{"id":1705,"date":"2014-05-28T00:55:45","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T04:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/?p=1705"},"modified":"2014-06-03T10:15:08","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T14:15:08","slug":"bringing-in-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/bringing-in-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing In the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1705\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbringing-in-the-dead%2F&amp;text=Bringing%20In%20the%20Dead&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbringing-in-the-dead%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><div id=\"fb_share_1\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px;\"><a name=\"fb_share\" type=\"box_count\" share_url=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/bringing-in-the-dead\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php\">Share<\/a><\/div><div><script src=\"http:\/\/static.ak.fbcdn.net\/connect.php\/js\/FB.Share\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div><p><em>On last week&#8217;s edition of my podcast, WHAT ARE YOU READING?, I made a painful disclosure about myself. Here I fill in some details. Warning: This is harrowing stuff.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I had boundaries, once. Not rules, not hard limits, more like the borders between towns and counties. Here was the music I liked, there\u00a0was the music I might like, and there\u00a0was the music I would just never, ever come to like. In that latter, smallest category: reggae, opera, and the Grateful Dead. And I tried plenty of all three, by the way. And of those\u00a0three, two were things I could take or leave but probably wouldn&#8217;t ever come to like. Only one was subject to my eternal dislike. I had, as the\u00a0meme goes, ONE JOB.<\/p>\n<p>And then I blew it.<\/p>\n<p>Cut to now, 2014: I&#8217;ve become a person who not only has favorite Grateful Dead shows (May 28, 1977, Hartford, aka <em>To Terrapin<\/em>; December 31, 1978, San Francisco, aka <em>The Closing of Winterland<\/em>; <em>Fillmore West 1969<\/em>), but favorite performances of Grateful Dead <em>songs<\/em>. (At the risk of embarrassing myself even more, I won&#8217;t tell you which versions of &#8220;Sugaree&#8221; or &#8220;Scarlet Begonias\/Fire on the Mountain&#8221; I like best.) I honestly don&#8217;t know what happened to me. I haven&#8217;t stopped loving any of the indie rock and soul and classic country, etc., that&#8217;s been my musical food for most of my adult life; all that stuff is there, but there&#8217;s this new stuff, too. It&#8217;s like waking up to find your house has somehow gotten bigger overnight &#8212; and who wouldn&#8217;t want that? Except\u00a0there&#8217;s a really tacky\u00a0couch you never asked for sitting in the living room.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1726\" style=\"width: 233px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/jerry-wave.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1726\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1726\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/jerry-wave.jpeg\" alt=\"Hi! Cool if I camp here for a while? My old lady kicked me out.\" width=\"223\" height=\"226\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1726\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">&#8220;Cool if I camp here a while? My old lady kicked me out again.&#8221;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>My first exposure to the Grateful Dead was not through\u00a0their music, but through their fans. I was thirteen, walking with my family through the Galleria mall in Worcester, Massachusetts, <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/gd1983-10-21.aud.silberman.348.shnf\" target=\"_blank\">October, 1983<\/a><\/span>. My parents, younger sister, and I were on our way to see a movie. The mall was our regular mall until it suddenly wasn&#8217;t: at the darkest end, beneath the escalator banks, swarmed what seemed like hundreds of hippies.<\/p>\n<p>TV portrayals of hippies always seem canned and too on-the-nose. Even <em>Mad Men<\/em>, revered for its attention to detail, has\u00a0gotten some shit for its generic hippies of the past two seasons. I wasn&#8217;t around in the &#8217;60s, but in 1983? This crowd looked exactly like TV hippies: lots of tie-dye, flowing skirts, hair, army jackets, bandanas. The works. And they weren&#8217;t belligerent or menacing, but I found their group-ness terrifying. More than that, they pissed me off.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1728\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/modern-deadheads.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1728\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1728\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/modern-deadheads-300x189.jpg\" alt=\"Now picture this in an '80s mall.\" width=\"300\" height=\"189\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/modern-deadheads-300x189.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/modern-deadheads.jpg 628w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1728\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Now picture this happening in front of a Stride-Rite.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>See, this was the year my older sister had run away.\u00a0She was sixteen and disappeared, just before the end of the school year,\u00a0with a rough, truly violent guy, and didn&#8217;t come home until the cops caught up with them at the very end of the summer. In between, my family spent a lot of time looking for her &#8212; it turned out she and the guy had never left our part of the county\u00a0&#8212; while doing our best to feel normal. My sister had fancied herself a hippie, and while I have no idea if she even listened to the Grateful Dead with any real interest, I knew I did not have much patience for hippies, certainly not that year.