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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. Foreign the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Hello friends. Welcome back to the Good old Grateful Dead cast. Today's episode is not only for you, it's about about you and by you. Today we dive into some of the stories you all have been leaving for us on dead.net and man do we have some good ones to share with you. In fact, we got so many good stories from Dead freaks such as yourself that we are reigniting the call for you, yes, you to go to dead.net and record your story as well. Have multiple stories. Record them all. We want to hear from you. Special shout out to any heads who went on the Europe 72 tour. We want your stories as well for next year's 50th anniversary. Tell your friends. And also don't forget to tell your friends that through season four you can get new episodes of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast right here every other week. Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast where you can leave your story and check out the extra materials we have for you to explore for this episode. Also at dead.net/deadcast are all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1, 2 and 3 and you can link from there to any and all the podcasting platforms available so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help us out by subscribing Hit that like button. Tell a friend and if you're up to the task, leave us a review. It helps more than you realize. Thank you very much. The new Grateful Dead Live archival release is is out now. Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 has seven previously unreleased concerts from St. Louis, Missouri recorded on December 9th and 10th 71 at the Fox Theater, October 17th, 18th and 19th 72 at the Fox and October 29th and 30th, 1973 at the Keel Auditorium. Dead.net will also exclusively release Light into Ashes which is a double LP on 180 gram custom vinyl, limited to 72200 copies. It's an hour plus jam plucked from the dead's 10-18-72 show at the Fox. The breakout show from this set is Fox Theater, St. Louis 121071 and is available as a 3 CD set and a limited edition 5LP set. It's got some vintage pig pen on there folks, and the band is cooking. Check it out. All of these configurations have listened to the River St. Louis 71, 7273 are available now. Get your info and your copies@dead.net well, what happens when a bunch of heads get together and start chatting it up? Tour Stories and thanks to everyone who left a story on dead.net we have the first episode in what we envision to be an ongoing series featuring you in your own words, sharing all the wonderful stories that make up the Grateful Dead experience. Now let's get these stories started with our very own storyteller, Jesse Jarno. Rebuckle with Silver His Metal with Bold. I asked him to come on in out of the cold. When the Grateful Dead came to town in the 80s and 90s, the news cameras often turned to the Deadheads that arrived along with them. Tonight I was out at the Worcester Centrum to see the Grateful Dead and discovered that the story there is as much about the fans as it is about the group. From the time you walked in the Rubber Bowls parking lot, you saw cars that looked like they'd driven in from the 60s. There was a sea of tie dye T shirts, walking rainbows, dancing skirts, peace sign, earrings, the peace sign and well, people just getting their head together. I'm told the big draw to a Grateful Dead concert is not only the music but the environment. It's a big festival here, a chance for many of these people to live the lifestyles of the 60s. And that means experiencing hippies, love and LSD. I saw groups of 18 year olds in moccasins, ponchos and tie dyed shirts keeping vigil following the group from city to city. It's been like this for 22 years, ever since this group first emerged from Haight Ashbury. It was more or less required by law for interviewers to ask members of the Dead about the Deadheads. Here's Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir facing down Good Morning America in October 1980. Your fans are unbelievable. The Deadheads, they call them. Don't believe me. What do you think about them? I mean they almost like. It's like a worship thing. They're actually real good people. They're not. They're game. Yeah, they're game. It was often suggested that the Dead's endlessly growing fan base had to do with nostalgia for the 1960s. That's what former Warner Brothers president Joe Smith implied when he spoke with Garcia in 1988, a recording now in the Library of Congress. I would think that that were the case if most of the young Deadheads came into it with some sense of history. But they don't come into it with some, you know, they don't come in having read the Kool Aid Acid Test or On the Road, you know what I mean? They don't have that same background. Earlier, during the 70s, that was the case. It's probably Garcia's most famous answer to the question and his most patriotic. I can almost hear the Stars and Stripes Forever from Dave's picks 26 playing. But now, during the 80s, these are people who are, I think the Grateful Dead kind of represents America. The spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large. You know what I mean? It's like one of the things that you can do is that you can go out and follow the Grateful Dead around and you have your war stories, you know, stories about the time that you were driving through Des Plaines in the middle of the night, got four flat tires, and some farmer helped you out and put you up. This memory is from Carl Restaino, and it matches Jerry's vision almost directly. It's 1987. Me and my buddies Ray Baz and Meniz are driving in my Toyota Corolla. Dark green Toyota Corolla that's called the Iguana. And we're driving to Providence for a show. And this torrential downpour hits on the highway. I have the wipers on full blast and I can't even see what's going on. The wipers suddenly die and the sky is pouring on us. So we had to pull over for a second and we took off our shoelaces and tied it to the wipers and. And I pulled on one shoe wiper with one shoelace, and Ray Boz pulled on the other wiper with his other shoelace, and we made it to the show. So a great show, like adventure stories, stuff that you can talk about and stuff that you can share with your friends and stuff that's not cheap. In other words, you have to go out and put some energy into it. But if you're willing to do that, you have a lot of fun and you meet a lot of neat people. So that's Kind of. I think that's what motivates the audience now that we represent that something like hopping railroads. You know what I mean? Something like that. Or being on the road, like. But you can't do those types of things anymore. But you can be a Deadhead. You can get in your van and go with the other Deadheads and cross the United States and meet it on your own terms. They're affectionately called Deadheads. What are Deadheads? Who are they? How are they? Where did they come from? And what were they doing? Where are they going? A Deadhead's an individual that follows the Grateful Dead for the music they play for their audiences. Okay, that's a starting point. But everybody's got different answers. And like the Dead, it's actually fine if those answers are different every time. Let's start with sociologist Rebecca Adams. Dr. Adams saw her first dead show in 1970 and has been studying the dead since the late 1980s. She co edited a fascinating book called Deadhead Social Ain't Gonna Learn what yout Don't Wanna Know, which has recently been republished along with a new ebook edition. We've Posted links@dead.net deadcast when people ask me what a Deadhead is, I quite frankly don't know quite how to answer. Because when I was doing my research and was trying to define what my population was, it was pretty challenging. Because not all Deadh want to be called Deadheads. And not all people who call themselves Deadheads have any clue of what other people think. That means, after trying to figure this out over the years, finally settled on thinking of Deadheads in two ways. One as a sense of identity, of self identity, and another as a set of behaviors that other people think about when they think about Deadheads. And sometimes they don't match up. People can identify as Deadheads who don't engage in the behaviors and vice versa. Steve Silberman co authored the essential 1994 book Skeleton Key A Dictionary for Deadheads. We've posted links to the current editions@dead.net deadcast it's one of the best places to start reading about the Grateful Dead. Our definition of Deadhead from Skeleton Key. Someone who loves and draws meaning from the music of the Grateful Dead. And the experience of Dead shows and builds community with others who feel the same way. I still feel that way. That's exactly what it is, you know. And you know I know Deadheads who are now 23 and are as passionate and as passionate as I ever was and more knowledgeable than I will ever be. And they never saw Jerry. They never got a chance to see Jerry. Am I going to say, like, well, they're not really Deadheads that didn't see Jerry, as many older Deadheads do. I not only completely disagree with that, what blows my mind is that these younger Deadheads are exactly like me and my friends were when we were in our early 20s. We see eye to eye across the generations, and