One night in the winter of 1996, Rob Eaton, a recording engineer who’d worked with Duran Duran and Pat Metheny, showed up at the home of a high-school chemistry teacher in Petaluma, California. Eaton had heard that the teacher had something that he and others like him were eager to get their hands on. He’d also heard that the teacher wanted to sell what he had for a million dollars, a sum no studio engineer was likely to supply. Still, one could always tender expertise. The teacher drove Eaton to a barn he owned, and they ran in through the rain. Inside, amid piles of junk, were three road cases, of the kind that rock bands use to cart around their amplifiers. Each had “Grateful Dead” stencilled on its side. In the first one, Eaton found, in addition to some rotting cookbooks, several dozen reel-to-reel tapes, caked in mold and silt. Most of them were unmarked, or at least too encrusted to read, but Eaton had an idea what some of them might be, and he felt a surge of excitement. The other boxes contained dozens more tapes, similarly degraded.

Eaton told the teacher that it was impossible to evaluate their worth, since they couldn’t know what was on the tapes, or even whether they were playable. The teacher grudgingly lent him five of the worst-looking reels, and Eaton took them down the road to a friend’s house. The friend was Dick Latvala, who at the time was the official archivist of the Grateful Dead, the keeper of the band’s fabled vault of live recordings, and an unapologetic enthusiast who would listen to old Dead shows for twelve hours at a stretch, notebook in hand. Eaton, too, was a longtime Deadhead—he had seen the band perform around four hundred times and had been making and trading tapes of their concerts for twenty years.

Eaton cleaned the tapes with cotton balls and alcohol, and Latvala loaded one up onto his reel-to-reel. The exposed outer layer—the first thirty seconds or so—was ruined, but as the music kicked in they realized they might have a treasure on their hands, a tapehead’s Nag Hammadi. They heard Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s lead guitarist, performing a set with the organist Merl Saunders, at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 6, 1973—a concert that hadn’t previously surfaced. Eaton and Latvala stayed up all night listening to the reels: other Garcia solo performances, a piece of a rare Dead show from the early seventies. The most remarkable thing was the crisp sound. They were first-generation two-track analogue soundboard recordings, with stereo separation among the instruments, a chunky bass, and plenty of air.

Eaton and Latvala wondered if these were Betty Boards—tapes made by Betty Cantor-Jackson, a longtime recording engineer for the Grateful Dead. Almost from the outset, the Dead were meticulous about taping their concerts. During several periods in their history, Cantor-Jackson did the taping, mixing the soundboard feed directly onto a two-track tape as the music was being performed. (She sat offstage, wearing earphones.) In Deadhead circles, she was renowned for her ear.

In the mid-eighties, she got into a dispute with the band over money. She went broke and lost her house in a foreclosure. Her belongings, including her tapes, which she’d withheld from the band, wound up in a storage locker in Marin County, and in 1986, after she failed to keep up with the payments, the contents, many of them damaged in a flood, were auctioned off. The Dead and its delegates declined to bid, even though dozens of Betty Boards were missing from their vault, but a few hundred people showed up—a stoner’s “Storage Wars.” Several bidders made off with batches of tapes. One batch fell into the hands of some enthusiasts who cleaned them up, transferred them to a digital format, and began distributing immaculate copies to the vast network of Deadhead tape collectors.

Another went to the chemistry teacher, who was not a Deadhead, by any stretch—“I like the Doobie Brothers,” he told me. But a kid who mowed his lawn, a member of the Dead’s road crew, had suggested that he go to the auction. As he recalls, he paid about a hundred dollars for the three road cases, which were so waterlogged that it took four men to load them into his pickup truck. He was interested in the cases, not the contents. He drove them to the barn, had a look inside, saw a sodden mess, closed them back up, and left them there for ten years. Along the way, he learned about Betty and assumed that he might have some of her coveted boards. When Jerry Garcia died, in 1995, the teacher began looking for a way to sell them.

The teacher hired Eaton to restore his tapes. In all, he restored two hundred tapes—nearly a hundred hours of music. The teacher had Eaton sign a contract stipulating that he not distribute the tapes, but Eaton made digital copies. “The music deserved to be preserved and properly archived,” he told me. “It would have been unconscionable to let it go.” The teacher, meanwhile, reached out to the Dead, in an effort to sell the tapes. Through a lawyer, he says, they offered him a hundred thousand dollars. The teacher asked for ten times that. The Dead, reeling from the loss of touring revenue after the death of Garcia, reminded him that they owned the music, even if he owned the tapes. He didn’t sell. Still, before long, copies found their way into the vault. The music came home.

In 2003, the Dead released a four-CD live album from one set of the tapes, from a series of concerts that they had performed at the Academy of Music, in Manhattan, in the spring of 1972.

The teacher, now retired and the keeper of hundreds of rescued pet goats, still had the reels when I talked to him, in July. He didn’t want me to print his name, lest he become a target of theft. He was on the verge of being evicted from his home. He was still trying to sell the old reels, and said he’d recently stumbled on another box. He asked if I had a million dollars. I told him I did not, though I’d be eager to hear the tapes.

