like my long-standing disdain for Patti Smith, my status as a dyed-in-the-wool detractor was hard to shake. I still winced and sighed with melodramatic resignation when the listing strains of "Ripple" came bleating out of someone's speakers at one social event or another. But, honestly, my tribal shtick had gotten old. Ideally, once you've crossed certain life events off your list, your allegiance to whichever youthful subculture you adhered yourself to decades earlier should probably matter less and less. No one wants to hear your war stories or watch you get all red in the face about how tough it was being a Circle Jerks fan in a world seemingly ruled by Deadheads. After a while, my pronounced penchant for verbosely knocking the Grateful Dead -- music genuinely held sacred by more than just a few people I respected, admired and loved -- wasn't just boring, it was rude.
At the very least, I started to have much more respect for the reverence and dedication my Deadhead friends had for their favorite band. As steeped in their fandom for the Dead as my allegiance to, once again, Killing Joke – especially in a changing pop-cultural landscape where live, guitar-based rock was suffering from diminishing support – these folks were way more similar to me than I’d ever originally considered. While this didn’t necessarily mean I wanted to sit down and subject myself to the band’s allegedly legendary 46-minute rendition of “Playing In The Band” from a 1974 show in Seattle, I started refraining from pugnaciously lipping off and coughing up a wad of phlegm at the thought. Ideally, my days of coming across like an irritable jackass to my Dead-inclined friends were over.
I want to think that olive branch was acknowledged. After years of sneering at their record collections, I want to believe friends of mine like John T., Chris R., Ken B., Jeff C., Mac B., Gee G. and even my ever-forgiving brother-in-law Scott S. noticed my newly tolerant demeanor when “Captain Trips” was invoked. Whether it was the broadening of my tastes, a new propensity for considering perspectives other than my own or just the ….er…. mellowing age and experience provides, I was no longer to be considered an exile on Shakedown Street.
And then came the Joe video.
As mentioned, I was informed by the head of the legal department that Joe, despite looking like a clean-cut, scholarly lawyer, was formerly a long-haired hacky-sacker and fervent acolyte of the Grateful Dead. Dutifully, I had the afore-cited “Truckin’” edited into the finished video, momentarily tempted to slip in The Pop-O-Pies’ irreverent rendition to see how many people were paying attention. But being that the video extended beyond the five minutes and nine seconds of that hallowed Dead chestnut, I needed to find another track to fill it out.
As such, I slipped on my headphones and, over the course of one December afternoon, found myself re-visiting the more celebrated selections of The Grateful Dead. In the process of doing so, I was struck by how genuinely familiar so many of those songs sounded. I was instantly transported to countless days and nights on Denison’s campus, sneaking into fraternity parties I wasn’t invited to, playing frisbee on the wide quadrangles of east quad, drinking beers on an off-campus roof while watching housemates of mine set fire to an old couch (long story), hanging out in likely spaces like the school newspaper’s office or the college radio station, staying up and late and talking heroic amounts of bullshit – first and foremost, this music reminded me of good times and people I love and miss.
For the video, I ended up settling on the afore-cited “Franklin’s Tower.” Sometime shortly afterwards, I found myself picking up a copy of the 2003 compilation, The Very Best of Grateful Dead. Yes, I’m fully aware that best-of’s (let alone Very-best-of’s…. translation: “Edited Highlights For Passive Dilettantes”) are for “housewives and little girls” (blame The Kids in the Hall), but being that it contained most of the tracks I was looking for, it fit the bill.
Later that afternoon, as I was ripping the disc to my shortly-to-vanish iTunes (another weepy post in itself), my daughter looked up from her iPhone. “Daddy, what are we listening to?,” asked Charlotte from her perch on the couch. Weaned as a toddler on her father’s favorite music – I used to rock baby Charlotte to sleep via acapella renditions of “The Good Son” by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – she’s used to hearing me play a certain variety of music around the house, even if she doesn’t always enjoy my taste. “Oh, this is just a band I used to completely hate called The Grateful Dead,” I responded. Charlotte looked back down at her phone. “Well, I think you should go back to hating them immediately.”
Charlotte needn’t worry. It’s far too late in the day for me to turn into a bona fide Deadhead, nor am I really interested in becoming one. But in terms of expanding my horizons, growing up and reconsidering a few firmly-held “convictions” (see this post for more of those), I no longer consider The Grateful Dead an unwelcome entity.
..but I STILL FUCKING HATE "Touch of Gray."
*Somewhat ironically, certain members of Black Flag have copped to being fans of the Grateful Dead.
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