Grateful for the Dead
STLtoday.com October 27, 2001
Just about everybody has a Grateful Dead-related story. Here’s mine.
When I was in college, I knew a guy that we’ll call Rodney. That, after all was his name. Rodney was from the middle of Kansas, but claimed to be from the planet Vega.
Vega, I would explain to him on occasion, was a star, not a planet, and don’t your feet get hot? He’d just glare at me.
Rodney was one of the school’s foremost stoners, and he lived down the hallway from me in a room with a supremely bored Long Islander who couldn’t seem to quite believe his bad luck in being sent by his father to a school in the middle of nowhere, at least from a New York point of view. Billy Joel could have based his song “Captain Jack” on this guy, and since I could never remember his name, that was how I referred to him.
Their dorm room was something of a stoner cliché: blacklight posters on the wall, a laundry-service towel always shoved underneath the door. If you dared enter their lair, you had to walk through a curtain of magnetic tape that had been pulled out of 8-track cartridges and hung from the doorway to achieve a cheap but decidedly exotic effect. Bongs and pizza boxes were everywhere. Their drugs of choice were LSD and primo Kansas ditch weed.
Rodney also drank, and when he did, it wasn’t pretty. He liked to mix grain alcohol with that luminous red punch you get from those ubiquitous college snack bar drink machines. You could always tell when Rodney was drinking instead of drugging, because he would usually throw up in the dorm’s communal bathroom. Walking in there in the middle of the night sometimes would be like dropping into the middle of a scene from “Friday the 13th.”
I know as much as I do about Rodney because, fairly often, I would have to go down the hallway, pound on his door, and demand that he and Captain Jack turn down the goddamn music. (Silly me, actually using my college years to study.) Invariably, the sounds blasting out of their stereo came courtesy of the Grateful Dead. It wasn’t too bad when they’d play “American Beauty” or “Workingman’s Dead,” but when they broke out the then-current stuff like the execrable “Shakedown Street” or “Terrapin Station,” well that just about sent me around the bend.
My interest in the Dead back then was marginal. Their best days were behind them, it seemed, and they had not yet established themselves as the world’s perennial favorite live act. When they toured, medium-sized venues like Kansas City’s Memorial Hall were sufficient.
That was where I saw the Dead for the first time, in 1978. Some acquaintances from the dorm were going and had an extra ticket, so I took the hour-long ride down the Kansas City just to check things out. I remember being mildly pleased by the show, especially the long drum workout by Mickey Hart and bill Kreutzmann. Overall, though, I wasn’t converted to Deadhead status. Not even close.
Midway through the show, I ran into Captain Jack in the lobby. He was there with Rodney, naturally, and they were having a great time seeing their heroes and tripping to their hearts’ content. We exchanged a few words and went back to our seats.
The next day, there was a knock at my door in the dorm. It was Captain Jack.
“Um, did you guys bring Rodney home last night?”
“No.”
“Well, we lost him.”
“You lost him? How the hell did that happen?”
“I don’t know. He was just gone, so we left. We figured he was with you.”
Perfect stoner logic, I thought, and closed the door, reasoning that a missing Rodney was more Captain Jack’s problem than it was mine. But Rodney never did turn up again, at least not at school. I didn’t hear the rest of the story until about a week later.
Rodney, it seems, had been arrested. He had walked outside Memorial Hall midway through the concert, removed every stitch of his clothing, and started walking down the street. His simple explanation to the cops became a part of the school’s oft-repeated lore: “Too many walls melted in front of me, man.”
That was the end of Rodney, so far as we knew, and by the end of the year, Captain Jack was gone, too.
I tell that story with this moral in mind: It’s not fair to blame a band for its audience, and for years, I held the Grateful Dead’s audience against them. To me, they just seemed silly and self-involved, tripping their life away and driving aimlessly around the country in VW microbuses. When I saw Deadheads, I saw carbon copies of Rodney, walls melting all around them.
I saw the Dead on a couple more occasions, usually more out of curiosity than a genuine love for the music. My appreciation for them came later – in some ways, I suppose, too late – starting around the time of Jerry Garcia’s death.
As it happened, I was in San Francisco just a day after Garcia died, and like so many others, I gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district just to see what was going on. The streets were packed, and not knowing what else to do, I walked up to 710 Haight Street, where the Dead used to live, and then down to the corner, which is now, of all things, a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor. I thought it would be the height of irony to go in and buy some Cherry Garcia, but plenty of others thought of it first. The line was a mile long, and by that time the store was even donating proceeds from Cherry Garcia sales to charity.
In the past couple of years, I’ve been deluged with Dead product, and have finally started listening to it in earnest. The “Dick’s Picks” series of authorized bootlegs has been going strong for years. “Volume 23” arrived in the mail just the other day, and not long before it, “Nightfall of Diamonds,” a live album culled from a performance in 1989.
Then a week or so ago came the motherlode: “The Golden Road (1965-1973),” a 12-disc box set encompassing all of the Grateful Dead albums recorded in that time span, plus bonus tracks and some rare pre-Dead performances.
I’m still listening to the set, and I’m sure I’ll be digesting it for some time to come. After all, the discs contain over 15 hours of music, and while that might be the hardcore Dead fan’s ideal length of one performance of “Dark Star,” I’ve still got a life to lead.
But listening to the set has led to the belief that the Dead phenomenon was and is first and foremost based on the music. Other things got in the way, and that clouded the story just enough to make me miss out on it for a very long time. But I’m pretty sure others missed out, too, including in their own way, Rodney and Captain Jack.
