I have to confess: I was once a Deadhead. I can’t help but be confronted with this skeleton from my own closet as the Grateful Dead start their 50th anniversary concerts series on Friday in Santa Clara

It is difficult for me to make this public since I’m now unable to listen to the band’s insidious jamming without pangs of embarrassment. But for about three years in my early teens, my interest in the band was all-consuming. I saw the Grateful Dead play nearly 20 times, wore tie-dyed t-shirts and had hundreds of bootleg concert tapes, which I traded through the mail.



With hindsight, I realize that what the Grateful Dead really provided for suburban kids like me was an easily accessible counterculture. The scene surrounding the band had anti-establishment trappings but was actually mainstream, bourgeois and ultimately quite safe. (That the conservative firebrand Ann Coulter is a Deadhead speaks volumes about the scene’s countercultural credentials.) Actual hippies, LSD casualties and dropouts who were “on tour” with the Dead gave the scene a whiff of authenticity – and patchouli oil.



By the time I discovered the band, a louche party atmosphere was more in evidence than the free love politics of the 1960’s. “The Dead stood for a freewheeling communalism in the public imagination, but by the early 1970’s any vestiges of utopianism in their music and accompanying scene had been replaced by apolitical hedonism”, said Robert Slifkin, professor of Fine Arts at New York University, who specializes in American art and culture. But, he said: “the continued presence of real hippies and hangers-on who had gone the chemical distance gave the scene a certain degree of outlaw credibility, even into the 1990s.”



Mostly, I interacted with middle class kids either slumming it by selling grilled cheese sandwiches or availing themselves of readily available recreational drugs. (Before one show, my father once told me, hilariously, that, if I saw anyone smoking marijuana, he would come pick me up.) Those fans, now in middle age, are the ones driving the prices for some tickets for the last shows into the thousands of dollars.

I never took psychedelic drugs at a Grateful Dead show and perhaps I missed a trick there with regards to my enjoyment of the music, but I have to admit I had a lot of fun at those concerts. They became a treasured summer ritual, even after I lost interest in the music. My memories of hanging out with friends in the heaving parking lot before a concert are the some of the best memories I have of those years. The music gave me my first taste of a world beyond the suburbs, albeit not very far beyond

The taped record of the shows I saw, starting in 1989, now reveal forced marches through improvisations that seem more tedious than exploratory. For every moment of pleasure there were at least two of pain. By the mid-80s the band seemed unable to recapture the vitality it had in the 60s and especially the 70s.



Even devoted fans acknowledge the unevenness of the band’s output. By the end, Garcia seemed a prisoner to legions fans that deified him. In support of these camp followers and a huge road crew, the band toured more than they should have, to the detriment of the product – if not its popularity, which reached new heights after an unexpected chart hit in 1987. The descent from 60s avant-garde to well-oiled commercial concern reached its nadir in the 90s with the marketing of garish Jerry Garcia neckties, emblazoned the guitarist’s iridescent watercolors. (For the reunion shows, the guitarist Trey Anastasio from the jam band Phish will stand in for Garcia, who died in a drug rehabilitation center in 1995.)



I knew the end was near when my grandmother, after seeing Garcia on the news, told me he looked like “a friendly old man.” I quickly abandoned the Dead when I discovered punk, with its progressive politics and anti-establishment stance, and heavy metal, which actually scares grandmothers.

Unable to separate the music from the cultish devotion of many Dead fans, I have always struggled to make peace with my Deadhead past. But, even after abandoning the scene – and, thank goodness, the fashion – I still made the trek with friends in college to see the odd show. Those same friends invited me to one of the reunion concerts, an invitation I took seriously for the same reasons I went to those last shows. By the band’s demise, I had recognized the concerts as great parties attached to forgettable music, which to me says it all about the Grateful Dead.

