Long before I was born, there was a band. Controversial in nature, progressive in stature and nothing but good and true in their hearts. They sang songs about love and lost love, their love for music and for those whose time has since passed- those who are “gratefully” dead.
Long before I was born, their times came and went, and came and went again. Throughout my life, I only got to interlap a little with their actual selves, as they didn’t play as much in their latter years.
Yet, their music will never stop. A mix of joy and sorrow, each Grateful Dead song is ingeniously written, with layers upon layers of music, each intricately intertwining, forming nothing but the finest of art (for your ears, of course). It is incredibly easy to get lost in their music, as every ballad seems to whisk you away, through the journey of the “jam”*.
My family happens to be huge fans of this “jammy” type of music, and naturally, I began to develop an affinity for it. Throughout my whole life, I’ve grown up around the sights and sounds of the Dead, even playing guitar with a Grateful Dead cover band during my Bar Mitzvah party.
Their music is such an essential part of my life, and this piece is meant to hopefully expand the minds of people who are not already familiar with the Grateful Dead.
After talking to another “grateful” enthusiast, art teacher Jeffrey Gutterman, he put the music into words that cannot be more perfect.
“Every time you hear it, it’s going to be a different experience. What’s amazing to me is that after 40 years of listening, I can still burst into tears from a song. Your life experiences change how you hear it. I’ve been listening to a song for 30 years, something happens, and now I hear the song completely differently. . . The note, the same note that anyone could play on a guitar, their spirit goes into that note, [Jerry Garcia] plays with passion, with sadness,” Gutterman said.
The sound of the dead itself, depends on the events in the band’s life. You can hear when they were sad, when they were happy, excited, on drugs or angry. And somehow, through all of it, the honesty never fractures– it only deepens, like roots pushing further and yet further into the earth. Their music doesn’t only exist to be heard; it exists to be felt, to be lived alongside, to evolve as you evolve.
What makes the dead so enduring is not perfection, yet their humanity. Their songs breathe; they mess up all the time. They stretch, and they wander, sometimes losing their way only to stumble upon something more beautiful in the process. A single note–a memory. A solo —a window into the band’s inner soul. And in that window– somewhere between structure and spontaneity– you begin, truly begin to understand.
For me (and many others), their music is so much more than sound– it’s like an inheritance. It’s the echo of long car rides with my dad, or the background noise at a Thanksgiving dinner. It is a thread that ties our lives together, binding moments of our lives to the present as some sort of strange cosmic consistency. When you listen, you are just recreating something in your ears; you step into their music and become part of something larger than yourself.
And maybe that’s the entire point. The Grateful Dead were never just a band; they are a feeling, a current, a way of life. Long after their final notes were played on stage, their music still drifts through the air like a haze; impossible to grasp, yet impossible to ignore.
So while their time here has come to an end, their spirit hasn’t faded. It exists all around us, whenever someone closes their eyes and lets the music take control.
In their words, from a song called Terrapin Station, “Let us rest at ease, and if you die before we do, leave us words of love and peace to stand instead of you.” We are the speakers in that verse, and they have left us words of love and peace to forever stand in their place.
*Jamming: the ability to spontaneously improvise during a set or song of music, going off the music you hear your bandmates play, sometimes ending in a grand crescendo of music- a masterpiece. (made popular primarily by the Dead and the Allman Brothers.)
