The cover of the Grateful Dead’s 1977 album Terrapin Station is a fairly accurate image of what those who loathe their music think when they hear or read the term “Deadhead.” Two human-like turtles are playing a banjo and a tambourine, respectively, and one is dancing exuberantly, head in the air, and looking as if the rest of the world and all its problems (outside of the tiny cabin with “Terrapin Station” written above the front door) are either useless or a fantasy. But, like many Deadheads, when you look inside Terrapin Station, and many other Dead records, the contents within are much more interesting and important than the representation. This type of Deadhead includes intelligent, vital human beings who (unlike devoted fans of most other music, including Phish) have found in the Grateful Dead not only a way to retreat from “normal” life by appreciating music that fails to adhere to labels, structure, or limits, but also escape doors into literature (Cassady, Kesey, Burroughs, etc.), music (David Grisman, Branford Marsalis, Bob Dylan, etc.), and causes (anything from the environment to the preservation of classical music) that the members and their songs continually made references to. Still, there were and are a great number of Deadheads who are simply lost, searching for an identity and/or a life-purpose in an art that someone else created and which, if taken too seriously or the wrong way, can change their lives and outlook on their lives for the worse. I met these types of Grateful Dead fans, both groups including college professors, high school teachers, radio DJs, prestigious journalists, and businessmen, at an academic conference sponsored by the Popular Culture and American Culture Association in Albuquerque, New Mexico from March 7-10 of 2001.
First of all, I’d like to say that I do not consider myself a journalist, in that I don’t like the idea of writing about what other people are doing (although getting paid for it is OK). But both the things I learned and the circumstances that got me to New Mexico this winter are so mind-boggling and got my pen moving at such a fast rate (both in notes about the conference and in my own work) that if slipping into the journalistic role for a while (strictly in the Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson sense) is what it takes to spark some creativity, then so be it. While talking to these people and hearing their amazing (and sometimes hilarious) stories about following a rock 'n roll band over three decades, I told myself that listening and observing and then commenting (being a journalist) can be extremely pleasing and rewarding.
“A few months ago,” he said to me from the balcony overlooking the breathtaking south-western skyline, “I was getting paid to hang out in Sweden. This is just crazy.”
“And Alaska before that,” I said to a response of shrugs, as if taking an Alaskan cruise to write about computer geeks for Wired was a rough deal. We should all be so lucky.
LSDThe first paper presented, a reflective jaunt into two decades of touring by a local college English teacher, was well-presented and caught all the emotions of a young adult being introduced to the Dead and rock concerts in general. But the content was really too broad to hit on any of the key subjects of the conference, which was supposed to hit only the “sociological” aspects of the Dead and Deadhead culture. Stephen Allen, a middle-aged man with a long (graying) brown beard, opened the conference with his paper titled “I’m On My Way,” a recap of Allen’s most notable experiences at Dead shows which happened to start with a recap of his first experiment with mescaline. To the dismay of anyone trying to gain a new perspective on the Grateful Dead and their fans, at least every other sentence of the paper included a reference to the group’s lyrics (which were penned mostly by both John Barlow and the main Dead wordsmith, the ever-iconoclastic hermit Robert Hunter).
One of the most disappointing presentations, though maybe the most moving and thought-provoking, was the second of the conference, written by a California English professor named Jon Ney and titled “Terrapin Station: A Postmodern Journey Into the Infinite.” I could feel my stomach turn after hearing that title, realizing I had to witness the next half-hour of someone “searching” (as Silberman says) for meaning in an extremely powerful, passionate (and very long) rock song that was also one of the 1970s’ best pieces of Avant-garde poetry and a pleasant enigma. “Terrapin,” the title track to the 1977 album of the same name, is a 16-minute opus that included a string section, chanting, an amazing drummer’s duel, and obviously the Robert Hunter lyrics that have been praised by scholars and rock fans alike for almost a quarter-century.
