The Good Ole’ Grateful Dead
My Life-Long Love Affair With the Grateful Dead
45 Years of Music, Drugs, and Spirituality
When I grew up, I was not “into” the Dead. I was born in 1965. My teenage years were in the late 1970s where I got into the early punk and New Wave scenes in Los Angeles. I thought the Grateful Dead was some “hardcore druggie band,” and all I had ever heard was “Truckin’.”
I did get my first LSD from a Deadhead and took a hit so strong in Freshman year that I did not have it again for four years. I did take more mushrooms, so I was not giving up on the whole thing.
In late 1985, while a first-year student at Stanford Law School, another classmate and I took a trip to Brussels and Amsterdam over Thanksgiving. On the flight out, we met this wonderful couple from the Oakland Hills. I hooked up and partied with them in Amsterdam the night I got mugged for the first time in my life. Well, they sized me up and insisted that I join them for a Dead show.
I had seen the movie in college, but February 9, 1986, at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, California, was my first Dead show. I lost count after 100. We met up at the couple’s house in the Oakland hills. Classic California bungalow. They had a wooden hot tub in the back. We met to grill some chicken and snacks before the show. My friend showed me to his freezer, where he had a couple, small square pieces of blotter paper for me. I put them on my tongue.
We drove down the hill together in Lettuce’s beamer. One of his friends was very nice to me, and it was his job to make sure I did not wander off and get lost at the show. He did a great job. The Dead blew my mind. I knew more songs of theirs than I realized and was singing along at my first show.
Before I went to my first Dead show, I was already a long-haired, bearded, overweight, tie-dyed wearing Jew. I did not realize that said description applied to many people in that crowd. It was the only place I could easily not be found in a crowd.
I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from Fall 1985 through the Fall of 1994. Some of that time, I lived in Mountain View, and we could walk to see the Dead at Shoreline (and get great tickets on pre-sale). They played several times a year between the Kaiser, the Frost, the Greek, and Oakland indoors and outdoors. Until 1995, when Jerry Garcia died, I had seen the Dead for the most part in the Bay Area and only a handful of times in other cities.
I just watched ten weeks of the “Dead & Co” tour on my TV, starting in August and ending last night. Why am I a Deadhead? Well, they’re the only ones who did what they did at the time.
Now, many bands are doing it, and there is a whole “Jam Band” scene. My wife and I are big Twiddle fans, and we plan to go to their Friendsgiving and New Years’ Eve shows. We love the positivity of the music. As a musician, I love jams. The music transports me to my happy place. I like to guess what songs might be played, and I love dancing and smiling at this music.
I stayed away from LSD until that night with the Dead. Then I did LSD over a hundred times, psilocybin mushrooms nearly 500 times, MDMA (Ecstasy) some 100 times, and DMT twice. Psychedelics go with Jam music like peanut butter goes with jelly. The drugs are not essential, but they certainly add to the experience.
Because of the psychedelics, I had a lot of visions at shows. Mushrooms in particular make me feel interconnected at some level to all other biological organs. You can feel this same community at the Dead shows, and the experience has led to my later spiritual growth. I learned so much from following the Dead. To those who missed it, I am sorry for you.
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