it's wonderful to share the excitement with them. We're going to roll through a range of Deadhead experiences today, from folkloric to historiographical, with plenty of transit points between. But this is hardly a comprehensive survey. Check out Steve and Rebecca's books for more. One term that comes up a lot is getting on the bus. Take it away we he trembled and exploded Made that bus stop in his place the bus goodbye I got home. That's when it all began. That was from October 19, 1972, on the New Listen to the river box set, the bus that Bob Weir sings about on the other one was the Merry Pranksters bus, further driven by beat hero Neil Cassidy. You're either on the bus or you're off the bus, ken Kesey said in a speech made famous in Tom Wolf's electric Kool Aid acid test. The term gradually migrated into Deadhead usage. In a large way, the Deadhead experience roots in the acid tests. This is Garcia speaking with Ben Fong Torres in 1975. In terms of what was the show and what wasn't the show, there was no delineation, there's no definition. Everybody came, there was the show show. And so you were also free to enjoy the show as well as to be the show, if you felt like it. That had that complete reciprocal thing, which is the thing that I. That's. That was it as far as I wow, this is the biggest news in years. You know, there isn't any difference between the audience and the music or the audience. The performance is happening all the time and everybody's involved in it. We explored the acid tests in our Hug the Heat episode. They were over by early 1966, but the band carried it with them, even if that dynamic wasn't able to manifest in most of the venues they played. Historically, before there were Dead Heads, there were Dead Freaks. Dead Freaks unite. Read the Gatefold, the Skull and Roses. We talked about the subsequent establishment of the Dead's official mailing list last season, and one definition of a Deadhead was simply anybody who subscribed to the Dead Heads mailing list. Harriet Milnes was one of the early subscribers. We got Mailings from the Deadhead and Unite people. They sent us seven inch records. We got a lot of things from Deadhead. Unite. Advance warnings of things. One time they told us to go down to our local record store and clean up the Grateful Dead area. There were all kinds of heads in the underground. I wrote a whole book about it called Heads. The first Deadheads certainly grew from the 60s counterculture. But Deadheads also grew from the Dead themselves and what the band projected somehow different from their rock and roll peers. My friend Richard Pettengill saw the Dead for the first time when he was a teenager. The first time I saw the Grateful Dead at the Woodstock Festival on August 16, 1969. They taught me to revere the human impulse, to take risks, to have the courage to perform in ways that are not fully planned out, and to embrace startling developments that no one could have predicted. Thankfully, there's a lot of headroom on the bus because one of the first people to board was nearly seven feet tall. Hey, Bill Walton. Somehow didn't see you come in. We didn't have a television set, Rich. We didn't have enough money for a television set, which was fantastic for me. We had the radio. I had a little transistor radio that cost 995. When they swung to FM radio and they started playing the long form music, that's when we found out about the Grateful Dead. Because the Grateful that they were not played on AM stations. None of us had cars or anything. And so we heard about a show coming up in Los Angeles. And in those days we just thought Los Angeles was one big giant place. We have no idea where it was, but it was somewhere in the Los Angeles area. We had to drive up there. Somebody took their parents car. Their parents were out of town. And we showed up there and we got in and. And we never left. You know, the Grateful Dead, once you find them, you never leave. And that's what happened to me in 1967 when I heard about it on the radio, went to the show, got in, got to the front of the stage, and all of a sudden, whoa. I said, this is me. That joy, the happiness, the excitement, the love, the community. And then the music and the people. And I looked around, I said, wow, this is me forevermore. The Dead carry that spontaneity with them like an intangible piece of musical gear. Michael Irwin saw them at Wesleyan in May 1970. We went backstage and I saw Jerry and Bob and other folks standing around talking and laughing. I wasn't very familiar with the Dead at that time. But they looked larger than life, travelers from another sunny universe. By foregrounding spontaneity, the Grateful Dead would both soundtrack and actively facilitate countless transformative experiences. A message carried from the acid tests to the last show at soldier field in 1995 and through every note played since. It wasn't just the Dead who were spontaneous when the show started. We just stayed watching from behind the stage. There was a box of percussion instruments close by, which we started to play. Billy glanced around at one point and wondered what the noise was, but he didn't say anything. I guess you could say that day I jammed with the Grateful Dead, tripped the light fantastic and became a Deadhead. Every show really was different, shaped by the chaos feel the Dead seemingly brought with them wherever they traveled. This is Jerry Garcia on KSAN in 1976. We've always had sort of a select following, so to speak. You know, we've always played to our own audience almost. It seems like just about everywhere we've gone, somehow. We got two accounts of an unrecorded dead show in November 1970. This is Philip Tomalin, Once Upon a Time. It was my first Show Back in November 22, 1970, in Edison, New Jersey, at the Middlesex County College. The whole gang came to town along with the New Riders. I was at the show. It was in the little gym. And Eric Clark was there too. I went with some older friends who were into the Dead. I didn't really know a lot about him at the time. We were hanging out on the grass around 3 o' clock in the afternoon. Two Cadillacs rolled up with a bunch of Harleys behind them in a cloud of dust. They were flying, man. And these cowboy looking guys tumbled out of the car. I was impressed. They sure were not from my neighborhood in New Jersey, I'll tell you that. I was upstage, right, and I was looking at this guy. He seemed. Was familiar to me. He was dressed in like a black motorcycle jacket with the studs on it, you know, that thing. And. And he looked familiar. And his name was Bruce. He played guitar. He was a couple of years ahead of me. He was from a neighboring town in Sarahville, I think it was. And that was Bruce Springsteen there for his. He came to check out the show. It's true. Bruce even wrote about it in his memoir. This is from the Born to Run audiobook, available from Simon and Schuster, wherever you get your audiobooks. In the 1970s, I went to a Grateful Dead show at a community college. I watched the crowd swaying and doing its trance dance thing. And I stood very outside of it. To me, sober, non mystical, only half hippie, if that me. They sounded like a not very talented bar band. I went home gently mystified at the show. I was wandering around after we had our space on a blanket and walked into the locker room off the back area where they set up a stage, and New Riders and Dead were in there and hanging out. I must have looked surprised because they laughed at me when I rolled in, and I just kind of waved and said, hey, guys, everybody's really looking forward to hearing you play. They were happy to hear that we shared some sacred refreshment. And I left them be. I remember the show where Jerry played steel with the New Riders. It was a beautiful sound. Dead played acoustic first. It was quite a beautiful experience, a great, gentle, chill show. And I've chased that vibe in live shows ever since. I don't know if the Grateful Dead were great, but I know they did something great. Years later, when I came to appreciate their subtle musicality, Jerry Garcia's beautifully lyrical guitar playing, and the folk purity of their voices, I understood that I'd missed it. They had a unique ability to build community. And sometimes it ain't what you're doing, but what happens while you're doing it that counts. Not everybody got on the bus. As the Boss reminds us, he had his own roads to ride. But there was definitely something going on, and some people picked up on it instinctually. With the Grateful Dead finding their way into the deepest parts of their lives. Adam Brown is an associate professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research. He saw the dead in the 90s and lately has been thinking a lot about Dead Heads in memory. I was introduced to the Dead at summer camp. You know, very quickly you go from the music to the culture, and it's almost like these two things are just so intimately connected to one another. As I became a psychologist and started studying things like memory, eventually I started to think about those social practices of how do we tell stories? And what ways in which these stories impact our sense of identity, how we understand ourselves, how we understand our relationships, and how we understand culture around us. And one thing that I think Deadheads love doing is telling stories. Telling stories about the journeys, about the music, about