NPR Music - How to love the Grateful Dead

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest places, if you look at it right. And if you get confused, just listen to the music play. This week, resident Deadheads Isabella Gomez Sarmiento and Felix Contreras help host Robin Hilton hear what he’s been missing in the music of the Grateful Dead.Are you a Deadhead? Share your memories about the Grateful Dead and we may include them in a big series about the band we're launching Aug. 1.Support the show with a review on Apple or Spotify wherever you listen to podcasts. Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] songs:(00:00) Intro and “King Solomon’s Marbles”(08:54) “China Cat Sunflower / I Know You Rider” Alpine Valley, WI 7.17.89(11:03) “Help On the Way / Slipknot / Franklin’s Tower”(16:39) “Ripple”(23:34) “Morning Dew (Europe ‘72)”(26:17) “I Shall Be Released (Live)” (30:05) “Black Muddy River”(31:34) “One More Saturday Night”(32:09) “Sunrise”(33:21) “Shady Grove”(39:14) “Birdsong”(41:45) “Uncle John’s Band”See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This episode of All Songs Considered comes to you from NPR Music and the NPR Music Podcasts. It's where you can find out about and hear best new songs, new albums, and just hang out with us, gab about whatever's going on in the world of music. NPR Music, also your home for Alt Latinos, Felix Contreras. Hey, man, what's happening? We've got new episodes of Alt Latino in this feed every Wednesday. That's right, man. Don't miss it. Close out the week with New Music Friday. That's on Fridays.

also NPR music reporter and sometimes host of all Latino, Isabella Gomez Sarmiento. Hi. So on this week's show, we're going to talk about one of the biggest blind spots I think I've ever had when it comes to music. I've got a lot of blind spots. But this is one that I think is somewhere near the top of my list. Maybe my biggest blind spot, The Grateful Dead. Let's get into it, man. Let's do it.

This is a band that I know is hugely important to both of you. Guilty as charged. Yep. Felix, I don't need to ask you how you came to the Grateful Dead. I have a pretty good idea. Well, it's probably a little different than, didn't you think. But, I mean, I ignored them for years. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, man. You weren't just, like, from right out the gate when you were a teenager. No, I'm a late bloomer because I was into other stuff. Yeah. Like jazz, specifically Santana. I was like, it was old. which is they're adjacent. I don't know why.

And it wasn't until I saw Garcia and Bob Weir do a benefit performance with Santana. I actually paid attention to what Garcia was playing. And I'm like, oh, my God. What year was this? In the 80s. 80s, you started dating and time. Yeah. How about you, Issa?

I mean, you're like a totally different generation. I mean, Jerry Garcia had been dead for years before you were even born. That's correct. I would call myself a Bob Weir dead-in-com. company Disciple. I was in high school, I was finishing high school when they did the 50th anniversary Fair The Well Show. So it was like suddenly the Grateful Dead was very much back in pop culture. And then they announced Dead and Company. I started seeing them. I started following them on the road. I just got really, really locked in while I was in college and I've stayed a huge

fan of the band ever since. Well, they're a band that, you know, unlike a lot of bands that I just don't care for. They're a band that like, I feel like I should love this band. And it's always felt like a failing of mine that I've just not been able to get into them. I mean, all my friends love them. My whole friend circle, there is literally no reason why I should not have been into this band. I was texting with a friend sometime in January. I was like, hey, what are you doing? And he said, oh, we're just, we're kind of having a wake for Bob. And we have, there's a friend in our circle of friends named Bob. It's like, Robin, how could you not know? I was like, who are you talking about?

like Bob weird. But like they, it was, it hit them so hard that like they all got together and they were just having a night. We were like, we're just remembering Bob tonight, man. I remember when Garcia died, I was at, you know, free internet, 95, August 9th, 95. And I was sitting at home. I think I heard it on MTV. Kurt Loder, I think, you know, it was that kind of thing.

And there was a knock on my door and it was a buddy of mine. We're both huge Los Lobos fans, but also Grateful Dead for. fans, he's like, bro, Garcia's dead. We just sat there and had a beer and just had our own little two-person wake about how bummed we were. I remember thinking, at least he lived a good long life because he was, in my mind, he was as old as dirt, and now I'm much older than he was. It was like 53?

