If people fear contracting the coronavirus during this pandemic, they’ve been equally likely to focus their anxieties on boredom and loneliness. Social distancing might not compare to storming the beaches of Normandy as a feat of human fortitude, but it’s undoubtedly strange and sad. Community is a human necessity. And, during crises like our current one, when normal socialization breaks down, we become hungry for a sense of belonging.
I suggest you try getting into the Grateful Dead. I know, I know, you probably don’t want to listen to a 20-minute guitar solo slithering around a Mixolydian scale, but, hey, you have time to kill, and enjoying the actual music can come later. I didn’t get into the Dead myself until I was 26, living in Brooklyn, and going to school on the GI Bill, with ample amounts of downtime. They found me at the right moment. One day, I listened to a live version of “China Cat Sunflower / I Know You Rider,” played at Bucknell University in 1971, and everything clicked. I was hooked.
But leaving aside their music, the Dead are perfectly suited to social distancing. First of all, there’s a lot of their music to go around. The band played well over 2,300 shows during their 1965-1995 life span. Despite cliches that jam bands always sound the same, the Dead were mercurial — you can dip a toe in at any point in their career and hear something different. There’s their mid-’60s garage band surf rock. The late-’60s psychedelia. The country-inflected barroom blues of the early ’70s. Or the stadium-swelling prog rock of the late ’70s. And, if you feel particularly adventurous, you can even check out the odd, strung-out jazz sound of their shows from the mid-’80s, my favorite Dead era for being so idiosyncratic.
Of course, all of these live shows wouldn’t mean much to us now if they hadn’t been meticulously documented and recorded by fans. The Dead started off as post-beat, pre-hippie author Ken Kesey’s house band during his “Acid Tests” — anarchic warehouse parties that blended LSD consumption with group experiments in multimedia technology. These “happenings” fused two of the boomer generation’s worst defining traits: libertine debauchery disguised as pseudospiritual exploration and the use of cutting-edge technology for navel-gazing. Polyamory and TikTok aren’t novel; they’re our cultural inheritance.
For better or worse, these two traits would also come to define the experience of listening to the Dead. Deadheads might come in many forms and from many walks of life, but they can be broken up into two broad categories: the seekers and the nerds. The seekers rambled around the country, selling handmade crafts in parking lots outside of shows and occasionally tuning in to the actual music, seeking from it the same thing they looked for in drugs: an epiphanic moment of bliss. The band was almost incidental. As rhythm guitarist Bob Weir sings in the song “Greatest Story Ever Told,” “It’s one in ten thousand that come for the show.”
That one in ten thousand was the nerd. And if they were really nerdy, they were tapers. The Dead, which hailed from San Francisco, had always existed in that Bay Area nexus of techno-libertarianism that would eventually morph into the modern Silicon Valley. The band pioneered new ways of pushing sound out into the world, from patron Oswald Stanley’s Altec Voice of the Theatre PA system to the monstrous Wall of Sound, described by Wired as using “92 tube amplifiers to push 26,400 watts through 604 speakers capable of projecting cosmic ‘Dark Star’ jams, whispered Garcia vocals, and thundering quad bass up to a half-mile from the stage without distortion.” But many of their fans were also technophiles who utilized new ways of recording, mastering, and distributing tapes of live shows.
The recording and trading of live Dead shows in many ways anticipated the internet. In fact, the first few things shared via ARPANET, the government-financed precursor to the internet, were a flagged typo, an offer to sell marijuana, and a request to trade set lists for Grateful Dead shows. As the internet matured, so, too, did the dissemination of Dead recordings. Some of the earliest websites where you could actually download music, such as etree.org, tapersection.com, and NYCtaper, were Dead-centric. Whatever narcissistic impulse lay behind Kesey’s original project to record everything, Deadheads, by digitizing and uploading nearly every show, had unwittingly made their community durable enough to both outlast the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995 and thrive during times of social isolation. Hippie spirituality might be banal, but this almost Talmudic sorting, downloading, and commenting on music performed 40 years ago is achingly poignant. It also means that, as memories of the old Deadhead cliches disappear and new generations engage with the music, empty pleasure-seeking is replaced with conversation and cultivation.
I listen to hours of the Dead every day, usually using the Internet Archive, where most commercially unreleased shows are housed. There’s something liturgical to the way I listen, picking out “this day in history” and dipping into shows from ‘71, ‘77, ‘83, or ‘91, performed for audiences in places as disparate as Southern Methodist University and the New York Academy of Music. It’s like accessing a radio with the ability to recover lost waves that have already escaped our atmosphere and leaked into the cold silence of space. There’s a joke about Watergate. An announcement that the Royals have won the World Series. A Chuck Berry cover. A riff from the theme of Close Encounters of the Third Kind noodled during a tuneup. Unable to leave the house much, these shows give me the texture of a stranger and funkier America, one that I never actually experienced firsthand. There’s something miraculous in the possibility of that connection, in these moments not quite lost to time. Even though the communication is only one-way, it’s a wonder that the distance is even bridged at all. It gives me hope that other rifts can be reconciled as well.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
