![]() With lyrics by Robert Hunter and music by Jerry Garcia, it’s about finding lessons and laughter in all your life’s adventures, making peace with what you can’t control, and finding strength in your “family of choice,” consisting entirely of other Deadheads. It’s a song about the joys of playing and listening to music. “Ripple” was the B-side to “Truckin’” (another one of the handful of Dead songs that could be called hits) and features on the 1970 album American Beauty, one of their most commercially successful studio albums and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of their most countryfied. (“Touch of Grey” is the exception that proves the rule, as it essentially celebrates their irrelevance.) For a band as prolific and culturally influential as they are, they have very few crossover hits. Almost everyone who loves them agrees you can’t get the full Dead experience unless you see them live, which, if you don’t already love them, is a risky commitment. I gave it a few more minutes and went back to reading about Watergate. Use diagrams if you need to.) And it had country mixed in, which, as an increasingly surly teenager growing up in a mountain town in Western North Carolina, was my most loathed genre, the antithesis of rebellion. (Seriously, compare this to the Soft Machine or Barrett-era Floyd and explain to me what’s “psychedelic” about it. Compared to what the Brits were up to in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most American “psychedelic rock” sounded like shitty blues to me, and this was the shittiest I”d heard. One Sunday night in autumn, I put on a syndicated radio show called the Grateful Dead Hour and waited for my new life to begin.Īfter the first 20 minutes of a live jam on “Fire on the Mountain,” I’d given up. ![]() Crumb and the seedier side of ‘70s culture, which made them seem slightly dangerous, but not on the level of N.W.A, the 2 Live Crew, or Geto Boys, whose albums I actually wanted to listen to but had to be very discreet about owning. After an all-consuming two-year Beatles fixation and another year spent listening to The Dark Side of the Moon and little else, I was psyched to try psychedelic drugs, I wanted to eat handfuls of all of them as soon as possible, and being a Deadhead seemed like an easy on-ramp for that. The Deadheads I knew were mostly pleasant, docile sorts, but also included my cousin Elizabeth, one of my favorite people on earth and one I very much wanted to have something in common with besides Dameron mutt DNA. I first noticed this when I was 13 and I tried to get into the Grateful Dead. ![]() Unfortunately, I don’t get to decide what these obsessions are going to be. When I’m off my ADHD meds, I’m dangerously, infuriatingly scatterbrained, yet also capable of “hyperfocusing” on a particular obsession for weeks or months at a time, turning it inside out with my mind and researching it to the ends of human knowledge.
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