Waxing Deadstalgic

On Monday I made a marked change in my life that I think I should try to get down on paper. I boxed up my Grateful Dead tapes and put them in the closet upstairs. This is a bit of a sea change for me, as those tapes have been sitting on racks, which I carefully built in my office, for several years. I enjoyed the sight of them—I could see them from the living room—and knowing that I had far more music than I could possibly make time for was somehow comforting to me. There were maybe four or five hundred of them, and they now sit, neatly boxed up in cookie dough boxes, in the closet of my bedroom.

I’m trying to avoid the “end of an era” approach to this because that would be inaccurate. The Grateful Dead graciously allows streaming of the majority of their shows from a website called archive.org. I can hook up my computer to my stereo and twirl around the house any time I want to—don’t worry, I don’t twirl. I usually crank the volume and continue the never-ending-battle with “pet smells” that persists at my house.

My first Dead show was in 1986. I was home from Africa for six weeks during a particularly unfettered time in my life. The show was at the old Redskins stadium, RFK in Washington D.C., and I was interested in seeing Bob Dylan, who was headlining a bill which also included Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. By this time, I had already bucked up against deadheads who snubbed you if you claimed “Sugar Magnolia” as your favorite song and rattled off set-lists with transparently self-conscious nonchalance. I was not going to see the Dead. I was going to see Dylan!

I went with my friends-since-grade-school, David and Michael. We met my roommate from Christ School, Bowles, in the filthy-rich northern Virginian town of Middleburgh. One of Bowles’ neighbors was the grandson of Jack Kent Cooke (the former owner of the Redskins) and we had the opportunity to watch our first Dead show from Cooke’s box at the stadium. This was sort of like letting the country-cousins into the Louvre. I was on a Tom Collins kick at the time—there was a VIP bar right outside the box—so things were a bit blurry and inappropriate, I’m sure. I remember, at one point, sitting down on the front row of the box and right before me, on the rail, was a fresh hot dog and a coke. The day was brutally hot, and I was hungry. I took a bite of the hotdog and started slurping down the coke when I felt a tap on my shoulder. The apparent owner of the dog was behind me and none-too-pleased. Jack Kent Cooke’s grandson ended up bailing me out of that one.

That first Dead show had me hooked. You can look it up online and most reviews of the concert have one thing in common, they all talk about how hot it was. Hot, with a happy community throng, and friendly strangers and a little weirdness, and some scariness, and some more friends and dancing and sweat and music. Sounds like Africa. I felt euphoric.

I went back to Africa with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty planted firmly in my cassette deck. I listened to that tape, each album occupying a side, for months and months. When I returned, I bought more official releases on vinyl and cassette. I had not yet started trading tapes, but I knew that at the core of this cultural undercurrent there was an exchange of currency going on that had more value than the products you could buy at the record store. Tape trading.

I really got into it because a boss of mine was a Deadhead. He was an original actually, having seen them at the Boston Tea Party in 69, and he would bring me examples of good quality tapes that he owned, and make me listen to them on a little walkman while I was trying to prep for dinner. He came up with the idea that we start trading nationally, using his collection, and anything he traded, he would make copies for me. We put an ad in Relix Magazine under the name of “Speeding Arrow Tapes.” Within a month I had a folder bursting with tape-lists from as far away as Honolulu. We had to pick a few good people to trade with, people who were serious and would come back with your requests, and this took a few months. But after a while we had established three or four good trading relationships and it was a happy day when I would get a yellow slip in my mailbox telling me that I had a package at the post office on Patterson Avenue. The package would usually contain about eight tapes, and, if the package was from a particularly competent trader named Uncle John, the quality would be excellent. I drove a little pickup at the time, and I would drive into the counties, doing a large loop around Winston, in order to listen to the tapes. This would often get me close to the feeling I felt at that first show.

There was a kind of holy-grail that we discovered during this time. It was 5/8/77. That is the date of a concert at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. I remember getting this tape in the mail, and I had probably heard it was good, but I had heard that about a lot of Dead tapes. It is still one of my favorite pieces of recorded music. There has been a great deal written about this concert, and it still is quite controversial in that some philistines claim it is overrated. It is not overrated. I remember having this discussion with a blowhard at a bar in Black Mountain. He had obviously had way too much to drink, and I left him spouting out concert dates to a non-dead-head, who looked confused and a little frightened.

After a while, I traded with one person exclusively, and my collection began to grow so much that I could no longer fit them in Kiwi Fruit boxes. I built racks for them and they lined the back of my office like little soldiers of peace, love and understanding. I also bought the massive three-volume Taping Compendium that gives detailed reviews of every show the Dead ever played. Yea, I had it bad.

Now, as I am nearing the finish line of school, books are invading our house like never before. I buy them for school, I buy them for enjoyment, and I want them to be visible throughout the house. I want to be able to find the book I need when I need it, and I want the books to act as a bulwark for my own writing. I am also craving a clutter-less work space. This is too much to ask for the whole house, I know, but where I do the most of my work I want the light that comes in from the northwest window to be free from little trinkets that I can’t seem to throw away. So the precious Dead tapes are going into hibernation.

I believe that one morning, when I am free of responsibility for a moment, I might venture upstairs and start digging for 5/8/77, or another concert I remember. It turns out that boxing them up and putting them upstairs was not the traumatic experience that I had feared. They are still here, in this house, and after all, they are right inside the closet door.