Yeah. He was really young, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, he didn't look, he looked way older than he was because of the substance abuse and bad health. Well, he always had the big gray beard. Yeah.

So you're going to break it down for me. We're going to talk about all kinds of stuff with the band. But the goal here is to walk away from this episode knowing or understanding how to love the Grateful Dead. This is public service journalism at its finest. This is what we're here for. This is what the people want. This year was a milestone for the Grateful Dead because, of course, Jerry Garcia, as a I mentioned he died more than 30 years ago.

But Bob Weir, founding member and guitarist, he basically kept things going, particularly with the dead and company. But he died in January. So fans, like y'all, have been kind of left wondering, where do we go from here? Issa and I have been working on a series of stories, sound stuff, podcast. We're doing a bunch of stuff. Photo essays. Photo essays? A bunch of stuff.

We did our own little summer dead tour to answer that question. What's next for Grateful Dead music and for fans? Right. Yeah. You know, the Grateful Dead officially ended 31 years ago in 1995. But somehow it felt like they had kept going for all this time because of what Bob Weir was doing, what Felesh was doing. So we were trying to understand, like, how did this phenomenon keep persevering despite death being a recurring thing in the band? And now it's like a new chapter, new ending, new beginning.

where do we go? All right. Well, look, I don't want to harsh your mellow. But I thought what we could do is just kind of go through some of the reasons people don't like the band, you know, whatever the main complaints or criticisms or whatever are. And you all can just swat them away. But I think these are maybe the main complaints that people in general have. We'll do the top five complaints. And I didn't rank these.

But what do you think is maybe, what would you guess is the number one complaint? probably, I don't know, the music meanders too much. Yeah, I think the jamming. People aren't into the jamming. I could see how that's a big sort of obstruction for getting into it. Yeah, so that's what I wrote down is the number one complaint. They're a jam band. But what does that really mean?

I think, like just saying a band is a jam band, it's a shorthand for that the music just sort of wanders around aimlessly, that nothing's really happening in the jams and that just kind of goes on forever. the songs don't go anywhere. Complain number one. I would argue that the Grateful Dead is not, they were the creators of what we now understand as jam bands. But like I'm not a big fan of other quote-unquote jam bands. It's, it's, I just can't really get into it.

I think what the Grateful Dead were doing in terms of improvisation just feels different. They were all coming at it from their own angle of like Jerry with the Bluegrass and there was a strong jazz influence. And, you know, you have Phil with like a classical music training. Like, it doesn't feel like they were just hippies with guitars being like, let's noodle for an hour. I think there was like music theory and composition that went into the way they approached improvisation. That I think a lot of other jam bands don't do it in quite the same way. So to me, it's like I don't even, they are the originators of the jam band, but that wasn't a thing when they were doing it. I don't know.

I really dislike the name jam band. It's been put on them and it doesn't capture what they did. And my perspective was as a jazz fan, like since high school, the more I learned about jazz that when I started listening to The Grateful Dead, and then I heard a jazz band in so many different ways, Bob Weir has said that his main influence as a rhythm guitarist, because he rarely played lead, was McCoy Tyner from John Coltrane's quartet, right? And just playing behind Coltrane.

That was his main source of inspiration. And within the structure of these songs that were either, they're short, you know, storytelling songs, longer, like I called them, meditations on life about creation. There are all these longer songs that have a lot of space for creativity, for playing stuff. So jamming, you know, it's like, you know, as a musician, I don't like to go to jam sessions because it's just like it's just a big mess, right? But that's not what they did for me. They just, they were, it was highly, highly musical in every, every sense of the world. And it would completely blow up sometimes. They admitted it.

All their fans admitted Dennis McNally, their publicist, demographer. They would miss read lyrics. They would miss cues. But it's like you're out there without a net, man. And that's the spark of creativity. And when it worked, like sometimes, you know, they were lost and they were trying to find their footing and they were trying to find each other. But then when like, when it clicked, And when they do find each other, it's like magic.

