Taylor Swift. Jerry Garcia. And Me.

My lifelong love affair with the Grateful Dead. Yep -- I'm one of THOSE people.

About forty-five years ago, I sat in the study of one of my high school buddies. Thanks to several very deep hits from a large glass bong, I was very, very high – right on the edge of “Uh, oh”. My friend leaned over and put a big green pair of over-the-ear Koss headphones on my head. He then lowered the needle onto the first song of the third side of the Grateful Dead’s three-record live Europe ’72 set – Brown-Eyed Women. 30 or so minutes later, I emerged from that room a different boy. This isn’t metaphor – I genuinely believe that experience changed the way my brain functions, on some level. This week I’m finally writing about my lifelong love affair with the Dead. They changed my life. They changed me.

“Brown-Eyed Women” is a lovely song that tells the story of the mythical Gentle Jack Jones, who lives in the equally mythical Bigfoot County. In one four minute story song, he contends with mortality, aging, poverty, snowstorms, rainstorms, and the death of his mother. All of it’s told in a smart, wise voice, the voice of someone who’s seen everything the world can do to people without losing perspective or a bit of humanity:

Brown-eyed women and red grenadine,
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down,
And it looks like the old man's getting on.

Tumbledown shack in Big Foot county.
Snowed so hard that the roof caved in.
Delilah Jones went to meet her God,
And the old man never was the same again.

I was fifteen years old. My father was just about to have the first of several heart attacks, which would ultimately kill him, far down the road. I had grown to my full height, and had, like all young men, had it up to here with the seeming restrictions and smallness of my little town. I was a dreamer. I loved to read and write. I was burning for creativity, adventure, girls, and I did not seem to fit in anywhere. I was absolutely on fire to get laid, to make my own money, to drive, and to see what was out there. I wanted out but had no idea where to go.

High school seemed like pointless bullshit – watching football players have fistfights in the cafeteria and contending with the feeling that I was in a kind of prison. The Grateful Dead were my first real, tangible clue that there were people out there doing something interesting, something I was drawn to, something so compelling and intriguing that it suddenly seemed like I might belong somewhere. Remember, I was sixteen years old, and my perspective wasn’t too nuanced.

Anything like a complete history of the Grateful Dead would fill several books. They were one of a few bands that were genuinely connected to social change. In a paragraph, they were the house band for the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests in the Bay Area in the last years of the 1960s. This was kind of the high-water mark of the counterculture, the place Hunter Thompson described as a visible line where the wave of change broke, then rolled back.

The Pranksters, on the bus. Literally.

The entire creaking superstructure of postwar America had begun to break down. Then it collapsed. In marched change – antiwar protests, feminism, civil rights, sex, music, and a massive generational wave of young people deciding that fuck no, they were not going to do the Good American Citizen thing, that there was adventure and information and whole new ways of living out there and by God, they were going to find it, and they didn’t give a shit what Mom and Dad and Father Denison thought about it.

All of this was colored by psychedelics. A lot of people were damaged by that stuff – I know of several fine old families that came to a screeching halt because someone discovered LSD. But in other cases, such as the Dead, the experience of seriously altering your consciousness opened them right up. Imagine getting up on stage to play before thousands of people while tripping. All the old showbiz rules about knowing your lines, and performing kind of dissolved in that environment.

From that beginning the Grateful Dead went on to a thirty-plus year career that included elements of rock, psychedelia, country, reggae, classical and jazz. It only ended when Jerry Garcia, the band’s de facto leader, died. And true to their counterculture roots, they broke pretty much every imaginable rule of the music business. For instance, they had no set lists – they just played what they felt like. They improvised constantly. They permitted people to tape shows, resulting eventually in a massive online library of every performance they ever delivered. There was never any byplay or chatting to the audience between songs — they were there to play, not dispense schtick. The Dead were a band that was about playing live music to warm, human beings. By their own admission, they made lousy records and usually screwed up important shows.

Their music is so diverse and varied that it is, as one of their songs says, beyond description. They were famous for their live shows, which were massive, soul-soaking explorations that sometimes went on all night, at least in the early days. Sometimes they were just awful – the hippie, improvisational spirit that powered the band didn’t result in professionalism.

But when they were on, when they were having a good night, they were the greatest rock band on the planet. Musically, they are basically a dance band, and a hot Dead show was like the biggest, best party you could ever imagine. I got to see this several times, live and in person, in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and I think, Washington, D.C. The old saying is that they’re not the best at what they do – they’re the only ones who do what they do. It’s true.

And the supernova at the heart of the band was the legendary Jerry Garcia, who is now a kind of Bay Area saint. It’s odd to go to see Dead and Company, the spinoff band that was created from some of the Dead’s original members after Garcia’s death, and to realize that because you had seen Garcia, you were a kind of elder now. It’s a nice feeling.

