I’ve been listening to a lot of Grateful Dead lately, which I do from time to time, and which would come as no surprise to the two or maybe three people in my life who know my big secret – that I’m a closet Deadhead. I don’t know that I could really say why I’m so guarded about this particular little piece of biography – perhaps it’s because Deadheads, as a group, have become a sort of cultural punchline, a misunderstood and much-maligned tribe, up there (or out there) somewhere with Trekkers and Renaissance Faire junkies. Everyone knows the cliche: Birkenstocks, patchouli, tie-dye, grooming choices which call to mind Jesus or Grizzly Adams. And of course the drugs, of which there have been admittedly many in the history of the band and its following, whose independent-minded ethos has attracted its fair share of troubled souls and sick twists. But observing the recent sport of outing the Heads, it seems like it’s now almost cool to say “I’m with the band,” that it’s a mark of more expansive values whose expression in the American public sphere has been oppressively absent in the recent half decade or so. Politics alone can claim the Dead cred of such heavy-hitters as Senators Harry Reid and Patrick Leahy, former vice-president Al Gore (and Tipper, too) as well as newly-minted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, confirmed by her rep as “a huge fan,” and who had the band’s surviving members play at her swearing-in party. And that’s just the liberals – conservative talking heads Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson as well as the National Review’s Delroy Murdock all have a history of getting on the bus. Bill Walton (aka “Grateful Red”) of NBA fame responded to that organization’s 2005 adoption of dress code rules by quipping that he had spent the entire summer sewing collars on his tie-dye t-shirts. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Owen Chamberlain claimed he got ideas from the band’s music. I could go on, but I’ll just drop the names of other out-ees like Al Franken, Jerry Greenfield (of Ben & Jerry’s fame, who really outed themselves with the oh-so-obvious Cherry Garcia), Phil Jackson – and yes, even Tony Blair – and leave it at that.
In some ways, I’m not a true Deadhead. I never went to a show, even though I date the beginning of my fan-hood to nearly a full decade before Jerry’s death and the official dissolution of the band. I take some pride in being able to say that, unlike most of the Heads in my generation, I was turned on to the band before “Touch Of Grey” broke Billboard’s Top 10 in 1987. I didn’t make it by much, though. My entrée to the Dead took place in about 1986 or so, as a result of the then-latest phase of my spiritual questing. I was in ninth grade, and had spent a good part of my junior high years sampling the churches of my friends in an effort to find an avenue for my growing need for the outward expression of an incresingly urgent sense of inner spiritual yearning. I was not raised in a religious household, although I sometimes attended Sunday services with my grandparents, who were Southern Baptists. I had no particular relationship to the Christian religion, but my journey started there by the inexorable default of living in a Judeo-Christian society. One of my friends was Lutheran, another Catholic, another of a more fundamentalist, charismatic persuasion. I visited their churches, sat with the congregations, and waited to feel at home. All I really felt, though, was out of place. I loved the buildings, was very moved by the concept of a sacred space where people came together and bore witness to their transcendent longing, but the teachings themselves were hopelessly out of sync with what I had come to know as my own intuitive sense of spirituality. In that understanding, there was no place for a personal, judgmental God; no affinity for a system that doomed and damned with its emphasis on the world as a sinister, omnipresent menace. There was only the quest for communion with some unimaginably vast reality that I was convinced was out there somewhere.
Having more or less given up hope that Christianity would provide the answers I needed, I turned next to Hinduism, the faith of a number of my friends, largely American-born children of Indian immigrant families who had come to work at the nearby Union Carbide chemical plant. I had been welcomed into the homes of my Indian-American friends, where I was invited to be a participant in their culture, and I had already had an interesting late-night encounter with Krishna at a seventh grade slumber party. I was a bit too self-conscious to ask my friends about their religion, and they at any rate seemed more focused on being as American as apple pie than in dwelling on their Hindu heritage. So I got books from the library on Hinduism, in whose pages I learned about multi-armed gods, yoga, meditation, and a cosmology that spoke of vast timescales and something that sounded startlingly similar to the big bang theory I was familiar with as an astronomy enthusiast. I was hooked. And somewhere in all that study of eastern philosophy, with its floating yogis and deathless gurus, I ran across the inevitable – the 1960s. I saw pictures of hippies, who seemed unaccountably glorious to me; was seduced by images of Allen Ginsberg as the great bearded bear, and thrilled to accounts of the wacked-out carnivalesque decadence of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. And the Grateful Dead – who were these people that were in the scene, later photos of Garcia enticing me like some slightly skewed Santa Claus? I gathered up my allowance and bucked up my courage and, with the ink barely dry on my driver’s license, dropped in at the local head shop, which was where I heard (through the grapevine, of course, since none of my friends were into that sort of thing) that you could buy the Grateful Dead’s music. So I got a tape of one of their studio albums, Aoxomoxoa, and one of Ravi Shankar to boot. Both of these were a revelation, but the Dead album really spoke to me. To my AOR-coddled ears, it was bizarre, rambling, at times dissonant and vaguely terrifying, but nonetheless – though I could never have articulated it at the time – immensely spacious music. It was like the ever-retreating horizon – ungraspable, unknowable – yet I recognized within its shifting sound something that resonated deeply with my spiritual quest. There was a clear sense of longing in the music, and a vibe of something ancient and mystical being exhumed and passed around. The Dead, probably the preeminent music for travellers of all kinds, soon accompanied me on my first fumbling attempts at meditation, the strains of “St. Stephen” playing softly on my stereo while I lit a candle, folded my legs, closed my eyes, and tried to go somewhere.