So this is a YouTube video. Okay. Go to YouTube, look for Elpine Valley, Wisconsin, 7, 1789. Oh, July. Okay, okay, got to see it. Yeah, sorry. Okay, now scroll in to at about five minutes and 20 seconds. This particular transition was so incredibly popular.

And they go from China Cat Sunflower to this traditional song called I Know You Writer. And it's that transition where they're Garcia soloing and then all of a sudden you're in I Know You Rider. You can hear for the last. Yeah, right? And Garcia was a singular guitarist. Like, so many influences, folk, bluegrass, jazz, rock and roll, his own thing. So you would argue that this is actually very carefully orchestrated and not just a bunch of mindless noodeline or whatever the complaint is.

I don't know that it's orchestrated, but they're in a flow. Like how orchestrated can you be when you're in this river and it's just pushing you along and you're on a tube? You're in control of the tube, but the river's just... taking you. Yeah, I would say to me, the thing about the jams is that these songs, particularly, like, the triptics and the ones that are sequences that are well known that go into each other, they're journeys, you know?

And it's funny Felix says you're on a river, because to me it's kind of like, um, one of the ones I was going to bring is help on the way into Slipknot into Franklin's Tower. And it starts off really moody and dark, and it's kind of like you're like sailing and a storm comes up and things get really dark for a second and everyone's like hanging on to each other for dear life. You know, the help on the way into Slipknot, it's all instrumental, it's kind of like these dark jazz arpeggios.

And then Franklin's Tower breaks into this really sort of hippie rock, mellowed out song. You listen to this, they know where they're going. Oh, yeah, man. Right? This isn't just like, let's just see what happens, man, and you just go for a while. And I've got, like, this is very carefully thought out here.

It's not aimless. Right. And there's tricky time signatures in the song. Some of them are in five, some of are in seven. You know, so they have to pay attention. And it feels like. Like, the clouds go away, the sun comes out, you can like jump in the water and you're reborn. It's like you're on this journey with everyone.

And like the destination's not the point, but there is a destination, which is why it doesn't feel like aimless noodling. Like you know you're going somewhere. You just have to kind of ride it out. It's all about the journey, man. I'm sorry, but it's true. I do think Franklin's Tower is like the stereotypical hippie music you think of when you think of the Grateful Dead. but to me there is no better feeling than reaching the crest where that instrumental transitions into Franklin's. And everyone's just like dancing and hugging and spinning around together in the crowd.

Well, so I mentioned that I went through a bunch of Reddit comments and threads and stuff like that. One of the comments that somebody made was the difficult part about getting into the Grateful Dead is that you have to learn how to listen to it differently than you do other music. Well, I'll say the original post was it's 2021. can we finally admit the Grateful Dead suck, have always sucked, and will always suck. And so someone wrote, I used to be in the same boat as you. And then one day, like a decade ago, the Dead just hit me. You kind of have to think of them as jazz where they take a riff and they play on it. Yeah.

To your point. Yeah. They are a jazz band. They're a jazz band. And this is something Dennis McNally, the publicist and biographer, told us. They're a jazz band working within rock and roll formats. But it's not aimless. with country, with folk, you know, there's equal parts of...

A little bit of disco. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff. Yeah. There's all kinds of stuff mixed in. Well, let's talk about the lyrics. You mentioned the lyrics. I think that brings me to complaint number two, which is the lyrics are just a mess. Too abstract, too cryptic or just total nonsense.

Felix, you played a little bit of China Cat Sunflower. Let me just pull a line from there. Copper Dome. Boaty, drip a silver kimono, like a crazy quilt stargown through a dream night wind. What's confusing about that? That makes a lot of sense to me. All right, you guys are grooving on a totally different wavelength. No, you know.

