A CNBC financial reporter reflects on his path down the Golden Road

It was a weekend in the middle of the financial crisis when I got a call: The Treasury Secretary of the United States wanted to speak with me in person. Only trouble was, I had tickets to see Phil Lesh and Friends at Jones Beach. 

As the nation’s finances hurtled toward a meltdown, I hadn’t had a break in weeks from my day job as a senior economics reporter for CNBC. I was determined to see the show. So I told the Treasury’s spokesperson I couldn’t get down to D.C., asking if we could do a phone call. She said he would be available at 9 p.m., right in the middle of the show. But I had to do it.

So with Phil playing “Mountains of the Moon,” I walked outside of the arena and leaned on a hamburger stand in the concession area and eyed a few stray hippies walking by in their own particular zone while I prepared to get into mine: a serious call with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson about the latest government response to the financial crisis. (I always wonder what they would have said if they had known what I was doing.) My cellphone was perched between shoulder and ear, and I furiously took notes as “The earth will see you through this time” wafted from the stadium.

It was probably the most surreal moment in my lifetime of balancing my passion for the Grateful Dead and a serious, high-powered career. I know I’m not alone.

In 2004, after I had been in television for just a couple years, a close friend got us great seats in the second row for a show with Bob and Phil that Warren Haynes opened. As I walked closer and closer to the stage, more and more people began to recognize me until it seemed nearly everyone in the first and second rows knew who I was. It occurred to me that all these Deadheads were Wall Streeters, Type A personalities who could afford the seats and found a way to nurture their souls  through the music of the Grateful Dead, and then re-enter normal life the next day.

My balancing act began 35 years ago, in college in the early ‘80s. I was the editor of the student magazine at the State University of New York at Buffalo and we published 13 out of the 15 weeks of the semester. As editor, I would make the call on which two weeks we took off. I don’t think anyone to this day knows that I would wait until the Grateful Dead announced their spring and fall tour schedules before deciding which weeks we would go dark. And so, I’d follow the Dead from Buffalo to Syracuse to New Jersey to Harrisburg to end up back at school editing the magazine.

It is actually, I believe, a special condition of the Deadhead to plot and scheme to get to shows and stay employed. When I worked as a reporter in Moscow for the Wall Street Journal, I once planned a trip home to the States in 1994 that would get me to both visit my parents in Florida and to a Dead show in Orlando. Police returned the favor by tear-gassing fans, but it was probably the longest-distance scam I ever executed. (I was traveling in a van in Siberia in 1995, listening to the BBC on shortwave radio, when I learned Jerry died.)

I think it’s a strength of the Deadhead community that guys and girls selling vegan sandwiches to stay on tour mesh so seamlessly with the folks, like me, who take off their ties and put on their tie-dyes. Whatever our differences, when the lights come down and the music starts, they melt away. And then, you eye that twirler girl who is maybe married to the road, but maybe she’s married with a couple kids, holding down a career as a lawyer. (Yup, I met one.)

Being a Deadhead seems so mainstream these days that it’s hardly noteworthy to learn that a guy in power, like President Obama’s former advisor David Axelrod, is a dyed-in-the-rainbow Deadhead. But one day, at a party in Greenwich put on by a friend who sells municipal bonds (and is a great patron of music), two hedge fund guys separately came up to me and thanked me for being so public as a Deadhead. They told me that talking about my passion on air makes it more acceptable in their workplaces. I still find it strange, maybe a sign of my naiveté, but it never occurred to me there was any stigma.

I don’t think there’s any special overlap between Deadheads and hard-driven Type A personalities. The music, to my ear, is a mix of visceral and raw rock-and-roll, beautiful and melodic ballads, and a vast array of Americana styles full of tension and complexity. I find it spiritual and intellectual all at once. I’ve been playing the Dead’s music for most of my adult life (now with the Stella Blue’s Band), and I have found it a life’s work, as interesting today as it was when I first picked out “Me and My Uncle” when I was 16.

Bob Weir likes to say that the one thing that unites us is people “with a heightened sense of adventure.” For some, that’s meant dropping out and going on the road with the band. For others, and I think it’s probably the vast majority of us, it’s meant leading near-common lives and dancing in and out of life with the band, scheming and plotting to get to the shows and back to the office in time for that important phone call. And sometimes, we just have to take that call at the show.