My life at age 42 is not what I\u2019d imagined at age 18. As a teenager, I hadn\u2019t been to South Carolina, much less thought of living and raising a family there. I grew up attending a Pentecostal church with gifts of the spirit and everyone-on-their-own-out-loud-all-at-once prayer sessions. Now, I attend a small country Methodist church with prescribed liturgical readings and recited-in-unison creeds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, of course, since I loved music, I imagined seeing my favorite bands in concert with my future spouse. But could I have foreseen that I would celebrate my wedding anniversary in the year of our Lord 2023 by running at breakneck speed from a Charlotte parking lot so I could catch a performance by The Dead and Co., the most successful of the Grateful Dead spinoff bands<\/a>? <\/p>\n\n\n\n In high school, I thought The Grateful Dead only had two things going against them: the condemnation of everyone whose music taste I respected and the fact that they weren\u2019t any good. Other than that, there was a lot to love. Who cared if they were morally objectionable? They were aesthetically repellent, a guilty pleasure at best and aural torture at worst. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I was a music snob as soon as I learned about alternative and indie rock. I subscribed to a Harvey Dent-esque dictum<\/a> about music allegiance: you either die a Pavement fan or live long enough to see yourself become a devotee of Phish, a grim fate indeed. Jam band fandom was where good taste went to die. I guess the Blues Travelers frontman was a pretty good harmonica player<\/a>, but that was like saying you made delicious candy corn, which is to say it was losing disguised as winning. Even if the Dead were further upstream, and thus more authentic, than the H.O.R.D.E.<\/a> of jam bands making the rounds when I was a teenager, this only made them somehow more responsible for bands like Widespread Panic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I got older, the barbs leveled against the Dead became more pointed. \u201cNo wonder their fans take all those drugs,\u201d said the Replacements-loving wag in my life. \u201cYou\u2019d have to be high for that music to sound good!\u201d When I tried to listen to \u201cSugar Magnolia<\/a>\u201d with the ears of an instrumentalist, all I heard was noodling. When I tried to listen to the lyrics of \u201cTouch of Grey<\/a>,\u201d things were a bit better, but I couldn\u2019t get past Jerry\u2019s pitchy warbling. As a young man, I\u2019d grown up on 80s CCM, so I was no stranger to poor production marring well-written songs. I knew you didn\u2019t have to be a technically sound singer to be great (cf. Bob Dylan). Still, when the few Deadheads I knew kept insisting that I couldn\u2019t judge the Dead by the studio tracks I heard on classic rock radio or, if I happened to hear a live track and disapprove, that I\u2019d just been listening to the wrong one, it was hard for the whole thing not to feel like a shell game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that was just one front on which the Dead got attacked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The more severe criticism came from Christians who gave the band (and their fans) a lot of flak for being drugged-out, dissolute hedonists. While I was in high school and college, it was true that the Venn diagram of people I knew who a) regularly burned down and b) would identify as Deadheads were nearly overlapping circles. It was tough to tell if these fans had chosen the Dead as a prerequisite to the kind of lifestyle they aspired to, akin to a pre-med undergrad taking the obligatory organic chem course, or because they actually liked the music. At a certain point, however, the distinction was moot. The only Christians I heard talk about the Dead were the ones who expressed thanksgiving for being rescued from liking that kind of music and its attendant scene, and if you told me you were into \u201cDark Star<\/a>,\u201d you were implicitly telling me you didn\u2019t serve the Daystar<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The irony was that I already exhibited traits that marked me as a future Deadhead. I instinctively believed that a song was better just because it was longer. It\u2019s why I was in the bag for jazz once I discovered that hard bop and modal jazz classics like Blue Train<\/a> and Kind of Blue<\/a> had no tracks shorter than five minutes. Call it the Anti-Ramones philosophy of song duration. I figured longer songs meant you were getting more bang for your buck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Add to that the fact that my charismatic upbringing left me