But that's the complaint. The lyrics are nonsense. Okay, so China Cat Sunflower is, to me, has always been, like, that's one of those ones where, you know, even John Lennon would write lyrics that would just matched, like, just matched some kind of syntax idea he had in his head. Okay, you also have to understand, like, there was a lyricist. Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics, and it's mostly Robert Hunter, and then Garcia would write music around these lyrics, like Bernie Taupin and Elton John, unconnected,

and sometimes they would write together, and sometimes they wouldn't. So he wrote these lyrics, and then Garcia wrote this really nice song around it. That's an example of the, like, I don't know, they're into it just because of the way the words sound together? Yeah, I think, I mean, I would just say, yes, sometimes the lyrics are difficult to understand and they're very abstract. I think Robert Hunter was a poet, an incredible poet. And I think part of it, from the things that I've read of him speaking about the lyrics and addressing some of these complaints, actually, with Franklin's Tower, he wrote an essay in 1996 responding to somebody saying that those lyrics didn't make any sense. And it seems like for him a big part of it is also

the experience of interpretation and the way that people create meaning within these words that he has built. I mean, that's a song that, like, if you look at the lyrics, it's, you know, in Franklin's Tower, there hangs a bell. And he talked about how he wrote it before the bicentennial in 1975, and that was supposed to be a nod to American independence. So there's all these things that you wouldn't necessarily get, I never thought about American independence listening to that song. To me, that's a song about like, you know, roll away the do, shake off all the bad things. If you get confused, listen to the music play, it's a grounding exercise. But I think the beauty of Robert Hunter is that they are kind of hard to decipher because you're supposed to kind of interpret it

for yourself. They're not, he's not spelling it out for you. Okay, so there's a couple of things we can do here. Let's try Ripple. It was on American Beauty. And American Beauty is, where they really,

really came together with their Americana thing. They went from the psychedelic LSD influenced. Okay, we're going to just try everything. And then they got, they really refined it in 1970. It released two albums, American Beauty and Working Man's Dead. And like,

and it's the studio album, I would say. Yeah. For sure. Friend of the Devil, Sugar Magnolia, Ripple, Broke Down Palace, Addicts of My Life, Trucking. A lot of these songs, man, they stayed with them forever. If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine and my tunes were played on the heart, strong, would you hear my voice come through the moon?

You know the line, let there be songs to fill the air. You know, the line, let there be songs to fill the air, like played on a harp on strong, ripple on still water, where there is no pebble tossed, there is no wind to blow. It's so, to me, in my personal journey, there's a direct parallel, And it's about looking for a path to perfection. And my own path to perfection

and just listening to the lyrics just always brings me to that point. Yeah, I would say the line that really always gets me in this song is if I knew the way I would take you home. I think, I mean, in my personal relationship to the dead, I am an immigrant and a young woman. And I think that when I was getting into the dead's music, it was like a coming-of-age moment of trying to connect

to an American identity and culture that felt like it was rooted in kindness and love and, like, unity and communion. And I think this song in particular, like, when you hear that everyone's singing along together at the end, if I knew the way I would take you home, I think a lot of people that are drawn to this music are people that feel like they don't fit in in some way, whether that's because, you know, like with me not being from this country or there's just something about, like, deadhead's sort of feeling like there's a friction with the way that they're supposed to be or the lives that they're supposed to lead and finding like that communion and that home within the Grateful Dead's music and I think that this is the song that really encapsulates that and when you hear everybody sing it together I always cry it just feels so it's like this is the

home that we all built together. One of my career highlights was bringing in Bob Weir with the Wolf Brothers for a tiny dust. And when they started singing this part at the end, La Da Da Da. Bobby Carter caught me crying. I was bawling. To hear the whole crowd just like just start singing, well, going to start again. It's like a lullaby too. It's just really, it's like reaching for a home that might not exist and might not be perfect,

but we're all reaching for it together. I don't know. It sounds like the message of the music, of course, is about. about letting go, but in order to really enjoy it, you also have to let go. This is the thing. I think a lot of the Grateful Dead's music and really leaning into it does force you to sort of,

it is an ego death experience. And I know that that's kind of like a stereotypical way to talk about it, but you can't have these walls up and be embarrassed and have ego around other people. Like I think even the experience of the way that people dance at the shows, right? And it's kind of a thing to make fun of. But everyone is so free and so,

