The first memory I have of the Grateful Dead is of a classmate in sixth grade telling me he’d gone to see them with his older sister. He reported that the band consisted of a bunch of hairy old guys in baggy clothes sitting on a stage eating spaghetti. It occurred to me later that he might have made this up, or that his sister had perhaps said something about “noodling.” I’ve since concluded that this would have been the band’s fall, 1980, stand at Radio City Music Hall, when the Dead, most definitely hairy and baggily clothed (though none of them yet over forty), opened each night with an acoustic set, during which a few of them sat on stools. I’ve never found anything in the literature regarding spaghetti.
Otherwise, I thought of the Dead at that time, if I thought of them at all, as some kind of malevolent cult, or, at least, a heavy-metal outfit, like Black Sabbath. A kid saw the iconography around—the skulls and skeletons—and imagined dark, angry noise. When I was thirteen, I bought an album of greatest hits, “Skeletons from the Closet,” and discovered that I’d been wrong. Many of the songs were delicate acoustic numbers with rustic harmonies and bouncy, if obscure, lyrics. There was some country, some folk, some blues, a Chuck Berry rocker. The lead singer, or one of them, had a delicate tenor. No Ozzy Osbourne, this guy. Maybe they really were just hippies who ate spaghetti onstage. It didn’t seem like much. Give me the guy who bites heads off bats. Give me “War Pigs.” (...)
It is very easy, and in many circles compulsory, to make fun of the Dead. “What does a Deadhead say when the drugs wear off? ‘This music sucks.’ ” The Dead, more than any band of their stature, have legions of haters—real hostility—as typified by Dave Marsh’s remark, in
Playboy, that they were “the worst band in creation.”
What’s to hate? Even the fanatic can admit to a few things. The Dead were musically self-indulgent, and yet, to some ears, harmonically shallow. They played one- and two-chord jams that went on for twenty or thirty minutes. One live version of “Dark Star,” a modal vamp based on the A mixolydian scale, with two short verses and no bridge, clocked in at forty-eight minutes. (Oh, to have been in Rotterdam!) Even their straightforward songs could go on for ten or twelve minutes. Pop-craft buffs, punkers, and anyone steeped in the orthodoxy of concision tend to plug their ears to the noodling, while jazz buffs often find it unsophisticated and aimless. The Dead’s sense of time was not always crisp. It’s been said that the two drummers, in the eighties, sounded like sneakers in a dryer. For those attracted to the showy side of rock, the Dead were always an unsightly ensemble, whose ugliness went undiminished in middle age—which happened to coincide with the dawn of MTV. They were generally without sex appeal. Bob Weir, their showman and heartthrob, might be said to be an exception, but he spent much of the eighties performing in short cutoff jean shorts and lavender tank tops—a sight even more troubling, I’d submit, than that of Garcia circa 1984, drooling on his microphone as he fought off the nods. Even the high-tech light shows of later years and the spaceship twinkle of their amplifiers could not compensate for a lumpy stage presence. They could be sloppy, unrehearsed. They forgot lyrics, sang out of key, delivered rank harmonies, missed notes, blew takeoffs and landings, and laid down clams by the dozen. Their lyrics were often fruity—hippie poetry about roses and bells and dew. They resisted irony. They were apolitical. They bombed at the big gigs. They unleashed those multicolored dancing bears.
Most objectionable, perhaps, were the Deadheads, that travelling gang of phony vagabonds. As unironic as the Dead may have been, Deadheads were more so. Not for them the arch framings and jagged epiphanies of punk. They dispensed bromides about peace and fellowship as they laid waste to parking lots and town squares. Many came by the stereotypes honestly: airheads and druggies, smelling of patchouli and pot, hairy, hypocritical, pious, ingenuous, and uncritical in the extreme. They danced their flappy Snoopy dance and foisted their hissy bootlegs on roommates and friends, clearing dance floors and common rooms. The obnoxious ones came in many varieties: The frat boys in their Teva sandals and tie-dyed T-shirts, rolling their shoulders to the easy lilt of “Franklin’s Tower.” The so-called spinners, dervishes in prairie skirts and bare feet. The earnest acoustic strummers of “Uncle John’s Band,” the school-bus collective known as the Rainbow Family, the gaunt junkies shuffling around their vans like the Sleestaks in “Land of the Lost”—they came for the party, more than for the band. Sometimes they didn’t even bother to go in to the show. They bought into the idea, which grew flimsier each year, that following a rock band from football stadium to football stadium, fairground to fairground, constituted adventure of the Kerouac kind.
This is not to say that adventures were not had. At a certain point, later in the band’s career, the Dead became, especially on the East Coast, a token of entitlement squandered or lightly worn. Consider the preppy Deadhead, in his new Jetta, and his counterpart, the Jewish Deadhead, with his boxes of blank Maxells. In “Perspectives on the Grateful Dead,” a volume of scholarly writings published in 1999, one author, in an essay called “Why Are There So Many Jewish Deadheads?,” attempts to explain the affinity in terms of the Diaspora’s search for spiritual meaning (
neshama) and community (
chevra). The goyish trustafarians lacked that excuse. At any rate, they all quailed in the presence of the biker Deadheads, the leather-vested roughnecks crying out for “U.S. Blues,” but were heartened, in absentia, to have seen them there. The tough guys seasoned the scene with authenticity and menace.
The Dead’s reputation and press coverage have always fixated on the culture that sprouted up around the band, and that then began to choke it, like a weed. When the Dead stopped touring, many of the fans moved on to other travelling carnivals—often to the so-called jam bands that had drawn inspiration and a music-industry approach (though not quite a musical vocabulary) from the Dead. This, too, was often taken to be a kind of indictment: the Dead are sometimes damned by the company their fans keep. The conflation of the Dead with, say, the Dave Matthews Band—incongruous as the two may be musically—can really smart.
There is a silent minority, though, of otherwise unobjectionable aesthetes who, as “Grateful Dead” has become a historical record, rather than a living creative enterprise, have found themselves rekindling a fascination with the band’s recorded legacy. These are the tapeheads, the geeks, the throngs of workaday Phil Schaaps, who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud. They may be brain surgeons, lawyers, bartenders, or even punk-rock musicians. Really, it shouldn’t matter what they do, or what they smell like, or whether they can still take a toke without keeling over. It’s the music, and not the parking lot, that’s got them by the throat.
Photo: Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
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