Talking to the  Dead, 1979

In 1979 I spent a few months shadowing the Grateful Dead for an article that first appeared in New West magazine. Later, David Dodd and Diana Spaulding kindly included it in the Oxford University Press’s Grateful Dead Reader.

The assignment got me into a lot of concerts, but the best part for me was interviewing the members of the Dead, a uniquely engaging and thoughtful bunch of people who loved talking about what they did.

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Years after the article, when I was writing my novel The Current Fantasy, I found that my characters were doing in the early twentieth century what Bob Dylan and the Dead did in the 1960s: mixing old ballads and blues with modern poetry to produce a new American music. Roland, the songwriting character in the book, synthesizes those strands in 1917, which is about the earliest they were all available. 

This description of Roland’s singing might ring a bell with Deadheads:

He talks like other Americans they’ve met but sings in a thin, quavery tone, as if an old man’s throwing his voice from inside him.

That voice is a ghost, Anna thinks. There’s nothing more they can do to it, not the landlord, the company store, careless lovers, steel hammers, or the Titanic. If he sang in a singing voice you wouldn’t believe him.

I interviewed Jerry Garcia at his house, and Phil Lesh over a long Sausalito dinner. I'll add more of the article in the weeks ahead.

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