so uninhibited in a way that like, I love indie rock, but you go to indie rock shows and everyone is just standing there, like rigid, kind of nodding along, and you can tell everyone's caught up in all their own stuff. I just had this conversation with a friend of mine who plays live, he plays dance music, and he plays these massive shows out in Portland where everyone's just dancing and freaking out. And we talked about the ways that people watch music, watch live music. And I said, you know, I think I've watched every live show I've ever watched, just standing there with my arms folded, just watching the musicians. And I remember all my friends, we'd go out and we'd go see shows, and we'd just stand there right by the stage with our arms folded, just very passively watching. And my thought was always, well, it's because we're musicians and we're listening for and watching something else.

Yeah. And everyone else around us is kind of letting go. And you know what was always fascinating to me? Like after my first show, you would see people out in the street, you know, filing out of the theater or whatever, the venue. And people were just like, hey, man, did you have a good show? Did you have a good show? It's always the question after.

It's like, did you have a good show? Did you have a good show? Did you enjoy yourself? Did you have a good show? It's always about the audience experience. Even when I went to go see them in Vegas, dead in company in Vegas at the sphere, walking back to my hotel in Las Vegas

and all the lights and everything's going on. But we just had this experience and everybody was still just sort of not, you know, mind-alternally substantively buzzing. It was just everybody's still glowing from the experience. It's like, hey, man, did you have a good show? And you do it in your own way. Like, that's not to say everyone's dancing.

Some people are standing. They're locked in on what they're doing and that's okay too. But I think it's this comfort of just doing what really feels natural and what really feels freeing for you in the moment, as opposed to being, yeah, within your preconceived notions and within these rigid structures of how you think you're supposed to be behaving at the show.

Well, I think we were ostensibly talking about lyrics there. That was complaint number two. Let's get to another complaint. You both mentioned how sometimes when they get into these jams or they're trying to take the song in a certain direction, it all kind of starts to fall apart. That brings me to complaint number three. Complaint number three.

Not great musicians. Very sloppy performances. Well, you know. That's just like your opinion, man. That just... Wrong. Just categorically wrong. That just shows how little you know about music.

I'm just... No, not you, man. Whoever said it. I'm just a vessel here for these complaints. That's exactly it. All musicians are just vessels for the energy coming from the universe. I read that from Coltrane in high school and took me forever. to understand. Okay, well, I'm just channeling the complaints here. One of them is that maybe these

guys actually aren't that good at their jobs. I have something to counter that. Go for it. It's called Morning Due, Europe 72. Oh my God. Is there a particular post or part? I should skip ahead here, too? Further in for sure. Are you talking about the guitar solo? Yeah. All right, let's get to the guitar solo then. I would say to get the full context of this song, because this is a song that really takes you on a journey. It's a folk song that did not write. about waking up in a post-apocalyptic world after the nuclear bomb or after a nuclear war, essentially. The Dead didn't.

You say The Dead didn't write this one? No, this is one of those cover songs that they really turned into their own thing. The Dead did a lot of covers. And, yeah, this was written about sort of waking up in a post-nuclear war reality. And, you know, I can't walk you out into the morning due. Like, you can't go outside. The air is literally toxic and nuclear. But I think the emotion that he conveys both through his voice, I know people have complaints about Jerry Garcia's voice, I think it has this incredible twang and the way that he uses the guitar to really sort of hone in on this like desperation and melancholy of the situation.

And then it kind of transforms into something else. I think the original song is a lot darker. And I think to me this song almost has like a hopefulness that comes through at the end. And there's these moments where, like, Jerry's guitar is really the protagonist here, but the way that everybody else in the band is able to come in and support him and there are moments in the song where it gets really intense and the drummers are playing and you can hear Bob and everyone's sort of around him. And then everyone kind of melts away and it's just Jerry and the guitar and his voice. I think it just tells a story in a way that I have never heard other instruments be able to do without having, you don't have to listen to the lyrics, in my opinion, for this song, to feel. the journey that it's taking you on. I have another suggestion so that you can hear

some of the emotions of Jerry Garcia's guitar. This is from the Jerry Garcia band, his side project that he always had going, played smaller venues, mostly played old rock and roll, played a lot of Dylan. They were big fans of Bob Dylan. This is from the Jerry Garcia Band album. It's a live album was recorded.