<\/p>\n<p>When I was fourteen, my next-door neighbor, who&#8217;d always been a reliable source of Ozzy Osbourne and Scorpions for me, said, &#8220;You have to listen to this.&#8221; And he sat me down on a metal chair in his basement and played what I now know to be &#8220;Dark Star&#8221; from the Live Dead album. It&#8217;s 23 minutes, 18 seconds long.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1732\" style=\"width: 226px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/darkstar.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1732\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1732\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/darkstar-216x300.jpg\" alt=\"Sure. Just like this.\" width=\"216\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/darkstar-216x300.jpg 216w, https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/darkstar.jpg 289w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 216px) 100vw, 216px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1732\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sure. Just like this.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>It did not do the trick. Two minutes in, when I realized this wasn&#8217;t going to erupt into some kind of awesome screaming of Carvel-Jackson guitars, I started to drift. Then he switched to <em>Workingman&#8217;s Dead<\/em> and began to tell me about the shift the band had made in 1970, from psychedelic jams to blahblahblahonandonandon and all I could think of was how the song that was playing, &#8220;Uncle John&#8217;s Band,&#8221; just sounded like Crosby, Stills &amp; Nash on a melted\u00a0tape. He didn&#8217;t give up, though, and sent me home with his copy of <em>Aoxomoxoa<\/em>. I put it on as I went to bed that night and fell asleep nearly instantly, though not without thinking that at least <em>that<\/em> album&#8217;s opener, &#8220;St. Stephen,&#8221; sounded recognizably like classic rock &#8212; vaguely Allman Brothers-y, maybe? But the next morning I handed it back and my neighbor stopped trying to convert me.<\/p>\n<p>My next attempt with the Dead was when &#8220;Touch of Grey&#8221; came out in the summer of 1987. I was a new driver, and being able to borrow my dad&#8217;s car (a Dodge Colt) and play cassettes as I drove was exciting territory. I still have no idea what possessed me to buy <em>In the Dark<\/em>, but I did and I&#8230;mostly didn&#8217;t mind it. I think I was more impressed with that fact than I was with anything that was actually on the album. It wasn&#8217;t bad to drive to, was the best thing I could say about it. Had I gone deeper, the Dead might&#8217;ve gotten their hooks in me right then if it weren&#8217;t for R.E.M., whose <em>Document<\/em> came out at the end of that same summer.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1729\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/mj-bad.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1729\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1729\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/mj-bad.jpg\" alt=\"Or, you know, this.\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/mj-bad.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/mj-bad-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1729\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Or, you know, this.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>From then on, it was a mix of indie rock, thrash, rap, industrial, and pretty much anything but the Grateful Dead. The tiny contingent of hippies at my working-class state college didn&#8217;t enrage me (several were friends), they just <em>baffled<\/em> me. Why would you listen to that noodling, watery guitar? How could that <em>move<\/em> you in any way? Did you not like momentum or hooks? Memorable melodies? Rock that at least <em>tried<\/em> not to be embarrassing? I held on to these questions for decades, the way I held on to the marvel I felt that I still loved Sonic Youth and Fugazi even as I discovered new stuff like Call Me Lightning and Sharon Van Etten, even as I delved deep into older stuff like Otis Redding and Loretta Lynn.\u00a0Then I got older than 40.<\/p>\n<p>I can blame a lot of things &#8212; a sudden, renewed interest in Pink Floyd at 39. The newfound ability, at 40, to listen to long, live Led Zeppelin jams. Acquiring the Television reissues produced by the great <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Andy_Zax\" target=\"_blank\">Andy Zax<\/a>. (There&#8217;s been a lot written over the years about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertchristgau.com\/xg\/rock\/television-78.php\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Television&#8217;s debt to the Dead<\/span><\/a>. I&#8217;d say the same is true of Sonic Youth, Pavement, and Wilco.) Watching <em>Freaks and Geeks<\/em> with my kids &#8212; I&#8217;d missed it the first time around &#8212; and watching the series fade out so perfectly to the tune of &#8220;Ripple.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1730\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fg-last-shot.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1730\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1730\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fg-last-shot-300x225.png\" alt=\"This post would be much shorter if Lindsay had suddenly become interested in The Knack.\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fg-last-shot-300x225.png 300w, https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fg-last-shot.png 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1730\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This post would be much shorter if Lindsay had suddenly become interested in The Knack.