Gans - Conversations With The Dead: the Grateful Dead Interview Book

I know they mean well most of the time. The straight press, that is.

Heres how it works: The Grateful Dead are coming to town. The editor of the local papers Lifestyles section sees kids wearing tie-dyes wandering around the downtown area, and notices dilapidated, bizarrely painted school buses taking up three and four metered parking spaces near his office.

Whats going on around here? the editor asks at his departments regular Monday morning meeting. Didnt this stuff die out in 1968? How come I cant find a parking space?

Theyre Deadheads, one reporter offers. The Grateful Dead will be here in a couple of days.

What? Are they still around? Didnt they die in a plane crash or something?

No, that was Lynyrd Skynryd. This could be a great story, chief. You knowsixties gypsies surviving in the nineties. The last vestiges of psychedelia. Flower children in the Age of Greed.

Hmmm. Maybe youre on to something. OK, Shepherd, give me two thousand words. Schuster, get your camera and get me some pix of these weirdos. The stranger the better. Were talking page one of the Sunday section!

Come Sunday, its all there in black and white. Shepherd has interviewed an aging hippie named Moonstone, whos been following the Dead for twenty-three years. There are a few quotes from some inarticulate local high schoolers, and the obligatory comment from the head of security at the arena where the Dead played. Sure, they look funny, but they seem to be pretty good lads by and large, he says. We had more problems when AC/DC was in town. The photographer contributed a nice portrait of the young hippie family selling veggie burritos in the parking lot and a concert shot that ran with the accompanying review of the concert. Graying guru Jerry Garcia: Grateful to still be playing, the caption read. The review itself, by a woman who two nights earlier had written about Whitney Houstons show in the same basketball arena, mentioned the ecstatic dancers gyrating to the Deads mellow grooves, singled out the two Dylan covers she recognized, and complained for a whole paragraph about aimless noodling in the second half of the show.

Meanwhile, in the next city on the Deads tour, an outraged editor shouts at no one in particular, Whats with those damn buses outside? What the hell is going on ground this city?

This is the view of the Grateful Dead that most of the world sees. Year in, year out, the scenario above is repeated in cities around the country. When the Dead went to Europe in the fall of 1990, we got to read the Swedish, German, French, and English versions of it all. Maybe its coming soon to a newspaper near you. Except for rare occasions, even the rock press treats the story the same waywhen they deign to write about the band at all.

It wasnt always like this. Throughout most of the seventies, almost nobody wrote about the Dead at all! The bands following wasnt as large and visible as it is today, of course, so there was no hook for mainstream newspaper editors. And most rock critics wrote the Dead off after American Beauty in 1970. The Dead were, after all, a sixties band, the typically misinformed thinking went. On to the next trend!

Hey, I was willing to check out the new trends as much as the next guy-Oh, okay, this month its twenty-five minute synthesizer solos?but I never gave up on the Dead; rather, my interest in the band increased the more I saw them. And as I attended more concerts by other bands, the specialness of the Dead became even more apparent to me. I loved it all the eclecticism of the music, the depth and mystery of the lyrics, the rapture of the eventand I loved the weird chemistry of the members of the Dead. Id read some pretty hip profiles of the group in magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy during the late sixties and early seventies, and those articles reinforced my thinking that somehow these guys were tuned in to a wavelength I could dig.

By 1976, I was involved in rock journalism myselfin the Deads own San Francisco Bay Area, no lessand I was determined to give the Dead the attention I thought they were due in the pages of