first shows that they've been through. But anytime you're waiting online, anytime you go online to read comments about shows, there is this, I just think, kind of very deep connection to share one's experience and to hear other people's experiences. Bruce van Buskirk in 1978, I was able to attend the first four shows the Dead played at Red Rocks. Before the second pair of shows in August, word was out that they'd finished an album, I had a Dream. Soon after that, I was at their show at Red Rocks, and something about Queen of Diamonds stuck in my head while waiting in the stands for the show to start. Red Rocks would allow you into the venue by midday. Someone started throwing playing cards and the Queen of Diamonds landed in my lap. I still have that card. When it comes to the Dead, we allow ourselves to, I think, engage with magic and a sense of wonder and possibility and randomness in ways that we might not do so in other parts of our lives, which I really love. I mean, just this idea of I met this person in the lot. Three days later I was dancing next to them at the show, or happened to have met this person, and years later we connected again. Or the finding of the ticket on the ground so randomly. But I think there is an openness to possibility and magic and serendipity that may not figure so prominently into other stories in these people's lives, but when it comes to talking about the Dead, it figures prominently, which I find so interesting. Rebecca Adams A lot of what I wrote about Deadhead values, a lot of that was based on data that were more observational than quantified, but they're definitely things like a belief in synchronicity. I would describe it as basic Jungian synchronicity, although it's Deadhead synchronicity. Many Deadheads wouldn't know Jung had written about it, but it was basically the idea that your faith had already been determined and that things were going to happen no matter what. Planning was not the way to go about doing things in the parking lot or in the show, because it wouldn't work. And if you were supposed to run into someone at the show, you would run into them because it was already going to happen. It was an experience you had to be open to. That was from the Palladium In New York, April 30, 1977, from the Download Series, Volume 1. In Robert Hunter's famous lyric, once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places. If you look at it right, that if is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But the Dead and the Heads did a lot to grease the necessary cosmic mechanisms. Steve Job, my first dead show, March 13, 1971, at Michigan State University. I was pretty much completely unfamiliar with the Dead at the time. Time I'd heard they were really good. So I splurged on those $3.50 tickets and bought four of them. One for me, one for a young woman I dated a few times and two others I thought somebody else would want. But it turned out nobody else wanted them. So I gave those to Glenda to put in her purse. We figured we'd sell them at the door. But by the time we got to the door, we were getting pretty darn high off that amazing sugar cube that we had split. So we just went into the show at intermission. She said to me, you know, I hate to tell you, but I didn't sell those tickets. I just gave them to a couple of people who looked like they really wanted to get into the show. Years later, I realized that we had miracled some people before there were such things as miracle tickets. And I thought that was pretty cool. And I'm glad a couple of people got a chance to have that amazing experience. The earliest fan made merch appeared in 1966, when some neighbors of the band in the Haight Ashbury made pins that said good old Grateful Dead. The first fan made T shirts followed in the early 1970s. One place that Deadhead culture began to emerge outside of Dead shows was cover bands. By the late 1960s, cavalry, the first Dead cover band, had sprung up in New Jersey. We interviewed guitarist John Zias in our two part special Plain Dead. Not too long after that, in Deadhead Central on Long Island, Michael Schiano and his friends had their own scene going. I was in what we think was the first Dead cover band on Long island, starting in 1972. The band was called Loci, and we had a local but pretty dedicated scene in the Massapequa area and beyond. For a while we were pretty dedicated ourselves. We learned the live Dead version of Dark Star note for note to try to get inside that music and understand what the band was doing. The four of us pretty much learned how to play by playing the Grateful Dead together. We talked a local catering hall owner into letting us use his empty hall and turned that place, the Bayview House, into our version of the Avalon. We packed at night after night for a while. We even had a songwriter who, like Hunter, didn't play in the band and and a girl singer. The rhythm section of that band, guitar, bass and drums, is still playing around Long island today. We're now called the Moondogs, and though our focus is a little different, you'll still find us pulling out a Dead tune or stretching out a jam on just about any given night. Lots of Deadheads would be inspired by the band to put their energies into different kinds of projects. Mike Dalgushkin saw his first show at the Berkeley Community theater in summer 1972 and started seeing the band regularly around the Bay Area. He had an especially inspirational experience at Winterland the next year. It was November 10, 1973, actually, where it was. You know, we got in line early, it was at 10 o'. Clock. We were like fourth or fifth in line or something at Winterland. And in the afternoon it started raining. So first they let us all come in under the overhang. And then about 4, about 4 in the afternoon they let us inside, they opened the doors and there was a sound check going on. But it wasn't okay, it wasn't the Dead. It was the Roadies band, which was known as Barking the Aspice From Hell. Okay, so they were playing and then after they were done, we heard a tape over the PA of it was like an instrumental other one into Sweden Inspiration with Donna singing, you know, Sweden. It was done by the Sweden aspirations for Aretha's backup band. I really wish that was surfaced sometime. Mike Dalgashkin is what we in the podcast biz call a reliable witness. It was those same Winterland shows that set Mike on the road to becoming the co editor of Dead Base, the legendary Grateful Dead set list compendium first published in 1986. I went to the Middle Night. I realized later that I could remember everything they played. And as it turned out, amazingly, you know, years later, when I ran across the recording, it was 100% accurate. My memory was. So, you know, I wrote it down and then I, you know, I had a few live tapes at that time, like a couple of them maybe. And so I wrote down what was on those. And then, you know, I could. I started showing them to my friends, like, look how cool this is. You can compare with the Dead Dare to different shows, but I had a tape of New Year's 72, 73 that someone gave me on eight track. So I had to play it on my dad's stereo, right? Because he had an eight track in there. Then I started writing down after that, like at the very next run I went to, which is in February at Winterland. You know, I went. I went the Middle Night and I wrote down the songs they did. But my friend of mine went all three nights. So I asked him, can you write down all the songs? They did. And so he did. So I had set lists for all three nights. Now they did premiere. They did premiere some stuff the first night and also did some songs my friend didn't know. So it wasn't completely accurate. But, you know, it was a start. And then it went on from there. Just, you know, writing down, you know, writing down the songs that shows. I went to and, you know, I started, you know, in those days our tape collections were pretty much limited to, well, what was broadcast on the radio locally. Around 74, we met, you know, a friend of ours got. It was like a Sony 152 or 53. I forget what it was when it was portable. Sony Decks started recording shows. Himself and his friends started. He started getting other tapes from unknown sources around the country. So our collection started growing a little bit more. And that's how it was in those days. Even if you didn't have any Dead tapes of your own, it wasn't too hard to get a collection started. You just had to find a deadhead or let one find you. John Orr it was about 1975. I was 10 years old. The neighbors had hired a gardener. Well, we, you know, now we call them landscapers. But back then, you know, the gardener, a real free spirited, you know, guy, very, you know, long hair, you know, had the whole look, you know, from just like he fell out of San Francisco in 1960 something. And so, you know, very cool guy. And he listened to music on his tape deck and it was great. It was good stuff. I would listen to it sometimes while I was sitting in the yard or whatever. I'm like, wow, that's, that's pretty good. And he, I would start talking to him through the fence. My parents, of course, they were. I think the neighbors hired a hippie. You know, that was terrifying to them that we had a hippie now in our neighborhood. So, yeah, he was, but, you know, he was talking to me. So they were, they were doubly thrilled about that. He said, here, let me, let me play something I think