I’m certainly not the first person to have touched the deep taproot of spirit in the Dead’s music, and the fact that my journey has taken me, nearly twenty years hence, through a concerted study of Vedanta, yogic philosophy, and finally to Buddhism, has only deepened that awareness. Repeated listenings constantly uncover new connections between the teachings and my reading of the Dead’s canon. Only recently was I struck by a verse from “Doin’ That Rag,” a song from the very first Dead album I ever heard:
You needn’t gild the lily, offer jewels to the sunset
No one is watching or standing in your shoes
Wash your lonely feet in the river in the morning
Everything promised is delivered to you
To me, this verse exhorts us against making so much show of something that we fail to see its intrinsic beauty, its intrinsic perfection. But this is a very human failing. In spiritual terms, we fail, too, because we’re always looking around to see who is watching, to see if such empty offerings are getting us anywhere. We want to impress people with our spiritual accomplishment in the same way we seek to gain admiration by flaunting our material possessions. Chögyam Trungpa called this “spiritual materialism,” an obsession with form and attainment that binds us to the very misery we profess to overcome. But in reality, we are not being observed, the observed and the observer are one, or even further – you’re not there at all. By washing the feet, an act associated across cultures with extreme respect and particularly with the ultimate expression of submission, we place ourselves where we need to be in order to be the recipients of wisdom.
“Ripple,” off the 1970 album American Beauty, (see David Dodd’s amazing online compendium The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics for more on this and other songs) contains one of the Dead’s most obvious nods to Eastern form and philosophy, its chorus a perfect 17-syllable haiku that rings out like a Zen koan:
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
Wake of the Flood, the band’s album from 1973, marked the first studio recording of the song “Eyes of the World,” whose chorus begins:
Wake up to find out
That you are the eyes of the world
Buddhist thought and practice is directed wholly at bringing about the empirical realization of our innate Buddha nature, a process often referred to as “awakening.” When we “wake up,” our false sense of separate self is vanquished by the understanding that we are intrinsically indivisible from all matter and all reality. So well do these two lines capture a truth about the enlightenment experience that the translators of 14th century Tibetan Buddhist and Dzogchen master Longchenpa’s The Jewel Ship: A Guide to the Meaning of Pure and Total Presence changed the title in its reprinted edition to You Are The Eyes Of The World, and printed a portion of the song’s lyrics opposite the book’s title page.
While the experience of listening to the Dead’s music often becomes ecstatic for me, my primary relationship to the music has been contemplative. It has been shaman, lama, and psychopomp, and I’ve often thought that its tendency for me to be about the inner journey has been largely responsible for my not seeking to connect with the outwardly manifest culture of the Deadheads. I’ve had ample occasion to kick myself for that, however, especially since that dark day in August 1995 when Jerry’s light went out and you knew you’d never get the opportunity again. Of course all of the surviving principle players are still in the business, touring with bands of their own, like Bobby’s Ratdog and Phil’s PL and Friends, although I’ve never been to see them, either. Tribute bands – the Dark Star Orchestra, for example – have become a virtual cottage industry, trying to capture in some small way the energy and mystique of the original Dead. But I’ve never gone.
I flirted with outing myself back in 1987, as a high school sophomore, when I got my first pair of Birkenstocks, handily beating the Birkenstock craze that some years later would see “made in China” knockoffs for sale at supermarkets and truck stops, and the Birki look on millions of fashion-forward feet across America. But then, all my friends laughed at how ugly they seemed. If they couldn’t handle the shoes, I had little hope that they would get Krishnamurti or transcendental meditation or the Grateful Dead. So the band became just one more piece of my interiority, and has since remained an almost wholly private expression of my spiritual exploration. I lurk on online discussion boards devoted to the Dead, and the migration of the live show tape trading culture to websites and other forms of virtual swapping has resulted in the clogging of my computer’s hard drive with several gigs of recordings. I’m partial to the shows from the seventies, when the buzz-blurred acid drench of the early Dead was softened by their explorations of American folk and roots music. They retained the same transcendent outlook, but became more like the great masters of Zen, who reveal the truth of the universe in a blade of grass – no high-flown mumbo jumbo necessary. This was largely due to the collaboration of Jerry Garcia with lyricist Robert Hunter (who I find, along with Townes Van Zandt, to be one of this country’s greatest underacknowledged poetic geniuses), and the music from the peak of their synergistic powers holds, for me, the band’s deepest moments of magic.
So I suppose I’ll take that step now and join the ranks of the acknowledged Deadheads, that is if they will have me. I will continue to let their musical wisdom inform my spirituality, to be a mirror for my own deepening widsom, continually growing and finding new relevance and illumination in what I hear. Maybe someday I will attend a live show, or maybe I will continue to just sit here, headphones on, and watch the woods through my window, letting the spirit of the music flow through me – a conduit, a seeker, a fan.
(written 02-27-2007)