I think it was recorded at the Warfield. At the Warfield in San Francisco. his solo on I Shall Be Released, Bob Dylan's masterpiece about facing eternity. If you go into like at 620, you'll hear him take that song to another level. There's a gentleness in the way that he plays that I think could be mistaken for not weakness,

but just sort of like kind of like a flaccid way of playing or something. You know, like, it's not like he's coming at you hard and fast, right? It's, he lets it breathe. Lots, lots of space and lots of melodicism. And when you hear him play and he's doing all the, like a lot of note, that's his bluegrass background. He played banjo. He started out as a banjo player.

Yeah, there's a narrative quality to the way that he plays guitar, where I feel like I'm every guitar solo. It's like I'm hanging on to every word of what he's doing, but it's not words. It's just the way he's playing the instrument. And also making room for everybody else in the band. Like, I think it's really amazing. He has these solos, but everyone else is also doing their thing.

Jerry is not really... He's in the spotlight, but he lets it be big enough to include everyone. It's a really beautiful dialogue between everybody on stage. All right, so that's complaint number three. Not great musicians. Again, these are just the complaints. I'm not saying this is a fact. It's just...

Don't at me, bro. Don't come at me. deadheads. Actually, we don't need to worry about the deadheads coming for anybody, right? No, never. That's not happening. Let's get to complaint number four. Complaint number four, and this has come up along the way here, Jerry Garcia can't sing. I think that that's actually a complaint that you could make against just about the whole band.

I was listening to the top of Dark Star. Like, I'm not a little pitchy, not quite in tune there. You know, again, I grew up with Bob Dylan, right? He's not a Sinatra singer. There are a lot of vocalists that they just, their voices weren't there. And I think Garcia's voice matched the material. I mean, this is sort of the argument of like Ringo Star. People saying Ringo couldn't drum, but he met the moment.

He matched the Beatles, like he was the perfect drummer for that band. Yeah. Even if you go on and in the later, years. Like one of the songs I was going to suggest as a song called Black Muddy River. It's world-weary, it's world-weregrills me to the book. When I can't hear the song, and I can't tell my pillow from a stone. It's world-weary. It's craggy. It's, it's been around. And that's, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's been around. And that's, the essence of the song. The essence of the song is about being in that spot.

And I think his voice matches it. Yeah, I agree with Felix. He has a fragile voice, but I think that's what helps carry the tone and the message and the stories of the songs. And I agree. Like, I think saying someone can't sing, it's like, you could say that about a lot of people

who have really distinct voices, and that's part of the beauty of their music, you know? It's not about having the cleanest, highest quality vocal. It's kind of like what that texture brings to the material. And I will say, I love Bob Weir's voice. It was like fiery and strong and husky. It's kind of the complete opposite of Jerry.

And I think those songs like balance each other out so well. And when they sing together, I love the sort of dissonance between their two approaches to singing. Bob's like in your face yelling. He would do these big yell sometimes in the middle, like one more Saturday night. True on Channel 6th, the president comes on the news. Says I get no satisfaction.

It's why I sing the blues. He's, you know, rocking out in such a different way than Garcia's mellowed out, floating behind. And I will come to Donna Godchow's defense. She freaking ruled. Sometimes it went off the rails, and that's part of the beauty of the Grateful Dead is. Sometimes everybody went off the rails. But she also brought this, like, kinetic, untamable energy to the whole thing. And to me, it just, it really works.

I love hearing their three voices. together anytime they're harmonizing. It's gritty, but it's really satisfied something for me. Well, Felix, you talk about how Jerry Garcia had the right voice for this band. One of the ways that I thought Jerry Garcia's voice did work really well, for me, was in his bluegrass and folk side projects that he did. And he had many. Yeah.

