It sounded as if the music was coming from the star, fellow students would tell Andy Acker ’83.

Acker lived in the penthouse of the Fiji house, and on that top floor, behind a wall adorned with a Fiji (Phi Gamma Delta) star, there was a massive speaker that played a constant stream of Grateful Dead.

Acker had been lured into Fiji by this very same siren song as a freshman in 1979. He had seen the Dead for the first time that summer and headed to Denison already hooked. During rush, when the fraternities would play music to entice potential recruits, Fiji was always playing the Dead. It was an easy choice for Acker.

The pull of the subculture is strong: Dead fans have bonds forged in a deep, shared understanding of the supremacy of their music and the warm ethos of the scene surrounding it. (To wit: the first day Beck Fisher ’84 stepped on campus as a freshman, he saw Acker wearing a Dead T-shirt and struck up a conversation. They are friends to this day.) From the outside, though, the Dead scene can resemble a cult: A fervent devotion that saw fans follow the band across the country and even the globe; a cultural ecosystem that happily exists outside of the mainstream; and the worship of sacred texts—live field recordings of the Dead at their untethered best, where songs would segue seamlessly from one to another, wandering on paths that varied from show to show, creating hundreds of totally unique concert recordings that inspired both personal devotion and tailgating debates.

These shows became a cultural currency of sorts, carefully transferred from cassette to cassette, with fans amassing vast libraries. When Fisher and fellow freshman Neil Goldblatt ’84 joined Fiji, the two brought almost 1,000 tapes with them to the house. “It was like a jackpot,” remembers Acker. “Those guys totally upped the ante.” A few years later, Acker paid it forward. Prescott Carter ’88, having heard the legend of Acker’s collection from his Fiji brothers, spent President’s Day weekend at Acker’s place in rural Coudersport, Pennsylvania, making copies of his tapes.

Those connections built around the Dead’s music tended to stick. “I would continue to have my college social group meet up even after graduating by planning to meet up at these shows. We’d use the concerts as connection points to get back together,” says Acker. “We socialized around what we understood as the idyllic time of our lives from college.”

And it was at one of these shows that Acker and Carter, both longtime consumers of the Dead’s mythology, would become part of it.