Too young and initially obsessed with hip-hop to have seen The Dead when they were still Grateful, my communion with the skull and roses is primarily a personal one. The first Damuscus Moment tape: a battered bootleg temporarily loaned by an ex-girlfriend, but hoarded as break-up spoils–dubbed off a radio station in Provo, Utah. Studded with Dylan covers and a broken-down but beatific Jerry–vocals sounding like a man who’d just spent a decade in a desert, guitars glowing and gliding like a shooting star. A type of diseased soul music, simultaneously spiritually nourishing and entrancingly vacant.
This was in my early 20s, right at the moment that Andrew Gaerig once described as, “when [you] become secure enough with [your] music tastes to start buying albums that the kids [you] hated in high school enjoyed.” I never hated hippies–I just didn’t get the appeal beyond the shallow triumph of cheap drugs and a pre-packaged lifestyle. Just because you liked The Dead didn’t mean you had to like Phish and Dave Matthews, and that metal-mouthed kid with dreads who sold oregano to 8th graders and really liked whippets…
In the last five years, the Dead have reaped an embarrassingly substantial percentage of my listening. Most days, they’re my favorite band. If you don’t understand them, you just don’t understand them. Had my post-collegiate years not involved proximity to more trees than Bob Ross, I probably still wouldn’t. One day, it’s the gravity bong that you’re hitting to conserve money for the rent, the next it’s “Morning Dew,” in the pre-dawn hours, in that cold, hazy space next to lucid dreams. The next, you’re waking up, and fuck, the Grateful Dead is your favorite band. Don’t laugh, it could happen to you.
Parking Lot Pimpin’ 
Saturday night felt like I was showing up to meet someone I’d only seen pictures of on the Internet, but in person, their cheekbones were less prominent and their tie-die more bright. Yet the love of the music creates a weird understanding–even though you and the raisin-faced burn-out with the Hailie Selassie beard, have less in common than Manuel Noriega and Noreaga, there’s a shared understanding that you rotate around the same addled axis.
Beyond the cliches, there’s an anachronistic, analogue romanticism to the Dead, of unnumbered cassettes and slower days, a moonshine mixture of bluegrass and pre-War blues, psychedelia and Stockhausen, their abyssal archives, their wild oscillations from era to era. Saturday night’s show was prosaic–the setlist bland, with a bewildering cover of “Satisfaction,” and a never-ending late show, “Drums>Space” that crushed any momentum. But my memories are relatively unblemished by first-person recollections of long-gone apogees and better, purer drugs. It was The Dead, and that was enough.
At this point, it’s about sustaining the tradition: burn-outs still spry enough for another go-round, jam kids kicking off their 20s with an idiotically endearing bluster, fathers taking daughters to see their favorite band from forever ago. Consider it a family reunion, with the participants grayer and the memories fuzzier, but an experience no less meaningful. Saturday night was about watching a cult congeal into a religion.
The always-excellent, August Brown, and I collaborated on the unofficially titled Wango-Deadgo, a compare and contrast of the hearts and minds of today’s teenagers. It will likely be the only piece you’ll read all year involving Soulja Boy and Bob Weir. Unless some asshole DJ decides to make a mash-up called, “Crank That Scarlet Begonia.”
LA Times: LIVE: The Dead at the Forum and KIIS-FM’s Wango Tango at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine
Download:
From: Dick’s Picks Vol. 8 (5/2/70)
MP3: Grateful Dead-“Dire Wolf”
From: Terrapin 77: 5/28/77
MP3: Grateful Dead-“Row Jimmy” (Left-Click)