I really loved, like, that album, Shady Grove that he did. Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall. If I can't have the girl I love, I don't want none at all. Shady Grove, my little love, Shady Grove, I know. Shady Grove, my little love, I'm bound for Shady Grove. Really loved hearing him sing those old bluegrass songs and folk songs. His voice was kind of old-timey in the way. It worked with that music.

And I think whenever I tried listening to The Dead, I was wanting a rock voice or something. And it didn't ever quite click for me. Because that's what he brought to the whole rock and roll spirit. Yeah. That was the whole thing. Yeah. It's just transferred into this rock and roll band that was playing jazz. Yeah. One layer after another.

It fit the band. Shady Grove I know. Shady Grove, my little love, I'm bound for Shady Grove. Well, much like the band's music, I feel like this show is just kind of, meandered around a little bit. Oops. Here we're just sort of, we're just letting go and seeing where it takes us, but we have been working through a rough top five list of complaints.

They're jam band. The lyrics are nonsense. Maybe not great musicians. Jerry Garcia can't sing. Which brings me to number five. What do you think is left in this list of principal complaints? Stoner culture. Oh, my God.

The culture of the scene. stoner band. Felix is here is just like playing with the music. He's like, wait,

what are we doing his show? He's like playing with the mic's stats. He's like, what? I think that

people have said that being under the influence of one thing or another enhances the experience. I personally have like in

since going to concert since 1973, I've never been in any an altered state at all. in any of the shows I've ever been to.

Ever. Seriously. Never. I'm giving him the most skeptical look I think I've ever given anybody in my life. I have never been mind-altered when I've gone to any show of any genre or any style, anything. I can see where people will say, oh, it's a stoner culture. It's a stoner band. They're just sort of meandering. You have to be high to get it. You know, my own personal experiences, like I said, I've never been high.

when it finally hit me, it really hit me in it, and I got it. But that is the scene. I mean, that is for... No, you can, seriously, you can buy mushrooms in the party lot. Yeah, I mean, I've been with people and we've done that. I think a lot of people just think, I don't just want to be around it. I don't want to be in the whole hippie scene, and I don't want to hang out in that crowd. Yeah.

I will say, I can't say the same thing as Felix. I'm not going to say I've never been to a show without having some sort of being in some sort of altered state. I've been to plenty of shows where I haven't. I think it's an incredibly welcoming scene, and I know that's not everybody's experience, but to me it's kind of like everyone's doing their own thing. There's all kinds of people there. You know, we talked to Jim James about his appreciation for the Grateful Dead, and something he said that really stuck with me is that for people who are interested in experimenting

with different levels of consciousness, that the Grateful Dead created a really safe space to do that. And particularly when those are things that are kind of stigmatized, in the culture. I mean, you think about like the Grateful Dead had a giant massive blowup in the 1980s with Touch of Gray, and that was during the Reagan say no to drugs, crack down on drug enforcement. And I'm not saying like drug use is okay or I'm not advocating for it. But I think they created a place where people could, for the most part, safely experiment and dive into these different experiences that they were curious about and be guided by music and art and doing so. And I think there is value to that. I don't think it permeates all of the scene. I've been to lots of

dead shows or dead gatherings where it's like a lot of little kids running around. It's a lot of families. It's a lot of older people. Like that always made me feel really safe at shows when I was like 18 and there were like grandparents around us wanting to talk about why we were there and why we like the Grateful Dead if we were so young. Like there is a community aspect to it and some part of that community might be engaging in the stoner culture. But not everybody is. And I think the bigger part, the bigger thing is that it's a very accepting place. I think the community, I think the community that you describe and the how welcoming it is and and the love and just sort of how peaceful it is. Do you think you would love the music just on its own if you were just listening to studio albums?

I think that there's an entry place for people who are into listening to, if they really spend the time listening to the lyrics and the lessons and the characters and, you know, there's so many. different ways to enter. And just, you know, try to decipher the metaphors. Try to decide, decipher what does it mean to you? Just like any other spiritual text, it's there. I think that the short answers, yeah. I think that there's a place for people to spend time. Really, I would suggest, like, I did this with a bunch of Tom Waits stuff, too, for a long time.

