I missed the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the same year I was born, yet I am still possessed by the band’s music. I was raised in the orbit of Deadheads; my dad was a casual fan, and his sisters, twins, were devoted: they followed the band on the road in the 1980s. When I got my first iPod, my parents had filled it with songs burned from my dad’s CDs. Songs like “St. Stephen,” with its ambiguous yet beautiful lyrics, changed my idea of what music could be: “Wishing well with a golden bell / Bucket hanging clear to hell.”
The long shadow of the band loomed over my childhood in San Francisco in other ways, too. In thrift shops I’d visit in Haight-Ashbury, the skeletons and skulls that symbolized the band were everywhere, frightening me. But the band itself was a thing of the past, like the Beatles, like Cary Grant, like plenty of other cultural icons that my parents introduced me to over the course of my childhood. The fact that many members of the original band were still alive and touring in other Dead-adjacent formations (Furthur, RatDog, etc.) didn’t make an impression. I thought that my experience of the Dead would be through playlists.
It wasn’t particularly cool to be a young person who liked the Dead back then. They certainly are an acquired taste, especially in recordings of their live shows. Not everyone wants to listen to a 15-minute version of “Eyes of the World” and compare it with an 11-minute version of “Eyes of the World” from 17 years earlier. In the 2010s, the Grateful Dead just wasn’t in the air; it wasn’t of our time.
In 2011 something unlikely happened that changed that. The pop star John Mayer heard the song “Althea” by chance on Pandora. Mr. Mayer had never been a Deadhead, but he was hooked. Like many before him, he dived in headfirst. He learned a lot of the Dead’s songs. Eventually he approached Bob Weir, a songwriter and guitarist in the band, to see if he’d be interested in playing together. They started performing together, with others, including some original members of the band, as Dead & Company. This version of the Dead soon began to fill stadiums.
It was in the era of Dead & Company, when I was in my mid-20s, that I came back to the music. During the pandemic, I had started listening obsessively to old shows in the Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead collection — a fantastic compendium of bootleg recordings of whole concerts that fans had made over the years. I was interested in the lost world this music conjured, a world of free-spirited teenagers like my aunts who had left home young and hit the road. What could I learn about them, and myself, by listening? I was returning to the bygone world of my own childhood, too, the already-vanished San Francisco where I no longer lived.
In the intervening years, I had grown up. I began to understand the music differently; the Dead have a reputation for being a party band, and they certainly can be — there is plenty of “dancin’ in the streets” to be had. But the music is also colored by darkness. This should have been obvious to me, even from the band’s name, from the skulls nestled alongside the roses, but it wasn’t something I really heard until the pandemic, when death knocked on every door. I came to understand how the escapism involved in following the Dead was not only about chasing joy and wearing scarlet begonias in your hair; it was also a mode of coping by running away. Many people in and around the band — and the people with them on the road — suffered from addiction, were in accidents or died younger than they should have. Even Mr. Garcia, who was just 53. The best of the songs are as full of loss as they are of life, and it was something about this combination, and the way you could never predict where a song would go — not really — that pulled me in.
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