you'll like one day when we were talking and he put on Ripple from American Beauty. And I was hooked. I was just like, that is a great song. He started playing some other stuff, you know, their Uncle John's Band Whatnot. And I just loved it. And from that point forward, I was just seeking the Grateful Dead. My parents, of course, were absolutely horrified that I had been influenced by this hippie. That was many, many years ago and been on the bus ever since. Mike Dolguskin setlist collection began to grow. I used the typewriter. I was using these small, these little binders, very small. You get them in stationery stores with these Little pages. And that's what I typed them in on. In later years when I had a big. It was more like you'd have like maybe six shows on one page. So it wasn't quite as easy to insert things. But at. By that time, I had more of an idea of which shows they actually played so I could leave space for stuff the grapevine hadn't really. At least among people I knew it hadn't been fully established yet. So I remember going to the June 4, 1977 show at the Forum in LA in Inglewood, and I remember talking to somebody and asked them, well, you know, we're talking about the. This, the past tour, right? The April and May tour. And he knew parts of it, you know, he. He told me what some of the highlights that he'd heard of were. And interestingly enough, the, you know, the highlight of the tour at that point was Hell was not held to be Cornell, but St. Louis. Wow. For more about that St. Louis 77 show, now released on the May 1977 box set, check out the end of our episode on Listen to the river, Keel Auditorium, October 1973. After the end of 77. By that time I had. I had met, you know, some of the big tape traders on the west coast, like Bob Manke and Charles Connor and robertrando. Some of those people I remember after. After the year after the January 78California tour was over, Manki gave me. It was like all the set lists for 1977 minus one show. And I'd never seen a complete year documented like that before. So that was. That was exciting. That was exciting. You could really, like, compare all. Compare the shows all across the board there. People had followed the Dead around since before they were the Dead. In our Listen to the River 1973 episode, we heard from Steve Brown, who caught multiple shows by the warlocks back in 65. Future Dead Archivist Dick Lotfila saw countless shows in the ballroom era of 1966 and 1967. And there are certainly accounts of people hitting the road with the band in the early 70s. But it was after the band's 1975 road hiatus that the touring culture really began to take hold. A new generation of Deadheads was born in 1977 with a massive festival at Raceway park in Englishtown, New Jersey. Now Dix picks volume 15. It was Jeff Needles first show. I got on the bus back in 74, but didn't get to my first show in 77 because New York was full of Deadheads and it was really tough to get A ticket. You had to actually, like, sleep out at the venue because Ticketmaster hadn't really kicked in yet. But in 77 the summer, they announced English Town, which ended up with 125,000 people in the middle of New Jersey. I was coming from soccer camp for my senior year with a bunch of my buddies, and one of my buddies and I were hardcore enough to take the train back into the city from Rhode island and then a bus to my uncle's house, which was in Matawan, only five miles away. The next morning, he could only get me within a mile of the place. He dropped me off and I was meeting my other buddy at the first aid station at 10 o' clock in the morning. That was the only plan. And amongst the madness of 125,000 people, I finally got to the front of the place and walked in and asked where the first aid station was. And the guy at the gate pointed to the right and I started to walk in there and ran right into my buddy. Ended up having a great show with New Riders and Marshall Tucker and getting out of there. Since my buddy had gotten there on the Wednesday before, he was parked so far in we had to sleep in the car. The tough part was the walk of shame back to my uncle's house because I ended up without a shirt and I had to pick up my bag at my uncle's house the next morning. Walking up to that door without a shirt was pretty funny. Great show, great time, Wouldn't get off the bus for anything. Steve Silberman at Oberlin, I would say I certainly didn't think of myself as like a prominent Deadhead or anything. I was a Deadhead, but I felt like I was an amateur. And there were guys who would regularly do every tour, really, at Oberlin. I forget the exact date, but it was Cleveland Music Hall 78. That was a huge event for the Oberlin Deadhead community. There were, I believe, more than 100 people from Oberlin at that show, and it was a small venue. Somehow those hundred people got ahold of some hits of a particular vintage of LSD called Red Dragon, which was some of the best LSD I ever had. I don't know how they got it, but in any case, and that show is still one of my favorite shows of all time, because the second set just sort of keeps dipping into and out of the rivers of jamming. It was kind of like playing jamming. It's a very fluid, flowy second set. And because they started the second set with drums and a jam into Jackaro that was completely unusual, like, even for hardcore Deadheads to start the second set with drums and jam. It was very unusual. They didn't get a big ovation when they came out for the second set. They just sort of came out, started tuning up and just like, pretty quickly just like started jamming. So it was like we were all there together. It was the most communal feeling I probably ever had at a Dead show. Really high on acid, really experimental music. So that was definitely a moment when I sort of leveled up. Jerry Garcia was a pretty keen observer of the Dead's audience. Here's a fascinating observation he made to WHMR in 1978. The interesting thing about it is that and may or may not be visible from, say, your point of view or even from longtime Deadhead's point of view, is that it's not like the same audience all the time. There's a turnover. And our audience, in fact, has been growing. In a way. We're the slowest rising rock and roll band in the world. And our audience has been growing. We have a lot of people in the audience who are really quite young, some of them like half our age, you know. And it's interesting, it leads us to believe something along the lines of that there is a kind of a minority group, regardless of, say, generation or age or whatever, that can dig what we're doing. The data actually supports it too, even though it's a little imperfect. With surveys across the 80s and 90s indicating a constant influx of younger fans, the Deadhead fan network soon began publishing Zines. Relics had started putting out a magazine for tape traders in the mid-70s, but had shifted in a popular direction by the 80s. The Golden Road established itself on the west coast and Dupree's Diamond News on the East. But one of the first publications that actually based itself on Tor was a one sheet newsletter called Michael, published by Michael Lyna. It included tour news, set lists, doodles, addresses of other Deadheads, occasional editorials, personal letters and more. It was very homemade. I wrote a story about it a few years back for Aquarium Drunkard and have posted a link@dead.net deadcast. There were all kinds of ways to get into the Dead. One of them was through the Michael zine itself. Here's my pal Julia Postil. I was a duplicate bridge player and Michael Lyna was a bridge director. That's what he did for his job, for his money. And he would go all over the country and he would be one of the people running around adjudicating a bird's game. I got to know him, you know, over many years of playing birds in the 70s and one day in the 80s, I think it was about 1982, I think, was it. He brought this bag with him to the bridge game. And he sat at the desk at the front of the room. And I looked up and I saw this pile of mail on his desk. And it was all very colorful. And I walked up and I said, michael, what is that? And he says, the mail I get from people to the Michael newsletter, it was just fascinating. It was so beautiful. Everything was so colorful, you know, so I. This is beautiful. He said, hey, why don't you come over to my house on Saturday and help me process this? Michael died of cancer in 1985, but his publication became a sub community of its own within the Dead world. Like a tour switchboard. I didn't go to a show until he died in 1985. So I fell in love with the fans. I fell in love with the communication that, that you got. Well, the people at that time were having with one another, you know, it was just a fascinating thing to communicate and to help these people communicate, Julia got on the bus where you can still find her. Around the time that Michael Liner died, Mike Dalgushkin and the creators of Dead Base were getting ready to publish their first edition. Their surveys would likewise show the fan base continuing to pull in young listeners. Dead Bass became a community building point, a consensus timeline of events shared by the Dead world, connecting young Deadheads to the legacy that stretched day by day back to the acid tests. We self published and we put ads and I guess Relics and Golden Road, handed out flyers at shows, did all that stuff. And oh, the