STLtoday.com October 27, 2001
Just about everybody has a Grateful Dead-related story. Here’s mine.
When I was in college, I knew a guy that we’ll call Rodney. That, after all was his name. Rodney was from the middle of Kansas, but claimed to be from the planet Vega.
Vega, I would explain to him on occasion, was a star, not a planet, and don’t your feet get hot? He’d just glare at me.
Rodney was one of the school’s foremost stoners, and he lived down the hallway from me in a room with a supremely bored Long Islander who couldn’t seem to quite believe his bad luck in being sent by his father to a school in the middle of nowhere, at least from a New York point of view. Billy Joel could have based his song “Captain Jack” on this guy, and since I could never remember his name, that was how I referred to him.
Their dorm room was something of a stoner cliché: blacklight posters on the wall, a laundry-service towel always shoved underneath the door. If you dared enter their lair, you had to walk through a curtain of magnetic tape that had been pulled out of 8-track cartridges and hung from the doorway to achieve a cheap but decidedly exotic effect. Bongs and pizza boxes were everywhere. Their drugs of choice were LSD and primo Kansas ditch weed.
Rodney also drank, and when he did, it wasn’t pretty. He liked to mix grain alcohol with that luminous red punch you get from those ubiquitous college snack bar drink machines. You could always tell when Rodney was drinking instead of drugging, because he would usually throw up in the dorm’s communal bathroom. Walking in there in the middle of the night sometimes would be like dropping into the middle of a scene from “Friday the 13th.”
I know as much as I do about Rodney because, fairly often, I would have to go down the hallway, pound on his door, and demand that he and Captain Jack turn down the goddamn music. (Silly me, actually using my college years to study.) Invariably, the sounds blasting out of their stereo came courtesy of the Grateful Dead. It wasn’t too bad when they’d play “American Beauty” or “Workingman’s Dead,” but when they broke out the then-current stuff like the execrable “Shakedown Street” or “Terrapin Station,” well that just about sent me around the bend.
My interest in the Dead back then was marginal. Their best days were behind them, it seemed, and they had not yet established themselves as the world’s perennial favorite live act. When they toured, medium-sized venues like Kansas City’s Memorial Hall were sufficient.
That was where I saw the Dead for the first time, in 1978. Some acquaintances from the dorm were going and had an extra ticket, so I took the hour-long ride down the Kansas City just to check things out. I remember being mildly pleased by the show, especially the long drum workout by Mickey Hart and bill Kreutzmann. Overall, though, I wasn’t converted to Deadhead status. Not even close.
Midway through the show, I ran into Captain Jack in the lobby. He was there with Rodney, naturally, and they were having a great time seeing their heroes and tripping to their hearts’ content. We exchanged a few words and went back to our seats.
The next day, there was a knock at my door in the dorm. It was Captain Jack.
“Um, did you guys bring Rodney home last night?”
“No.”
“Well, we lost him.”
“You lost him? How the hell did that happen?”
“I don’t know. He was just gone, so we left. We figured he was with you.”
Perfect stoner logic, I thought, and closed the door, reasoning that a missing Rodney was more Captain Jack’s problem than it was mine. But Rodney never did turn up again, at least not at school. I didn’t hear the rest of the story until about a week later.
Rodney, it seems, had been arrested. He had walked outside Memorial Hall midway through the concert, removed every stitch of his clothing, and started walking down the street. His simple explanation to the cops became a part of the school’s oft-repeated lore: “Too many walls melted in front of me, man.”
That was the end of Rodney, so far as we knew, and by the end of the year, Captain Jack was gone, too.
I tell that story with this moral in mind: It’s not fair to blame a band for its audience, and for years, I held the Grateful Dead’s audience against them. To me, they just seemed silly and self-involved, tripping their life away and driving aimlessly around the country in VW microbuses. When I saw Deadheads, I saw carbon copies of Rodney, walls melting all around them.
I saw the Dead on a couple more occasions, usually more out of curiosity than a genuine love for the music. My appreciation for them came later – in some ways, I suppose, too late – starting around the time of Jerry Garcia’s death.
As it happened, I was in San Francisco just a day after Garcia died, and like so many others, I gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district just to see what was going on. The streets were packed, and not knowing what else to do, I walked up to 710 Haight Street, where the Dead used to live, and then down to the corner, which is now, of all things, a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor. I thought it would be the height of irony to go in and buy some Cherry Garcia, but plenty of others thought of it first. The line was a mile long, and by that time the store was even donating proceeds from Cherry Garcia sales to charity.
In the past couple of years, I’ve been deluged with Dead product, and have finally started listening to it in earnest. The “Dick’s Picks” series of authorized bootlegs has been going strong for years. “Volume 23” arrived in the mail just the other day, and not long before it, “Nightfall of Diamonds,” a live album culled from a performance in 1989.
Then a week or so ago came the motherlode: “The Golden Road (1965-1973),” a 12-disc box set encompassing all of the Grateful Dead albums recorded in that time span, plus bonus tracks and some rare pre-Dead performances.
I’m still listening to the set, and I’m sure I’ll be digesting it for some time to come. After all, the discs contain over 15 hours of music, and while that might be the hardcore Dead fan’s ideal length of one performance of “Dark Star,” I’ve still got a life to lead.
But listening to the set has led to the belief that the Dead phenomenon was and is first and foremost based on the music. Other things got in the way, and that clouded the story just enough to make me miss out on it for a very long time. But I’m pretty sure others missed out, too, including in their own way, Rodney and Captain Jack.