I would sit there with the lyrics and listen to his storytelling and listen the way his voice, talking about a voice, right? Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, listen to how his... His voice and his persona and his lyrics interpret life. Yeah, I think there's a dead for everybody, and there's a way to connect with the dead for everybody.

And I think for a lot of people, it doesn't have to be going to the shows. But I think if you've been to a show, it's hard to separate because I think that those experiences that you have with people become a part of how you feel the music and how you feel the songs, even when you're by yourself. I remember being in a show at Shoreline Amphitheater, and they played Bird Song, which wasn't a song that I really liked that much. But I was like laying back on the grass and there was birds flying over and the guy next to me was like,

oh my god, you see the birds? And now every time I listen to that song, I think about that guy and I think about that experience. If you hear that same sweet song again, you know why? Oh, sings a tune so sweet is passing by. So it just becomes like a part of the music's DNA. And I don't think I would not enjoy the music without it, but it definitely makes it richer, and it keeps adding layers, the more experiences that you have with the music. And your example is a perfect example of the power of the song, because that song was

written for Janice Joplin shortly after she passed. So it's, you know, a bird who came in and sang a song just for a little while. It's such a beautiful, they play to hear a tiny desk with the harp. It's a beautiful homage to her spirit, but then people like her that have that same kind of spirit. Yeah, and I would say that to me, so much of the beauty of the dead is the humanity of it. They go on these big adventures. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work.

But listening to those shows, like even listening to something where, you know, Bob comes in too early or somebody comes in too late and you can tell they messed up, it's a reminder. Like, I'll be listening and I'm like, these were real people on a stage performing all together in the same space for an audience and having this very human connection and experience through, the music and through the art that is just so visceral and so fun. Like I love having those little interruptions in the show or hearing something kind of go off the rails and then they find it again. I think especially as like our lives become more dependent on phones and technology and AI

becomes a bigger thing. There is something so grounding about the Grateful Dead just being this human quest for something greater than all of us. Is there, like if you picked one song to try to get somebody into the Dead, like, To me, it's probably like trucking or something. I think trucking. Deal. The kind of like rootsy rock Americana ones, I think, are really.

Uncle John's band is a great one. But I think people don't know as much, but it's so beautiful. Yeah. Well, the first days are the hardest days. Don't you worry anymore. When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door. think this through with me Let me know you're mine

This is the era when they were Working a lot with Crosby Stills and Nash So there was an emphasis on getting these vocals right They were very, very rehearsed Yeah, no, this is the tightest the vocals Yeah, American Beauty and Working Man's Dead You know all the rules by now And the fire from the ice

Will you come with me Won't you come with me? Whoa, oh, what I want to know. Well, remind everybody what you all are working on and tell us when the series that you've been working on launches. And I think you're also doing a call-out, yeah? So it's a multi-part series. You know, we're going to be doing podcasts,

digital stories, photo essays, all kinds of pieces looking to answer what people love about the dead and how they stay connected to the culture, especially in a moment like this one. And it launches August 1st. And what's the callout you're doing? We're asking people to write in to tell us what it is that they like about the dead.

What does it mean to them? When did they first get exposed? Personal stories about their connection to the dead. And that callout's already up, I think. And people can also record voice memos and email those to the all songs address, all songs at npr.org. Yeah, we want to hear from the deadheads. There you go.

Well, I have to ask, did you have a good show? Yes, I did, man. Okay, Robin, are you on the bus? Are you getting close there? Are you waiting for the bus to show up? I'll tell you what, when the bus shows up, I'll get on and I'll go with you for a while, and I'm happy to see what happens. That's where I am.

Yeah, listen to some of the songs. That's all we can hope for. Yeah, that's it, man. I live in a silver mic, and I call it Vegas tomb. I got me a viola. and I beg you called the tomb. Isabella Gomez, Armiento, Felix and Treas, thanks so much to you both. Thank you, man.

Thank you, Robin. Pretty strange trip, man. Long strange trip. All right, you're listening to All Sons Considered from NPR Music. Come here, Uncle John's band by the river side. Got some things to talk about. Here beside the rising tide Come here, Uncle John's bad,

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