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.”

A few years later, I went to a boarding school where the Dead was something of a cult. The cool older kids had trays of cassette tapes of Dead concerts—copies of copies of copies, usually many generations removed from the original source, which might have been an audience tape (or aud, made by someone in the audience, with a microphone), a soundboard tape (made by someone who’d plugged into the main feed from the public-address system), or a tape of a radio broadcast.

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None of it sounded like that album of greatest hits. It was denser, feverish, otherworldly. If you took an interest, you’d copy a few tapes, listen to those over and over, until they began to make sense, and then copy some more. Before long, you might have a scattershot collection, with a couple of tapes from each year. It was all Grateful Dead, but because of the variability in sonic fidelity, and because the band had been at it for twenty years, there were many different flavors and moods. Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal. Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or a cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog. Or, having decided that it all sounded like one long meandering dirge, you went back to whatever normal people listened to.

That summer, I went to see the Dead for the first time, at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, an outdoor venue in Maryland. It was 1984. I was fifteen. I went with two friends and one of their older brothers. We got there just in time to hear the opening of “Casey Jones,” which, despite being a staple of classic-rock radio, was by that time a rarity in the Dead’s repertoire, and the crowd went berserk. My impressions of the night were diffuse, many fixating on the shabby human carnival that had taken over the parking lot and the pavilion: freaks dangling from trees, skulking muppets muttering, “Acid, acid.” In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke. His hair was long and lank. He hardly looked up. He was, at this point, very deep into an addiction to heroin. Backlit, he looked like some woodland ghoul. But he played in long, convoluted paragraphs and snappy banjo blurts. Torrents of melody poured out of his stubby, tarred hands, chiming and snarling into the night. The sounds produced by the bassist, Phil Lesh, were by turns plummy and thick, trebly and melodic. The music was somehow both pretty and mean, bouncy and diabolical, busy and clean. You could get lost in it. I went again the next night. That show, in retrospect, was the best I would ever see.

Later, I got the tapes. To my ears, the performances held up, and the music, on repetition, began to feel like something composed, rather than improvised. It took on a life of its own, apart from my experience of having witnessed its creation. The tapes themselves are long gone, but I still listen to those shows from time to time. I’ve even found an amateur video of the second night on YouTube, synched to a soundboard recording. The fact that I also listen, with equal or even greater regard, to many dozens of shows that I never attended, the majority of them performed during my nursery-rhyme years, props up my usually fruitless contention that nostalgia has nothing to do with the way the Dead wormed their way into my mind’s ear and fought off all comers even decades after the band had disappeared from the stage. The Dead inspired many lamentable bumper stickers, but one good one captured how it felt, and feels, to be under their sway: “Who are the Grateful Dead, and why do they keep following me?”

The Grateful Dead occupy a curious spot in the canon. Their music has turned out to be extremely resilient, considering that they were primarily a live act and effectively ceased to exist seventeen years ago, when Garcia died, and that for many of the years prior to that (how many is just about the most debated question in Deadland) they were a weak incarnation of themselves. They made a lot of studio albums, but few memorable ones, and had just one Top Forty hit in thirty years, and not for lack of trying. Yet it’s probably safe to say that the Dead have more recorded music in circulation than any performing group in history. (History, admittedly, is short. If there’d been such a thing as a Nakamichi 700 tape deck in eighteenth-century Leipzig, people might be trading bootlegs of Bach performing his own fugues: “St. Thomas’s Church, 5/8/39, Johann rips on the ‘Little’—epic!”) From their establishment, in 1965, to the death of Garcia, in 1995, they played 2,318 concerts, and more than two thousand of those are available in some form or another.

The band has released a hundred archival concert recordings, under various rubrics, but they also often (though not always) tolerated the taping of their concerts by people in the audience, as long as the tapes were traded, not sold. As Garcia said, “Once we’re done with it, the audience can have it.”

The Dead’s immense body of work invites and sustains obsession, and its variability is in some respects the draw. All this may dilute any song’s or album’s or concert’s case for canonical consideration—it’d be hard to know what to send into space. This spring, the Library of Congress announced that it was adding a Dead recording to its National Recording Registry. It chose a Betty Cantor-Jackson recording: Barton Hall, Cornell University, in May of 1977. It has never been released by the band; it’s not even in the vault. In the opinion of many, including me, it is not even the Dead’s best performance that month, much less in their history. But because a good audience tape of it circulated right after the show, and because a particularly clean soundboard version materialized, in the eighties, with the appearance of the first batch of Betty Boards, and because it is a polished and accessible example of the band at a high point, it became a mainstay of most tape collections and is possibly their most beloved piece of work. Blair Jackson, a Grateful Dead historian and biographer, estimates that it has been copied two million times. That’s a lot for a bootleg—enough for a conspiracy theory to have sprung up around it. Some believe that the show never happened, that the tape is just a collection of performances culled from other shows.

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.

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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.