what a long, strange trip
how the grateful dead taught me how to be myself
My introduction to the Dead came by way of an older cousin whose main goal in life it seemed was lending me albums that would change my life forever. Led Zeppelin, The Who, Cheech & Chong, all those albums that opened my ears and my eyes came from him. I had placed a great trust in him and I was always rewarded well when I listened to his suggestions.
One Sunday — I know it was a Sunday because we were eating at our grandma’s house — he took me aside and handed me a copy of Steal Your Face. “Here,” he said, shoving it in my hand as if it were something to be kept under wraps. “Listen to this. It’s not like anything I’ve given you before, but trust me.” Of course I trusted him. I looked at the album. I’d heard of the Grateful Dead but never really listened to them, they didn’t seem like my cup of rock and roll tea. Nor did they seem like my cousin’s thing, but if he recommended the band, I was going to give them a try.
I was barely 14 at the time. It was summer and I was about to transition from public school to Catholic school. I was a nervous wreck that I’d never make friends at the new school and my life would become more of a disaster than it already was. Little did I know that this fairly new copy of Steal Your Face would set in motion a sea change.
I went home after dinner and put the album on. No, it wasn’t really my thing, I remember thinking. But I was determined to give it a go, to listen to the entire four sides and figure out what my cousin enjoyed about it.
It wasn’t until I got to side four and “Sugaree” that I connected with the record. Listening in the dark of my room, there was something about the song — the comforting cadence, perhaps — that pulled me in. When I was done with the album I started it over again. I got caught up in it. I liked it. My cousin struck gold again.
The next day I gathered my collected allowance money and, at the suggestion of my trusted cousin, went down to the record department in Modell’s department store and bought myself Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.
Fast forward to fall of that year. I’d submerged myself in the music of the Grateful Dead. I was careful to walk the line between metal and the Dead, not sure what the kids in the new school would be into. That summer was filled with offerings from Kiss and Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest and I kept rocking outwardly while in the comfort of my home, in the peaceful hour or so after coming down from a high (we started young in the suburbs of Long Island), I closed my eyes every night to the Grateful Dead.
The new school year started and I nervously entered the halls of my new Catholic high school, afraid of what would greet me. Would I make friends? Would I find anything in common with these kids who all came with ready made cliques from richer neighborhoods?
Of course, music was the great commonality. We had a stereo in the lunch room and it was easy to find out just by looking around at who was air drumming to certain songs the people who were your people. I found myself mingling with the Led Zeppelin crowd and soon enough I had ingratiated myself into a group of kids who had no idea about me or my past or where I came from or who I was. Fresh start. Still, after years of having trouble maintaining friendships, after a tormented career in grade school and junior high, I had a bit of trepidation about letting myself just be me in front of them. I was afraid being me wouldn’t be good enough. So I hung around the periphery of the group, never really letting myself all the way in for fear they would find out too much about me.
Turns out there were a bunch of kids like me, people without a country, no real clique to call our own, but just drifted like nomads between the rockers and the burnouts and the jocks and the theater nerds. We had something in common with each group, but not enough to become part of them. We just drifted.
What we had in common with each other, besides the lack of confidence that would have allowed to possibly join a more popular group of friends, were two things: pot and the Grateful Dead. We spent a lot of time after school listening to the band’s cassettes on my little portable tape player, smoking and singing and not really saying much to each other, just reveling in the music and the moment. In those moments, I didn’t care where I did or didn’t belong. I didn’t care about who I had been or who I was becoming. I was just one with the music and my immediate world. If we weren’t in the back of the school listening to the Dead, we were in Maryanne’s basement doing the same. Maybe sometimes we mixed in some Doors or Jefferson Airplane, but mostly it was the Dead.
High school went on like this. I was always discovering new music, I was still listening to metal and hard rock, but my constant was the Grateful Dead. The Dead is what bound us few nomads together and I clung to the music like a life preserver because without that music and the ties it brought, I felt like I would be drifting aimlessly and alone.
In October of 1979, the Dead set a few dates for the Nassau Coliseum. They had been around earlier in the year, but we were unable to get tickets. This time, we were lucky. A Halloween show, the first of many Dead shows I would see at various venues in the tri-state area.
I knew what to expect from talking to other Deadheads, the kind of Deadhead who traveled around the country going to shows. Yet I didn’t really know what to expect, what my experience would be, because the way I understood it, everyone experienced a Grateful Dead show in a different way. Depended on your aura at the moment, I suppose. My aura that Halloween night was somewhat chemically altered with things normally ingested at Grateful Dead shows and I never felt so ready for a new experience.
What I saw there among the thousands of fans grooving to the music was a collection of people who just didn’t care. They were each and every one of them doing their own thing, being themselves, carefree and uninhibited. And no one looked at them like they were weird. No one gave sideways glances to the day-glo outfits or long hair or flailing arms and spinning-in-a-circle dances. Everyone had their guard down and were just doing their own thing. I felt an epiphany rising. An understanding. In my teenage mind, this whole thing - the show, the music, the people - it was all a sign, a giant sized neon sign telling me: It’s ok to be yourself. It’s ok to be you, to do the things you do and be who you are without pretending to be someone else for the sake of being palatable to others. No one at this show cared what anyone thought of them and the great thing was, no one was thinking anything of anyone else. They were too busy being planted in their own immediate worlds, where it was just them and the music and the feelings that came with all that. That the band reveled in all that, that they seemed so pleased to see everyone dancing and flailing and doing their own thing, it felt like freedom.
The Grateful Dead had become like family to me. I knew everything about them, I followed their lives, I kept tabs on everything they did. They were part of me. I wanted to take this sense of freedom and bring it outside the arena, bring it everywhere I went with me. And I could do that, couldn’t I? I could let down my guard and just be myself and not care what others thought about where I had been or who I was becoming. Here I am, I thought. This is me. And I danced. I danced through the jams and I spun in circles and sang the lyrics and became one with the music and the people I was with did the same. Thousand of us, there together, just being ourselves, letting go of whatever constraint life put on us.
I did bring that feeling outside with me, and that wasn’t just the chemicals talking. I kept that sense of freedom bottled up inside me, I refused to let it go. Every time I wanted to shrink back from a social situation or hide who I really was, I remembered that night, that feeling, the thousands of people letting go, and I let go as well. I was free to be me, in the parlance of the time.
It’s been a while since I listened to the Grateful Dead. I’m listening now as I write this and it’s all coming back. Somewhere along the line I lost that feeling of freedom and closed myself in again. Maybe listening to the Dead is the cure to what ails me in my adulthood. Maybe I just need to be that teenager again, have that epiphany once more, remember that it’s ok to be myself, to let my constraints go. Maybe I need to listen to the Grateful Dead more often.