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How Jerry Got Hip (Again)

Just as punk was an underground within the mainstream, a sub-secret Deadhead network existed in the ‘80s indie-punk world, which counted among its members artists on the influential SST label, including founder Greg Ginn of Black Flag, Curt and Cris Kirkwood of The Meat Puppets (who recorded “Franklin’s Tower” for their first album), and Ranaldo.

“They’re always kind underneath the radar in a lot of ways,” offers Dylan Carlson of veteran Seattle sludge-psychers Earth and lifelong Dead fan. (His band’s latest, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, is a sly metaloid reference to “Samson and Delilah.”) “Maybe the perception is that they represent this whole thing—it’s so hippie we gotta hate it—especially in the underground rock world.”

In fact, a whole subgenre exists of anti-Dead songs. “I’d wanna kill Pigpen if he were alive,” sing A.D. Nation and Buz Rico on “Kill Jerry Garcia.” A small sampling of other titles include Eleventh Dream Day’s “Bomb the Mars Hotel,” Archie Brown and the Bucks’ “Bring Me the Head of Jerry Garcia,” and Anti-Heroes’ “Jerry Was a Piece of Shit.”

One who noticed similarities between the Dead world and punk was Ginn, who saw the Dead and various Garcia projects an estimated 200 times, and helped pioneer the hardcore scene with Black Flag with singer Henry Rollins. They were “different undergrounds that beneath the stereotypes had so much in common,” he says. “Of course, as undergrounds age, they become more rigid and the participants acquire more rules in an attempt to maintain the status quo.”

“Psychedelic rock was considered an anachronism by the end of the ‘70s and the Grateful Dead was about the only practitioner still standing,” Ginn continues. “That insistence on continuing to go against the grain was a big influence on me. There are always those with pre-conceived notions that are not correct.”

“I know all of the hippies at my high school worshipped them,” says Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes. “It took me a long time to even give them a listen, ‘cause they had such a stigma in my mind. I was definitely not expecting to sound like they do.”

“I think the Dead are weird because a lot of people who say they don’t like them haven’t actually heard them,” concurs Carlson, who—in addition to being the leader of Earth—was also Kurt Cobain’s best friend. Cobain’s loathing for the Dead, as it turns out, had less to do with the music than the Deadheads. “Unfortunately, Kurt was not one I was ever able to turn,” he sighs, though notes he was able to expose The Screaming Trees to “Mountains of the Moon.” “A lot of it had to do with his relationship to Chad [Channing], their drummer. They weren’t getting along, and Chad”—frequently described by Nirvana biographers as “elfin”—“is the embodiment of all things hippie.”

Just as the Dead were an immense force in American music, the Deadheads were an equally immense force in American subcultures. By the end of their career, the Dead themselves were an island in a protective ocean of Deadheads, who often literally—and quite symbolically—drowned the band’s music by singing along. “As time went on I just got over the fact that you can’t blame a band for their fans,” admitted Modest Mouse leader Isaac Brock in the Garcia Fader issue. Without the Deadheads migrating seasonally about the interstate system like North American mammals, defining the band’s story, it might be easier to appreciate the Grateful Dead’s music for what it was, and is.

The music they made in the 1960s is as removed from a 20-something today as the mysterious Depression-era folk and blues musicians were removed from Jerry Garcia. “I owe a lot of who I am and what I’ve been and what I’ve done to the beatniks from the Fifties and to the poetry and art and music I’ve come in contact with,” Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1991. “I feel like I’m part of a continuous line of a certain thing in American culture, of a root,” he mused. To new listeners who didn’t have an older brother or cousin to initiate them, the Dead are old and weird and pure.