Garcia, by one of my daughters

As a personality, Garcia was tragically flawed. Unlike a lot of famous rock stars, he was very, very human. He was legendary for his curiosity, his charisma, his lack of pretension and a kind of constant openness to everything – ideas, people, books, music. Yet, he was also a genuinely wounded person. As a result, I think, of witnessing his father’s death as a child, he had a kind of carefully hidden but very real emotional vulnerability that made fame unbearable, and eventually led him to a debilitating heroin addiction. That, combined with a major cigarette smoking habit, killed him at the age of 53.

But through the mysterious process that drives a lot of creative people, his damage also propelled him to become an absolutely unrivaled guitarist, who was deservedly famous, above all, for his solos. The solos were what really nailed me sitting in that home office. They nail me today. They are lovely, melodic, and have more musical ideas packed into one, long guitar solo, more really original ideas spiraling up and out, than most bands develop in their entire careers. Pudgy, bearded, not particularly demonstrative, Garcia would wait until the song was well and truly launched, the platform had been built, and then, staring at nothing, would let yet another glorious solo rip.

John Mayer, who took on the daunting task of taking over Garcia’s guitar role after his death described the art of doing this nicely in an interview: “I wish I could describe to you all the buttons and pulleys and levers that are required to make this thing work the right way. How you convert energy, how you convert ideas. How you don’t overplay, but how you DO overplay. If I told you how to play this gig, I would say, “Overplay, but don’t OVERPLAY.” And “take a long solo” but don’t take a LONG solo.” In other words, it’s impossible to describe, to make sense of. Yet, there it is.

Garcia did this every night. At the appointed moment, he would step forward, position the 747 on the runway, and shove the throttles all the way forward. The band knew what was happening, and would surround him, back him up, propel him. But his elegant, luxurious solos, the energy and creativity and polish, the deep knowledge of American music – that was what made the beautiful solos work, what made them possible, what made Garcia possible.

Which may be what makes them so unique, and so much a part of my life.

Chef White, in situ.

At the moment, one of the books I’m reading is The Devil in the Kitchen, by Marco Pierre White, one of Britain’s most celebrated, talented chefs, and the first of a wave of celebrities in the kitchen. He’s also, of course, ferociously talented. The early years of a high-level chef’s career, it turns out, can be very, very disciplined, regimented, demanding. White wrote about how in one of his early gigs in a serious, high-level kitchen, the staff were known in the industry as the “Roux robots”. The job was to cook in a way that resembled a machine as much as possible. It’s an interesting concept. Wonderful food created thanks to machinelike precision.

Some musicians are like that, including, or especially, Taylor Swift. Swift, like Shania Twain before her, is the ultimate, polished professional. I love her for that – seeing one of her videos is like walking into the lobby of a five-star hotel. Everything is clean, everything is expensive, everything works perfectly. Everyone who works there knows their job, and is well-compensated to do it. It’s relaxing, because it’s so reliable. The hooks are there, just enough edginess is inserted to make it arresting and evocative, and as always, the song will be great. You can kind of relax into it because you know exactly what’s coming, which emotional buttons will be pushed by her flawlessly-manicured finger in what order.

The Dead are different.

The Grateful Dead are like walking into the familiar, warm kitchen of a beach house that hasn’t changed much since the 1920s. I actually lived in a place like this, the legendary 825, in Santa Cruz. The stove is gas. There’s coffee on, and bagels on the tile counter. The floor is linoleum. Jackets and wetsuits hang outside. Cans and jars and boxes are on open shelves, like a summer camp. The china doesn’t match. The coffee mugs are completely random.  The wiring’s a little weird, and sometimes a fuse blows or a breaker needs to be replaced.

Yet, this is also the kitchen of a thousand conversations, at parties, in the morning, over cigarettes, drunk, sober, happy, sad, and nobody really even notices that little rip in the screen because it’s always been there. It’s the Human Kitchen.

There is a place in my heart for all kinds of music. I love Bob Marley, the whole smoky Rasta reggae thing. I love Grimes, in all her arty weirdness. I love angry punks, and the sorrow and beauty of Sinatra and particularly Chet Baker, and the majesty and depth of Beethoven, Mozart, and his playful little friend, Debussy.

But since I get to pick a favorite, I pick the funky kitchen that is the Grateful Dead. They led me to California, really. I love the surprise of it, the reverence for playing music rather than being rich or famous or selling billions of records. I love the willingness to take risks, knowing that you may fuck up in front of twenty thousand people. And I love the tolerance for real, no-kidding diversity. For example, Bob Weir, who played rhythm to Garcia’s lead, looked like a model and dressed like a preppy in the midst of a bunch of hippies self-described as the Ugly Brothers.

What other band would have as a member a full-time, full-share lyricist? Or have two drummers, because it made the music more interesting? Or for a couple of years, tour with the biggest, purest, most powerful sound system the world had ever seen at that time, just because they thought superlative sound was important? What other band would sometimes play all night – literally until dawn – because they felt like it? What other band would be at the heart of an instantly recognizable traveling army of fans, who would spend years following the band and seeing every single show? Or dress up in clown costumes, or have Barney the Dinosaur show up onstage, or dose everyone involved during a live television appearance, including Hugh Hefner?

No other band. Ever.