reception was great. I mean, it was something people have been waiting for, that there was a need for it to have all that information in one place. It's a timeline. And that's one of the reasons we made sure to put the day of the week in there too, because people might remember, oh, I went to the Thursday show of that run, Adam Brown, probably more so than any other musical group that can exist in terms of the way it was documented so carefully. But within those historical verbatim records, we have so much fluidity and so much malleability and so much subjectivity about what happens in all of those spaces. And I think that's part of what I find so exciting about it is the convergence of the subjective with the objective that we're always considering in this world. There's something I love about the Dead and the music and Everything around improvisation that fits really well with memory in that memory is malleable, and it's constantly changing based on moment to moment. And in fact, what we know from neuroscience research is what we're remembering is the last thing that we remembered. And we're really recalling things based on our present stance, where we are in that moment, how we're feeling, what our environment is like, maybe what legacy we want to leave. But every time we go to remember something, it's shaped by all of those factors. Michael Moon the Grateful Dead were my university. I would hop on a bus and get to a Dead show where I'd meet people and join the traveling caravan, learning about life, love, music, and exploring America. So many magic moments. I loved how we could see the Dead stickers on a vehicle and instantly know we had friends at the next rest stop. I learned to play music while on tour and ever since have been a professional musician, focused on the healing power of sound. The Grateful Dead were my teachers. Sitting right in the center of RFK Stadium. So hot, so humid, I can no longer tell where I end. And the air begins feeling at one with the entire audience as huge black thunderheads roll in and the band begins playing. The intensity of their energy, we feel it and go wild. Releasing it back into the clouds, the band takes it even higher. A circle of energy between the audience, the Thunderheads and the band. I could feel the energy of a lightning storm pour down, but it never rained. We bonded with the energy, and it passed. I understood the shamanic power of music and group energy viscerally that night. Here's Steve Silberman with the crux of the Biscuit. To me, the essence of what Grateful Dead shows were were they were improvised, psychedelic, shamanistic initiations. And I'm not saying that there weren't guys there who didn't give a about that or, you know, were just eating hot dogs or, you know, would go to the bathroom when DrumSpace was being played. But for me, the Grateful Dead subculture was a community to support this really very ancient experience in human life. Psychedelic shamanistic initiation is part of indigenous cultures all over the world in different forms. And I feel like Deadheads kind of stumbled on that at the same time that the band kind of stumbled on that. If they deconstructed their music, which started with feedback in the late 60s, if they deconstructed their music somewhere in the middle or towards the end of the show, that it would be amazingly appropriate for an audience that was turned on to psychedelics. I don't use hyperbolic phrases like ego, death, or anything but something happens, like you're no longer imprisoned in the cage of your personality. As much as people reported spiritual experiences at those shows, a spiritual experience in terms of either self revelations or feelings of unity were the two most common kinds. Of course, there were out of body experiences and all sorts of other things too. Second set builds to a peak, the structure falls away, which is the part of the shows where Deadheads were most frequently reported self reflection and then often came back into, you know, rock and roll with a strong backbeat, bringing back feelings of unity, making people feel part of that community before they exit the show, you know, so there was a trajectory to the ritual as well that allowed for those self revelations and changes in identity and transformation. Another theme that I think that really emerged is life lessons for the road and for the journey that both goes into actual stories and memories of how you got to shows. And I love that theme of the car broke down and it was pouring rain or it was snowing and somehow took our shoelaces off and we put them around the windshield wiper and we got to the show. But there's that perseverance and that sense of determination that is such a part of the world of Deadheads, but that also then connects to life well beyond the actual road. But maybe getting hit by an illness or, you know, some kind of big upheaval in one's life that you keep coming back to. These lessons that are embedded both in. In the lyrics and the music, but also in these cultural practices around the band that people continue to kind of come back to and really draw a lot of support on. And I think we saw that more than ever during COVID 19, where people were looking to be. To connect with something familiar, something grounding, something bigger than them. And also, I think, something that kind of provided a little bit of a guide for how to get through these really unpredictable times. Along with metaphysical lessons, being a Deadhead could also be a way to build collaborative skills. Back when I was originally doing my research, you had to call the hotline and find out when are tickets going to go on sale and what are the instructions? Because the instructions changed and the address changed and you had to know what period you were allowed to mail in and all of that. And you had to pay for long distance. And so it was a pretty common practice for Deadheads friendship groups to share responsibility for calling the hotline every once in a while to see if the message had changed. Doing the ticket orders together, you had to have somebody check your envelope because it was so easy to screw up. And to get your money order returned with no tickets, you had to make sure you had everything done the right way, especially if you were a novice you didn't want. I remember one of my students teaching me to do mail order the first time I see the same people in Martinsville because we were the one who knew where the short line was at that post office, you know. And we didn't know each other until we started hanging around in line together. Here's Eileen Law with a Grateful Dead Hotline message from March 1987. Thank you for calling the Grateful Dead hotline number. This is a new message as of March 11, the Grateful Dead with Bruce Hornsby in The Range and Ry Cooter will play two concerts at the Laguna Seca Recreation Area in Monterey, California on May 9th and 10th. The show times are 12 noon. Tickets will be available by mail order starting immediately. All instructions must be followed exactly. The ticket price is $21.24 per ticket with a maximum of eight tickets per concert. All tickets are general admission. The ticket price includes a $1.25 service charge. You may order both concerts in one envelope. Only one order per person. Duplications of any kind will cause disqualification of all involved orders. Each person must fill out their own order. Lest you think Rebecca was kidding about the specifics of filling out mail order. All orders must be sent in a number 10 size envelope containing a number 10 self addressed stamped envelope. 22 cents for 1 to 8 tickets, 39 cents for 9 to 16 tickets. Also include a 3x5 index card with your full name, address, area code and telephone number in the upper left hand hand corner. List how many tickets to each concert you want and your order of preference. Write anything if you will accept anything. This is very important for these Laguna Seca shows. Eileen Law offered some pretty sweet news. There will be overnight campgrounds available Friday and Saturday nights. For further camping information, look for the ad in the Sunday, March 15 San Francisco Chronicle or call the hotline after March 15. Pete McKernan was at those Laguna Seca 87 shows. I went to see the Dead up in the Bay area for the first time back in 87. I lived down in San Diego and I drove up with a bunch of friends. We went to Laguna Seca Raceway and it was a really great camp scene all around the all around the amphitheater or the raceway. There was a rolling grass hills, rolling grass hills one after another and all the Deadheads camped out throughout the weekend. It was a really cool setup Go over one rolling grass hill, find a party. Then you'd keep on walking over another hill and find another great party, meeting people throughout the weekend. It was a really cool scene. Bill Graham had a shower set up. They kind of looked like little swing sets. You just walk up and pull the rope and. And the shower would come out, you know, so there's a bunch of heads that he would. A bunch of heads up on top of the hill taking showers. Bill Graham always had, you know, buses, shuttle service that would take the heads up, you know, to the showers in the morning. So it was a really great scene, really great festive atmosphere. And we went to both first two shows, really had a great time. The third show, we just figured we'd sit outside, just kind of chill