A Thousand Words on The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead in 1970. Photo by Chris Walter

I must have been fourteen when I first heard about the Grateful Dead. 

I was on a vacation with my family in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, a hoity-toity beach town that would soon become too expensive to justify visiting any longer. This town had two Christmas stores, the smaller of which had a variety of music-related ornaments set up for purchase in the back corner. 

What I noticed was there was an entire set of shelves dedicated to some band I had never heard of, set next to all the Kiss and AC/DC and Willie Nelson paraphernalia. The image of the dancing bear logo stuck in my head, but the name didn’t, so I went on assuming that this was some unknown band local to the area that had spent a pretty penny on some promotion. 

How I had not heard about the Dead in any capacity before this, I really have no idea. I hadn’t so much as seen any of their logos plastered onto the back of a car driven by an old hippie cruising down the highway. I didn’t even hear one of their songs until much later. 

For the longest time, maybe six months or even a year, the only Dead song I ever heard on SiriusXM station Classic Vinyl was “Truckin’”. To say they had better options to pick from isn’t exactly incorrect–they had better, lesser known options–but I didn’t know enough Dead to bitch about which songs they played too often, and “Truckin’” was as good an introduction as any if I had to choose. 

The second song of theirs I was to hear on the radio (which station I cannot specifically recall) was “Sugar Magnolia”, and I hated it. The disc jockey had been waxing poetic about his favorite cosmic American music, so I suspect it was Deep Tracks. Anyway, I thought that descriptor was far too beautiful for whatever the Dead were churning out, to the point where it was offensive. “Cosmic” implied something so inconceivably otherworldly about the music, this other-worldliness the Dead were simply not achieving on “Sugar Magnolia”. 

In the years since, “Sugar Magnolia” slowly became one of my favorite songs. I still wouldn’t fit it with the label of cosmic American, however. The Dead have churned out plenty of songs more befitting of that moniker, but unfortunately “Sugar Magnolia” is not one of them. 

The first Dead song I became fully infatuated with was “Casey Jones” off “Workingman’s Dead”, which I regrettably have still not listened to all the way through at the time of writing. I was in the car with my father, stuck at a stoplight on the way to some nowhere place, listening to the now defunct Rock and Roll Hall of Fame station. I was surprised to hear them singing about cocaine, and even more surprised to see my father didn’t change the channel. But there was something that caught my ear in particular: the bass part. 

I don’t know how long I had been playing bass for when I first heard “Casey Jones”, but I recognized how terrific of a part it was almost immediately. I spent years waiting to build up the courage to tell whichever bass teacher I had that I wanted to learn the song, and the skill for me to deem myself worthy of such a challenge. 

Despite not having learned another Dead song since my sophomore year of high school, they’re one of the first bands I think of when I want to go out hunting for new bass parts to consider learning. Something about the musical complexities of the songs, of Phil Lesh’s ability to never repeat himself, was captivating. 

That must’ve been the point of no return. 

I do not consider myself a deadhead, and even if I was aspiring to be one, I would have a long way to go before I could ever feel like I knew enough about them and had accrued enough of their discography to be assimilated into the subculture. I have, however, grown a healthy appreciation for them as a band, and for their music, and to feel a little pang of joy every time I see an old deadhead out in public. 

Often in the process of writing stories, I would inspect a plethora of pictures of bands to study how they dressed themselves, how they presented themselves to the public through publicized photographs, the same five now doomed to be circulated between online magazines until the end of time. I recognized Jerry Garcia, of course–who wouldn’t?--but the member I found the most visually striking was Bob Weir. 

Maybe it was because I wanted to look like him. Maybe it was because he was one of the less talked about members, relegated to the sidelines amidst casual Dead conversation. Maybe it was just because I didn’t know who he was. But there was something in his looks, his warbling guitar and wickery voice that finally offered up something a million times better than whatever damn Skynyrd song they were playing on the other radio stations. 

For whatever reason, I wasn’t particularly struck by Weir’s death–Phil Lesh’s was the one that really got to me–I guess you could say I was expecting it. Hell, I had just spun my copy of “American Beauty” that morning. Between him and Bill Kreutzmann, it only makes sense Weir was the one to go first. Drummers are always getting served up odd fates like that. 

It was almost a full twenty-four hours later when I finally heard a Dead song on the radio following the news of Weir’s passing. It was “Truckin’”, of course, being played on 70s on 7 by one of their more functional disc jockeys–perhaps it was Lisa Evans, but it might’ve been Ron Parker. I was a bit disappointed to hear that as the premier choice to remember Weir, though I suppose for a station specializing primarily in songs that occupied the Top Forty, it was the best they could do. And I guess it was only fitting that things ended the exact same way they started.