Ney, donning flannel and looking like either a construction worker or a high school math teacher, spoke softly and told the audience that his first Dead show was also the first performance of “Terrapin Station,” the song he calls “an enigma of man’s beingprobing mysteries within a magical suite.” He spoke of fellow Deadheads as his “sisters and brothers” (like in the song “Promised Land”) and explained how he’d planned to “deduce” the riddles of “Terrapin.” Sitting there listening to this middle-aged man stammer through explanations like “without the nothingness, there’s nothing there” and half-baked Buddhist references such as “the unbegotten beginning,” I felt like I was at a Star Trek convention for the first time during the conference.
Is bringing a copy of former Dead vocalist Donna Godchaux’s (then Donna Jean Thatcher) Alabama high-school yearbook to the conference an example of the Trekkie side of being a Deadhead? Hell no. But more importantly, does being a dork make one more prone to becoming a Deadhead, or does being a Deadhead make one more prone to becoming a dork? Hard to tell. Hearing Ney describe “Terrapin” in his paper as a song that “transports the unknown into an unfathomable realm,” I realize he has tried very hard to fit into the Deadhead culture, which he ironically speaks of as “non-conformist.” Frank Zappa sang of “Pojama People” and dissed the Dead on 80’s albums like You Are What You Is because he knew that people are capable of adjusting themselves to both the corporate way of life and the bohemian way of life just to have somewhere to call home.
I believe that “Terrapin,” like many other rock songs, and poems, is something that is held sacred because of its status as an enigma, thus it may be better to enjoy it than to, perhaps in vain, attempt to fully understand it. Ney calls Hunter “a cosmic genius with no logic” and then tries hopelessly to make sense of a very mosaic-like song that, no matter what it’s true meaning, may never be completely understood by the listener or the composer, but is wonderful nonetheless. As Marge Piercy once wrote in an essay on complexity in poetry, “any piece of writing is a seduction. Once [it] is finishedpeople will experience it in marvelously inefficient and fabulous ways, making it mean to them what you never imagined.” Yes “Terrapin” “shimmers on the supernatural shores of our subconscious” like “Stairway to Heaven,” “A Day in the Life,” or “Desolation Row,” but would it intrigue us so much if we knew exactly what every word meant?
Regardless, Ney’s presentation ended with absolutely no concrete clarification of “Terrapin Station,” but did include the very telling statement “this song inspired my life,” prompting me to (very brutally, I admit) scribble in my notes “what did it inspire you to do listen to more Grateful Dead music?”
To my dismay, the next paper presented (by Lans Smith) was another “searching” synopsis of Robert Hunter’s lyrics: a comparison of a few Dead songs to ancient mythology (specifically the Nekyia, or “decent into the underworld”) that included the observation “Nietszche was ever-present at Dead shows.” Once again, while the presenter, an English professor at Midwestern University, was less “Trekkie” than Ney and even made a surprisingly honest joke that alluded to Dead song titles (“Eyes of the World,” “the Other One,” etc.) being written thousands of years ago on Egyptian hieroglyphs, he fell short if only because his paper attempted to look at the Grateful Dead from the inside although he was admittedly an outsider, as is anyone who basically didn’t write their songs. As I read now from my notebook: “Robert Hunter was a brilliant poet and [lyricist], easing bits of history, fact and fiction, into utterly perfect songs which, whether understood completely or not, open a magic door in the mind of the listener.” Scholars like Smith do Hunter justice by dipping into every facet of his writing, but the one thing they must realize is that we are not just listening but also living, and Hunter was writing as well as living. Therefore, both listener and composer are human and capable of equaling (and complementing) each other in some way.
I was intrigued by Smith’s entire presentation, especially his virtual breakthrough-observation that the powers of imagination are important in creation, but I had already learned to take each paper not grounded in intense research or practical experience with a grain of saltwhich makes a nice segue into Rebecca Adams’ investigative and surprisingly realistic presentation on Deadhead culture.
Adams, better known as the “Dead Professor,” is a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina in her late forties, and a virtual encyclopedia of what the Skeleton Key called “useless Dead statistics.” Her presentation, which was basically a stellar excerpt from her new book Deadhead Social Science, was easily the most successful of the conference based on content alone – and her mind-numbing research humbled the audience by being both interesting and bewildering. “It will be a trip home, at least visually,” she said.
LSDLSDAKA