for the last show. So we sat back behind the stage at Laguna Seca Raceway. There's a little pond back behind the stage. So we just sat on the other side of that pond. We could hear the band perfectly. We were kind of a styling group, me and my eight friends. We all had a tie, dyed blanket, case of beer on ice. And all of a sudden, Bill Graham walked up, he asked how many tickets we need. He has some extra tickets for tonight's show. And he peeled off nine tickets and then just took off. It was kind of like a hit and run. So thanks a lot, Bill Graham. It seemed like the crowd parted just like the Red Sea, and we just kind of danced right up front to the front of the stage. It was pretty awesome. My co host Rich, saw them a few months later. I didn't make it to the Laguna seca shows in 87, but we did go to the Ventura County Fairground shows in June of that year. And it was really cool to be at those shows because in 86, the year before, we were on our way up to Ventura when we heard on KLOS that Jerry was in a coma and the shows were going to be canceled. So. 87, Ventura County Fairgrounds. Literally right on the ocean, California Street. A right point break is there you can surf before the show. It's right there on the beach. Perfect place for the Saturday show. My friend Sean Marshall and I got really close to the stage on Jerry's side, maybe like 20, 25ft from the stage. And towards the end of the show, they bust out a morning dew. I'm tripping out because I'm pretty sure Jerry's staring right at us. Turn to my friend Sean. He confirms it. Jerry did not look away from us the whole song. He just locked eyes with us. And even at the point where, you know, he gets into the solo, he's really getting into it, and he pushes up his glasses when he's going to get serious. He just locked into us, absolutely locked in, eye to eye. It was a very trippy feeling, Very cool. But the weirdest thing was I never really knew what the song was about. But after the song was over, I knew what it was about. It was like Jerry had transmitted the meaning of the song. That summer of 1987, with the MTV success of Touch of Grey and the unexpected hit album of in the Dark, was also the summer that sociologist Rebecca Adams began to really study the Dead. The first research I actually did was I supervised four independent studies students who went on tour, summer 1987, and passed out a survey at the shows. Basically, what happened is I received more surveys, surveys than I, you know, xeroxed, and people copied them. And so I had to, like, I thought of this as the least scientific study of all time because I got a more than 100% response rate. But of course, it wasn't a, you know, a systematic sample or anything. I very quickly realized that I hadn't asked all the right questions on that survey. And that's actually what led me to doing more research, because I realized, oh, I didn't capture it in that survey. And that was all I intended to do. Over the next few years, Rebecca began to study different aspects of the Deadhead experience. There were so many examples of synchronicity, you know, that came up in my research, too, that I think that part of it is just cultural development. People sharing the stories and using a. That lens to. To interpret what happens to them. Oh, you know, I can't believe it. There I was in this big venue, and the person who sat next to me next night, the night before showed up. But she also interviewed Steve Marcus, who ran Grateful Dead ticket sales. He told me, well, the way we filled tickets was to go through the pile in order, and if people ordered them, if they came in at the same time, they would end up sitting with each other on the tour. That's where their assignments would be. And he told me that they even sometimes would put people next to each other repeatedly because they saw they were on tour by themselves. And it wasn't all synchronicity. Some of it was social intervention and planning. But Deadheads, when they told the story, it was always synchronous. Without thinking about. There was behind the scenes structuring going on. Rebecca encountered some deep tour families while she was researching. There were definitely People who'd been doing it for a long time. I did talk to a guy who worked on Volkswagen minivans and that was it. He had all the parts and he'd go around the parking lot and look for people who couldn't get their vans started and would help them. There was a difference between the east coast and the west coast at the time. Because on the west coast they did what I called homesteading, where people would go wait in line and run in and put blankets down and secure their area near wherever they wanted to be in the venue. And down in front, you would even need a password to get back to your back to your blanket. They would keep people out. Whereas on the east coast it was a free for all. And if you could get down to the stage while you could get down to the stage. But that kind of behavior on the west coast was not appreciated. So there were really east coast and west coast cultures. And many of those people I'm calling homesteaders on the west coast had been, you know, they were little show families that were organized and had a system. They take turns sleeping in line and being there at the front. And one person would run, one person would carry this stuff. Some of those families have been going to shows for a long time. Jerry Garcia observed the differences between East Coast Deadheads and West Coast Deadheads to WNRW in 1982. There are differences in American audiences too, regionally. You know, some, like the east coast audience is tremendously energetic, as you probably know, like the west coast audience. The San Francisco audience is a little bit more like the English audience. They're a little more laid back as a hackneyed phrase. But that explains it as well as anything. But none of those kind of generalities is 100% true. It wasn't just the set list that changed from show to show, or even just the Jam, but the overall textures and energy levels. It's nice to have those differences, you know, and the different flavors in the audience because they bring out, they elucidate different elements of the music, you know what I mean? Like different parts of the music come to the fore in response to that. Steve Silberman became a West coast dad head in the 80s. Once I got out to the Bay Area where I moved in part to see the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia band a lot. I started meeting Deadheads regularly at particularly places like Kaiser. There were shows at Kaiser and Cal Expo that were not sort of widely publicized. Like everybody knew about the so called high holy days of the Greek and the Frost. But those Little shows, you know, in the off nights. Those shows were for Deadhead lifers, like they were for the people who moved here to the Bay Area to see shows a lot. What I think is really interesting about the Dead is how neighborhoods and families formed within the show among people who had not traveled there together. So the fact that the Tapirs all knew one another, okay, they didn't travel together, but they still formed a neighborhood within the show, and they knew each other. The Rail Rats often didn't travel together, but when you went to the Rail, either on the east coast or the west coast, you would see the same people. Even like the Wharf Rats, of course, had a table where they gathered. But some of these groups just were generated by people's preferences in the show experience. The Death Deadheads are another example where they went to the same place in the show, because sometimes there would be a signer, different computer communities would be a little bit more organized about meeting. But the point I'm making is that there were friendship groups that had representatives from all over the country and even from other countries where they didn't travel together. And that's the part I find really interesting, that you could be on tour and because of your preferences for the show experience, you would see the same people over and over again without planning to do so. See, there's the synchronicity thing coming in again. Oh, I ran into the same guy. Well, yeah, because he likes hearing the music the same way you do. The scope of the Deadhead experience extends far beyond seeing the Dead in concert, though. Matt Holmes. A band and some tunes can be much more than that. Or maybe just that is much more than it seems. I was 19, my first season fishing for salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska. I was tired and lonely and homesick, and yet, at the end of a great adventure, I think you all know the feeling. I was listening to a tape on the back deck. The boat pulled out of the bay and into the black, muddy river, and the band broke into Beat It on down the Line as the lights of civilization came back into view for the first time in weeks, beckoning me to shore and to home, back where I belong. At that moment, a crabber boat passed by, its name written in giant letters, the Ramble On Rose. We pulled up to the dock, and I stepped off that ship of fools that had been my home for the past few months. And on the wharf, I looked back out into the waves. I was on top of the world, a million miles from anywhere. But the band had followed me there, or maybe probably Already been there waiting. It was then I realized there's no place that the tunes won't