Being a Deadhead hasn't always been easy.
I joined the cult in 1977, my freshman year in college, and saw the Grateful Dead perform in 1978, the first of dozens of shows I would attend over the next 15 years. In retrospect, the entire '70s decade seems like the Dead's glory days, but in truth, they were already falling out of fashion at the time. Punk rock and New Wave were taking hold. The idealism and carefree vibe of the hippie era were giving way to synthesizers, angst and painstakingly coiffed hairstyles. The Dead may have enjoyed a big increase in popularity in 1987, when "Touch of Grey" became a fluke Top 10 hit, but a lot of that surge consisted of folks who were more concerned with the endless (or so it seemed at the time) traveling circus Dead tours had become. And in some ways, that made Dead fandom even more unfashionable.
By the time I moved to Nashville as an aspiring guitarist in 1997, the Dead were about as popular in Music City as Barack Obama at an NRA convention. The moratorium on Dead-bashing following Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 had already faded. I soon noticed that the mere mention of the Dead elicited eye rolls from more than a few of the musicians, producers and other music-biz types I encountered.
And it made perfect sense. Nashville was the song-craft capital of world; many Dead songs defy the typical rules of radio-friendly song structure, and more than a few have one or two more verses than logic would seem to dictate. In Music Row studios, precise musicianship was the rule of the day; the Dead's often-sloppy 20-plus-minute forays into the psychedelic wilderness were the antithesis of precision. Accurate vocal pitch and harmonization were so essential to the Nashville sound that Auto-Tune became de rigueur not only in studios but in concert halls and arenas; at their best, the Dead's live vocal harmonies could generously be described as endearing, and at their worst, cringe-worthy. Nashville drummers were expected to keep it clean and simple; in his excellent 2012 New Yorker story "Deadhead," Nick Paumgarten described the Dead's two drummers, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, as sounding at times "like sneakers in a dryer."
So, outside of doing some gigs with first-call studio and stage bassist Byron House's fine Dead cover project Dead Set in the late '90s and early Aughts, I kept my Dead love under wraps. At record stores, I'd scan the room and wait for the perfect moment to peruse the Grateful Dead bin, like a guy trying to inconspicuously check out the porn section at a newsstand. I didn't play Dead albums around fellow musicians and I never festooned my guitar cases with dancing Jer Bears and Steal Your Face decals.
It wasn't that I felt shame about my musical proclivities — I wasn't a self-loathing Deadhead. It was more a matter of musical self-preservation. And to that end, I stopped listening to so much Dead, which was probably a good thing. I had been getting a few session gigs here and there, and on at least a couple of occasions the producer said, "Sounds great, but a little less Jerry."
Which is why it's ironic that 18 years later, there seems to be no such thing as too much Jerry, at least when it comes to my musical career. For more than a year now, I've been the guitarist in bassist Christian Grizzard's Dead cover band, The Stolen Faces, and I'm playing more gigs and making more money doing it than I have since I moved to Nashville. Sure, my ultimate passion is still my own original music, but frankly, it's a hard sell — all-instrumental, at times dissonant and largely improvised music isn't stuff that fills a lot of clubs these days. Meanwhile, playing in a Dead cover band beats the hell out of most guitar sideman gigs, where improvising, taking chances and stretching out are typically discouraged.
But what's most surprising is that what was once an albatross around my neck has become my ticket to street cred. For a variety of reasons, the Dead are cool again, even with young indie artists and tastemakers who years ago I would have assumed frowned on the Dead or considered them dusty relics. The Stolen Faces played a couple of sets of Dead tunes at a surprise party for Jamin Orrall, drummer for Nashville underground stalwarts JEFF the Brotherhood, where he and his buddies smiled and danced their asses off for a three hours. The fabulous guitarist William Tyler — who is known for his work with indie darlings Lambchop and Silver Jews, and was recently voted Best Instrumentalist in the Scene's Best of Nashville Readers' Poll — calls me to pick my brain about Dead esoterica and stops by to learn Jerry licks. And Silver Jews drummer Brian Kotzur frequently plays with The Stolen Faces.
So why is it hip to like the Dead again, particularly in Nashville? No doubt, the spotlight has been shining on the Dead's legacy because of the remaining band members' various 50th anniversary concert tours, but that doesn't really explain how it became cool to like the Dead again. If anything, so much mainstream coverage would tend to make it less fashionable.
Maybe enough time has passed since Garcia's death that folks can remember — or romanticize — the band from any era they choose, while editing out the counter-culture elements that ultimately stigmatized them. Anyone who's lost an elderly parent knows that strange feeling that seeps in as time elapses: The loved one is no longer an infirm 90-year-old present in front of you, but a collective memory. Once they're gone, their prime and vital years are just as real as their waning ones. (And Jerry Garcia's waning years were sometimes difficult to watch.)
Maybe it has to do with the evolution of Nashville. The city's thriving rock scene has developed in part as a reaction to the pristine Nashville sounded that was sucking the soul out of music. Perhaps contemporary country, Americana and even niche genres such as shoegaze have so thoroughly absorbed the Dead into their DNA that they are just accepted as a formative influence. And in many ways, the Dead were the original indie band, the first of their stature to say, "Fuck you" to the music industry and do things their own way. Or maybe it's just that a new generation of fans, untainted by any sort of memory of the band's declining years, can appreciate the magic of the Dead at their best, which is still a pretty potent brew. How potent? Well, potent enough to get the town's cool kids amped up for a John Mayer appearance at Bridgestone Arena. Mayer (who himself admitted to discovering the Dead in recent years) will pinch-hit for Garcia in Dead & Company — the half-reunion/half-tribute version of the band playing Nashville on Wednesday.
Whatever the reason for yet another bizarre chapter in the long, strange story of the Deadhead phenom, it's finally safe for this skeleton to come out of the closet.
Email Music@nashvillescene.com