used to a form of spirit-filled musical improvisation: a worship chorus that might last fifteen minutes instead of three, a tongues-in-interpretation moment where a song would suddenly stop and the congregation shut up on queue without a signal as we waited for God to speak, and two to three-hour church services on a Sunday night. There was a reason the form of Dead shows resonated with me when I finally got around to listening to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, I was a saxophone player at our church who helped add a little alto and soprano spice to the typical piano\/guitar\/bass\/drums of our worship band. So on any given Sunday night when we found ourselves, unexpectedly, in an eight-minute version of the chorus \u201cJehovah Jireh<\/a>,\u201d I was not just a congregation member singing the same four-line chorus twenty times. I was on the platform playing along and figuring out how to listen to where the fiery song leader (often my dad) or our pastor (a fantastic guitar player) was headed. That is, I hadn\u2019t just listened to spirit-filled jam sessions. I\u2019d been playing in the band. And, on a few special nights, my horn was the proximate cause for the move of the Spirit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I can only see those inchoate traits in retrospect. I was too busy listening to Pavement\u2019s Slanted and Enchanted, Son Volt\u2019s Trace, Jeff Buckley\u2019s Grace, and The Sundays\u2019s Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic to get anywhere near Live\/Dead or Europe \u201872.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I got to be a Dead fan like Mike Campbell from The Sun Also Rises<\/em> went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I really loved the 2005 Ryan Adams albums Cold Roses<\/a> and Jacksonville City Nights<\/a>, both indebted to the rootsy Americana of Workingman\u2019s Dead<\/a> and American Beauty<\/a>, especially when Adams and his band The Cardinals played the songs live. When my wife shared her fave all-time songs, her disc began with \u201cScarlet Begonias<\/a>,\u201d a song I\u2019d never heard before. Its syncopated rhythms, fantastic solo and outro, and evocative story\u2013it was by far the best Dead tune I\u2019d ever heard. There was Bert, my first honest-to-goodness tie-dyed-in-the-wool Deadhead friend, who had seen over 100+ shows of the original band and at least as many concerts of the spin-off incarnations. I loved hearing stories about the scene surrounding the Dead, and when I\u2019d hear a new Dead tune I dug (\u201cStella Blue<\/a>\u201d or \u201cCosmic Charlie<\/a>\u201d or \u201cWharf Rat<\/a>\u201d), I\u2019d ask him questions about lyrics or the best versions of the song he\u2019d seen live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, just as Martin Scorsese\u2019s No Direction Home<\/em> <\/a>doc spurred my love for Dylan, the multi-part 2017 film Long Strange Trip<\/em><\/a> also provoked my Dead deep-dive. As a teen, the closest I\u2019d gotten to a Grateful Dead doc was the Kris-Kristofferson narrated VH1 Legends<\/a> episode, which bordered on parody in its use of the story tropes of artistic creativity, chemical addiction, inter-band squabbling, and untimely death. LST<\/em> not only filled in a lot of the band\u2019s history I didn\u2019t know, but it also came with a playlist<\/a> that introduced me to many songs (in their live incarnations!) that I\u2019d never heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was it. I was in. And so, I\u2019ve gone through all the band\u2019s eras over the past six years. The late 60s experimental stuff with Pigpen<\/a>. The Europe \u201872<\/a> concerts. All the Betty-board 1977 shows<\/a>.The early Brent Mydland years<\/a>. Jerry right before<\/a> and after<\/a> his pre-diabetic coma, wherein, as Bert told me, his singing voice bore an uncanny resemblance to Big Bird. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The COVID-era lockdowns gave me a lot of time to listen to whole shows and hear what each band member brought to the band. I knew I was in for real when I could wax poetic for two minutes on Bob Weir\u2019s rhythm guitar playing<\/a> or the counterpoint basslines Phil Lesh added <\/a>to a particular song. Plus, the music is excellent for playing in the kitchen while my wife or I make dinner. If we\u2019ve got forty-five minutes, that\u2019s time for at least three songs, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along the way, I\u2019ve picked up things from the band that reinforce things I already knew from my faith. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Most importantly, judging the music by the fans is a bad idea. It\u2019s a cliche about how many people have been turned off to Christ because of Christians. And I know I\u2019ve been the Christian who shakes his head when a prominent celebrity preacher uses the name of Christ to justify get-rich-quick nonsense or warmed-over left-over self-help practices, much less to hide moral degeneracy. Deadhead fans aren\u2019t blind to the people who are just into the Dead because the scene\u2019s heavy on hallucinogens. Real fans like my friend Bert care about the music, and if I didn\u2019t love \u201cHelp on the Way<\/a>,\u201d the fans wouldn\u2019t be much help anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plus, the Dead\u2019s catalog is a constant reminder that you\u2019re only one listen away from hearing a song in a new way for the first time. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve read particular passages of scripture multiple times only to have your 351st time through it hit you like the atom bomb. \u201cOh! That\u2019s what makes the discussion of the sheep and goats<\/a> so devastating!\u201d or \u201cI\u2019d never noticed the context for that suitable-for-a-Hobby-Lobby-piece-of-wall-art<\/a> verse in Jeremiah before!\u201d Because so much of the Dead\u2019s live work is available for streaming, you can hear the same song again and again and again during a tour or across tours. So there are different incarnations of \u201cSt. Stephen<\/a>\u201d or \u201cThe Other One<\/a>\u201d or \u201cScarlet Begonias\/Fire on the Mountain\u201d (dig this one <\/a>that puts \u201cTouch of Grey\u201d in between the two). I skipped \u201cLoser<\/a>\u201d or \u201cNot Fade Away<\/a>\u201d or \u201cLet It Grow<\/a>\u201d or \u201cBirdsong<\/a>\u201d in live sets for the first four years of my fandom, and now those songs are some of my favorites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s because the most important thing you can do as a fan of the Dead, or as a follower of Christ, is keep listening. There\u2019s a reason why the repeated refrain from Revelation<\/a> is, \u201cHe who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says\u2026\u201d The band\u2019s superpower was the willingness each of its members had to listen to each other. Jerry was the only true instrumental virtuoso in the group. Still, he wouldn\u2019t have gotten where he went without collaborators: Robert Hunter\u2019s lyrics or the musical partnerships offered by the band. Dennis McNally\u2019s band bio <\/a>makes that clear. I\u2019m still unsure what Mickey Hart<\/a> is doing up there, but I don\u2019t always know why I need to listen to Leviticus or particular parts of Ezekiel, either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what happened when my fandom took me and my wife to a Dead and Co. show in May<\/a>? A whole lot of people watching, but frankly, it wasn\u2019t all that different from the mega-rallies I used to attend on Friday nights. More charismatic resonance, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I discovered that while I probably know more than 99% of the world about the Grateful Dead, I wasn\u2019t even in the 25th percentile of those fans. I hadn\u2019t heard \u201cLoose Lucy<\/a>\u201d before, and I didn\u2019t know \u201cThe Wheel<\/a>\u201d at all, yet countless people\u2013young and old\u2013sang along to every lyric. There\u2019s a set of people who\u2019ve gotten into the band due to John Mayer\u2019s collaboration with Bob Weir<\/a>, and there are people who you just know saw the band back in 1971. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I also left that night knowing I\u2019m not an unadulterated fan. No one else ran in a dead sprint to get to the show; the Deadhead tribe is more of a loping crew<\/a>. I wasn\u2019t in official Deadhead garb and stayed stone-cold sober for the entire show. And it\u2019s tough to tell how many people around me singing \u201cFire on the Mountain<\/a>\u201d would have joined me in a full-on-belief-filled rendition of \u201cGo Tell It on the Mountain<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
![is more of a loping crew<\/a>. I wasn\u2019t in official Deadhead garb and stayed stone-cold sober for the entire show. And it\u2019s tough to tell how many people around me singing \u201c](\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fqph.cf2.quoracdn.net%2Fmain-qimg-924899671e790f7b1c750909c71ee42b.webp&tbnid=yPZu-MukFBJ4uM&vet=12ahUKEwjbv_yExtqDAxVNajABHQFVBekQMygAegQIARAz..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.quora.com%2FIn-the-Grateful-Dead-song-Truckin-who-or-what-was-the-Do-Dah-man&docid=IZAWHFovL2BDwM&w=600&h=600&q=grateful%20dead%20guy%20with%20the%20thumb%20crumb&ved=2ahUKEwjbv_yExtqDAxVNajABHQFVBekQMygAegQIARAz\"){kind=link}