follow. John Lilja I'm an American that's lived in Norway for the last 24 years and I live in an area where very few people know the Grateful Dead, which is odd because Brent's family is from this area. So I've always felt like the lone Deadhead for miles and miles. I was attending bar one night, there were two guys in the bar. I put on Europe 72. The one guy kind of looks up. Is this the Grateful Dead? Yeah. Are you a Deadhead? Yeah. Are you? Yeah. All of a sudden we're good friends. And he tells me a story about being in a bar the next town over a night when there were very few customers, so the few customers that were there were allowed to pick the music. So he puts on, some Dead guy comes over to him, says, hey man, is. Is this the Grateful Dead you're playing? Guy says, yeah. The other guy says, ah, cool. My cousin was in that band. So yeah, an area where Brent's got plenty of kin and nobody knows a debt. But luckily I've met a couple of like minded thinkers along the way. Here's where I get to insert my own story. I actually passed through Stavanger, Norway a few years back on a fact finding mission about the legendary local band Kasvat Va Akst. But my destination was the beautiful nearby coastal village of Egersund. One afternoon we were out looking at fjords with our host, as one does in Norway, and the topic of the Dead came up, as happens when there are dead freaks in the car. I think I may have even made a joke about all the road signs for the town of Midland, which I learned from our host actually is where Bret Midland's family is from. Bret flew lots of them over to the States to see the band at Madison Square garden in the 80s, and he still got lots of family in the area. Midland is actually a pretty common last name in the region, and there are apparently a number of other Brent Midlands in Midland, Norway. Our host insisted on stopping by the home of Brent's closest living relative. And somewhat mortified, I was elected to go knock on the door. I was simultaneously relieved and a little disappointed that nobody was home. Sometimes we ride on your horse our Sometimes we walk alone Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our. That was Eyes of the world from August 13, 1975. One from the vault. How is it playing over in Europe? I mean, you must have a lot of Americans. Yeah, There's. Well, there's European Deadheads too. Uhhuh. What's the difference between them? Their accents? That's Jerry Garcia speaking with Ray White on WLIR in 1979. Jerry was kidding, but also not. They're kind of like Deadheads everywhere, except that they have their own definition of themselves. You know, I mean, they have their own little numbers and stuff, but. But the kind of input that we get from them and the kind of letters that they write and when they. When, when. When we meet people over there and stuff like that, the kind of people they are is a lot like American Deadheads, whatever that is. But it's a very specific kind of person. What was it like? They laugh a lot. They have fun. The expression we are everywhere came from the gay liberation movement, but it crossed over to Deadhead usage too. Beth Elliot. I was a Bay Area teenager in the 60s, which my friends say explains a lot. I was more into Jefferson Airplane, but really turned into a Deadhead through Workingman Stead. I went on to see lots and lots of really cool Dead shows. In the early 90s, I was one of some Bay Area gay and lesbian Deadheads who managed to find each other and hang out together. We called ourselves the Queer Deadheads just for grins, and we'd meet online for shows so we could groove together. In 1993, when it wasn't ridiculously expensive, we bought a contingent permit for the San Francisco Pride Parade. As fate would have it, that year's theme was the Year of the Queer. This was highly controversial, as many people considered queer to be a slur, not an in your face reclaiming of the word. Not like today. We didn't care. We decorated a VW bus and packed it with a sound system and show tapes. We snuck smokes and boogied our way up Market street carrying signs like Jerry's Fairies. Queers for Weir and Lesbians for Lesh. And I'm still one of those. It was great fun for all the pro and con hullabaloo over the Year of the Queer theme. We were the only contingent that had queer in our name. And so we won a prize for best use of theme. Us, the Queer Dead Heads. A bunch of hippies. We were proud and happy. Steve Silberman was at Pride that year as well. I'm at, you know, watching Pride walk by, and all of a sudden I see a Queers for Weird Banner, you know. And so I rushed out and joined them. And then this older guy came up to us with a camera snapping our picture. And he was crying. And he said, oh my God, I've been waiting my whole life for this. And it was John McIntyre, the former manager for the Grateful Dibs. And he had been closeted in a very straight scene. People think of the Dead as very progressive, and in some ways they were, but they weren't especially feminists and they weren't especially a gay liberation organization. So he had lived a complicated life as a closeted gay man, as inner circle as you could get. John Chernetsky met my husband on 3 16, 1990. As a gay Catholic from the rural part of Pennsylvania. The Grateful Dead has always shown me that love will see me through. 31 years later, my husband and I are still together and still happy. Perhaps the definition of magic is the inability to disprove it. This is Lisa Rowe. The Highlight of Spring 95 tour was most definitely Phil breaking out on Broken Chain in Philly. But a week later, my three friends and I found ourselves in the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown Atlanta. It was a weird scene at the Omni shows as shakedown sort of spread all along the cramped downtown streets and you had very few places to eat. So here we are, four 18 year old girls in a booth, when an older guy at the next table starts chatting us up. He assumes, correctly, that we're going to the shows and he then claims that he's Jerry's driver. In my memory of that day, there were reasons that I can't recall now that we believed him. So of course, not wanting to squander the situation, we decided to write a note for him and have him give it to Jerry. In the note, I think, of course, we claimed our undying love for the band and I had to take the opportunity to request my number one song. At the time it was Terrapin Station. So he claimed that he was going to give Jerry the note and we went on with our day. Cut to later that night and after a few so so first set. And as the first half of the set goes on, I hear the transition from estimated and lose my he played it. Of course it was due, but he fucking played it. 3 hours, 26 minutes and 95 seconds is my Terrapin station. One place that overlaps meaningfully with the Dead world is the Recovery community. Founded in 1986 as an unaffiliated recovery group, the Wharf Rats began meeting under bushels of yellow balloons during set breaks. We talked about them in our wharf rat Episode 1. Powerful tool the Recovery community shares with Deadheads is storytelling. Murph Shea. Hey, my name is Murph Shea. Long time deadhead, long time in recovery. First show, 5270 Harper College, hometown show. I was 12 years old. Been on the bus ever since. 60, 1995, giant stadium. Was heading towards a warfare meeting. Kind of got lost. And a kind security guard directed me, said, hey, what are you looking for? Told him, he said, let me take you a shortcut. Long story short, Jerry was sitting there in a chair and went by, and he knew him. And he said, hey, Jerry, I gotta meet. I want you to meet someone. This is Murph. He's a wharf rat. Jerry looked up tired and, oh, he looks so tired. And he looked up at me and I. Fire came in his eyes and he said, dude, keep doing what you're doing, man. You're saving your life. And others changed my life. Inspired the heck out of me. I've already been doing the work red thing. But long story short, still doing to this day. I love getting to do what I love to do without doing what I used to do. I've been a long time part of this community. It's inspired me in so many ways to be kind, be peaceful, be loving. And I can do that, and I still continue to do that. But magic existed all the way to the end of the Grateful Dead. Michael Gutsow. My first show was actually the last Dead show at Soldier Field. We were selling jewelry the day before, and a Japanese man that barely spoke any English bought a piece of jewelry from my friend. And he. He lifted up his sleeve and showed us a tiny steal your face tattoo. It was super tiny because Japan looks down on tattoos. And so he kept pointing it, saying, 20 years, 20 years. And we're like, oh, he got that, that tattoo 20 years ago. And my friends always told me about how. How magical the shows are and just how people are so connected. So the last night was the night we had tickets for, and it was my best friend's birthday. So I went with him. And he's never gonna have a big birthday party like that again. But it was so packed, we couldn't get to our seats. We're just standing on the stairs and in the aisles dancing. And within 10 minutes of getting into the stadium and getting to where we stood, we turn around and there was our Japanese friend from the day before with his woman. And we just all group hugged and. And started dancing all night. And it was. It was really magical. And