As one deadhead blogger recalls, the band has always managed to bring together diverse elements of humanity: The Grateful Dead’s live performances are timeless, obliterating ticket inventories in 2015 as they did in 1970, their music seemingly unbound by language or culture or even sound itself. After a few inspirational songs I was intrigued after my first Furthur show I was hooked and I cried during “Jerry’s last show”-every time I watched it on YouTube. A gathering of Deadheads-be it at Soldier Field for the Dead themselves for offshoot bands Furthur and Phil Lesh & Friends or for any number of Dead cover bands-is a place where people shed divisions and embrace a universal “phamily,” one that cuts across the boundaries of sex, class, and race. “Throwing Stones,” one of the Dead’s few political tracks, inspires me as much as any hip-hop does: a reminder that beyond all divisions of race, class, gender, and orientation, we are one human race on a (increasingly fragile) “big blue ball spinning, spinning free.”Īnd then there are the shows. The exhortation of “Sugaree”-“just one thing I ask of you…just don’t tell ‘em you know me”-would resonate with every adulterer and closeted gay man on Earth. “Shakedown Street” is, to me, a tale of a disdained city no more at home in 1985 than 2015. Being born in the final days of Generation X with an ear calibrated to digital music, I am more likely to reach for my phone 10 minutes into an “epic jam” than to scream “woo!”
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I wouldn’t even really call myself a “Deadhead”: I only discovered and fell for the Dead in 2012, at a relentless friend’s urging-17 years after Jerry Garcia died. I was not among the privileged 71,000 who got to see the final concert in the flesh, but I jammed and cried along with my friends and the millions of live-streamed webcast viewers who made it the largest online music pay-per-view event of all time.Īs a technologically inclined, black, gay hip-hop artist from East Baltimore who grew up on punk rock, I am not what most would consider a “typical” Dead fan. After 50 years, thousands of shows, and millions of inspired fans, the Grateful Dead’s “long strange trip” came to an end, culminating in a five-day California-to-Illinois Fare Thee Well tour. The night marked the outro of a glorious era of American music.