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>More than anything, I can blame Spotify. In addition\u00a0to causing me much moral conflict\u00a0&#8212; and I promise you, I do still buy music &#8212; Spotify has enabled my sick relationship with the Grateful Dead in a way that wouldn&#8217;t have been possible two years ago. How I know what shows I like and what performances are my favorites is largely due to the fact that every official Dead release (including all the <em>Dick&#8217;s Picks<\/em>, <em>Download Series<\/em>, and the complete <em>Europe &#8217;72<\/em>) is on fucking Spotify. This is how I came across <em>Fillmore West 1969<\/em>, which opens with &#8220;Morning Dew.&#8221;\u00a0This version of &#8220;Morning Dew&#8221; has a slow build to a pounding lead section with real bite and actual distortion. This is the track that got me.<\/p>\n<p>Now: anyone who&#8217;s listened to the Dead even casually knows that &#8220;pounding lead section&#8221; doesn&#8217;t remotely describe the bulk of the band&#8217;s output. And that&#8217;s where I&#8217;ve been most surprised: that I&#8217;ve grown not just the constitution but\u00a0an outright love, even, for Garcia&#8217;s doodly excursions, Phil Lesh&#8217;s weird, loping bass lines, and the often-pointless two-drum attack of Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. I miss Donna Godchaux&#8217;s long-maligned background vocals when they&#8217;re not there. I&#8217;ve even learned to absorb\u00a0the goofy barroom piano when it shows up.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll notice\u00a0I left something out.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1731\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/weir.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1731\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1731\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/weir-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"&quot;I can't wait to meet Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry's gonna LOVE me!&quot;\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/weir-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/weir-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/weir.jpg 402w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1731\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">&#8220;I can&#8217;t wait to meet Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry&#8217;s gonna LOVE me!&#8221;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;m sorry, but Bob Weir nearly kills it for me every time. Every band has a member who just tries too hard, and he is the Dead&#8217;s. For some reason, Weir decided he was going to sing all the R&amp;B-flavored songs &#8212; &#8220;Promised Land,&#8221; &#8220;Bertha,&#8221; &#8220;One More Saturday Night.&#8221; But Bob Weir\u00a0has perhaps the\u00a0least\u00a0soulful voice in all of rock and roll. It&#8217;s a big claim, but I think he can back it up. Even from the earliest, sloppiest days, he sounded like someone&#8217;s Presbyterian uncle cutting loose on the back porch. The one song of Weir&#8217;s that I really like is &#8220;Jack Straw,&#8221; whose non-badness is undercut <em>immediately<\/em> by a first line &#8212; \u00a0&#8220;We can share the women\/We can share the wine.&#8221; &#8212; so gross it could be an outtake from &#8220;Lay Lady Lay.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s the other thing about getting older: I let things like this go. Where once a &#8220;bad&#8221; song would be grounds for skipping, now I think: &#8220;Eh, if I let this play, then &#8216;I Know You Rider&#8217; or &#8216;Deal&#8217; will be that much better.&#8221; And that&#8217;s how I know that despite all my early excuses (&#8220;I just find them interesting!&#8221;), I am actually a Grateful Dead fan.<\/p>\n<p>The Grateful Dead Curse (as it is commonly known) has infected me in other ways. Why, just the other day I was driving along, listening to part of a 25-minute live version of Fleetwood Mac&#8217;s &#8220;Rattlesnake Shake,&#8221; from their 1970 Boston Tea Party show, and I heard myself go, &#8220;Wow! Jeez.&#8221; To be fair, Peter Green is a bit of a monster, as far as guitar players go. But still:\u00a0&#8220;Wow! Jeez&#8221;? Hearing that from my own mouth was like walking in on someone doing\u00a0something intensely\u00a0personal. How long before I start referring to people as &#8220;cats&#8221;? How long before I start sneaking up to Toad&#8217;s Place in nearby New Haven to check out the Grateful Dead tribute acts? And how long before I find an equally goony friend\u00a0to go there with me?<\/p>\n<p>Something might cure this. Time itself could reverse the process. Death, certainly would. Or maybe digging out the three-disc <em>This Is Industrial<\/em>\u00a0compilation and making that my only means of entertainment for a month. Or maybe I&#8217;ll just accept what&#8217;s happened. Maybe I&#8217;ll enjoy the music, avoid the goofier trappings, and learn to say, &#8220;Hey, I love the Grateful Dead&#8221; without any qualifiers.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1705\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbringing-in-the-dead%2F&amp;text=Bringing%20In%20the%20Dead&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fbringing-in-the-dead%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><p>Why the Grateful Dead? Why now? I don&#8217;t know, man, I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-are-you-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1705"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1734,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705\/revisions\/1734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}