ever since then, I've been going to Dedico every year at Wrigley. I'm actually going to be getting the same tattoo our Japanese friend had next month. Sheila Swan A few weeks after Jerry died, I had a dream. I was standing in my mother's driveway looking up at the night sky. I saw a weird square spaceship up above and I was thinking to myself, Jerry was right. And then I saw as plain as day, like a red neon line drawing in the sky. It was Jerry. The hair, beard and glasses. It was him. I felt a presence walking up to me from behind. I felt it coming closer and this presence had something to tell me, and I knew it was Jerry. He was right behind me and the presence was so strong I wanted to hear what he was going to tell me. But then I felt that if I turned around to see him, I would be dead too. It was very strange and powerful sensation. I woke up. That dream has never left me. Mickey Hart's album Mystery Box came out. I listened to down the Road and was like, that was my Jerry dream. To quote I heard a laugh I recognized Come rolling from the earth I saw it rise into the skies like lightning giving birth it sounded like Garcia but I couldn't see the face Just the beer and the glasses and a smile on empty space I heard a laugh and recognized Come rolling from the earth I saw it rise into the skies like lightning giving birth it sounded like Garcia but I couldn't see the face Just the beard and the glasses and a smile on empty space down the road Lyrics I'll point out by Robert Hunter but even though there was no more Grateful Dead, that didn't mean there were no more Deadheads. Ryan Storm has a Fish podcast we move through stormy weather. Although I was born too late to see Jerry in person, my dad always played the Grateful Dead in the house growing up. When I was 5 years old, not only was I a huge Grateful Dead fan, but I was ready to try to convert my friends on a bus to day camp. One day they asked us to bring our favorite CDs so everyone can enjoy some music, probably expecting most kids to bring pop hits, which they did. However, I showed up one morning with the Europe 72 box set with intentions of playing Everyone China Rider, which was definitely very out of character. Deadheads do not have the problem the Amish have. They're continuing to recruit members from outside the community. It's one of the reasons I have a problem with calling Deadheads a tribe. Originally, I didn't like that term because there wasn't a second generation, really. I mean, or at least not there wasn't evidence that a second generation was going to stay within the community. When I was first starting the research. And so since tribe implies generation, I didn't like the term in the beginning. And of course now we've got the issue with the neocolonial connotations of tribe and it's just not a cool term anymore. And we have the issue that although there are some Deadheads who are second generation or third generation and maybe even fourth generation Deadheads, not all young Deadheads are coming from within the community. They're being recruited from outside the community through Dead Derivative and Dead cover bands. And also just because of the music legacy that's available online now, even though there are young Deadheads, they don't all comprise part of the original tribe. Our community is getting more diverse in its experiences. We no longer have a community where we all knew what the party was that night. Logan Van Buren I'm a proud second generation Deadhead. For me, the Grateful Dead has always kind of been the glue that sticks everything in my life together. From my family to my friends, my relationships, the Dead is the one thing that seems to connect them all. Actually my parents first date was to a Grateful Dead show and then I came out a couple years later and it funny, if you look back at my baby videos, most of them, you can hear the Dead playing in the background. And it's interesting to grow up in that environment with my dad, who's a huge Deadhead and a taper. He ended up passing all of that passion and music onto me, which led to me developing this lifelong love for this band. So although I would have like to have been there for the shows that happened before I was born, I do like where I'm at as the generation who is being handed down the torch. There was kind of this cosmic synchronicity that comes with being around this band your entire life and even before you were actually born. I hope to pass that love and passion for the Grateful Dead onto my children for a third generation of Deadheads, because I see the band as the pebble tossed and I'm just a part of the second wave of ripples that stemmed from the splash that they made. So here's to many more ripples to come. Carly Brock I was not old enough to see Jerry perform live, but that definitely does not waver my love for the Grateful Dead whatsoever. I remember being a little kid and my dad giving me skeletons in the closet on vinyl and listening to it on repeat. But it wasn't until 2016 when I saw Dead & Co. Perform in Bristow, Virginia that I really fell in love with the Grateful Dead and all that it stood for. I just remember being there and seeing all the people in attendance and really understanding the scene and falling in love with the live music. So my love for the Grateful Dead has always been pretty strong. And I feel like it's gotten stronger, actually, during the coronavirus, just because I created this group on Instagram. It's now the largest young Deadhead group on all of social media. It's called Jerry's children 710. And we've just created a real community, and it's made me not feel so isolated during these hard times. We have group chats, regional group chats, so that you're able to meet up with people in your area. We have features on the page so you can learn about everyone's Deadhead history. It's just a really wonderful group to be a part of. And I would love for any young Deadheads listening to come check us out. There are new generations of younger Deadheads, for sure, but there are almost literally Deadheads of all ages. The music keeps people engaged in the community and going to shows, perhaps longer than people with other musical tastes would go to shows merely because of the old habit of not wanting to miss anything. So you have to keep going back. I haven't already heard it all, so I think that there's something to that. But I also. There are certain kinds of physical aging challenges that I think older Deadheads have more than maybe other people their age. Lots of standing and dancing on concrete. I am right now showing you, taking out my hearing aid. I happen to have taken out my fill hearing aid. Wear and tear on the joints. Just different kinds of aging experiences because of the show experiences and all the set of behaviors that go along with being a Deadhead. My right leg is never going to be the same because it was held that pedal down on long trips for long periods of time. There are certain challenges for older Deadheads to continue to go hear live music, and it's one of the reasons it was so great. The Couch tour got a big boost during COVID because now I'm not nearly as worried about losing my ability to go to shows, because I know I can at least hear live streams for the rest of my life. Poetry about the Grateful Dead is part of the Deadhead tradition, too, as I'm sure many people will remember from the Grateful Dead movie. So we'll leave you with a poem we received from Mike Larkin, a Note of Prayer, or a prayer of note to the Grateful Dead. Through these uncertain and definite growing pains of our country in the year of our gourd something,020 or so. Inspiration is where you can find it. From a beautiful sunrise to a beautiful sunset. From time spent with who you can. Through the appreciation of our family and friends, plant, animal or human alike, we hold together what is dear, important and inspiring in our hearts. Drawing from the in such times as these, the time tested beliefs and convictions of what we feel is right and true. We then rely on these values, joys and hysterias to see us through. And they always do. This is where you come in, you Grateful Dead, our ever faithful companion in the great experience of experience. Somewhere, somehow each day employers smile. My brother Esau saw me through to talk to you. Ventura 85 birdsong set it right where it could have been wrong Box the rain ease the pain. Educate that is not all in vain. Alligator is an elevator to above the equator. The real devils destroy and recreate all the levels. We love you Grateful Dead. Thank you for seeing us through and through. You know we will always be true. When we singed and clapped not fade away. It was forever and ever. It is still bright, right and strong. Thank you Grateful Dead for your emotions. Most multi leveled tri headed seven armed, interdimensional, everlasting, glorious jelly bean monster that you are. God bless. We will get by. Special thanks to our guests Bill Walton, Rebecca Adams, Steve Silberman, Mike Dilgushkin, Adam Brown and everybody who left a listener submitted story. Thank you very much. Keep them coming. We need your stories for upcoming episodes. And don't forget if you are at Europe 72 or you know somebody who went, get them to leave a story too or leave one yourself. Thanks so much. Have a happy Thanksgiving and we'll see you next episode. Take care. Be kind. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.